How to deal with neglected tropical diseases in the light of an African ethic

Many countries in Africa, and more generally those in the Global South with tropical areas, are plagued by illnesses that the wealthier parts of the world (mainly ‘the West’) neither suffer from nor put systematic effort into preventing, treating or curing. What does an ethic with a recognizably African pedigree entail for the ways various agents ought to respond to such neglected diseases? As many readers will know, a characteristically African ethic prescribes weighty duties to aid on the part of those in a position to do so, and it therefore entails that there should have been much more contribution from the Western, ‘developed’ world. However, what else does it prescribe, say, on the part of sub‐Saharan governments and the African Union, and are they in fact doing it? I particularly seek to answer these questions here, by using the 2013‐16 Ebola crisis in West Africa to illustrate what should have happened but what by and large did not.     

The (extra)ordinary ethics of being HIV‐positive in rural Papua New Guinea

HIV/AIDS continues to be intimately entwined with the moral domain, and thus a positive diagnosis can cast doubt on a person's moral status. I draw on recent literature in the anthropology of ethics and morality, as well as feminist moral philosophy, to analyse the post‐diagnosis practices of HIV‐positive women in Papua New Guinea as they attempt to recuperate their moral personhood and make their ethical commitments visible to others. I argue that they carve out a repertoire of (extra)ordinary ethics from the ‘ordinary’ domain and that their practices tend towards a deontological ethics, rather than a virtue ethics, orientation.     

Making the Baruya great again: From glorified great men to modern suffering subjects?

This paper explores avenues for prestige‐making now available to and championed by the Baruya, the archetypal ‘Great Man’ people of Papua New Guinea, who I recently studied following previous work by Maurice Godelier. Amid critiques by Robbins and Ortner of anthropologists’ drive to document and empathise with “suffering subjects”, I suggest that being ‘left behind’ and ‘forgotten’ is an important part of Baruya social life that reinterprets previous ways of ‘making great men.’ Baruya exposure to material and institutional modernity remains very limited. Local rhetorics of being ‘last place’ (las ples) are both concomitant and discordant with Baruya assumptions and assertions of being ‘the greatest people’ of their region. Unable to revive traditional contexts for producing great men through warriorship, shamanism, cassowary hunting, and salt‐making, Baruya turn to the very modernity they cannot quite reach for their own pursuit of masculinity and prestige—which paradoxically now lies within domains also open to women. Desirous to both establish continuity with their glorified past and to depart from it, Baruya's local modernity itself constrains their newly‐shaped desire for prestige—and dramatically changes gender relations in the process. Though the concrete impossibility to ‘be great’ reinforces Baruya perceptions of enduring what we might call a ‘suffering slot’, the larger issue is how concrete experiences sediment into socio‐cultural change over time. This process is informed by a tension between a quest for modernity and its larger failure, resulting in a drive to reignite longer standing values of morality, spirituality, and ultimately, greatmanship.     

‘A good neighbour is not one that gives’: detachment,ethics, and the relational self in Kenya

Since Mauss, anthropologists have been drawn to gifts because they are understood to index the moral, often in contrast to the amorality of the market. Giving is considered to bring people closer together, weaving them into the fabric of sociality. However, in Korogocho, a low‐income informal settlement in Nairobi, women recognize the dangers of giving and of closeness. Not only could others be a burden on them, but they could also be a burden on others. Thus, women seek ways in which they can detach from one another. Beginning with the assumption of the relational self, I argue that this detachment is an ethical practice that can be best understood as what I term a ‘care for relationships’. In making this argument, this article aims to contribute to debates within the anthropology of ethics and morality concerning social relationships by showing the way in which relationships might be the explicit object of ethical practices.     

Mobility,white bodies and desire: Euro‐American women in Jakarta

This paper illustrates how cultural logics of desire are being transformed in the context of the global economy refashioning intimate lives. Exploring the experiences of Euro‐American female professionals in Jakarta, it suggests that they become uncomfortably visible as ‘white bodies’; their desirability appears compromised, especially given Orientalist discourses which valorise Asian women's bodies. At the same time, women's position as well‐paid employees generates a contradictory logic of desire: the ‘ego‐boost’ they experience at work may intensify their demands on the masculinity and enlightened views of potential partners, thus rendering Indonesian men, with their perceived bodily effeminacy and ‘traditional values’ unattractive. As one response to the lack of desirability, some women engage in a moral discourse that casts Indonesian women whom they consider ‘bargirls’, as well as the Euro‐American men they attract, as morally deficient. The paper thus provides an alternative perspective on reconfigurations of desire in the context of global gendered mobility.     

