Introduction: Entangling Ethnography and Health

Health can be understood as a concept, a practice and a capacity, and is inherently complex, fluid and indeterminate. Ethnography, with its attention to how relations unfold between people, places, practices and things, is well suited to explore the situated meanings of health. The introductory chapter describes the scope and purpose of this collection, which draws together contemporary ethnographies investigating health, through a variety of topics, settings and disciplines. We describe the multiple ways in which ethnography and health become ‘entangled’ with one another through the research process, and how ethnographic and health knowledge emerge, take form, shape and challenge one another. We discuss emerging directions in ethnography and health, and raise important questions about how these entanglements produce new ways of doing both.