P W Geissler
Biographic Data
| ID | 31781 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P W Geissler |
| GIVEN NAMES | P W |
| FAMILY NAME | Geissler |
| SIGNATURE | GEISSLER P W |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oslo |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4724-5593 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 506 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
‘Corona is Over’: Temporalities and Material Afterlives of the Covid-19 Pandemic in Kenya
After what most Kenyans experienced as the "end of Covid" in 2021-22, material remains of anti-epidemic measures, biological traces such as long covid, and memories of deaths persisted. While infection itself left few visible material traces, paraphernalia of its control - masks, tests, handwashing stations, and routines - proved more durable, although often losing or changing their function and meaning. This paper examines Covid-19 residues in w…
Practical norms in emerging infectious disease control: Lessons for transnational collaboration from a suspected newly emerging zoonosis outbreak in Ghana
Concern around the emergence of zoonoses with pandemic potential has fuelled significant foreign engagement with domestic infectious disease surveillance and response systems across Africa. These international efforts at augmentation have likely been hampered, however, by an inattention to how such systems actually manifest on the ground and the critical activities and undertakings that take place outside of official structures and protocols. Suc…
Vaccinations, Pills, and Resistance: School Health Campaigns in Kenya During the Covid Pandemic
In the shadow of HIV: Fear, rumor, and stigma among young women living with HIV in Covid-19 pandemic in Western Kenya
Drawing on ethnographic research in Dudi village in Western Kenya, this article explores how the lingering legacies of the 1990s HIV/AIDS epidemic shaped local perceptions of, and responses to, the COVID-19 pandemic and related vaccine controversies. Focusing on the lives of young women living with HIV, the article traces how their experiences of navigating HIV care, stigma, and gendered expectations intersected with anxieties around COVID-19 vac…
Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, Nothing but Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects
Journal Article Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, Nothing but Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects Get access Kirsten Moore-Sheeley, Nothing but Nets: A Biography of Global Health Science and Its Objects, Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. Pp. xii+231. $49.95. Hbk. ISBN 978-1-4214-4757-5. Paul Wenzel Geissler Paul Wenzel Geissler Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway [email protected]…
Anthropology of Modern Traces
Industrial and colonial capitalism, and underlying ideas of melioration and domination, technological progress and encompassing, violent territorial expansion, shorthanded as “modernity,” have made and remade the material world humans inhabit today. Despite mounting doubts about modern projects and their progressive temporalities—on account of their mistakes and failures, and the collateral damage they caused—their material remains and residuals …
Ineffective responses to unlikely outbreaks: Hypothesis building in newly‐emerging infectious disease outbreaks
Over the last 30 years, there has been significant investment in research and infrastructure aimed at mitigating the threat of newly emerging infectious diseases (NEID). Core epidemiological processes, such as outbreak investigations, however, have received little attention and have proceeded largely unchecked and unimproved. Using ethnographic material from an investigation into a cryptic encephalitis outbreak in the Brong‐Ahafo Region of Ghana …
A failing anthropology of colonial failure: Following a driver's uniform found at Amani research station, Tanzania
The remains of Amani, a century-old scientific laboratory in Tanzania, are quintessential modern relics. When anthropologists turn to such infrastructures of, originally colonial, knowledge-making, their own implication with the object of their study - and with its epistemological and political-economic origins and order - becomes part of the ethnographic pursuit. This entanglement between researcher and research material should challenge familia…
Toxic worldings: Introduction to toxic flows
In the course of recent world history, humans have permanently changed the chemical composition of the planet, as human-made chemical substances become part of the air, water and soil, pervading human and non-human bodies and upsetting linear imaginaries of past and future. The slow violence of toxic exposure associated with industrial activity and economic growth is a particularly insidious dimension of inequality and exploitation, woven into gl…
Remembering Africanization: Excerpt of Reunion Transcripts
Professor Bukheti Swalehe Kilonzo, born 1949: joined Amani in 1968 as a Scientific Assistant. Studied microbiology and parasitology in London; PhD in plague epidemiology from Dar es Salaam in 1984. Left Amani in 1982 as Research Scientist and became professor at Sokoine University
Remembering Africanization: Two Conversations Among Elderly Science Workers About the Perpetually Promissory