Uncivil society: the politics of HIV activism in Pakistan

This article presents an ethnography of the Association of the People Living with HIV in Pakistan, established under the auspices of UNAIDS, international NGOs, and the government's AIDS control department as an attempt to strengthen ‘civil society’. It was initially run by formerly marginalized HIV‐positive leaders of community‐based organizations (CBOs), until a young university‐educated HIV‐positive man from America was selected as its national co‐ordinator. One of the ways in which this new entrant undermined the dominance of long‐established leaders of the ‘PLHIV’ (People Living with HIV) sector was to democratize the Association by attempting to hold country‐wide elections among HIV‐positive people and de‐linking the Association from the CBOs. The resulting tug of war between the pioneers of HIV activism and a privileged newcomer with a savvy agenda revealed the politics of community, the importance of numbers, the ideal of democracy, and the breaking down of monopolies. This article explores how the Association became a site of contested claims instead of serving its envisaged purpose of bringing HIV‐positive people together on a common platform and agenda for a shared good. I argue that the recent literature that examines the activism of HIV‐positive people in terms of ‘biological citizenship’, or their organizations as spaces where people are subjectivated as ‘therapeutic citizens’ with a potential for world‐wide solidarity, must be reconsidered in light of the local histories and sociologies of HIV, and would benefit from a greater appreciation of the activists’ moral complexity.     

‘Deep engagement’ and disengaged reason

In this paper, I explore what it would mean to pursue modes of ‘deeper engagement’ and how this might be done without abandoning the capacity for disengaged reasoning. Charles Taylor recognises disengaged reasoning as ‘one of the most important developments of the modern era’ and as essential to the pursuit of the good society, even though (like everything else) when taken to an extreme it corrupts or distorts the modes of being‐in‐the‐world. In A Secular Age, Taylor continues a long‐running critique of disengaged reason and its contributions to the malaise of modernity, focusing especially on its conflictual relationship with religious belief and its central role in the disenchantment of the world. My objective here is to relativise and contextualise the relationship between disengaged and engaged modes of being, in part by exploring some of the ways in which we may be deeply engaged in the world and with one another while also employing the critical faculties that enable us to analyse dispassionately, amongst other things, theistic and other interpretations of being‐in‐the‐world.     

Troubled landscapes,troubling anthropology: co‐presence,necessity, and the making of ethnographic knowledge

If ‘co‐presence is a condition of [anthropological] inquiry’ (Fabian), what sort of knowledge does it produce? I explore this question through an ethnography of a ‘troubled landscape’ in Malaysian Borneo: a lush, hilly region that has been the site of a dam construction and resettlement project since the late 2000s. My article uses the notion of co‐presence as both a lens through which to explore the predicaments of the four small communities affected by the scheme and a reflexive device that underscores the embeddedness of the ethnographic encounter in a larger relational field – one characterized as much by chance and necessity as it is by anthropologists’ intellectual agendas. In the process, I seek to trouble some of the methodological and ethical issues posed by anthropology's recent ‘ontological turn’, notably the long‐standing questions of what it means to ‘take seriously’ and how ethnography and the ethnographer are implicated in this project.     

I Gave My Child Life but I Also Gave Her Death

The capacity for a complex inner life—encompassing inner speech, imaginative reverie and unarticulated moods—is an essential feature of living with illness and a principal means through which people interpret, understand and manage their condition. Nevertheless, as Nigel Rapport has pointed out in a recent edition of The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2008: 19 (3)), interiority largely remains a ‘terra‐incognita’ for social science, while anthropology lacks a generally accepted theory or methodological framework for understanding how interiority relates to people’s public actions and expressions. Moreover, as conventional social‐scientific methods are often too static to understand the fluidity of perception among people living with illness or bodily instability, I argue we need to develop new, practical approaches to knowing. By placing the problem of interiority directly into the field and turning it into an ethnographic, practice‐based question to be addressed through fieldwork in collaboration with informants, this article works alongside women living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda with the aim of capturing the unvoiced but sometimes radical changes in being, belief and perception that accompany terminal illness.     

Cruising: ‘Moral Panic’ and the Cronulla Riot

In this paper I draw on ethnography I undertook amongst locals in the Cronulla area after the riot of December 2005. A number of the young beach goers I came across had been on a P&O ‘schoolies cruise’ at the time of the riot. For two weeks the students depended on the media for information about what was going on in their suburbs. Sailing back, I was told, a pumped‐up chorus of ‘Shi‐ire!’ and ‘White Pride!’ rang out over Sydney Heads, as expectations climbed high of the ship being met by gangs of Middle Eastern youths, ready for the fight. Back on the beach, months later, bodies baking in the sun try to reconcile the thought of riot with what they know about Australia, and Cronulla, as a place of laid back, leisurely, lazily tolerant people. How can the two scenes of bodily excess be brought together? What are the limits of the ‘moral panic’ idea, in relation to the Cronulla riot? How do the competing truths of major discourses on Cronulla misrepresent the community in question?     

