The Production and Circulation of AIDS Knowledge in Malawi

As the AIDS epidemic continues to spread across Africa, a demand for evidence produced by policy-relevant research means that expatriate-led research projects have become a fixture in highly infected countries. While many have drawn attention to the social and economic consequences of AIDS suffering, few have documented the everyday practices, contradictions and politics of producing AIDS-related knowledge in impoverished contexts. This study examines the ways in which AIDS survey research projects in Malawi produce new socialities and mobilities, generate new exclusions and inclusions and reconfigure expertise and evaluations of knowledge. Rather than focusing on a single knowledge community, the study follows AIDS knowledge itself as it is formulated and circulates through sites of production (the “field”), conversion and manipulation (the office) and consumption (conferences, journal articles or other forums). Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2005 and 2007-08 with case study research projects, researchers, fieldworkers, rural research participants and policy makers in Malawi, this study examines how actors’ positioning within the social field of “AIDS research” informs their stakes in research and analyzes the tactics they employ to achieve them. Central to the study is an illustration of how boundaries and differences (between people, knowledge and context) are produced and negotiated within interactions between actors with multiple and crisscrossing commitments, interests and ideas

Cooking Data

COOKING DATA is an ethnographic study of how demographic data is collected, handled, processed, and manipulated by fieldworkers, researchers, policymakers, and NGOs in Malawi and internationally. Crystal Biruk’s fieldwork with people at all levels of major survey projects explores how survey-based research projects call truths about the populations they work with into being, transforming data from answers to survey questions into statistics that appear self-evidently true. Beginning with the assumption that clean data is a myth, Biruk uncovers the hidden relationships between the knowledge work that produces data and its value to various audiences. Specifically, her work considers how health-related data have become financially valuable both to NGOs and to the young Malawians who work as data collectors and, later, supervisors--and how the commodification of health information intersects with local social worlds

The MSM category as bureaucratic technology

The MSM category has traveled far and wide from its invention in US public health worlds in the late-1990s, migrating as well into anthropological scholarship that is critical of its reductionist, biomedicalized, Western, and de-eroticizing logics. While much has been written about ‘MSM’ as a flawed category that misdirects resources in health worlds, or as an imported nominalization that grafts awkwardly onto ‘real’, local, sexual, and gendered selves, my interest in this article is in revisiting the MSM category as a technology that facilitates linkages, processes, and dynamics constituting projects that take form in performance-based aid economies. Long-term, if episodic, work within projects targeting MSM deepens our understandings of the transformations and travels of the MSM category, beyond the dominant biomedical and cultural frames that characterize most anthropological literature. After briefly describing an NGO focused on LGBTI rights that I work with in Malawi, I present vignettes to analyze the work done by the MSM category in sociotechnical infrastructures. I closely read paperwork practices in NGO worlds to illustrate how the MSM category operates as a bureaucratic technology and a unit of accounting and measurement that is the engine behind the reproduction and performativity of projects. Throughout, I highlight how the patchy, contingent, frenetic, and unpredictable rhythms of aid economies are crucial context for understanding the workings of the MSM category. Finally, I reflect on how anthropologists’ embeddedness in such projects might reconfigure the meanings, tempos, and methods of anthropological work and writing

Soap

Anthropology has long grappled with the politics of critique. In critical global health studies, an emerging subfield of medical anthropology with roots in histories and geographies of colonial and international health, ethnographers negotiate relations and transactions in the field that pivot around boundaries at the core of our disciplinary practice: inside/outside, critique/complicity, theoretical/applied. Yet, while critique is a primary endeavor of the anthropologist, few have explicitly analyzed or reflected on its meanings, valences, affects, and entailments, particularly amid the rise of global health and the NGOization of the global South that inflects much of our work. In this essay, I reflect on the state of critique in critical global health studies, sketching its gestures, rhetoric, and intentions. Then, I trace some of the journeys of the bar of soap pictured below, an object that touched me in many senses of the term by intersecting, facilitating, and holding my anthropological interest for over a decade. Finally, drawing on recent feminist science studies scholarship, I suggest that critique, as entangled and entangling practice, is a form of care that might productively reframe anthropologists’ normative aspirations to ‘usefulness’ or ‘relevance’

Introduction

As an emerging subfield of medical anthropology with roots in histories and geographies of colonial and international health, critical global health studies reflects both changing modes of health practice and the centering of critique as a core anthropological endeavor. This special section seeks to analyze and reflect on the meanings, valences, affects, and entailments of anthropological critique, taking the rise of global health and flourishing of global health ethnography as key sites of investigation. Each of the contributing pieces is oriented around a global health object or technology

Studying up in critical NGO studies today: reflections on critique and the distribution of interpretive labour

Drawing on work with a human rights NGO in Malawi, this article considers the politics of anthropological knowledge production in Africa in the wake of Laura Nader’s classic essay. First, I briefly elaborate on the role of scalar metaphors (namely ‘studying up’) in the anthropologist’s toolkit, with special focus on how such metaphors might stabilize a normative mode of critique as negative orientation to objects of study. I then analyse two vignettes drawn from my collaboration with an NGO to show how activists and peer educators interpret and analyse their circumstances – studying ‘up, down, and sideways’ – to navigate local landscapes through which increasingly diverse resources, people, and ideas circulate. Throughout, I analyse my dual role as critic and participant in the apparatus, and conclude by suggesting that the enduring power of ‘studying up’ lies in its invitation to view social problems – in Africa or elsewhere – from various angles, and to learn from our interlocutors how individuals and communities make life more liveable. Reflection on the changing circumstances of ‘studying up’ in Africa today from the perspective of an anthropologist of and in NGOs highlights the division of interpretive labour among diverse actors and destabilizes normative definitions of scholarly critique

Aid for Gays: The Moral and the Material in \u27African Homophobia’

In recent years, ‘African homophobia’ has become a spectacle on the global stage, making Africa into a pre-modern site of anti-gay sentiment in need of Western intervention. This article suggests that ‘homophobia’ in post-2009 Malawi is an idiom through which multiple actors negotiate anxieties around governance and moral and economic dependency. I illustrate the material conditions that brought about social imaginaries of inclusion and exclusion – partially expressed through homophobic discourse – in Malawi. The article analyses the cascade of events that led to a moment of political and economic crisis in mid-2011, with special focus on how a 2009 sodomy case made homophobia available as a new genre of social commentary. Employing discourse analysis of newspaper articles, political speeches, the proceedings of a sodomy case, and discussions about men who have sex with men (MSM) as an HIV risk group, I show how African homophobia takes form via interested deployments of ‘cultural’ rhetoric toward competing ends. This article lends a comparative case s