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The Land Is Dying
Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores life in and around a Luo-speaking village in western Kenya during a time of death. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS affects every aspect of sociality and pervades villagers' debates about the past, the future and the ethics of everyday life. Central to such debates is a discussion of touch in the broad sense of concrete, material contact between persons. In mundane practices and in ritual acts, touch is considered to be key to the creation of bodily life as well as social continuity. Underlying the significance of material contact is its connection with growth – of persons and groups, animals, plants and the land – and the forward movement of life more generally. Under the pressure of illness and death, economic hardship and land scarcity, as well as bitter struggles about the relevance and application of Christianity and ‘Luo tradition’ in daily life, people find it difficult to agree about the role of touch in engendering growth, or indeed about the aims of growth itself.
Traces of the Future
This book presents a close look at the vestiges of twentieth-century medical work at five key sites in Africa: Senegal, Nigeria, Cameroon, Kenya, and Tanzania. The authors aim to understand the afterlife of scientific institutions and practices and the "aftertime" of scientific modernity and its attendant visions of progress and transformation. Straightforward scholarly work is juxtaposed here with altogether more experimental approaches to fieldwork and analysis, including interview fragments; brief, reflective essays; and a rich photographic archive. The result is an unprecedented view of the lingering traces of medical science from Africa's past.
Para-States and Medical Science
In Para-States and Medical Science, P. Wenzel Geissler and the contributors examine how medicine and public health in Africa have been transformed as a result of economic and political liberalization and globalization, intertwined with epidemiological and technological changes. The resulting fragmented medical science landscape is shaped and sustained by transnational flows of expertise and resources. NGOs, universities, pharmaceutical companies and other nonstate actors now play a significant role in medical research and treatment. But as the contributors to this volume argue, these groups have not supplanted the primacy of the nation-state in Africa. Although not necessarily stable or resp...
Medical Anthropology
This book provides an introduction to the basic concepts, approaches and theories used, and shows how these contribute to understanding complex health related behaviour. Public health policies and interventions are more likely to be effective if the beliefs and behaviour of people are understood and taken into account.
Evidence, Ethos and Experiment
Medical research has been central to biomedicine in Africa for over a century, and Africa, along with other tropical areas, has been crucial to the development of medical science. At present, study populations in Africa participate in an increasing number of medical research projects and clinical trials, run by both public institutions and private companies. Global debates about the politics and ethics of this research are growing and local concerns are prompting calls for social studies of the “trial communities” produced by this scientific work. Drawing on rich, ethnographic and historiographic material, this volume represents the emergent field of anthropological inquiry that links Africanist ethnography to recent concerns with science, the state, and the culture of late capitalism in Africa.
African Modernism and Its Afterlives
The legacy of colonial and postcolonial African architecture. This edited collection of essays and image-driven pieces by anthropologists, archaeologists, architects, and historians examines the legacies of African architecture from around the time of independence through examples from different countries. Drawing on ethnography, archival research, and careful observation of buildings, remains, and people, the case studies seek to connect the colonial and postcolonial origins of modernist architecture, the historical processes they underwent, and their present use and habitation, adaptation, and decay. Deriving from a workshop in connection with the 2015 exhibition "Forms of Freedom" at the National Museum in Oslo and the Venice Biennale, the volume combines recent developments in architectural history, the anthropology of modernism and of material culture, and contemporary archaeology to move beyond the admiration or preservation of prized architectural "heritage" and to complicate the contemplation--or critique--of "ruins" and "ruination."
Rethinking Biomedicine and Governance in Africa
In the domain of health, the relation between bodies, citizenship, nations and governments has changed beyond recognition over the past four decades, especially in Africa. In many regions, populations are now faced with a total lack of medical care, and the disciplinary regimes of modernity are faint memories. In this situation, new critical insights beyond the critique of old »modernization« and the »disciplinary regimes« of imperial times are needed. How can we keep up our sophisticated criticism of knowledge regimes and our doubts with regard to narratives of development, when so many people in Africa are dreaming about modernity and are envisioning their own renaissance?
Managing Uncertainty
The overall focus of this book is the ways humans deal with life conditions, with destiny, uncertainty and misfortune - how we try to control the risks of living through medicines, technologies and magic. When dealing with questions of health and illness rational solutions and meaningful explanations may be hard to find, and treatment efforts are often guided just as much by hope as by rational choice. Evaluating the risks of illness is just one of a number of ways in which human beings attempt to exert some sense of control over their lives. New methods of testing for ills and new developments in, for example, genetic screening and in vitro fertilisation combined with the growing demands of...
Anthropology of Our Times
This anthology represents the culmination of a series of public discussions with some of the leading international anthropologists of today —organized by the editor, Sindre Bangstad—at the House of Literature in Oslo, Norway. Thus, it provides fresh and original insights into the lives and work of these leading scholars. It features conversations with Didier Fassin, Angelique Haugerud, Ruben Andersson, Claudio Lomnitz, David Price, Magnus Marsden, Richard Ashby Wilson, and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, in addition to an introduction by Sindre Bangstad and a preface by Thomas Hylland Eriksen.
A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa
An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study....