Just Choices: Representations of Choice and Coercion in Sex Work in Cambodia

In global discourses about sex work, the image of the ‘sex slave’ has been influential in constructing the view of women working in the sex industry in developing countries as ‘victims’. This paper examines the perpetuation of such discourses through powerful lobbying groups and socially conservative governments. It argues that frameworks that situate women working in the Cambodian sex industry through a singular identity of ‘victim’ or ‘agent’ are inadequate in informing our understandings of sex work in the country. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with sex workers in the port city of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, this paper questions prevailing stereotypes of ‘trafficking victims' and the image of ‘defiled’ or ‘duped’ women and girls central to such frameworks. It examines the intricate intertwining of elements of individual choice and coercion in women's lives and illuminates how, in the transition to a market economy, women's choices are constrained by hierarchal structures such as gender, class and socio‐cultural obligations and poor employment opportunities.     

AIDS and ‘building a wall’ around Christian country in rural Papua New Guinea

This paper explores an ongoing dialogue about Christianity in light of the recent influx of HIV and AIDS into the villages of the Gogodala of Western Province, Papua New Guinea. I argue that a suggestion by a woman in late 2004 to ‘build a wall’ around the Gogodala region in Western Province in order to stop or slow the spread of HIV/AIDS reflects a recent concern with the sustainability of this rural Christian community, referred to in English as ‘Christian country’. Understanding AIDS to be a threat posed largely from outsiders, whether Papua New Guinean or European, sections of these primarily village‐based communities aim to create both a physical and metaphorical boundary between themselves and outsiders. At present, local prevention and intervention strategies concerning HIV and AIDS focus on conservative, evangelical narratives about the preservation of the principles and practices of Christian country, through the repudiation of unrestrained sexuality, for example, which is believed to be increasingly prevalent not only in their own area but throughout urban Papua New Guinea. A growing divide between rural and urban Gogodala, then, has become a major part of the local dialogue about AIDS and represents significant contestation over the practices and ideational basis of Christian country.     

The Evil Eye (għajn) in Malta: Grappling with Skinner’s pigeons and rehabilitating lame ducks1

In this paper, I construct a plea for superstition and examine the ways in which contemporary scholars use the term to denote irrational belief. ‘Superstition’ has, throughout history, been used as a derogatory term denoting inferior and dangerous beliefs. Examining the process whereby people continue to believe that which they deem irrational, I adopt a reflexive and phenomenological approach. Focussing on the evil eye (g?ajn) in Malta and the Mediterranean, I redefine ‘superstition’ as the product of an intrasubjective antinomy between orthodoxy and its subversion.     

Epistemic artefacts: on the uses of complexity in anthropology

Distinctions between the ‘simple’ and the ‘complex’ have enjoyed a long and varied career in anthropology. Simplicity was once part of a collective fantasy about what life was like elsewhere, tingeing studies of tribal life with human longing for simpler ways of being. With the reflexive turn and the rise of cultural critique, simplicity has been all but excommunicated in favour of widespread diagnoses of complexity. In this article, I tease out some transformations in the uses of complexity in anthropology, and weave in some critical responses to these uses, spanning many decades, from within the discipline. I pay special attention to recent critiques by anthropologists who are beginning to grow weary of complexity as both an end‐in‐itself for scholarship and an empirical diagnosis. For these critics, complexity is deeply entwined with anthropological methods and knowledge practices. Drawing on these critical views, I suggest that complexity may be an epistemological artefact, rather than something that can be diagnosed ‘out there’, and offer a way of reframing complexity as a ‘dominant problematic’ in anthropology and beyond.     

THE LIMITS OF INTIMATE CITIZENSHIP: REPRODUCTION OF DIFFERENCE IN FLEMISH‐ETHIOPIAN ‘ADOPTION CULTURES’

The concept of ‘intimate citizenship’ stresses the right of people to choose how they organize their personal lives and claim identities. Support and interest groups are seen as playing an important role in the pursuit of recognition for these intimate choices, by elaborating visible and positive cultures that invade broader public spheres. Most studies on intimate citizenship take into consideration the exclusions these groups encounter when negotiating their differences with society at large. However, much less attention is paid to the ways in which these groups internalize the surrounding ideologies, identity categories and hierarchies that pervade society and constrain their recognition as full citizens. In contrast, this paper aims to emphasize the reproduction of otherness within alternative spheres of life, and to reveal the ambiguities and complexities involved in their dialectic relationship with society at large. To address this issue, the paper focuses on the role that ‘adoption cultures’ of Flemish adoptive parents with children from Ethiopia play in the pursuit of being recognized as ‘proper’ families and full citizens. The ethnographic research among adoptive parents and adoption professionals shows a defensive discourse and action that aims at empowering against potential problems, as well as a tendency to other the adoptive child by pathologizing its non‐normativity. By showing the strong embeddedness of adoptive families' practices of familial and cultural construction in larger cultural frames of selfing and othering, characterized by biologism and nativism, one begins to understand the limits of their capacity to realize full citizenship.     

