R Whyte
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 2745 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | R Whyte |
| NOMBRES | R |
| APELLIDO | Whyte |
| FIRMA | WHYTE R |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7253-6478 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 60 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 660 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 60 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1981 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 13 |
Land for refugees
In Adjumani District, all 19 refugee settlements are located on land offered by local kin groups for an undetermined period of use. The concepts of sharing and exchange illuminate host community explanations about their provision of land. To the extent they were sharing, they originally availed land in solidarity with refugees. To the extent they were exchanging, they provided land as a move in a transaction with the national and local government…
Rivals
In East Africa, patterns of partnership have shifted over historical time, from my first fieldwork beginning in 1969 to my recent research on frail partnerships and child filiation. But shifts also occur in the lived time of a partnership. Becoming a co-wife, or ‘rival’, changes the relationship a woman has to her husband. While competition, jealousy, envy, and tensions often characterise the relations between co-wives in the present, this articl…
Still here
The passage of generational time may be one of the most fundamental ways of experiencing ageing; we age in relation to others with whom our lives are intertwined - by becoming a grandmother or losing a father. Those of the oldest generation weaken and pass away, but in that process, they persist - for a while - with the younger generations. In rural eastern Uganda, old people are 'still here' for younger generations in many ways. I choose three k…
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 conce…
Textures of precarity
Palabek Refugee Settlement in Northern Uganda hosts more than 40,000 refugees from South Sudan. They receive plots of land upon which they must build their own houses, as well as a few relief items and minimal food rations. The people who cross the border are not passive recipients of humanitarian aid. They creatively repurpose items often associated with precarity and helplessness in ways that challenge images of refugee victimhood. UNHCR tarpau…
Disability and technology in Africa
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Charm of Medicines
Medicines are absolutely central to health care in the views of both patients and practitioners. This fact, which has long been taken for granted in Western cultures, is being brought urgently to our attention as manufactured pharmaceuticals become widely available in developing countries. Reports on the intense interest in drugs have corne in from ail parts of the world. Anthropologists, who long neglected the study of medicines in favor of more…
Legacies of Violence
In the Long Run
Uganda has progressive legislation in place to support the rights of people with disabilities, and it has received donor support over the years for special education and community-based rehabilitation programs. Yet while political mobilization and interventions that aim to minimize disabling conditions have been important, they are not necessarily seen as a means to achieving rights and self-sufficiency. Using examples of families I have known fo…
Anger and Bitter Hearts
In many societies, the phenomenon of suicide provides a particularly powerful example of how something sinister might 'run in the family'. In the Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda, concerns about its capacity to spread increased during and after the Lord's Resistance Army war. Based on interviews with bereaved families in 2016 and historical material on suicide, we offer an analysis of suicide as an approach to the contagious connections of ki…
Diskurser om defekte kroppe
The notion of discourse is useful in examining the various ways in which impairments of the body are construed. In the last several hundred years of Western history, bodily difference has been the object of Christian charity, pedagogy, medical classification and rehabilitation. The article reviews these shifts in discourse and points to some fundamental assumptions about difference in Euro-American culture. In non-Westem cultures, discourses on b…
Struggling to Be a "Happy Self"? Psychotherapy and the Medicalization of Unhappiness in Uganda
