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

DIY Methods 2022 Conference Proceedings

As the past years have proven, the methods for conducting and distributing research that we’ve inherited from our disciplinary traditions can be remarkably brittle in the face of rapidly changing social and mobility norms. The ways we work and the ways we meet are questions newly opened for practical and theoretical inquiry; we both need to solve real problems in our daily lives and account for the constitutive effects of these solutions on the character of the knowledge we produce. Methods are not neutral tools, and nor are they fixed ones. As such, the work of inventing, repairing, and hacking methods is a necessary, if often underexplored, part of the wider research process. This conference aims to better interrogate and celebrate such experiments with method. Borrowing from the spirit and circuits of exchange in earlier DIY cultures, it takes the form of a zine ring distributed via postal mail. Participants will craft zines describing methodological experiments and/or how-to guides, which the conference organisers will subsequently mail out to all participants. Feedback on conference proceedings will also proceed through the mail, as well as via an optional Twitter hashtag. The conference itself is thus an experiment with different temporalities and medialities of research exchange. As a practical benefit, this format guarantees that the experience will be free of Zoom fatigue, timezone difficulties, travel expenses, and visa headaches. More generatively, it may also afford slower thinking, richer aesthetic possibilities, more diverse forms of circulation, and perhaps even some amount of delight. The conference format itself is part of the DIY experiment