Desire Work: Producing Heterosexuality in South African Pentecostal Gay Men

Gay men in Cape Town, South Africa joined a Pentecostal ministry in an attempt to produce what they understood as ‘natural’ heterosexual attraction. In this article, I explore how these gay men try to form new selves through what I call ‘desire work’, or physical and emotional micropractices and discipline. Desire is not ‘natural’, but it is produced through a multitude of engagements with cultural norms, public life, political economies, and social forces. New selves are built through concerted bodily changes and comportment [Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press], and although gay Pentecostal men shared this process, their success was limited. I understand desire work as a response to a larger context in which many Pentecostals are disaffected with the post-apartheid government and withdraw from politics as a result. Their fears of the uncertainties of democracy pushed them to engage in optimistic fantasies of heterosexual lives, which were not often realised [Berlant, Lauren Gail. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press].     

Valuing Lives and Allocating Resources: A Defense of the Modified Youngest First Principle of Scarce Resource Distribution

In this paper, I argue that the ‘modified youngest first’ principle provides a morally appropriate criterion for making decisions regarding the distribution of scarce medical resources, and that it is morally preferable to the simple ‘youngest first’ principle. Based on the complete lives system's goal of maximizing complete lives rather than individual life episodes, I argue that essential to the value we see in complete lives is the first person value attributed by the experiencer of that life. For a life to be ‘complete’ or ‘incomplete,’ the subject of that life must be able to understand the concept of a complete life, to have started goals and projects, and to know what it would be for that life to be complete. As the very young are not able to do this, it can reasonably be said that their characteristically human lives have not yet begun, giving those accepting a complete lives approach good reason to accept the modified youngest first principle over a simple ‘youngest first’ approach.     

Migrant African women: tales of agency and belonging

Abstract

This paper explores issues of belonging and agency among asylum seekers and refugee women of African origin in the UK. It discusses the ways these women engendered resistance in their everyday life to destitution, lack of cultural recognition, and gender inequality through the foundation of their own non-governmental organization, African Women's Empowerment Forum, AWEF, a collective ‘home’ space.

The focus of this account is on migrant women's agency and self-determination for the exercise of choice to be active actors in society. It points to what might be an important phenomenon on how local grassroots movements are challenging the invisibility of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ lives and expanding the notion of politics to embrace a wider notion of community politics with solidarity.

AWEF is the embodiment of a social space that resonates the ‘in-between’ experience of migrant life providing stability to the women members regarding political and community identification.     

Cleaner Wrasses Keep Track of the ‘When’ and ‘What’ in a Foraging Task1

In recent years evidence has accumulated that at least some animals can remember the ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ of personal experiences. Currently, evidence for such ability is taxonomically restricted to birds and mammals. Here, we demonstrate for the first time that cleaner wrasses Labroides dimidiatus are able to remember when they interacted with what after a single event. In nature, cleaners remove ectoparasites from other reef fishes, so‐called clients. Clients are depleted, non‐stationary food patches at the end of an interaction and replenished only after a delay. In our experiments, we presented twelve cleaners every 2.5 min, a choice between two of a total of four plates with different colours and patterns. One plate was always accessible but contained a non‐preferred food item while the other three contained a preferred food item, but allowed a next feeding event only after 5, 10 or 15 min. Thus, to maximise food intake, cleaners had to remember for each choice when they had last interacted with which plate. When confronted with two plates offering preferred food, cleaners showed an overall significant preference for the plate that allowed access during the trial. For six cleaners, the preference was significant. Also, on trials involving the always accessible plate, cleaners discriminated between trials in which they had to eat the non‐preferred food and trials on which they could eat the preferred food. In conclusion, cleaners are able to track the ‘when’ and ‘what’ (or possibly ‘who’) within a biologically meaningful time period.     

Only one Mayweather: a critique of hope from the hopeful

Professional boxing offers hope of vast wealth and global mobility for aspiring athletes in Accra, hopes bolstered by the understanding that Ghanaians are particularly suited to boxing's attrition. However, when boxers become active in the global industry, they encounter power relations which locate them as cheap, subordinate labour, and stymie their championship hopes. As boxers build lives through the sport, they reflect critically on the role their hopes of ‘making it big’ play in perpetuating industry inequalities, recognizing what I call the ideological function of hope. Despite this, they remain committed to hopes of dramatic success. Their simultaneous optimism and cynicism complicates contemporary accounts of hope as a strategy of resilience in contexts of profound uncertainty. Building on ethnographic research with Accra boxers, I theorize hoping as a paradoxical experience of critique and optimism in equal measure, to account for the contradictory ways people act when orienting themselves towards better futures.