The 'Africanization' of science after decolonization was replete with dreams. Claims to Africa's place in the high-modern world, expectations of national technological and economic progress, and individual dreams of scientific discovery, professional development and fulfilled careers drove scientific work and lives. The term Africanization, coined by the colonizers, reproduced colonial notions of race but also stimulated the imagination of mid-tw…
Beyond realism: Africa's medical dreams Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Global Health Interventions and Research
Health interventions and research, often intertwined, are at the core of “global health,” the early twenty‐first‐century version of biomedical expansion into the “global South,” the deprived, often postcolonial zones of the planet. These scientific interventions are transnational and large scale, yet simultaneously often circumscribed to specific diseases, particular technological tools, limited sites and time spans, and bounded populations. They…
Scenes of Amani, Tanzania: Biography of a postcolonial landscape
In this paper an architect, two social anthropologists, and an architecture historian assess the postcolonial landscape of Amani Hill research station, a once highly productive and century-old site of scientific research. Rather than an ‘objective’ description of the overall site, this is done through six ‘scenes’ composed of photographs, drawings, and short essays that each highlight particular aspects of the ‘biography’ of this landscape. The m…
Capacity as history and horizon: Infrastructure, autonomy and future in African health science and care
Field station as stage: Re-enacting scientific work and life in Amani, Tanzania
Located high in Tanzania's Usambara Mountains, Amani Hill Station has been a site of progressive scientific endeavours for over a century, pushing the boundaries of botanical, zoological and medical knowledge, and providing expertise for imperial expansion, colonial welfare, national progress and international development efforts. The station's heyday was from the 1950s to the 1970s, a period of global disease eradication campaigns and the 'Afric…
A home for science: The life and times of Tropical and Polar field stations
A 'halfway house' between the generic, purified space of the laboratory and the varied and particular spaces of the field, the field station is a controlled yet uncontained setting from which nature can be accessed and anchored. As living quarters for visiting scientists, field stations are also enmeshed in the routine and rhythms of everyday domestic life, and in longer cycles of habitation, wear, and repair. This introduction considers the empi…
Seeking exposure: Conversions of scientific knowledge in an African city
Transnational medical research has become a common feature in many parts of Africa. This paper explores the contribution such activity makes to the social and economic lives of those involved, including both trial subjects and local staff. By considering the value of the 'exposure' that involvement brings to staff and research participants, we reflect on the conversion of scientific knowledge into practical knowledge and its value to sustaining p…
In/dependent Collaborations: Perceptions and Experiences of African Scientists in Transnational HIV Research
This article examines collaboration in transnational medical research from the viewpoint of African scientists working in partnerships with northern counterparts. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork in an HIV laboratory of an East African state university, with additional data from interviews with scientists working in related research institutions. Collaboration is today the preferred framework for the mechanisms by which northern institutions su…
Anthropology through Levinas: Knowing the Uniqueness ofEgoand the Mystery of Otherness
An anthropological commonplace since Evans-Pritchard has been that ethnographic subjects will have their rationality circumscribed by the discursive opportunities made available by a "culture." Hence, social science comes to terms with the "internal" nature of judgements (Winch). Ultimately, the relativist nature of both Winch's and Evans-Pritchard's conclusion has its source in Wittgenstein's philosophy. For Wittgenstein, "the limits of my langu…
Introduction: Sustaining the Life of the Polis
How are publics of protection and care defined in African cities today? The effects of globalization and neo-liberal policies on urban space are well documented. From London to São Paulo, denationalization, privatization, offshoring and cuts in state expenditure are creating enclaves and exclusions, resulting in fragmented, stratified social geographies (see Caldeira 2000; Ong 2006; Harvey 2006; Murray 2011). ‘Networked archipelagoes’, islands co…
Field Workers at the Interface
This issue of Developing World Bioethics includes a collection of papers on intermediary staff and volunteers working at the interface between research institutions and researchers, and the communities from which research participants are recruited. ‘Field worker’ – a short hand commonly used in many research settings – refers here to those whose main role is face-to-face engagement with participants, who usually speak the participants’ first lan…
Engaging Communities to Strengthen Research Ethics in Low‐Income Settings: Selection and Perceptions of Members of a Network of Representatives in Coastal K enya
