Haunted by a legacy of apartheid governance that left millions in material poverty, South Africa has among the highest tuberculosis (TB) morbidity and mortality rates in the world. Our Social Markers of TB research project shared a vision of working with ethnographic research methods to understand TB-infected persons, their families, care providers, and social networks. We argue that felt and enacted TB stigma and the related HIV-TB stigma impaired our ability to collect the necessary data for a full portrait of TB-infected persons and their lived conditions. To circumvent this limitation, each researcher improvised and augmented conventional anthropological methods with more creative, directed, and at times destabilizing methods. We present three case studies as useful illustrations of the complexities and challenges we encountered in our attempts to conduct ethically sound TB research. We discuss the implications of our call for "improvisation" for the politics of research and ethical oversight.
In the spirit of Max Gluckmans's 1940 'The Bridge' paper, this paper offers a situational analysis of the Kylemore versus Groendal High School Derby Day in the Western Cape's Dwars River valley in 2014. I compare this Derby Day with an athletic event at my Former Model C (Whites-only during apartheid) school in 2004. Situational analysis allows us to track persistent racial disparities over time and ask how time is figured differentially in relation to belonging. I show how historically contingent stereotypes of Coloured people were actively gainsaid, and subjectivities that are subversive and plural were enacted at the former. At Sutherland High where pupils 'reach for the stars' by drawing on a repertoire of colonial tools of distinction, the future was optimised in reference to the 'rainbow nation'. In both cases symbols of modernity were drawn on in the practice of enacting belonging. These sites share a foundational logic that operates differentially, maintaining and creating unequal terrain for play. This logic can be observed by considering and questioning White lines and the iterative process of drawing, ignoring, and challenging them.
In 2019 and 2020 students in an Australian university conducted a short ethnographic exercise, a ‘journal’, with an attunement to the multiplicity of meanings evident in a single space by a range of interlocutors. We emphasised and assessed ‘empathy’ as a short-hand for the kind of anthropological sensibility we hoped to encourage. By requesting an account that represented an awareness of how ‘others’ encounter and come to ‘know’ the world we promoted their adoption of a modality which is central to the discipline. We wanted them to describe the world—the terrain, the stuff of their surroundings—based on their observations of how these others behaved. To couch it in anthropological terms, we wanted them to be attuned to a multiplicity of ‘taskscapes’, Ingold’s term for the mutual constitution of people and places through culturally politically, economically, and spiritually informed actions (‘tasks’) (Ingold, 1993). These ‘taskscapes’ were illustrated through the work of McKee (2016), whose account of multiple simultaneous experiences in the Negev desert by those living in (variously labelled) Israel/Palestine, represented an unexperienced domain for most of the Australian students. Rather than reinforcing the dated notion that anthropology is something that is done ‘elsewhere’, by asking students to focus on anthropology ‘at home’ they embodied their understanding of a transferable concept—introduced via an ‘exotic’ example—through a locally embedded experience. This paper describes the delivery of this assignment in 2019 and 2020 and explores in detail the content of five student journals and their evidence of the targeted learning.
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