Thomas Cousins
Biographic Data
| ID | 77757 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Thomas Cousins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Cousins |
| SIGNATURE | COUSINS T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stellenbosch University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8869-1886 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 67 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Jane Guyer's generative capacity
The Work of Repair: Capacity after Colonialism in the Timber Plantations of South Africa
In 2008, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, South African timber corporations distributed hot cooked meals to laborers as a nutrition intervention to bolster falling productivity and profits. But for those laborers, life and sustenance is about much more than calories and machinic bodies. At stake is the nurturing of capacity across all domains of life—physical, relational, cosmological—in the form of amandla . An Nguni word meaning power, str…
The Good Doctor’: The Making and Unmaking of the Physician Self in Contemporary South Africa
In this article we examine the figure of the doctor in animated debates around public sector medicine in contemporary South Africa. The loss of health professionals from the South African public system is a key contributor to the present healthcare crisis. South African medical schools have revised curricula to engage trainee doctors with a broader set of social concerns, but the disjunctures between training, health systems failures, and a high …
Containment and conversion: Urban livelihoods and the circulation of value amid South Africa's avian influenza outbreak
In South Africa the racialized contours of economic life powerfully shape the distribution of who owns poultry enterprises, who is employed to labor in them, who consumes poultry products, and in which way. When, in late 2017, an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N8) decimated the South African poultry sector, it revealed the ontological transformations of industrial egg-laying poultry into "cull birds" and then intoimileqwa, the q…
The changing climates of global health
International audience
Critical orientations for humanising health sciences education in South Africa
In this article, the authors make a case for the 'humanisation' and 'decolonisation' of health sciences curricula in South Africa, using integration as a guiding framework. Integration refers to an education that is built on a consolidated conceptual framework that includes and equally values the natural or biomedical sciences as well as the humanities, arts and social sciences, respecting that all of this knowledge has value for the practice of …
Conserved spaces, ancestral places: Conservation, history and identity among farm labourers in the Sundays River Valley, South Africa
Conserved spaces, ancestral places: conservation, history and identity among farm labourers in the Sundays River Valley, South Africa." Anthropology Southern Africa, 41(1), pp. 69–70
The temporary as the future: Ready-to-use therapeutic food and nutraceuticals in South Africa
The reconfiguration of food as a pharmaceutical in biomedical regimes has been considered by scholars along two axes: (1) food supplementation as humanitarian intervention, based on a specific value of life and delivered in 'crisis' situations with a short temporal horizon; (2) food supplementation as commodity, marketed as enhancing 'wellness' or potential, based on notions of risk in broad temporal frames. We consider nutraceuticals and ready-t…
Strata of the Political: Epigenetic and Microbial Imaginaries in Post‐Apartheid Cape Town
The epigenetic and microbiomic imaginaries that animate public health discourse on perinatal nutrition and the infant gut in South Africa offer a case study through which to reconsider the ontological presuppositions of “space” that frame epigenetic biopolitics. We suggest that the mutual constitution of the relations at stake in and around questions of nutrition, mothers and infants, the gut and sanitation in Khayelitsha, can be understood throu…
Indexing the human: From classification to a critical politics of transformation
“Indexing the Human: From Classification to a Critical Politics of Transformation” consisted of a year-long programme of seminars, workshops and reading groups at Stellenbosch University in 2014–2015. The seminar series brought together local, regional and international scholars around four thematic areas: technologies of governance and the shapes of politics; the place of race; science, experimentality and intervention; and kinship, ethics and t…
Sex, gender and marriage in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: A Minor Otherwise
In this article, I describe the practice of a “game” of marriage between women labourers in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, called umshado wokudlala. I describe the ritualised game in order to follow the ways in which kin terms operated in daily usage among the labourers. Umshado wokudlala shows how a form of “play” opens out and re-imagines possibilities for organising care, intimacy and relatedness under conditions of lat…
Antiretroviral Therapy and Nutrition in Southern Africa: Citizenship and the Grammar of Hunger
How might we understand and respond to the new forms of hunger that arise with the massive rollout of antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV in southern Africa? Rather than 'merely' a technical problem of measurement, medicine or infrastructure, I suggest that a philosophical question arises concerning the relationship between the experience of hunger, the utterances that communicate that experience, and the bodily regimes of well-being and ill-bei…
HIV and the remaking of hunger and nutrition in South Africa: Biopolitical specification after apartheid
A mediating capacity
