Stakes and challenges of an ethnographic journey in public health: the case of SociocoViD during the pandemic in Switzerland

What is anthropology good for during a sanitary crisis? This article aims to address this question by narrating the birth and development of SociocoViD, a medical anthropology project developed within the framework of an interdisciplinary collaboration with a team of epidemiologists and social medicine physicians in the Swiss Canton of Vaud. The objective is to highlight the various methodological, epistemic, and institutional challenges that the implementation of the project raised by documenting the practices of interdisciplinarity in the making. The first part of the article will discuss how the social sciences responded to the pandemic in Switzerland. In the second part, the specific modalities of collaboration deployed in this project will be analyzed by focusing on the important relational and epistemic work necessary to build an interdisciplinary collaboration. By showing how interdisciplinarity both legitimizes and frames the scope of an anthropological approach embarked in public health, this project serves as a case study to open up a broader reflection on the role and critical capacity of anthropology in a health crisis context.