This article is an ethnographic study of emergent discourses, practices, and institutions focused on mental health and psychotherapy in Uganda. It compares the recent rise of a psy-dispositif in two very different settings: postwar northern Uganda, which has become a hub for international trauma interventions, and Kampala, the capital, where a small group of Ugandan psychotherapists has established a number of private practices, which mainly cate…
Matthew Carey
Matthew Carey: Mistrust. An Ethnographic Theory Anmeldes af Susan Reynolds Whyte
Technologies of inquiry
HIV testing and divination are both performances that offer access to privileged knowledge about grave problems. In comparing this relatively new technology with a very old technology of knowledge, we consider the experience-near analogies in the ritual performance of discovery and the handling of uncertainty. Specialists must convince inquirers that the knowledge revealed is true. Inquirers test the provisional truths these practices offer by se…
Living and Dying in the Contemporary World
Reviewed by: Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium ed. by Veena Das and Clara Han Susan Reynolds Whyte Veena Das and Clara Han, eds. Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium. Oakland: University of California, 2016. xiv + 876 pp. Ill. $175.00 (978-0-520-27841-7). This is a big book in several senses. Running to nearly nine hundred pages, it is hefty (1.675 kg) and weighty in subject matter, as the title suggests…
Social Sensations of Symptoms
The interpretation of sensations and the recognition of symptoms of a sickness, as well as the movement to seek treatment, have long been recognised in medical anthropology as inherently social processes. Based on cases of HIV and trauma (PTSD) in Uganda, we show that even the first signs and sensations of sickness can be radically social. The sensing body can be a 'social body' - a family, a couple, a network - a unit that transcends the individ…
These Things Continue
After decades of violent war, families are rebuilding their lives in the Acholi subregion of Northern Uganda. The return to normal order is marked by problems people see as consequences of the years of insecurity: mental illness, alcoholism, domestic violence, marital instability, and land conflicts that sometimes turn vicious. The ravages of war and years of constraint have left a legacy of troubles that is contagious and contaminating. The war …
Generations and Access to Land in Postconflict Northern Uganda
Generational tensions are one of the many forms that land conflicts take in northern Uganda. The convention in Acholiland was that young men gained land-use rights through their fathers and young women gained them through their husbands. This pattern of generational governance has become complicated in the wake of the civil war and decades of internment in IDP camps. Lacking husbands, young women are using land of their patrilateral kin, while yo…
Communication in the Context of Family Caregiving
It is important to consider the complexities of family dynamics when deciding when and how to communicate with HIV-infected children about their illness and treatment. Previous research has focused on providers’ and caregivers’ perspectives on whether, when and how to disclose HIV/AIDS diagnosis and treatment to HIV-infected children. From the perspective of HIV-infected children, communication does not mean just giving information about illness …
Accessing diabetes care in rural Uganda
Non-communicable diseases including type 2 diabetes (T2D) are increasing rapidly in most Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries like Uganda. Little attention has been given to how patients with T2D try to achieve treatment when the availability of public health care for their disease is limited, as is the case in most SSA countries. In this paper we focus on the landscape of availability of care and the therapeutic journeys of patients within that l…
Knowing hypertension and diabetes
Life
Recognition as care
This longitudinal study provides critical insight into the social processes of municipal diabetes training for Arabic-speaking immigrants in Denmark focusing on participants’ experiences. Our study builds on observations of three diabetes courses and 36 interviews with participants at the start of, immediately following or 30–36 months after the courses. Lifestyle change and responsibility were dominant messages in the courses; over time and depe…
Measuring and Managing Bodies in the Later Life Course
Generations in Africa. Connections and Conflicts
In this book, sixteen studies examine relations between generations of kin and between historical and political generations. The topics range from grandmother's cooking, migrant remittances, youth unemployment, teenage pregnancy, Valentine's Day, and hip hop music, to respect, religious virtue, gerontocracy, memory, wisdom, complaint, and the meaning of tradition.
The Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals
This review discusses pharmaceuticals as social and cultural phenomena by following their "life cycle" from production, marketing, and prescription to distribution, purchasing, consumption, and finally their efficacy. Each phase has its own particular context, actors, and transactions and is characterized by different sets of values and ideas. The anthropology of pharmaceuticals is relevant to medical anthropology and health policy. It also touch…
The Charm of Medicines
The ready availability and extreme popularity of Western pharmaceuticals in developing countries poses important general issues for medical anthropology. In attempting to explain why medicines are so attractive in so many different cultures, this article suggests that they facilitate particular social and symbolic processes. The key to their charm is their con-creteness; in them healing is objectified. As things, they allow therapy to be disengag…
Health Identities and Subjectivities
The formation of identity and subjectivity in relation to health is a fundamental issue in social science. This overview distinguishes two different approaches to the workings of power in shaping senses of self and other. Politics of identity scholars focus on social movements and organizations concerned with discrimination, recognition, and social justice. The biopower approach examines discourse and technology as they influence subjectivity and…
Burying SM
One body, two funerals orations of the dead silences of the living living bodies and their knowledge the productions of culture the constitution of an African state Owino Misiani's lamentation, 1987
Children's Children
This article brings two analytic perspectives to bear on temporal aspects of relations to children's children. The first, which we call processual time, is the long-term, 'experience-distant', view of household developmental cycles over a historical period. Beginning with this approach, we describe the arrangements of family and marriage that provide the framework for people's relations to the children of their sons and of their daughters in Buny…
Going Home? Belonging and Burial in the Era of Aids
In Eastern Uganda, a married woman should be buried at her husband's home, raising questions such as: which husband? were they really married? These questions become urgent when a woman dies at the home of her parents or brothers, a situation that has become increasingly common as women ill with AIDS seek care from their families of orientation. In Bunyole, the ways in which a woman 'belongs' to two different homes are brought out as discussions …
Remaining Internally Displaced
The 20-year war that displaced more than 90 per cent of the population of Acholiland has drawn to a close and most people have left the IDP camps and returned to their rural homes. But some remain behind, unable to ‘re-place’ themselves in the traditional patterns of Acholi belonging to homes and land. Socially mediated access to land has been weakened by the death of husbands and parents; conjugal partnerships and children’s affiliation were not…
Chronicity and control
This paper proposes a way of framing the study of 'noncommunicable diseases' within the more general area of chronic conditions. Focusing on Africa, it takes as points of departure the situation in Uganda, and the approach to health issues developed by a group of European and African colleagues over the years. It suggests a pragmatic analysis that places people's perceptions and practices within a field of possibilities shaped by policy, health c…
Penicillin, battery acid and sacrifice
Generations and Access to Land in Postconflict Northern Uganda
Generational tensions are one of the many forms that land conflicts take in northern Uganda. The convention in Acholiland was that young men gained land-use rights through their fathers and young women gained them through their husbands. This pattern of generational governance has become complicated in the wake of the civil war and decades of internment in IDP camps. Lacking husbands, young women are using land of their patrilateral kin, while yo…
These Things Continue
After decades of violent war, families are rebuilding their lives in the Acholi subregion of Northern Uganda. The return to normal order is marked by problems people see as consequences of the years of insecurity: mental illness, alcoholism, domestic violence, marital instability, and land conflicts that sometimes turn vicious. The ravages of war and years of constraint have left a legacy of troubles that is contagious and contaminating. The war …
A Heart for the Work
Lifetimes Intertwined
In this volume we return to one of the treasures of our contributors' anthropological heritage: the study of kinship in Africa. We have chosen to focus on the intertwined lives of grandparents and grandchildren because they raise so clearly fundamental issues of temporality and relationship. While grandparents and grandchildren live together in shared time, their lifetimes overlap only partly. They have different pasts and different futures, and …
Epidemic Projectification
This article explores the responses to the AIDS epidemic in Uganda as events and processes of projectification. AIDS projects became epidemic. Prevention and treatment projects supported by outside donors spread to an extent that made it hard for some to see the role of the Ugandan state and health-care system. We describe the projectified AIDS landscape in Uganda as projects make themselves present in the life of our interlocutors. We argue that…