In this article I seek to develop a conceptual framework for anthropological work on 'the gut' by bringing together reflections on ethnographic fieldwork on nutrition and well-being in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, with recent advances in the sciences of the gastroenterological and enteric nervous systems. While new evidence suggests that diet, immune system functioning, memory, and behaviour are shaped by the characteristics and processes of the …
Knowledge of life: Health, strength and labour in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
The article examines the production of new modes of calculation, calibration and measurement of bodies at work in the timber plantations of northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa — modes that echo older, diverse technologies of self and health while producing new ways of talking about the body and its social context. I describe two sets of substances that augment wellbeing for those who work the plantations, one in the form of a nutrition intervent…
Not knowing endings: An Epilogue
As part of thinking about how life materialises in our work, four contributors — Fiona Ross (FR), Patricia Henderson (PH), Kathleen Lorne McDougall (KLM) and Thomas Cousins (TC) — met at a two-day workshop in June 2014. From our recorded discussion, we've crafted an epilogue that explores connections and points of productive divergence in the papers. It traces our engagement with the history of political-economic understandings of social life in …
The social dynamics of consent and refusal in HIV surveillance in rural South Africa
Getting connected: The social dynamics of urban telecommunications access and use in Khayelitsha, Cape Town
This article examines urban telecommunications access and use by poor households in the township of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. Analysis draws upon a broad range of quantitative and qualitative data and in doing so seeks to reveal the complexities of how this access and use underpins a wide range of social and economic processes critical to processes of social development. By way of example, the issue of informal urbanisation and housin…
Spaces of Resistance: Informal Settlement, Communication and Community Organisation in a Cape Town Township
This paper examines struggles for urban permanency in an informal settlement on the fringes of Cape Town in the run up to the South African national election of 2004. It focuses on the rapid emergence of the settlement of Nkanini (Forceful) and the key social, cultural, political and communicative dynamics that framed the ensuing bitter struggle between residents and local City of Cape Town authorities over claims to occupy the land. Analysis fra…
The Political Economy of Social Capital: Chronic Poverty, Remoteness and Gender in the Rural Eastern Cape
This paper uses two case studies drawn from in-depth ethnographic research in South Africa's Eastern Cape to interrogate and problematise the often simplistic or reductive ways in which the concept of social capital is used in debates about development and poverty alleviation. It argues that if the concept is to be useful at all, it needs to be used in ways that are sensitive to the fact that social capital inheres in social relations; that these…
Managing Distance: Rural Poverty and the Promise of Communication in Post-Apartheid South Africa
This article examines rural telecommunications access and use among poor village households in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Discussion is based upon a content analysis of 165 telephone calls, as well as a broader information and communication technology (ICT) ownership, access and use survey undertaken in 50 poor households within a number of rural villages in the Mount Frere district. These data are complimented and supported by qualitative d…
The social dynamics of consent and refusal in HIV surveillance in rural South Africa
Spaces of Resistance: Informal Settlement, Communication and Community Organisation in a Cape Town Township
This paper examines struggles for urban permanency in an informal settlement on the fringes of Cape Town in the run up to the South African national election of 2004. It focuses on the rapid emergence of the settlement of Nkanini (Forceful) and the key social, cultural, political and communicative dynamics that framed the ensuing bitter struggle between residents and local City of Cape Town authorities over claims to occupy the land. Analysis fra…
Managing Distance: Rural Poverty and the Promise of Communication in Post-Apartheid South Africa
This article examines rural telecommunications access and use among poor village households in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Discussion is based upon a content analysis of 165 telephone calls, as well as a broader information and communication technology (ICT) ownership, access and use survey undertaken in 50 poor households within a number of rural villages in the Mount Frere district. These data are complimented and supported by qualitative d…
Antiretroviral Therapy and Nutrition in Southern Africa: Citizenship and the Grammar of Hunger
How might we understand and respond to the new forms of hunger that arise with the massive rollout of antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV in southern Africa? Rather than 'merely' a technical problem of measurement, medicine or infrastructure, I suggest that a philosophical question arises concerning the relationship between the experience of hunger, the utterances that communicate that experience, and the bodily regimes of well-being and ill-bei…
Knowledge of life: Health, strength and labour in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
The article examines the production of new modes of calculation, calibration and measurement of bodies at work in the timber plantations of northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa — modes that echo older, diverse technologies of self and health while producing new ways of talking about the body and its social context. I describe two sets of substances that augment wellbeing for those who work the plantations, one in the form of a nutrition intervent…
The Political Economy of Social Capital: Chronic Poverty, Remoteness and Gender in the Rural Eastern Cape
