Ordinary women and shapes of knowledge: Perspectives on the context of STD and AIDS

Public Understanding of Science

Volumn 7, Issue 2, 1998, Pages 169-185

  Wallman, Sandra ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0003681872     PISSN: 09636625     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/096366259800700205     Document Type: Review

References (32)

1. For an anthropological formualtion, see editors' introduction to L. Holy and M. Stuchlik, eds., The Structure of Folk Models (Assoc. Soc. Anth. Monog. 20) (London: Academic Press, 1981).
2. STD is relevant to HIV/AIDS in two ways: (i) in Africa, heterosexual contact is by far the most significant source of new HIV infection - which is not the situation in Europe and the USA; and (ii) curing STDs reduces the risk of (incurable) HIV infection by healing the skin lesions characteristic of many genital infections: breaks in the skin facilitate entry of the virus. See H. Grosskurth et al. "Impact of Improved Treatment of STD on HIV Infection in Rural Tanzania: Randomised Control Trials," The Lancet 346 (1995): 530-536.
3. R. Paine, "'Chernobyl' Reaches Norway: The Accident, Science, and the Threat to Cultural Knowledge," Public Understanding of Science 1 (1992): 261-80.
4. The project was funded by the UK Overseas Development Administration (ODA: now DfID - the Dept. for International Development) as R5397 under the title: "Informal Economy of Health in African Cities." The views expressed here are the responsibility of the author, not of the sponsoring agency. An oral version of this paper was given to World AIDS Day Seminar at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, 29 November 1996.
5. The parish, called Kamwokya (pronounced Kam-oh-tcha) is an RC2 area containing 10 RC1s, which are the smallest units in the elected political hierarchy. See S. Wallman, Kampala Women Getting By: Well-Being in the Time of AIDS (London: James Currey, with University of Ohio Press and Fountain Press Kampala, 1996).
6. S. Wallman, "Sex and Death: The AIDS Crisis in Social and Cultural Context," J. AIDS 1 (1988): 571-578.
7. Conversely, the lay actor is not interested in the professional contexts of medical or social research.
8. Clyde Mitchell, "Case & Situation Analysis," Sociological Review 31, no. 2 (1983): 187-211.
9. W. L. Ditto and L. M. Pecora, "Mastering Chaos," Scientific American (August 1993): 62-68.
10. For anthropological purposes and my purposes here, intelligibility, being context dependent, is a more useful notion than its philosophical cognate, rationality. See Raymond Firth, "Degrees of Intelligibility," in J. Overing, ed., Reason and Morality (Assoc. Soc. Anth. Monographs 24) (London: Tavistock, 1985).
11. Hilary Standing, "AIDS: Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Researching Sexual Behaviour in Sub-Saharan Africa," Social Science & Medicine 34 (1992): 5, 475-83.
12. I proposed these to frame discussion in a seminar on "Sexuality in Multi-Cultural Society" convened and published (in Swedish) by The Institute for Public Health, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1994.
13. See, classically, Ernest Gellner, "Concepts and Society" in I. C. Jarvie and J. Agassi, eds., Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
14. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, 1978).
15. Mary Douglas, "Witchcraft and Leprosy: Two Strategies of Exclusion," MAN 24 (1991): 4.
16. Sontag, Illness, 59-61.
17. John Adams, Risk and Freedom (Cardiff: TPP, 1985);
18. and "Why More Condoms May Not Contain the Spread of AIDS," London: The Independent, 8 January 1988.
19. See e.g. Clyde Mitchell, "The Meaning of Misfortune for Urban Africans," in M. Fortes and G. Dieterlin, eds., African Systems of Thought (Oxford: International African Institute, 1965).
20. Residents' involvement enhances the aim of ethnographic survey, which is distinct from census: i.e., to understand the local context as a system of relationships as well as an agglomeration of people.
21. "Well-being" is discussed at length in Wallman, Kampala Women Getting By, specifically in Chapter 5.
22. This story is taken from case material in the work of Grace Bantebya-Kyomuhendo.
23. See H. Graham on "the reasonableness of unreasonable behavior," in Women, Health and the Family (Brighton, UK: Wheatsheaf Harvester, 1984).
24. Resty does not use these words, but her classification of symptoms exactly parallels their meanings.
25. S. Wallman, Eight London Households (London: Tavistock, 1984).
26. S. Wallman and M. Baker, "Which Resources Pay for Treatment?" Soc. Sci. Med. 42, no. 5 (1996): 671-680.
27. These women do not represent others in any statistical sense. Anthropological case studies serve to demonstrate "the operation of some identified general theoretical principle," and their number is beside the point. See Mitchell, "Case & Situation Analysis."
28. The story of Sally was recorded in the field by Jessica Ogden.
29. See J. A. Ogden, "Producing Respect: The Proper Woman in Post-Colonial Kampala," in R. P. Werbner and T. Ranger, eds., Post-Colonial Identities in Africa (London: ZED Press, 1996).
30. There are many drug shops in Kamwokya, most of which are either unlicensed or not licensed for the drugs they sell.
31. Empisa is also required of men, but its strictures are there different. The woman's empisa ensures marital harmony and, by patience and good example, her husband's support and fidelity (Ogden, "Producing Respect.")
32. Paine, R. "What is gossip about? An alternative hypothesis" MAN 2, no. 2 (1967): 272-285.