Susan Reynolds Whyte
Biographic Data
| ID | 3611646 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Reynolds Whyte |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan Reynolds |
| FAMILY NAME | Whyte |
| SIGNATURE | WHYTE S R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 545 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Still here: Age and Generational Time
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…
Textures of precarity: Repurposing in a Ugandan refugee settlement
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: Introduction
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
Legacies of Violence: The Communicability of Spirits and Trauma in Northern Uganda
In the Long Run: Ugandans Living with Disability
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: The Spread of Suicide in Northern Ugandan Families
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…
Matthew Carey: Mistrust. An Ethnographic Theory
Matthew Carey: Mistrust. An Ethnographic Theory Anmeldes af Susan Reynolds Whyte
Technologies of inquiry: HIV tests and divination
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: A Compendium ed. by Veena Das and Clara Han
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: Violence as Contamination in Everyday Life After War in Northern Uganda
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: Youth Have No Voice in Land Matters
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…
Life
Second Chances: Surviving Aids in Uganda
During the first decade of this millennium, many thousands of people in Uganda who otherwise would have died from AIDS got second chances at life. A massive global health intervention, the scaling up of antiretroviral therapy (ART), saved them and created a generation of people who learned to live with treatment. As clients they joined programs that offered free antiretroviral medicine and encouraged positive living. Because ART is not a cure but…
Crafting forgiveness accounts after war: Editing for effect in northern Uganda (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
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 …
Epidemic Projectification: Aids Responses in Uganda as Event and Process
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…
Urbanisation by subtraction: The afterlife of camps in northern Uganda
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 …
Measuring risk, managing values: Health technology and subjectivity in Denmark
Based on fieldwork among Danes with a diagnosed risk of type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease, this paper investigates how the technological possibilities of diagnosing and monitoring invisible risks shape understandings of health and form subjectivity. It focuses on the experiences of being diagnosed with a risk condition in the form of high blood pressure or elevated blood glucose and the ensuing use of measuring devices. It argues that mea…
Context of Medicines in Developing Countries: Studies in Pharmaceutical Anthropology
The land is dying: Contingency, creativity and conflict in Western Kenya
Chronicity and control: Framing 'noncommunicable diseases' in Africa
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…
Leslie Swartz, Able-Bodied: Scenes from a Curious Life
Ghosts of Kanungu: Fertility, Secrecy and Exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa
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
Health Identities and Subjectivities: The Ethnographic Challenge
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…
The Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals: A Biographical Approach
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: Metaphors and Metonyms
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 Ethnographic Challenge
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…
Children's Children: Time and Relatedness in Eastern Uganda
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 …
Chronicity and control: Framing 'noncommunicable diseases' in Africa
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: Youth Have No Voice in Land Matters
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: Violence as Contamination in Everyday Life After War in Northern Uganda
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 …
Epidemic Projectification: Aids Responses in Uganda as Event and Process
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…
Treating Aids: Dilemmas of unequal access in Uganda
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: Ugandans Living with Disability
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: Afterthoughts on Crisis and Chronicity
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
Planning for essential drugs: Are We Missing the Cultural Dimension
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…
Disability and Culture
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…
Crafting forgiveness accounts after war: Editing for effect in northern Uganda (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
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: The afterlife of camps in northern Uganda
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 …
Disability and technology in Africa: Introduction
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
Technologies of inquiry: HIV tests and divination
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…
Measuring risk, managing values: Health technology and subjectivity in Denmark
Based on fieldwork among Danes with a diagnosed risk of type 2 diabetes or cardiovascular disease, this paper investigates how the technological possibilities of diagnosing and monitoring invisible risks shape understandings of health and form subjectivity. It focuses on the experiences of being diagnosed with a risk condition in the form of high blood pressure or elevated blood glucose and the ensuing use of measuring devices. It argues that mea…
Popularité et scepticisme: Opinions Contrastées Sur Les Médicaments1
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'…
Anger and Bitter Hearts: The Spread of Suicide in Northern Ugandan Families
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…
The land is dying: Contingency, creativity and conflict in Western Kenya
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: Studies in Pharmaceutical Anthropology
The Charm of Medicines: Metaphors and Metonyms
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: Are We Missing the Cultural Dimension
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: Transformations in the social relations of health care in Uganda
Disability and Culture
Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa
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: A Biographical Approach
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: The Nordic countries
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
Akademisk og anvendt
Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in East Uganda
Popularité et scepticisme: Opinions Contrastées Sur Les Médicaments1
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: Time and Relatedness in Eastern Uganda
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: Dilemmas of unequal access in Uganda
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 …
Disability in Local and Global Worlds
The lives of many disabled people in Europe and North America have improved over the past two decades through innovative technologies and the efforts of the disability rights movement. These changes have been spreading to other societies around the globe—albeit unevenly. In this collection of essays, leading scholars explore global changes in disability awareness, technology, and policy from the viewpoint of disabled people and their families in …
Wheels and New Legs: Mobilization in Uganda
Discrimination: Afterthoughts on Crisis and Chronicity
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 Ethnographic Challenge
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
Ghosts of Kanungu: Fertility, Secrecy and Exchange in the Great Lakes of East Africa
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
Context of Medicines in Developing Countries: Studies in Pharmaceutical Anthropology
Sociology (32 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (15 works) · Psychology (14 works) · History (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Medicine (11 works) · Anthropology (10 works) · Geography (10 works) · Philosophy (10 works)