In this article, we discuss the challenges facing humanities researchers approaching studies in clinical and community health settings. This crossing of disciplines has arguably been less often explored in the countries we discuss—Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa—but our experiences also speak to broader trouble with disciplinary ‘ethnocentrism’ that hampers the development of knowledge. After a brief contextualising overview of the structures within our universities that separate or link the humanities, medicine and social science, we use case studies of our experiences as an arts researcher, an anthropologist and a historian to draw attention to the methodological clashes that can hobble research between one disciplinary area and another, whether this manifests in the process of applying for ethical clearance or a professional wariness between healthcare practitioners and humanities scholars in health spaces. We argue overall for the great potential of humanities in the health ‘space’—as well as the need for improved dialogue between the disciplines to bring a diverse community of knowledge to bear on our understandings of experiences of health. And we suggest the need for a robust awareness of our own positions in relation to medicine, as humanities scholars, as well as a patient persistence on both sides of the humanities–health science equation to create a broader and ultimately more effective research system.
This study examines the Mbozi society`s responses to the plight of marginal groups attributed to HIV/AIDS for the past three decades. The groups in question include people suffering from and or living with HIV/AIDS, AIDS related widows, AIDS orphans, and the elderly caring AIDS orphans. Rather than focusing synchronically on the responses from the international community, government and Non-governmental organizations as has been done by many studies, this study diachronically concentrates on the ordinary people`s responses at the grass-roots level. It argues that to cope with their plight, marginal groups associated with HIV/AIDS engage in different livelihood strategies including wage-labour, begging, sex work, petty trade, income generating groups, self-help groups, farming as well as enlisting family and neighbourhood support. By drawing on documents and interviews with people at the grass-roots level, this study not only brings to the fore the voices of the marginalized and people`s agency and resilience in the context of HIV/AIDS pandemic but it also adds to the growing body of knowledge on social exclusion in Tanzania in particular and Africa as a whole.
The study of the connection of East African coast, the Middle East and India through the Indian Ocean has been attracting great interests from scholars for centuries. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea writings in the 1st century A.D documented the connection so did Ibn Batuta and Portuguese voyage writings in the 14th, and 15th to 17th centuries respectively. Thomas McDow`s book, Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (henceforth Buying Time), fits in this Indian Ocean scholarship.
This article examines the forces that have engendered corruption in Tanzania since independence. Rather than solely associating the causes of corruption with the so called exceptional African or Tanzanian cultural practices as done by some scholars, the paper situates corruption in the changing political economy of Tanzania. By drawing on primary and secondary sources, the paper argues that corruption in Tanzania is embedded in the changing socio-economic, cultural and political forces. The forces include increased discretion power of office holders, moral decline, government policies, economic and global imperatives. This historical study on corruption in Tanzania is important as its findings may be used by stake-holders who are currently involved in interventions against the scourge. Specifically, the stake-holders may draw past lessons which could shed light on refining the current strategies against corruption. Such lessons could entail incorporating into their strategies economic, political and cultural determinants of corruption.
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