Abstract

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

P. Wenzel Geissler teaches social anthropology at the University of Oslo and at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He studied medical zoology in Hamburg and Copenhagen and social anthropology in Copenhagen and Cambridge. Since 1993 he has worked in western Kenya, conducting first medical research and then several years of ethnographic fieldwork. Currently he is writing an ethnography of post-colonial scientific research in Kisumu, Kenya.

Catherine Molyneux, Ph.D., is employed by Oxford University and has been working as part of the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme in Kilifi, Kenya, since 1994. She currently co-leads the Social and Behavioural research (SBR) group in Kilifi. Her current research focuses on community accountability and producing new thinking, evidence and recommendations around strengthening community involvement in biomedical research and health delivery in sub-Saharan Africa.