Transnational dimensions to environmental resource dynamics: modes of governance and local resource management in Eastern DRC

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'MMR talk' and vaccination choices: an ethnographic study in Brighton

In the context of the high-profile controversy that has unfolded in the UK around the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and its possible adverse effects, this paper explores how parents in Brighton, southern England, are thinking about MMR for their own children. Research focusing on parents’ engagement with MMR has been dominated by analysis of the proximate influences on their choices, and in particular scientific and media information, which have led health policy to focus on information and education campaigns. This paper reports ethnographic work including narratives by mothers in Brighton.Our work questions such reasoning in showing how wider personal and social issues shape parents’ immunisation actions. The narratives by mothers show how practices around MMR are shaped by personal histories, by birth experiences and related feelings of control, by family health histories, by their readings of their child’s health and particular strengths and vulnerabilities, by particular engagements with health services,by processes building or undermining confidence,and by friendships and conversations with others,which are themselves shaped by wider social differences and transformations. Although many see vaccination as a personal decision which must respond to the particularities of a child’s immune system, ‘MMR talk’, which affirms these conceptualisations, has become a social phenomenon in itself. These perspectives suggest ways in which people’s engagements with MMR reflect wider changes in their relations with science and the state

Changing Perspectives on Forests: Science/Policy Processes in Wider Society

This Bulletin attempts to link two sets of pressing contemporary concerns. On the one hand, it addresses changing relationships between science, policy and society in the context of internationalisation and public challenges to formal expertise; concerns currently under hot debate in European settings as much as in developing countries. On the other hand, it engages with issues around rural landscape and livelihoods in low‑income countries, particularly in West Africa and the Caribbean. Tropical forests provide a linking focus, strongly implicated as they are both in local livelihoods and struggles for resource control, and in scientific and policy debates extending from local settings to highly charged global arenas – not least in the lead-up to the ‘Rio Plus 10’ Conference on Environment and Development in Johannesburg, 2002. The Bulletin reviews important advances in the science of forest dynamics, which in turn suggest ways that forest policies could become more ‘pro-poor’. At the same time, it analyses the science/policy processes and power/knowledge relations, which must be addressed if such changes are to come about. We hope that this Bulletin will be of interest not only to researchers, policy-makers and practitioners working in the forestry, environment and development fields, but also to those interested in science and policy more broadly, illustrating how issues often examined in ‘northern’, hi-tech industrial settings, could work out in very different contexts in the ‘south’

Biocharred Pathways to Sustainability? Triple Wins, Livelihoods and the Politics of Technological Promise

Biochar’ is currently the focus of extraordinary levels of both technological optimism and debate. As a substance, biochar refers quite simply to the carbon-rich product that results when biomass – from wood or leaves to manure or crop residues – is burned under oxygen-deprived conditions. But around the idea of biochar and the processes of generating and then burying it are emerging claims and hopes with far-reaching implications. The promise of biochar is generating a mass of research, imagination, and investment that for the moment far outpace actual practices, implementation and systems on the ground. Critique and counter-arguments are swirling too, in a mass of sometimes heated and polarized debate. This paper tracks key narratives and positions in this emerging ‘politics of technological promise’ around biochar, and thus reflects on the prospects of biochar becoming part of pathways to sustainability that also meet the livelihood priorities of small farmers in rural African settings and beyond.ESR

Childhood vaccination and society in The Gambia : public engagement with science and delivery

This paper examines public engagement with routine vaccination delivery, and vaccine trials and related medical research, in The Gambia. Its approach is rooted in social and medical anthropology and ethnographic methods, but combines insights from the sociology of scientific knowledge, and ‘actor-oriented” sociology in development. Current analysis and professional reflection on public engagement with vaccination reflects the concepts and imperatives of health-providing and research institutions. In contrast Gambian parents’ perspectives are couched in very different conceptual and experiential terms, linked to the wider dilemmas of raising infants in a hazardous world. In this context the paper traces parents’ experiences of routine infant welfare clinics and then how they narrate their experiences with two vaccine related studies orchestrated by the Medical Research Council laboratories. A range of contrasts emerges. Whereas health professionals tend to attribute vaccination acceptance to the acquisition of modern scientific attitudes, and talk of “defaulters” as misinformed, parents understand vaccination as a complement to other forms of infant therapy and protection and miss vaccinations through a combination of contingent circumstances and specific worries about vaccination delivery practices. Most parents consider medical research studies less as a separate “scientific” activity than as part of the nexus of normal health practices, and their longer-term experiences and perceptions of MRC as an institution matter more than the aims of any particular study. Whereas medical research staff often perceive public engagement as a matter of understanding or misunderstanding aims and procedures, or of trust and distrust, parental narratives reveal research engagement as a balance of danger and benefit. Study participation depends more on how people’s particular calculus is shaped by social and gender relations, than on issues of knowledge or trust