This paper uses two case studies drawn from in-depth ethnographic research in South Africa's Eastern Cape to interrogate and problematise the often simplistic or reductive ways in which the concept of social capital is used in debates about development and poverty alleviation. It argues that if the concept is to be useful at all, it needs to be used in ways that are sensitive to the fact that social capital inheres in social relations; that these…
A mediating capacity
In this article I seek to develop a conceptual framework for anthropological work on 'the gut' by bringing together reflections on ethnographic fieldwork on nutrition and well-being in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, with recent advances in the sciences of the gastroenterological and enteric nervous systems. While new evidence suggests that diet, immune system functioning, memory, and behaviour are shaped by the characteristics and processes of the …
Strata of the Political: Epigenetic and Microbial Imaginaries in Post‐Apartheid Cape Town
The epigenetic and microbiomic imaginaries that animate public health discourse on perinatal nutrition and the infant gut in South Africa offer a case study through which to reconsider the ontological presuppositions of “space” that frame epigenetic biopolitics. We suggest that the mutual constitution of the relations at stake in and around questions of nutrition, mothers and infants, the gut and sanitation in Khayelitsha, can be understood throu…
Critical orientations for humanising health sciences education in South Africa
In this article, the authors make a case for the 'humanisation' and 'decolonisation' of health sciences curricula in South Africa, using integration as a guiding framework. Integration refers to an education that is built on a consolidated conceptual framework that includes and equally values the natural or biomedical sciences as well as the humanities, arts and social sciences, respecting that all of this knowledge has value for the practice of …
Getting connected: The social dynamics of urban telecommunications access and use in Khayelitsha, Cape Town
This article examines urban telecommunications access and use by poor households in the township of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. Analysis draws upon a broad range of quantitative and qualitative data and in doing so seeks to reveal the complexities of how this access and use underpins a wide range of social and economic processes critical to processes of social development. By way of example, the issue of informal urbanisation and housin…
Spaces of Resistance: Informal Settlement, Communication and Community Organisation in a Cape Town Township
This paper examines struggles for urban permanency in an informal settlement on the fringes of Cape Town in the run up to the South African national election of 2004. It focuses on the rapid emergence of the settlement of Nkanini (Forceful) and the key social, cultural, political and communicative dynamics that framed the ensuing bitter struggle between residents and local City of Cape Town authorities over claims to occupy the land. Analysis fra…
The Political Economy of Social Capital: Chronic Poverty, Remoteness and Gender in the Rural Eastern Cape
This paper uses two case studies drawn from in-depth ethnographic research in South Africa's Eastern Cape to interrogate and problematise the often simplistic or reductive ways in which the concept of social capital is used in debates about development and poverty alleviation. It argues that if the concept is to be useful at all, it needs to be used in ways that are sensitive to the fact that social capital inheres in social relations; that these…
Managing Distance: Rural Poverty and the Promise of Communication in Post-Apartheid South Africa
This article examines rural telecommunications access and use among poor village households in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Discussion is based upon a content analysis of 165 telephone calls, as well as a broader information and communication technology (ICT) ownership, access and use survey undertaken in 50 poor households within a number of rural villages in the Mount Frere district. These data are complimented and supported by qualitative d…
Getting connected: The social dynamics of urban telecommunications access and use in Khayelitsha, Cape Town
This article examines urban telecommunications access and use by poor households in the township of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. Analysis draws upon a broad range of quantitative and qualitative data and in doing so seeks to reveal the complexities of how this access and use underpins a wide range of social and economic processes critical to processes of social development. By way of example, the issue of informal urbanisation and housin…
The social dynamics of consent and refusal in HIV surveillance in rural South Africa
Knowledge of life: Health, strength and labour in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
The article examines the production of new modes of calculation, calibration and measurement of bodies at work in the timber plantations of northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa — modes that echo older, diverse technologies of self and health while producing new ways of talking about the body and its social context. I describe two sets of substances that augment wellbeing for those who work the plantations, one in the form of a nutrition intervent…
Not knowing endings: An Epilogue
As part of thinking about how life materialises in our work, four contributors — Fiona Ross (FR), Patricia Henderson (PH), Kathleen Lorne McDougall (KLM) and Thomas Cousins (TC) — met at a two-day workshop in June 2014. From our recorded discussion, we've crafted an epilogue that explores connections and points of productive divergence in the papers. It traces our engagement with the history of political-economic understandings of social life in …
HIV and the remaking of hunger and nutrition in South Africa: Biopolitical specification after apartheid