Struggling to Be a "Happy Self"? Psychotherapy and the Medicalization of Unhappiness in Uganda
This article is an ethnographic study of emergent discourses, practices, and institutions focused on mental health and psychotherapy in Uganda. It compares the recent rise of a psy-dispositif in two very different settings: postwar northern Uganda, which has become a hub for international trauma interventions, and Kampala, the capital, where a small group of Ugandan psychotherapists has established a number of private practices, which mainly cate…
Treating Aids
The price of antiretroviral (ARV) medicines in Uganda has fallen dramatically in recent years and more people are under treatment. By mid-2003 it was estimated that 10 000 people were taking ARVs. Drawing on participant observation, qualitative interviews, work with key informants and document reviews, we seek to map out the channels through which ARVs are being made available to people and to describe and assess the social implications of the pr…
In the Long Run
Uganda has progressive legislation in place to support the rights of people with disabilities, and it has received donor support over the years for special education and community-based rehabilitation programs. Yet while political mobilization and interventions that aim to minimize disabling conditions have been important, they are not necessarily seen as a means to achieving rights and self-sufficiency. Using examples of families I have known fo…
Discrimination
Crisis denotes discrimination or separation, writes Henrik Vigh in his introduction to this collection of essays. To discriminate is to differentiate, to set things apart, distinguishing them, and
Men, Women and Misfortune in Bunyole
This article deals with what may be called a problem in collective representations. It attempts to show how a model which is shared by all the members of a society may in fact be elaborated from the perspective of only one group within that collectivity. Collective representations contain a point of view and a set of interests associated with a particular social position. The argument is made in terms of Nyole ideas as to the causes of misfortune
Knowing hypertension and diabetes
Planning for essential drugs
Planning for essential drugs: are we missing the cultural dimension? Sjaak van der Geest, Sjaak van der Geest 1Anthropological-Sociological Centre, University of AmsterdamThe Netherlands Correspondence: S van der Geest, Anthropological-Sociological Centre, University of Amsterdam, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Anita Hardon, Anita Hard…
Social Sensations of Symptoms
The interpretation of sensations and the recognition of symptoms of a sickness, as well as the movement to seek treatment, have long been recognised in medical anthropology as inherently social processes. Based on cases of HIV and trauma (PTSD) in Uganda, we show that even the first signs and sensations of sickness can be radically social. The sensing body can be a 'social body' - a family, a couple, a network - a unit that transcends the individ…
Measuring and Managing Bodies in the Later Life Course
Crafting forgiveness accounts after war
After two decades of conflict and internment in camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDP), the Acholi people have returned to their homes and are trying to heal their wounds after the long war in northern Uganda. Bilateral and multilateral donors, NGOs, cultural organizations, and religious institutions are involved in the politically and personally sensitive work of reconciliation. Yet for most people, the actual restoration of peace lies in …
Urbanisation by subtraction
As peace returns to northern Uganda, a unique arithmetic of development is evident in the former Internally Displaced Persons camps. Small trading centres whose populations multiplied as they became camps now envision futures as Town Boards. Subtraction is necessary: the displaced people and the dead buried in the camps are being returned to their rural villages. Urban planners have produced meticulous drawings that envisage the division of land …
Men, Women and Misfortune in Bunyole
This article deals with what may be called a problem in collective representations. It attempts to show how a model which is shared by all the members of a society may in fact be elaborated from the perspective of only one group within that collectivity. Collective representations contain a point of view and a set of interests associated with a particular social position. The argument is made in terms of Nyole ideas as to the causes of misfortune
Penicillin, battery acid and sacrifice
The Context of Medicines in Developing Countries
The Charm of Medicines
The ready availability and extreme popularity of Western pharmaceuticals in developing countries poses important general issues for medical anthropology. In attempting to explain why medicines are so attractive in so many different cultures, this article suggests that they facilitate particular social and symbolic processes. The key to their charm is their con-creteness; in them healing is objectified. As things, they allow therapy to be disengag…
Planning for essential drugs
Planning for essential drugs: are we missing the cultural dimension? Sjaak van der Geest, Sjaak van der Geest 1Anthropological-Sociological Centre, University of AmsterdamThe Netherlands Correspondence: S van der Geest, Anthropological-Sociological Centre, University of Amsterdam, Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, 1012 DK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Anita Hardon, Anita Hard…
