By Giulia Sinatti – Ten years since its last edition, the Medical Anthropology Europe (MAE) conference returned in September 2025 with a live (and online) four-day event in Vienna. Hosted at the University of Vienna and co-organized by the EASA MAE Network and the Health Matters Research Group, this conference was an important moment for those who identify as medical anthropologists to reconnect. Most importantly, it was also a moment to discuss where the field has been heading in the last decade, an ambition reflected in the conference title: Redefinitions of Health and Well-being.
Conference panels spanned from the politics of reproductive justice and planetary health to the ethics of emerging biotechnologies and multi-perspective ethnography, showing that medical anthropology is much more than the study of health systems or patient experiences. Medical anthropology is increasingly concerned with entanglements: between care and technology, ethics and politics, science and society.
A panel that I jointly convened with Jennifer Creese (University of Leicester) and Julie Salvador (University of New Mexico) unpacked some of these entanglements in the practice of ethnography for healthcare improvement. When researching healthcare services, we engage in relationships with them as research objects and research partners. As anthropologists, we often encounter frictions in these working relationships. Through examples from their own research, four panelists illustrated the ethical dilemmas and relational tensions that arise in healthcare ethnography. From unsettling moments in clinical settings to the politics of publishing “uncomfortable truths,” the discussion showed how anthropologists often witness and are themselves entangled in unresolved frictions. As panelist Michelle Parsons noted, the field is not neutral, and sometimes we are nudged to take sides, especially when power asymmetries are at play. During the discussion, Mirko Pasquini reflected on how his own research in emergency rooms could have focused on everyday violence and silencing, but instead, he chose, together with his respondents, to write about what they most wanted others to hear. These choices, participants in the panel reminded us, are relational and political.
This idea of friction as something relational that emerges from and shapes our connections in the field while doing medical anthropology was also discussed in several other sessions. Ethnography is not just a method of observation: it is often also a form of intervention. By participating in them, it reveals, unsettles, and transforms the very spaces it seeks to understand. But it also demands care: in how we represent others, how we navigate competing truths, and how we make our own positionalities transparent.
A roundtable on crossing boundaries between medical anthropology and biomedicine brought similar questions to the table. Christine Holmberg spoke openly about being a “token anthropologist” in biomedical spaces and how practice theory helped her challenge normative assumptions about what anthropologists can contribute in interdisciplinary collaborations. Reflecting on his role as a medical school director (and medical anthropology supporter), Torsten Risør emphasized the importance of creating structures for dialogue rather than simply teaching interdisciplinarity. These reflections illustrate how collaboration across epistemic boundaries is not just about merging knowledge but rather about setting the conditions for durable and equitable dialogue and cross-pollination.
Another panel on multi-perspectival ethnography deepened this conversation. Presentations explored how ethnographic writing can amplify the voices of different, entangled parties without collapsing differences, and how disagreement itself can become a productive force. Anne-Sophie Guernon, a PhD student presenting in this panel, had a powerful message about triangulation not being about resolving multiple truths into unity but about holding them together. The challenge is one of curation: as medical anthropologists, we are required to navigate uneven perspectives, manage the relationship between them, and make our choices explicit.
What I took home from Vienna is that medical anthropology is broadening and deepening. It is responsive to the entanglements of our time: it is collaborative, ethically engaged, and ambitious in linking different perspectives. The conference reminded me that medical anthropology, just like anthropology more broadly, thrives not despite messiness, but because of it. Friction, interdisciplinarity, and multi-perspectival approaches should not be obstacles, but the very conditions that make medical anthropology so valuable.
The return of MAE after a decade felt like a reunion and an opportunity to reimagine the field of medical anthropology. We can now look ahead at the next MAE conference in 2027, wondering where it will be heading.
Giulia Sinatti is Assistant professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, currently researching health, care, and biotechnologies. She is committed to working collaboratively with research partners in these fields. You can read more about the frictions this entails in this article written collaboratively with co-conveners of the MAE 2025 panel on frictions in healthcare ethnography, Jennifer Creese and Julie Salvador.
Photo by Parker Sturdivant on Unsplash