There is wide agreement that community engagement is important for many research types and settings, often including interaction with ‘representatives’ of communities. There is relatively little published experience of community engagement in international research settings, with available information focusing on Community Advisory Boards or Groups ( CAB / CAGs ), or variants of these, where CAB / G members often advise researchers on behalf of t…
Ethical Challenges that Arise at the Community Interface of Health R esearch: Village R eporters’ Experiences in Western K enya
Community E ngagement ( CE ) has been presented by bio‐ethicists and scientists as a straightforward and unequivocal good which can minimize the risks of exploitation and ensure a fair distribution of research benefits in developing countries. By means of ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in K enya between 2007 and 2009 we explored how CE is understood and enacted in paediatric vaccine trials conducted by the K enyan M edical R esearch I nstitute…
‘She's My Sister‐In‐Law, My Visitor, My Friend’ – Challenges of Staff Identity in Home Follow‐Up in an HIV Trial in W estern K enya
Identities ascribed to research staff in face‐to‐face encounters with participants have been raised as key ethical challenge in transnational health research. ‘Misattributed’ identities that do not just deviate from researchers' self‐image, but obscure unequivocal aspects of researcher identity – e.g. that they are researchers – are a case of such ethical problem. Yet, the reasonable expectation of unconcealed identity can conflict with another e…
Public secrets in public health: Knowing not to know while making scientific knowledge
Unknown knowns-or "public secrets"-may play an integral part in publicly funded medical science. In one large transnational field research site in Africa, such unknowing pertains to vital material inequalities across the relations of scientific production. These inequalities are open to experience but remain often unacknowledged in public speech and scientific texts. This silence is not usually achieved by suppressing knowledge but through lingui…
He is now like a brother, I can even give him some blood' - Relational ethics and material exchanges in a malaria vaccine 'trial community' in The Gambia
The Land Is Dying: Contingency, creativity and conflict in western Kenya
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 ritua…
Ethics and the ethnography of medical research in Africa
The ethics of medical research have grown as an area of expertise and debate in recent years, with two broad approaches emerging in relation to transnational research: (1) the refinement of guidelines and strengthening of review, processes primarily to protect the right of individual research participants and strengthen interpersonal relations at the micro-level; and (2) considering more centrally, as crucial ethical concerns, the wider interests…
Kachinjaare Coming: Encounters Around Medical Research Work in a Kenyan Village
When conducting medical field research in a Luo village in western Kenya, my colleagues and I were occasionally suspected of being blood-thieves, locally calledkachinja. The article contextualizes these blood-stealing accusations within the practices of medical research that prompted them, and within the local historical experiences which, I shall argue, they refer to. Further, it examines two social situations, in which blood-stealing accusation…
Anthropology through Levinas: Knowing the Uniqueness ofEgoand the Mystery of Otherness
An anthropological commonplace since Evans-Pritchard has been that ethnographic subjects will have their rationality circumscribed by the discursive opportunities made available by a "culture." Hence, social science comes to terms with the "internal" nature of judgements (Winch). Ultimately, the relativist nature of both Winch's and Evans-Pritchard's conclusion has its source in Wittgenstein's philosophy. For Wittgenstein, "the limits of my langu…
In/dependent Collaborations: Perceptions and Experiences of African Scientists in Transnational HIV Research
This article examines collaboration in transnational medical research from the viewpoint of African scientists working in partnerships with northern counterparts. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork in an HIV laboratory of an East African state university, with additional data from interviews with scientists working in related research institutions. Collaboration is today the preferred framework for the mechanisms by which northern institutions su…
The Significance of Earth-Eating: Social and Cultural Aspects of Geophagy among Luo Children
Earth‐eating is common among primary school children in Luoland, western Kenya. This article describes the social significance and meanings attributed to it. Earth‐eating is practised among children before puberty, irrespective of their sex, and among women of reproductive age, but not usually among adult men or old women. To eat earth signifies belonging to the female sphere within the household, which includes children up to adolescence. Throug…
The land is dying: Contingency, creativity and conflict in Western Kenya
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 ritua…
Children and medicines: Self-treatment of common illnesses among Luo schoolchildren in western Kenya
Worms are our life', part I: Understandings of worms and the body among the Luo of western Kenya