The social dynamics of infant immunisation in Africa : perspectives from the Republic of Guinea

Infant immunisation is currently a focus of national and global policy attention in relation to Africa as a key means to address ill-health and contribute to the Millennium Development Goals. Yet vaccination coverage is stagnant or falling in many African countries. Redressing such declines, and ensuring the effectiveness and sustainability of proposed expansion of immunisation programmes, requires a sound understanding of the factors shaping vaccine delivery and acceptance in contemporary African health systems. This paper explores these issues through an anthropological approach. It considers how vaccine delivery is influenced by the wider context of the health care system; how vaccination demand is shaped by socially-differentiated knowledges and political identities, and how interactions with delivery institutions and their frontline health workers unfold. It focuses on urban and rural sites in the Republic of Guinea, where dominant policy perspectives often see increasing immunisation coverage as a matter of (a) improving demand through educational approaches that enhance people’s biomedical understandings of the reasons for vaccination, and quell misguided ‘anti-vaccination’ rumours, and (b) redressing supply difficulties through improvements to vaccine delivery system infrastructure, financing and management. In contrast, our ethnographic findings suggest that high demand already exists, although underlain by socially- embedded forms of knowledge and reasoning that fail to match, and often contradict, biomedical views. Yet people frequently cannot realise effective access to vaccines, less because of inherent problems in vaccine delivery systems, but because of the ways these are embedded in the multiple, pluralised processes through which health services are now provided in the Guinean context. As health workers struggle to cope with provision dilemmas, interactions arise which mothers often experience as negative, and which can deter their future demand. Such an analysis, and its implications for policy, emerge only through detailed ethnography of what vaccination practices actually mean to Guinean parents in the context of everyday child care and social relations. Keywords: immunisation, vaccination, Guinea

The Mande creation myth, by Germaine Dieterlen – a story of Marcel Griaule’s laboratory boat and Kangaba’s intellectual elite

This article proposes a new reading for Germaine Dieterlen's classic text “The Mande Creation Myth,” and presents it as evidence for Kangaba's prominent military role as ruler of the Niger and defender of the gold mines that for centuries provided the wealth of the Mali Empire. It is demonstrated that, although Dieterlen was in search of a unified cosmology, her informants in Kangaba provided answers that voiced Kangaba's military concerns and claims as political heir of the medieval Mali Empire and ruler of the River Niger. The starting point of the analysis are new insights on how creation is envisioned in the West African savannah, with an emphasis on termite mounds, earth, and blacksmiths. These insights are compared to the fieldwork data that Dieterlen collected in 1953-55, which she used in 1955 for a publication on the Kamabolon ceremony in Kangaba and, under strikingly different personal circumstances, in 1957 in the article “The Mande Creation Myth.” The article explains why Dieterlen herself nor other researchers have never been able to reproduce neither her 1953-55 findings nor her 1957 findings by pointing to Kangaba's raised prestige as a major historical site for a new Republic of Mali, which had acquired independence in 1960. Kangaba's new position replaced the earlier focus on military rule on the Niger and defense of gold mines (in what had become the Republic of Guinée in 1958). This argument is substantiated by a recently discovered contemporary report of the 1961 Kamabolon ceremony, written by a leading contemporary intellectual, Mambi Sidibé

Comparison of social resistance to Ebola response in Sierra Leone and Guinea suggests explanations lie in political configurations not culture

Sierra Leone and Guinea share broadly similar cultural worlds, straddling the societies of the Upper Guinea Coast with Islamic West Africa. There was, however, a notable difference in their reactions to the Ebola epidemic. As the epidemic spread in Guinea, acts of violent or everyday resistance to outbreak control measures repeatedly followed, undermining public health attempts to contain the crisis. In Sierra Leone, defiant resistance was rarer. Instead of looking to ‘culture’ to explain patterns of social resistance (as was common in the media and in the discourse of responding public health authorities) a comparison between Sierra Leone and Guinea suggests that explanations lie in divergent political practice and lived experiences of the state. In particular, the structures of authority in which the government-sanctioned epidemic response was channeled relate very differently to communities of trust in each country. Predicting and addressing social responses to epidemic control measures should assess such political-trust configurations when planning interventions