Field station as stage: Re-enacting scientific work and life in Amani, Tanzania

Abstract

Located high in Tanzania's Usambara Mountains, Amani Hill Station has been a site of progressive scientific endeavours for over a century, pushing the boundaries of botanical, zoological and medical knowledge, and providing expertise for imperial expansion, colonial welfare, national progress and international development efforts. The station's heyday was from the 1950s to the 1970s, a period of global disease eradication campaigns and the 'Africanization' of science. Today, Amani lies in a state of suspended motion. Officially part of a national network of medical research stations, its buildings and vegetation are only minimally maintained, and although some staff report for duty, scientific work has ceased. Neither ruin nor time capsule, Amani has become a quiet site of remains and material traces. This article examines the methodological potentials of re-enactment - on-site performances of past research practices - to engage ethnographically with the distinct temporalities and affective registers of life at the station. The heuristic power of re-enactment resides in its anachronicity, the tensions it introduces between immediacy and theatricality, authenticity and artifice, fidelity and futility. We suggest that re-enacting early post-colonial science as events unfolding in the present disrupts straightforward narratives about the promises and shortfalls of scientific progress, raising provocative questions about the sentiments and stakes of research in 'the tropics'.

Re-imagining global health through social medicine

“…Other global health methodologies fall into the same trap, including use of statistical and RCT-based interventions that tend to hold 'the social' as a constant, presuming that the social operates as a sort of background static in the system as opposed to a robust and teeming source of information that may be key to both efficacy and critique of the interventions being attempted. There is a robust literature on the complicated relationships between qualitative and quantitative methodologies in global health, particularly on the reductive tendencies emerging from qualitative research in global health in and around notions of the social (Geissler & Kelly, 2016;Smith-Morris, 2016). The assumptions and erasures of complex sociality in much global health work only bolster the ambiguous renderings of methodology as interchangeable and remind us how important it is to devote time and effort to deciphering what 'social' we are talking about at any time or place.…”

Visions from behind a desk? Archival performance and the re‐enactment of colonial bureaucracy

“…Groups of investigative re‐enactors have put emphasis on the social and intersubjective aspects of historical technical work. For example, Geissler and Kelly () investigated colonial laboratory science in Tanzania, Kneebone and Woods () explored the “hive mind” of historical surgical teams. With hindsight, I think that this would have been a better way to approach colonial bureaucracy.…”

“…It is now common for scholars to describe their investigative re‐enactments as muddying and confusing the passage of time in productive ways. The terms “anachronism” and “haunting” (Edensor, ; Geissler & Kelly, ) have become celebratory within scholarly research. To focus on how re‐enactment practices merge and multiply temporalities, however, is to skip a basic point: that to “re”‐enact offers the suggestion that the investigated experience is in some way closed, that it is “over.” By “closing” the past, re‐enactment bypasses and figuratively erases the other vectors or acts of transfer through which the past persists in the present.…”

Remembering Africanization: two conversations among elderly science workers about the perpetually promissory

“…By 2015, its staff numbered about thirty, composed mainly of caretakers and a handful of qualified elderly staff who regularly opened and locked up laboratories and offices and kept their workspaces meticulously clean. Gradually, since the 1980s, the scientific station had been transformed from a place of the future – promising scientific contributions to the nation's well-being and an opportunity for personal advancement – into a place of the past, of waiting and quiet contemplation (Geissler and Kelly 2016). 11…”