Perceptions of worms and their role in the body were studied among the people in a Luo village in western Kenya. Worms were found to be prominent in people's body-image and ideas about illness. Two models applied to worms were distinguished analytically as 'traditional' and 'biomedical', referring to their sources, modes of transmission and relation to wider understandings of life. The first acknowledged worms as positive agents of both digestion…
Lifetimes Intertwined: African Grandparents and Grandchildren
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 …
Shared Lives: Exploring Practices of Amity Between Grandmothers and Grandchildren in Western Kenya
This essay explores the relationships between three Luo grandmothers and their grandchildren with particular attention to forms of address and of sharing as practices of amity. Classic Africanist kinship studies identified these as central to the relations between alternate generations. We argue that they are also crucial to our understanding of some aspects of the notion of 'love' (hera)that old and young Luo describe as constitutive both of gra…
Knowledge of herbal and pharmaceutical medicines among Luo children in western Kenya
Primary school children aged between 10 and 15 years old in a rural community in western Kenya are frequently ill and have considerable knowledge of both herbal remedies and pharmaceuticals in treating common illnesses, such as headache, cold, fever, abdominal complaints and injuries. This paper explores this area of children's medical knowledge and practice, looking at children's ideas about and categorisation of illness and medicines, and their…
Toxic worldings: Introduction to toxic flows
In the course of recent world history, humans have permanently changed the chemical composition of the planet, as human-made chemical substances become part of the air, water and soil, pervading human and non-human bodies and upsetting linear imaginaries of past and future. The slow violence of toxic exposure associated with industrial activity and economic growth is a particularly insidious dimension of inequality and exploitation, woven into gl…
Beyond realism: Africa's medical dreams Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Seeking exposure: Conversions of scientific knowledge in an African city
Transnational medical research has become a common feature in many parts of Africa. This paper explores the contribution such activity makes to the social and economic lives of those involved, including both trial subjects and local staff. By considering the value of the 'exposure' that involvement brings to staff and research participants, we reflect on the conversion of scientific knowledge into practical knowledge and its value to sustaining p…
Transport to Where: Reflections on the Problem of Value and Time À Propos an Awkward Practice in Medical Research
Based upon Kenyan ethnography, this article examines the gap between the bioethics aversion to value transfers in clinical trials, and research participants' and researchers' expectations of these. This article focuses upon so-called 'transport reimbursement' (TR): monetary payments to participants that are framed as mere refund of transport expenses, but which are of considerable value to recipients. The interest in this case lies not so much in…
"Becoming "One Who Treats: A Case Study of a Luo Healer and Her Grandson in Western Kenya
Using a case study of a healer and her grandson, this article shows how learning to heal is embedded in the close relationship of reciprocity and care between grandmother and grandchild in Luo society. Through shared daily life with his grandmother, the child develops social sense, respect, and compassion for people, as well as practical skills. By showing that learning to heal is not only embedded in everyday practice and in social relations, bu…
Perceptions of soil-eating and anaemia among pregnant women on the Kenyan coast
Worms are our life', part II: Luo children's thoughts about worms and illness
The ideas of Luo schoolchildren about worms and their role in the body were studied. Worms were found to be prominent in the children's body‐image and ideas about illness. To give meaning to their bodily experiences, children made use of both a ‘traditional’ and a ‘biomedical’ model, providing different views on the relationship of worms and the body. The children learned about the traditional model from older people and about the biomedical mode…
Active Compounds and Atoms of Society: Plants, Bodies, Minds and Cultures in the Work of Kenyan Ethnobotanical Knowledge
This paper examines a sequence of investigations in parasitology, botany, pharmacology, psychometrics and ethnopsychology focused on Kenyan village children's knowledge of medicinal herbs. We follow this work of making and ordering of knowledge, showing that the different disciplinary perspectives on bodies, medicines, knowledges, children and cultures produced by this research all sought the foundation of knowledge in reference to objective real…
The relationship of acceptance or denial of HIV-status to antiretroviral adherence among adult HIV patients in urban Botswana
A home for science: The life and times of Tropical and Polar field stations
A 'halfway house' between the generic, purified space of the laboratory and the varied and particular spaces of the field, the field station is a controlled yet uncontained setting from which nature can be accessed and anchored. As living quarters for visiting scientists, field stations are also enmeshed in the routine and rhythms of everyday domestic life, and in longer cycles of habitation, wear, and repair. This introduction considers the empi…
