Overview
- A narrative ethnography combining fieldwork, letters of interlocutors, and auto-ethnography
- Offers a fine-grained ethnography to explore how war, political turmoil, development aid, AIDS, and antiretroviral treatments have changed life in Uganda since the 1970s
- Probes the ethical questions raised by ethnographic research and the potential violence of doing anthropology
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology (PSLA)
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About this book
A narrative ethnography about a Ugandan woman and her relatives, this novelistic, fine-grained volume shows how global questions of responsibility and inequity travel in family networks and confront people with decisions about life and death. It is a story of existence under extremely challenging conditions, about belonging and marginalization, about the opacity and ambiguity of social relations, and about growing up in a country haunted by violence and civil war only to be later lifted by optimism and devastated anew by the AIDS epidemic. The story draws on long-term fieldwork and letters from the woman who takes centre stage in the story, while at once providing unique and privileged insight into the ethical challenges of a research method that demands personal involvement that is ultimately withdrawn for scholarly analysis.
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Keywords
Table of contents (14 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
'This is a remarkable narrative ethnography of an anthropologist’s attempts to understand the complicated lives and deaths of people in Uganda that she has been close to for several generations now. Drawing from intensive fieldwork in East Africa since the 1990s, the author writes beautifully and incisively of the joys and sorrows of life, family, friendship, and existential hope and despair in situations of life-long poverty and precariousness. The story moves in compelling ways from biographical portraits, life histories, and letters sent from afar to reflections on the damaging consequences of war and violence, and efforts to combat sickness and disease with medical treatments. Hanne Overgaard Mogensen writes in altogether honest ways of the ethical challenges of conducting ethnographic research with interlocutors in sustained and intimate ways, especially when the stakes are so high. For these reasons and more, the book marks a singular advance in the generative possibilities of narrative ethnography.'
‘This is a beautiful, sad, hopeful, thought-provoking book that reads like a novel and is one of the best texts I know on the intricacies of doing close-in ethnographic fieldwork. The elements of mystery, uncertainty and revelation woven into the author’s puzzlement and persistent attempts to understand give the story momentum. At the same time, the book provides rich empirical material about women’s livelihood strategies, partnership difficulties, childcare arrangements, hopes and disappointments within a carefully described setting of time and place. It is rare to find such rich ethnography together with such a superb account of how it was assembled. The book sensitively considers ethical dilemmas of doing fieldwork with people who are poor, sick and concerned to maintain control over knowledge about their lives. It will provide a superb basis for discussion of these issues.'
—Susan Reynolds Whyte, Professor of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
—Robert Desjarlais, Professor of Anthropology, Sarah Lawrence College, USA
‘This is a beautiful, sad, hopeful, thought-provoking book that reads like a novel and is one of the best texts I know on the intricacies of doing close-in ethnographic fieldwork. The elements of mystery, uncertainty and revelation woven into the author’s puzzlement and persistent attempts to understand give the story momentum. At the same time, the book provides rich empirical material about women’s livelihood strategies, partnership difficulties, childcare arrangements, hopes and disappointments within a carefully described setting of time and place. It is rare to find such rich ethnography together with such a superb account of how it was assembled. The book sensitively considers ethical dilemmas of doing fieldwork with people who are poor, sick and concerned to maintain control over knowledge about their lives. It will provide a superb basis for discussion of these issues.'
—Susan Reynolds Whyte, Professor of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Hanne Overgaard Mogensen is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. She has published broadly on international health, poverty and access to health care in Africa, as well as on the moral world of anthropologists both inside and outside of academia.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic
Book Subtitle: Letters from Uganda
Authors: Hanne Overgaard Mogensen
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47523-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-47522-2Published: 30 July 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-47525-3Published: 31 July 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-47523-9Published: 29 July 2020
Series ISSN: 2946-4218
Series E-ISSN: 2946-4226
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXVIII, 246
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: Social Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Ethnography, African Culture