Living in an Inverted World: Experiences of Non-Anthropologists in an Anthropologically Driven Research Center

Every organization possesses a specific organizational culture and history, including university-based and freestanding research centers. In most research centers organizational culture is guided by a particular disciplinary emphasis (for a fuller discussion of the organizational culture of the Hispanic Health Council, see Singer 1990). When anthropologists are employed at health research centers, as they have been in growing numbers in recent years (Hahn 1999), they usually constitute a minority group functioning under the sway of another discipline's (e.g., psychology, epidemiology) worldview, methods, traditions and institutional control (e.g., Price, 1992). By contrast, anthropologists co-founded the Hispanic Health Council (in collaboration with community health activists) and the Director of the Hispanic Health Council's (HHC) Center for Health Research. The primary research arm of the organization, has, except for a brief period early in the organization's history, always been an anthropologist. Mo...