Searching for Pathways in a Landscape of Death: Religion and Aids in East Africa
The commonalities of eastern Africa's history from colonial occupation to the formation of nation states and their post-postcolonial decay, the region's shared experiences with the religions of the book-fist Islam and later Christianity-and its shared struggle with the physical, social, political and epistemological predicament of HIV/AIDS, make East Africa, with its cultural and historical diversity, a suitably coherent field to study the relati…
Worms are our life', part II: Luo children's thoughts about worms and illness
The ideas of Luo schoolchildren about worms and their role in the body were studied. Worms were found to be prominent in the children's body‐image and ideas about illness. To give meaning to their bodily experiences, children made use of both a ‘traditional’ and a ‘biomedical’ model, providing different views on the relationship of worms and the body. The children learned about the traditional model from older people and about the biomedical mode…
Worms are our life', part I: Understandings of worms and the body among the Luo of western Kenya
Perceptions of worms and their role in the body were studied among the people in a Luo village in western Kenya. Worms were found to be prominent in people's body-image and ideas about illness. Two models applied to worms were distinguished analytically as 'traditional' and 'biomedical', referring to their sources, modes of transmission and relation to wider understandings of life. The first acknowledged worms as positive agents of both digestion…
Perceptions of soil-eating and anaemia among pregnant women on the Kenyan coast
Children and medicines: Self-treatment of common illnesses among Luo schoolchildren in western Kenya
The Significance of Earth-Eating: Social and Cultural Aspects of Geophagy among Luo Children
Earth‐eating is common among primary school children in Luoland, western Kenya. This article describes the social significance and meanings attributed to it. Earth‐eating is practised among children before puberty, irrespective of their sex, and among women of reproductive age, but not usually among adult men or old women. To eat earth signifies belonging to the female sphere within the household, which includes children up to adolescence. Throug…
Self-treatment by Kenyan and Ugandan schoolchildren and the need for school-based education
Studies on Kenyan and Ugandan primary schoolchildren's knowledge of medicines and self-treatment practices show that children aged between 10 and 18 years have a broad knowledge of herbal and biomedical remedies and that they use them frequently, often without adults' involvement. They use pharmaceuticals, including prescription-only drugs, but lack knowledge about indications and dosages. There is a gap between the children's life worlds and the…
"Becoming "One Who Treats: A Case Study of a Luo Healer and Her Grandson in Western Kenya
Using a case study of a healer and her grandson, this article shows how learning to heal is embedded in the close relationship of reciprocity and care between grandmother and grandchild in Luo society. Through shared daily life with his grandmother, the child develops social sense, respect, and compassion for people, as well as practical skills. By showing that learning to heal is not only embedded in everyday practice and in social relations, bu…
Knowledge of herbal and pharmaceutical medicines among Luo children in western Kenya
Primary school children aged between 10 and 15 years old in a rural community in western Kenya are frequently ill and have considerable knowledge of both herbal remedies and pharmaceuticals in treating common illnesses, such as headache, cold, fever, abdominal complaints and injuries. This paper explores this area of children's medical knowledge and practice, looking at children's ideas about and categorisation of illness and medicines, and their…
Medicinal plants used by Luo mothers and children in Bondo district, Kenya
Lifetimes Intertwined: African Grandparents and Grandchildren
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 …
Shared Lives: Exploring Practices of Amity Between Grandmothers and Grandchildren in Western Kenya
This essay explores the relationships between three Luo grandmothers and their grandchildren with particular attention to forms of address and of sharing as practices of amity. Classic Africanist kinship studies identified these as central to the relations between alternate generations. We argue that they are also crucial to our understanding of some aspects of the notion of 'love' (hera)that old and young Luo describe as constitutive both of gra…
Kachinjaare Coming: Encounters Around Medical Research Work in a Kenyan Village
When conducting medical field research in a Luo village in western Kenya, my colleagues and I were occasionally suspected of being blood-thieves, locally calledkachinja. The article contextualizes these blood-stealing accusations within the practices of medical research that prompted them, and within the local historical experiences which, I shall argue, they refer to. Further, it examines two social situations, in which blood-stealing accusation…
Searching for Pathways in a Landscape of Death: Religion and Aids in East Africa
