Tropical Africa was one of the last regions of the world to experience formal European colonialism, a process that coincided with the advent of a range of new scientific specialties and research methods. The history of British attempts to understand and control African trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in cattle), following the intense human epidemics that broke out between 1895 and 1910, reveals hitherto ignored scientific research in the fields of ecology, epidemiology, and tropical medicine that helped produce a new understanding of the "ecology of disease." Often generated within a transnational and inter-disciplinary context, this knowledge increasingly assumed that vector-borne diseases in tropical environments were highly complex, dynamic, and interrelated phenomena. Thus while many people continued to hope that trypanosomiasis could be eradicated, research results made this prospect seem unlikely, if not impossible.
This essay examines the history of European empire building and health work in sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on four patterns that shed light on the ethics of outside interventions: (1) the epidemiological and bodily harms caused by conquest and economic development; (2) the uneven and inadequate health infrastructures established during the colonial era, including certain iatrogenic consequences; (3) the ethical ambiguities and transgressions of colonial research and treatment campaigns; and (4) the concerted and inadvertent efforts to undermine African healing practices, which were not always commensurable with introduced medical techniques. This kind of historical analysis helps us home in on different kinds of ethical problems that have grown out of past asymmetries of power-between people, professions, states, and institutions-that shape the nature of international health systems to this day.
Scholars in imperial and science studies have recently begun to examine more systematically the different ways knowledge systems around the world have intersected. This essay concentrates on one aspect of this process, the codification of research into "primitive" or "indigenous" knowledge, especially knowledge that was transmitted orally, and argues that such investigations were a by-product of four interrelated phenomena: the globalization of the sciences themselves, particularly those fields that took the earth and its inhabitants as their object of analysis; the professionalization of anthropology and its growing emphasis on studying other cultures' medical, technical, and natural knowledge; the European push, in the late nineteenth century, toward "global colonialism" and the ethnographic research that accompanied colonial state building; and, finally, colonized and marginalized peoples' challenges to scientific epistemologies and their paradoxical call that scientists study their knowledge systems more carefully. These phenomena came together on a global scale in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century to produce a subgenre of research within the sciences, here labeled "vernacular science," focused explicitly on "native" knowledge.
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