An insider psychologist and an outsider anthropologist: identities, documents, and power relations in health institutions

identidades, documentos e relações de poder entre instituições de saúde

Abstract

The article reflects on the ethical, methodological, and epistemological challenges faced by an anthropologist conducting ethnographic research in a public hospital in Brazil. The author, also a psychologist, occupied an ambiguous position—recognized institutionally through her background in psychology, yet regarded as an outsider due to her anthropological approach within the biomedical field. The text explores the tensions experienced during the submission of her research project to ethics committees, whose demands, grounded in biomedical rationality, required linguistic, methodological, and institutional adaptations. The requirement for a faculty member to serve as the principal investigator, the need for institutional affiliation, and the use of documents such as the Informed Consent Form (TCLE) reveal hierarchical relations and epistemological disputes embedded in the research process. The author argues that these documents, more than formal requirements, construct identities and “paper persons,” erasing the researcher’s agency. Drawing on Foucault, Marx, and Weber, she analyzes how the scientific approval system operates through disciplinary norms, class-based inequalities, and bureaucratic rationality. Despite the obstacles, the author highlights the potential of anthropology to broaden understandings of health and illness, emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue and the inclusion of the social sciences in biomedical settings. The article proposes the ethnography of documents as an analytical tool to understand how anthropological knowledge is authorized (or not) within hierarchical institutions, suggesting that anthropologists must continually negotiate their roles in order to produce knowledge in fields dominated by other epistemologies.

KEYWORDS: Hospital anthropology. Ethics committee. Psychology.