Medical Anthropology Past, Present, and Future

When we accepted our roles as editors of this journal back in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had only recently taken the world by storm.One of our challenges was to think about how a journal such as Medical Anthropology could best respond to world events, predictable or otherwise, as they unfolded through the painstaking ethnography that is our discipline's hallmark.Policymakers, after all, need the insights that will help them formulate possible solutions sooner rather than later.We also agonized over how we could best keep the journal -and the oftentimes ground-breaking research our contributors write about -relevant within and beyond the sub-discipline of medical anthropology.And we thought about how we might utilize the journal to join in the broader work of decolonizing scholarship.In writing this, what is likely to be our final editorial, we look both backwards, to consider how medical anthropology has changed over the last decade or so, and forwards, in a bid both to identify the challenges that face us in the contemporary moment and to predict what the future might have in store.In doing so, we draw on the insights of our editorial board and team of associate editors, a diverse group of medical anthropologists from across the globe with whom we have been privileged to engage throughout our tenure as editors.Our twice-yearly meetings, as well as multiple ad hoc encounters inbetween, have served not only as a sounding board for ideas about how best to run the journal, but as a remarkable barometer on the state of Medical Anthropology more generally.Collectively they have offered us real insights into what is going on in the discipline, have helped offer practical solutions to epistemological, ethical, and practical concerns, and shown their unstinting support in helping us to develop the journal in line with developments both in the discipline and in the wider world beyond.It felt fitting, then, that we should draw specifically on the knowledge and experience of this team in authoring this final editorial.With their consent, we sent each member of the editorial board three broad questions to consider, which we summarize as follows: How has medical anthropology changed over the last decade?What are the most important challenges currently faced by medical anthropologists?And: how do you predict medical anthropology will change over the next decade?Fourteen board members responded, and we draw on all of them in what follows to answer those questions.We have, of course, focused most on areas of broad agreement (and, although they are far from a homogenous bunch, they did agree on a great deal), and have necessarily been selective in what we have included from each of their answers.Collated together, their comments ran to ten tightlyspaced pages, so we apologize to them in advance for not elaborating in the detail that some of the responses might well have deserved.There will, we hope, be many more meetings, panels, and workshops at which their ideas will come to life.Combined with our own reflections, however, we hope that the following does some justice to what they told us, and offers readers a sense of where we are as a discipline.We begin, then, with the question of how medical anthropology has changed.Recognition of the connections between planetary health, shaped by climate change, and the interconnected health of humans and animals, has become the pressing issue in Medical Anthropology over the last decade -even if, as we discussed in our last editorial (Staples and Marsland 2024), published work that tackles it head-on has been in relatively short supply.As our editorial board members rightly point out, however, that recognition has been instrumental in penetrating the once firmer boundaries between medical and environmental anthropology, as well This article has been corrected with minor changes

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