Main description:

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.

Contents:

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'

Hansjoerg 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 Muller-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 Cooperation: 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