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Medical research has been central to biomedicine in Africa for over a century, and Africa, along with other tropical areas, has been crucial to the development of medical science. At present, study populations in Africa participate in an increasing number of medical research projects and clinical trials, run by both public institutions and private companies. Global debates about the politics and ethics of this research are growing and local concerns are prompting calls for social studies of the “trial communities” produced by this scientific work. Drawing on rich, ethnographic and historiographic material, this volume represents the emergent field of anthropological inquiry that links Africanist ethnography to recent concerns with science, the state, and the culture of late capitalism in Africa.
“Each of the chapters is noteworthy. Together, they offer a promising opportunity to broaden the field of postcolonial science studies in ways that remind us how ethicality is at the heart of these encounters of science… the volume will be useful to medical anthropologists, science studies scholars, and generalist scholars of Africa and global health. Individual chapters, as well as whole sections of the book, will be particularly useful for teaching at the upper-division undergraduate or graduate levels.” • Medical Anthropology Quarterly
“…a series of compelling and well written chapters…Considering the explosion of medical research in Africa in the age of global health, Evidence, ethos and experiment is a valuable and much-needed contribution to the development of multiple contextual frameworks for historical and contemporary medical research in Africa and elsewhere.” • Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale
“The book is instructive, interesting and innovative. it draws on strong empirical work and opens up significant discussions concerning epistemological and ethical issues and will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including medical anthropology, history, medicine, science and epidemiology.” • Tijdschrift Medische Antropologie
“This is an extremely interesting and innovative collection with unusual empirical richness, with ethical and epistemological discussions cutting across anthropology, medicine, history, epidemiology and other disciplines.” • Lotte Meinert, Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University
Introduction: Studying trial communities: anthropological and historical inquiries into ethos, politics and economy of medical research in Africa
P. Wenzel Geissler
This chapter is available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust.
Engagements
Chapter 1. Writing Knowledge and Acknowledgement: Possibilities in Medical Research
Susan Reynolds Whyte
Chapter 2. Can one Rely on Knowledge?
Marilyn Strathern
Chapter 3. Being 'with MRC': Infant Care and the Social Meanings of Cohort Membership in Gambia's Plural Therapeutic Landscapes
Melissa Leach and James Fairhead
Chapter 4. Contextualising Ethics in AIDS Research: or, the Morality of Knowledge Production in Ethnographic Fieldwork on ‘the Unspeakable’
Hansjörg Dilger
Chapter 5. Testing a New Drug for Leprosy: Clofazimine and its Precursors in Ireland and Nigeria, 1944-1966
John Manton
Chapter 6. Elucidating Ethics in Practice -- Focus on Accountability
George Ulrich
Evidence
Chapter 7. When Physicians Meet: Local Medical Knowledge and Global Public Goods
Steven Feierman
Chapter 8. The Plausibility Design, Quasi-Experiments, and Real World Research: a Case Study from the Interdisciplinary Monitoring Project for Antimalarial Combination Treatment in Tanzania
S. Patrick Kachur
Chapter 9. Remember Bambali: Evidence, Ethics and the Co-Production of Truth
Ann Kelly
Chapter 10. Foetuses, Facts and Frictions: Insights from Ultrasound Research in Tanzania
Babette Müller-Rockstroh
Chapter 11. Healers and Scientists: The Epistemological Politics of Research about Medicinal Plants in Tanzania or ‘Moving Away from Traditional Medicine’
Stacey A. Langwick
Chapter 12. Parasite Lost. Remembering Modern Times with Kenyan Government Medical Scientists
P. Wenzel Geissler
Chapter 13. Is the Sharia of the Doctors Killing the People? A Local Debate on Ethics and the Control of HIV/AIDS in a Rural Area in Kenya
Suzette Heald
Politics
Chapter 14. The Historical Interface between the State and Medical Science in Africa: Kenya’s Case
Kenneth S. Ombongi
Chapter 15. The intimate rules of the French Coopération: Morality, Race and the Postcolonial Division of Scientific Work at the Pasteur Institute of Cameroon
Guillaume Lachenal
Chapter 16. The Mosquito Taken at the Beer-Hall’: Malaria Research and Control on Zambia’s Copperbelt
Lyn Schumaker
Chapter 17. Trial Communities: HIV and Therapeutic Citizenship in West Africa
Vin-Kim Nguyen
Chapter 18. Differences in Medicine, Differences in Ethics: or, When is it Research and When is it Kidnapping or is That Even the Right Question?
Luise White
Index