The commonalities of eastern Africa's history from colonial occupation to the formation of nation states and their post-postcolonial decay, the region's shared experiences with the religions of the book-fist Islam and later Christianity-and its shared struggle with the physical, social, political and epistemological predicament of HIV/AIDS, make East Africa, with its cultural and historical diversity, a suitably coherent field to study the relati…
Life Seen: 1 Touch and Vision in the Making of Sex in Western Kenya
This article is part of a project about transformations of relatedness among the Luo of western Kenya, which we examine by observing, in the everyday life of one village, concrete practices that constitute and negotiate material contact. In short, villagers understand physical touch and associated forms of material contact as practices that momentarily merge persons or their bodies by sharing substance. Such moments of merging release creative or…
Providing Reproductive Health Care to Internally Displaced Persons: Barriers Experienced by Humanitarian Agencies
Reproductive health care for internally displaced persons (IDPs) is recognised by the Inter-Agency Working Group on Reproductive Health in Refugee Situations and the Reproductive Health Response in Conflict Consortium as a neglected area in humanitarian relief operations. To identify barriers to agencies providing reproductive health care to IDPs, and their strategies for overcoming these barriers, we interviewed representatives of 12 relief and …
The relationship of acceptance or denial of HIV-status to antiretroviral adherence among adult HIV patients in urban Botswana
Ethics and the ethnography of medical research in Africa
The ethics of medical research have grown as an area of expertise and debate in recent years, with two broad approaches emerging in relation to transnational research: (1) the refinement of guidelines and strengthening of review, processes primarily to protect the right of individual research participants and strengthen interpersonal relations at the micro-level; and (2) considering more centrally, as crucial ethical concerns, the wider interests…
He is now like a brother, I can even give him some blood' - Relational ethics and material exchanges in a malaria vaccine 'trial community' in The Gambia
Aids and Religious Practice in Africa
This volume explores how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS. Examining the social production, and productivity, of AIDS - linking bodily and spiritual experiences, and religious, medical, political and economic discourses - the papers counter simplified notions of causal effects of AIDS on religion (or vice versa). Ins…
Discussing matters of sexual health with children: What issues relating to disclosure of parental HIV status reveal
Little is published about the disclosure of parents' own HIV status to their children in Africa. Research shows that keeping family secrets from children, including those related to a parent's HIV status, can be detrimental to their psychological well-being and to the structure of the family. Further, children with HIV-positive parents have been shown to be more vulnerable to poorer reproductive health outcomes. This qualitative study in Botswana…
Active Compounds and Atoms of Society: Plants, Bodies, Minds and Cultures in the Work of Kenyan Ethnobotanical Knowledge
This paper examines a sequence of investigations in parasitology, botany, pharmacology, psychometrics and ethnopsychology focused on Kenyan village children's knowledge of medicinal herbs. We follow this work of making and ordering of knowledge, showing that the different disciplinary perspectives on bodies, medicines, knowledges, children and cultures produced by this research all sought the foundation of knowledge in reference to objective real…
Factors influencing uptake of HIV care and treatment among children in South Africa – a qualitative study of caregivers and clinic staff
Despite antiretroviral therapy rollout in South Africa, fewer children than expected are accessing HIV care services. Our objectives were to describe barriers and facilitators of uptake of HIV care among children. Our study involved six private-sector clinics which provide HIV care free-of-charge in and around Gauteng province, South Africa. In-depth interviews were conducted in July 2008 with 21 caregivers of HIV-infected children attending thes…
The land is dying: Contingency, creativity and conflict in Western Kenya
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 ritua…
The Land Is Dying: Contingency, creativity and conflict in western Kenya
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 ritua…
Transport to Where: Reflections on the Problem of Value and Time À Propos an Awkward Practice in Medical Research
Based upon Kenyan ethnography, this article examines the gap between the bioethics aversion to value transfers in clinical trials, and research participants' and researchers' expectations of these. This article focuses upon so-called 'transport reimbursement' (TR): monetary payments to participants that are framed as mere refund of transport expenses, but which are of considerable value to recipients. The interest in this case lies not so much in…
Sociology (32 works) · Political science (29 works) · Law (21 works) · Medicine (18 works) · Anthropology (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (12 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · History (11 works)