A Note about the Astounding Silence of Medical Anthropology

The extremist reaction of antismoking researchers and organisations to the hookah smoking “epidemic” was expected. As for the silence of independent biomedical researchers, there are two main explanations for their attitude. 

First, those from the rich nations have either been afraid for their careers or simply lacked the necessary experience to be in a position to criticise, point by point, the numerous errors that were published in scientific publications.

Second, the work of scientists in the so-called “developing world”, despite the high calibre of many of them in the field of tobacco smoking, was dismissed. This was even more easy when they had published studies in their own national language (particularly in Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Urdu, etc.). In fact, most of the independent researchers cannot write in English, the dominant language, and have subsequently been ruled out by the international biomedical publishing process clearly infiltrated by extremist antismoking activists.

However, for ten years now, the silence of anthropologists, particular medical anthropologists, around the whole world, has been amazing, not to say dumbfounding. Indeed, was there nobody to point out that a hookah is not a mere water pipe prototype in a chemistry laboratory ? Such a silence has amounted to accepting that the issue needed to be treated exclusively through the (antismoking) biomedical research looking glass (medicalisation of the hookah issue). The rest of the story is well known.

In these conditions, the asymmetric scientific encounter took place on two main fronts : biomedical and anthropological.  When looking back at this situation, it appears that this approach proved natural, useful and very efficient.

It is hoped that a new generation of brave scientists will dare critically look at the existing publications, consider the size of all scientific errors and fallacies and will not accept to blindly cite them in their own studies without revealing the whole truth about them. In other words, they should not behave like “parrots” as the herd of uncritical antismoking researchers have been doing for years and for clear reasons. Any scientist worthy of this name should not be a parrot and should reject what was once called “expert mongering” when her/his colleagues, as in the case of other alerts about other epidemics, go too far [1].

Consequently, the author has never claimed anything in this field : prestige, money, etc. His favourite poetic quotation (inserted as an epigraph in his book) is :

I am nothing. I will always be nothing. I cannot wish to be anything. Apart from that, I hold inside myself all the dreams of the world

Original: “Não sou nada. Nunca serei nada. Não posso querer ser nada. À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo” (Fernando Pessoa, Tabacaria, 1928)”

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