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In Cooking Data Crystal Biruk offers an ethnographic account of research into the demographics of HIV and AIDS in Malawi to rethink the production of quantitative health data. While research practices are often understood within a clean/dirty binary, Biruk shows that data are never clean; rather, they are always “cooked” during their production and inevitably entangled with the lives of those who produce them. Examining how the relationships among fieldworkers, supervisors, respondents, and foreign demographers shape data, Biruk examines the ways in which units of information—such as survey questions and numbers written onto questionnaires by fieldworkers—acquire value as statistics that go on to shape national AIDS policy. Her approach illustrates how on-the-ground dynamics and research cultures mediate the production of global health statistics in ways that impact local economies and formulations of power and expertise.
This timely account of politicized homophobia contests portrayals of the African continent as hopelessly homophobic, highlighting how elites deploy it.
The last three decades have witnessed a proliferation of nongovernmental organizations engaging in new campaigns to end the practice of female genital cutting across Africa. These campaigns have in turn spurred new institutions, discourses, and political projects, bringing about unexpected social transformations, both intended and unintended. Consequently, cutting is waning across the continent. At the same time, these endings are misrecognized and disavowed by public and scholarly discourses across the political spectrum. What does it mean to say that while cutting is ending, the Western discourse surrounding it is on the rise? And what kind of a feminist anthropology is needed in such a mo...
How global health practices can end up reorganizing practices of care for the people and communities they seek to serve Commodities of Care examines the unanticipated effects of global health interventions, ideas, and practices as they unfold in communities of men who have sex with men (MSM) in China. Targeted for the scaling-up of HIV testing, Elsa L. Fan examines how the impact of this initiative has transformed these men from subjects of care into commodities of care: through the use of performance-based financing tied to HIV testing, MSM have become a source of economic and political capital. In ethnographic detail, Fan shows how this particular program, ushered in by global health donor...
In Trafficking in Antiblackness Lyndsey P. Beutin analyzes how campaigns to end human trafficking—often described as “modern-day slavery”—invoke the memory of transatlantic slavery to support positions ultimately grounded in antiblackness. Drawing on contemporary antitrafficking visual culture and media discourse, she shows how a constellation of media, philanthropic, NGO, and government actors invested in ending human trafficking repurpose the history of transatlantic slavery and abolition in ways that undermine contemporary struggles for racial justice and slavery reparations. The recurring narratives, images, and figures such as “slavery in Africa,” “Arab slave traders,” a...
Contributors to this special issue investigate how queer theory might change when African texts, experiences, and concepts are placed front and center rather than treated as examples or case studies. The authors consider what the concept of customary does to the dialectic of tradition and modernity that is at the heart of much Africanist scholarship. Can queer theoretical texts travel beyond the North Atlantic world that made them without reproducing imperial ways of knowing? Can there be an African queer theory? In posing these questions, the authors encourage readers to consider queerness from and within Africa, exploring what African customary forms of gender and sexuality might do to the anti-normativity of queer theory and how presumptions within Euro-American queer scholarship contribute to Afro-pessimist and/or Afro-optimist scholarship. Contributors. Cal (Crystal) Biruk, Laura Edmondson, Kirk Fiereck, Neville Hoad, Phoebe Kisubi, Keguro Macharia, Danai Mupotsa, Edgar Nabutanyi, Eddie Ombagi, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse
With in-depth analysis of more than fifteen countries, this volume examines the impact of the double disease burden on health care regimes, resource allocation, strategies for prevention and control on the wealthiest nations in the region, as well as the smallest Pacific islands. Milton Lewis, University of Sydney.
This book explains how field research contributes value to political science by exploring scholars' experiences, detailing exemplary practices, and asserting key principles.
In the early twentieth century, people in the southwestern Pacific nation of Vanuatu experienced rapid population decline, while in the early twenty-first century, they experienced rapid population growth. From colonial governance to postcolonial sovereignty, Moral Figures shows that despite attempts to govern population size and birth, reproduction in Vanuatu continues to exceed bureaucratic economization through Ni-Vanuatu insistence on Indigenous relationalities. Through Alexandra Widmer’s examination of how reproduction is made public, she demonstrates how population sciences have a naturalized focus on women’s fertility and privileged issues of wage labour over women’s land access...
Against a background marked by endless ordinary crises, widespread precarity, and disrupting critical events, Queer and Trans Life charts queer investments for the future. It examines the challenges and pleasures in marginal everyday experiences of gender and sexual dissidence and the labours of care and endurance which sustain a sense of sociality and community, often against all odds. It presents queer and trans anthropological research from emerging European contexts. Though occasionally posited as non-belonging, the volume demonstrates that queer anthropology in Europe continues to thrive by providing textured ethnographic analysis and timely interventions in anthropological theory.