Uncertain Persons in Nyole Divination1
The posture of uncertainty and questioning in the face of misfortune has been a theme in the study of African religion since EvansPritchard published his study of Zande witchcraft. In one of the most famous passages in anthropological writing, he showed what kinds of questions were raised in Zande minds by events like the collapse of a granary upon people sitting in its shade (1937: 69 ff). He, and other scholars after him, called attention to a …
Uncertain Persons in Nyole Divination
Pharmaceuticals as folk medicine
Disability and Culture
Burying SM
One body, two funerals orations of the dead silences of the living living bodies and their knowledge the productions of culture the constitution of an African state Owino Misiani's lamentation, 1987
The Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals
This review discusses pharmaceuticals as social and cultural phenomena by following their "life cycle" from production, marketing, and prescription to distribution, purchasing, consumption, and finally their efficacy. Each phase has its own particular context, actors, and transactions and is characterized by different sets of values and ideas. The anthropology of pharmaceuticals is relevant to medical anthropology and health policy. It also touch…
Courses in medical anthropology
There is a strong and growing interest in medical anthropology at Nordic universities. Optional courses in the anthropology of health are offered in many Institutes/Departments of Anthropology as part of the programme leading to bachelor, kandidat or magister, and Ph.D. degrees. However, there are no masters programmes specifically in medical anthropology; it is treated as a specialisation integrated within the discipline. In addition, medical an…
Pragmatisme
Akademisk og anvendt
Questioning Misfortune
Lifetimes Intertwined
In this volume we return to one of the treasures of our contributors' anthropological heritage: the study of kinship in Africa. We have chosen to focus on the intertwined lives of grandparents and grandchildren because they raise so clearly fundamental issues of temporality and relationship. While grandparents and grandchildren live together in shared time, their lifetimes overlap only partly. They have different pasts and different futures, and …
Popularité et scepticisme
Les auteurs de cet article discutent de deux points de vue différents sur les médicaments. Leurs propres recherches ainsi que d'autres études indiquent une grande popularité des médicaments dans les sociétés prospères comme dans les sociétés pauvres. Ils sont parvenus cependant à constater en même temps une attitude plus sceptique et réticente vis-à-vis des médicaments pharmaceutiques. Ils perçoivent ce scepticisme comme l'expression émergente d'…
Children's Children
This article brings two analytic perspectives to bear on temporal aspects of relations to children's children. The first, which we call processual time, is the long-term, 'experience-distant', view of household developmental cycles over a historical period. Beginning with this approach, we describe the arrangements of family and marriage that provide the framework for people's relations to the children of their sons and of their daughters in Buny…
Treating Aids
The price of antiretroviral (ARV) medicines in Uganda has fallen dramatically in recent years and more people are under treatment. By mid-2003 it was estimated that 10 000 people were taking ARVs. Drawing on participant observation, qualitative interviews, work with key informants and document reviews, we seek to map out the channels through which ARVs are being made available to people and to describe and assess the social implications of the pr…
Going Home? Belonging and Burial in the Era of Aids
In Eastern Uganda, a married woman should be buried at her husband's home, raising questions such as: which husband? were they really married? These questions become urgent when a woman dies at the home of her parents or brothers, a situation that has become increasingly common as women ill with AIDS seek care from their families of orientation. In Bunyole, the ways in which a woman 'belongs' to two different homes are brought out as discussions …
Wheels and New Legs
Discrimination
Crisis denotes discrimination or separation, writes Henrik Vigh in his introduction to this collection of essays. To discriminate is to differentiate, to set things apart, distinguishing them, and
Health Identities and Subjectivities
The formation of identity and subjectivity in relation to health is a fundamental issue in social science. This overview distinguishes two different approaches to the workings of power in shaping senses of self and other. Politics of identity scholars focus on social movements and organizations concerned with discrimination, recognition, and social justice. The biopower approach examines discourse and technology as they influence subjectivity and…
Special Edition for Anthropology and Medicine Biomedical Technology and Health Inequities in the Global North and South
Displacement, mobility and poverty in northern Uganda
Ghosts of Kanungu
Richard Vokes. 2009. Ghosts of Kanungu: Fertility, Secrecy and Exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa. Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester, NY: James Currey. Kampala: Fountain Press. 256 pp. USD
Sociology (43 obras) · Political science (34 obras) · Psychology (22 obras) · Law (17 obras) · History (14 obras) · Medicine (14 obras) · Anthropology (13 obras) · Geography (13 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Politics (13 obras)