A mediating capacity
In this article I seek to develop a conceptual framework for anthropological work on 'the gut' by bringing together reflections on ethnographic fieldwork on nutrition and well-being in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, with recent advances in the sciences of the gastroenterological and enteric nervous systems. While new evidence suggests that diet, immune system functioning, memory, and behaviour are shaped by the characteristics and processes of the …
Indexing the human: From classification to a critical politics of transformation
“Indexing the Human: From Classification to a Critical Politics of Transformation” consisted of a year-long programme of seminars, workshops and reading groups at Stellenbosch University in 2014–2015. The seminar series brought together local, regional and international scholars around four thematic areas: technologies of governance and the shapes of politics; the place of race; science, experimentality and intervention; and kinship, ethics and t…
Sex, gender and marriage in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: A Minor Otherwise
In this article, I describe the practice of a “game” of marriage between women labourers in the timber plantations of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, called umshado wokudlala. I describe the ritualised game in order to follow the ways in which kin terms operated in daily usage among the labourers. Umshado wokudlala shows how a form of “play” opens out and re-imagines possibilities for organising care, intimacy and relatedness under conditions of lat…
Antiretroviral Therapy and Nutrition in Southern Africa: Citizenship and the Grammar of Hunger
How might we understand and respond to the new forms of hunger that arise with the massive rollout of antiretroviral therapy (ART) for HIV in southern Africa? Rather than 'merely' a technical problem of measurement, medicine or infrastructure, I suggest that a philosophical question arises concerning the relationship between the experience of hunger, the utterances that communicate that experience, and the bodily regimes of well-being and ill-bei…
Strata of the Political: Epigenetic and Microbial Imaginaries in Post‐Apartheid Cape Town
The epigenetic and microbiomic imaginaries that animate public health discourse on perinatal nutrition and the infant gut in South Africa offer a case study through which to reconsider the ontological presuppositions of “space” that frame epigenetic biopolitics. We suggest that the mutual constitution of the relations at stake in and around questions of nutrition, mothers and infants, the gut and sanitation in Khayelitsha, can be understood throu…
Critical orientations for humanising health sciences education in South Africa
In this article, the authors make a case for the 'humanisation' and 'decolonisation' of health sciences curricula in South Africa, using integration as a guiding framework. Integration refers to an education that is built on a consolidated conceptual framework that includes and equally values the natural or biomedical sciences as well as the humanities, arts and social sciences, respecting that all of this knowledge has value for the practice of …
Conserved spaces, ancestral places: Conservation, history and identity among farm labourers in the Sundays River Valley, South Africa
Conserved spaces, ancestral places: conservation, history and identity among farm labourers in the Sundays River Valley, South Africa." Anthropology Southern Africa, 41(1), pp. 69–70
The temporary as the future: Ready-to-use therapeutic food and nutraceuticals in South Africa
The reconfiguration of food as a pharmaceutical in biomedical regimes has been considered by scholars along two axes: (1) food supplementation as humanitarian intervention, based on a specific value of life and delivered in 'crisis' situations with a short temporal horizon; (2) food supplementation as commodity, marketed as enhancing 'wellness' or potential, based on notions of risk in broad temporal frames. We consider nutraceuticals and ready-t…
The changing climates of global health
International audience
The Good Doctor’: The Making and Unmaking of the Physician Self in Contemporary South Africa
In this article we examine the figure of the doctor in animated debates around public sector medicine in contemporary South Africa. The loss of health professionals from the South African public system is a key contributor to the present healthcare crisis. South African medical schools have revised curricula to engage trainee doctors with a broader set of social concerns, but the disjunctures between training, health systems failures, and a high …
Containment and conversion: Urban livelihoods and the circulation of value amid South Africa's avian influenza outbreak
In South Africa the racialized contours of economic life powerfully shape the distribution of who owns poultry enterprises, who is employed to labor in them, who consumes poultry products, and in which way. When, in late 2017, an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N8) decimated the South African poultry sector, it revealed the ontological transformations of industrial egg-laying poultry into "cull birds" and then intoimileqwa, the q…
The Work of Repair: Capacity after Colonialism in the Timber Plantations of South Africa
In 2008, at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, South African timber corporations distributed hot cooked meals to laborers as a nutrition intervention to bolster falling productivity and profits. But for those laborers, life and sustenance is about much more than calories and machinic bodies. At stake is the nurturing of capacity across all domains of life—physical, relational, cosmological—in the form of amandla . An Nguni word meaning power, str…
Jane Guyer's generative capacity
Sociology (18 works) · Political science (14 works) · Economic growth (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Geography (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Medicine (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Gender Studies (6 works)