Developing Trust in Collaborative Research: Utilizing Indigenous Pacific Methodologies to Create Dialogue Within Research Teams.

This article explores the processes involved in developing international, cross-cultural research teams. Scholarship on Indigenous and Pacific Methodologies demonstrate the importance of employing methodologies that center Indigenous approaches to research and relationships. This article explores using these methodologies within research teams as a preliminary step in developing sustainable and impactful international, cross-cultural research teams. Although this is not a formal study, the article reports that the importance of building trust within research teams as an essential step in addition to building trust with communities.

Anthropology, brokerage, and collaboration in the development of a Tongan public psychiatry: Local lessons for global mental health.

The Global Mental Health (GMH) movement has raised questions of the translatability of psychiatric concepts and the challenges of community engagement. In Tonga, the local psychiatrist Dr Puloka successfully established a publicly accessible psychiatry that has improved admission rates for serious mental illnesses and addressed some of the stigma attached to diagnosis. On the basis of historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork with healers, doctors, and patients since 1998, this article offers an ethnographic contextualization of the development and reception of Puloka's three key interventions during the 1990s: (a) collaboration with traditional healers; (b) translation of psychiatric diagnoses into local cultural concepts; and (c) encouraging freedom of movement and legal appeal to involuntary admission. Dr Puloka's use of medical anthropological and transcultural psychiatry research informed a community-engaged brokerage between the implications of psychiatric nosologies and local needs that can address some of the challenges of the Global Mental Health movement.

The efficacy and self-efficacy of treatment: ethnomedical aspirations, biomedical inhibitions, and health outcomes.

This article argues for a shift from an evaluation of the efficacy of "traditional medicine" to an analysis of the influence of notions of efficacy on health seeking and health outcomes. Studies on the therapeutic value of traditional medicine tend to focus on countering or engaging with biomedical models to explain the process and efficacy of healing. Less examined is how efficacy is evaluated by traditional healers and patients themselves. Ethnographic research focused on health seeking and language use in Tonga reveals a diversity of claims of efficacy that relate to the social and epistemological positions of healers, health workers, and patients. Using the celebrated case of a man who was cured by a healer after the hospital could do no more for him facilitates greater epistemological dialogue and poses a challenge to the current efficacy consensuses in medical anthropology and Tonga.

'MMR talk' and vaccination choices: an ethnographic study in Brighton.

In the context of the high-profile controversy that has unfolded in the UK around the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and its possible adverse effects, this paper explores how parents in Brighton, southern England, are thinking about MMR for their own children. Research focusing on parents' engagement with MMR has been dominated by analysis of the proximate influences on their choices, and in particular scientific and media information, which have led health policy to focus on information and education campaigns. This paper reports ethnographic work including narratives by mothers in Brighton. Our work questions such reasoning in showing how wider personal and social issues shape parents' immunisation actions. The narratives by mothers show how practices around MMR are shaped by personal histories, by birth experiences and related feelings of control, by family health histories, by their readings of their child's health and particular strengths and vulnerabilities, by particular engagements with health services, by processes building or undermining confidence, and by friendships and conversations with others, which are themselves shaped by wider social differences and transformations. Although many see vaccination as a personal decision which must respond to the particularities of a child's immune system, 'MMR talk', which affirms these conceptualisations, has become a social phenomenon in itself. These perspectives suggest ways in which people's engagements with MMR reflect wider changes in their relations with science and the state.