Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic

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insight into the ethical challenges of a research method that demands personal involvement that is ultimately withdrawn for scholarly analysis.

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

Auteur

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.

Contenu

Preface.- Chapter 1: The Missing Letters.- Chapter 2: Girls with Fast Legs.- Chapter 3: Women on the Move.- Chapter 4: Intersecting Trajectories.- Chapter 5: Questions of Belonging.- Chapter 6: Stories that Alter Life.- Chapter 7: Dying Poor.- Chapter 8: Feeling Stuck.- Chapter 9: Closeness and Distance.- Chapter 10: Knowing what to Hide.- Chapter 11: The Order of Secrecy.- Chapter 12: Shifting Secrets.- Chapter 13: Whose Responsibility and what Happened to the Letters?.- Chapter 14: Moving on.