Structural Problems are Solvable Problems: Working Together to Prevent Health Inequities With a Structural Vulnerability Approach

Anthropologists have long grappled with how to analyze the structural production of harm. Foundational formulations of structural violence demonstrated how social forces became embodied as disparities in health and survival but were difficult to operationalize across anthropological subdisciplines. We argue that the related framework of structural vulnerability provides a tractable approach for contemporary anthropological and interdisciplinary inquiry. A structural vulnerability framework centers people, their positionalities, and experiences to better analyze who is put in harm's way. Like structural violence, structural vulnerability reframes health as a social condition rather than an individual outcome and shifts explanations of suffering toward upstream social factors that pattern risk. Unlike structural violence, structural vulnerability foregrounds existing interventions that prevent harm and promote resilience while making other possible interventions visible. Here we trace the emergence of the structural vulnerability framework, provide three concrete goals arising from it, and use biological, medical, archaeological, cultural, and forensic examples to show how it has been successfully operationalized across subdisciplines. In doing so, we show how structural vulnerability functions as a multiscalar framework that reanimates anthropological holism while supporting policy engagement. Structural vulnerability offers anthropology both a shared analytic language and a practical orientation for addressing preventable harm.