Vol. 25 No. 44 (2026): Artificial Intelligence and health
Originalartikler

Homes, Homeliness, and Otherness in Medical Anthropology “at Home”

PDF (Dansk)
  • Camilla Brændstrup Laursen
Camilla Brændstrup Laursen
Aalborg Universitet
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7146/tfss.v25i44.160333

Published 2026-06-26

Keywords

  • Home,
  • Homeliness,
  • Otherness,
  • Medical anthropology at home,
  • Positionality

How to Cite

Laursen, C. B. (2026). Homes, Homeliness, and Otherness in Medical Anthropology “at Home”. Tidsskrift for Forskning I Sygdom Og Samfund - Journal of Research in Sickness and Society, 25(44), 148–169. https://doi.org/10.7146/tfss.v25i44.160333

Copyright (c) 2026 Camilla Brændstrup Laursen

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Around the 1990s, the notion of “at home” flourished among medical anthropologists who used it to describe research conducted in the anthropologist’s own society. In this article, I argue that there are still reasons to continue “at home” research, but also to continue discussing the notion of “at home”: What is this “home”, and how can discussions about medical anthropology “at home” be fruitfully expanded? Being born and raised in Denmark, with both of my parents working in the healthcare system, my medical anthropological research fits the category of “at home”. In the article, I draw on experiences from two ethnographic fieldworks conducted in Denmark: one among people afflicted by irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and one in the acute healthcare system. I present and analyze one situation from each fieldwork to explore what it means to be “at home” as a medical anthropologist, and how experiences of “home”, “not home”, and “not not home” may shift and overlap. Discussing the empirical examples, I use Rosa’s phenomenologically inspired conceptualization of “home” (2019) and Waldenfels’ phenomenology of the alien (2011) as sources of inspiration for challenging and refining the notion of “at home”. Overall, I argue that “home” is not a fixed, geographical place, and that homeliness and otherness are entangled rather than separate and opposed. I point to the potentials of a relational understanding of medical anthropology “at home” that acknowledges that distinctions between “home” and “not home”, “familiar” and “unfamiliar” are not always clear-cut.

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