of access to healthcare, and by extension the Greek patient identity11, in order to better
serve the Roma, a population they deemed to be “unlike them” and their community.
I later approached a contact at the Ministry of Health to see if we could get
support from a higher level. He too refused. Not willing to give up, I undertook to
convince this individual and several others I had spoken with including some members of
another health NGO, that outreach was beneficial and, indeed, that the Roma were
worthy of this kind of care. I had become a full-time advocate. This did not concern me
in and of itself; in fact, it can be argued that some of the best ethnography has been
written by advocate anthropologists (see for example Farmer 1992; Fortun 2001;
Scheper-Hughes 1993). Instead, my concern was that advocacy was taking up all my
time and was even coming to inform which field sites I was visiting and the questions I
would pursue in each. My involvement with the vaccination outreach issue got to the
point where I was canceling meetings with non-health-related contacts, as it were, and
losing touch with groups I had worked very hard to get to know. In the end I decided to
put the vaccination program on hold. Unfortunately, I left the country before I had a
chance to pursue the matter further. The following month a tuberculosis outbreak caused
over half the population of the compound to fall ill12. Two children subsequently died.
I was unable to maintain a hybrid advocate∕anthropologist identity in the field.
Had the subject of my research matched more closely with the mission of MERIA and
had all my field sites related to the issue at the heart of my advocate activities (equality
and access to healthcare), even if indirectly, I would have been able to keep this
11 The standard Greek patient identity is complex, certainly variable, and informed by particular formal and
informal nationalist discourses. The typical patient∕doctor interaction involves an overt show of deference
by the patient toward the doctor underscored by the willing payment of a bribe for their service.
12 The outbreak was covered by Skai News on September 28, 2007.