When I envisioned this blog I never imagined that I would include a post on the ethical quandaries of field work. As I have mentioned in previous posts, this was a space for thoughtful, analytical reflection on topics of relevance to what will become my dissertation. It was not a space for musings about my personal experience.
However, after more than a year in South Africa, I have come to accept that the ethics of research are not simply a part of my personal experience, but that they are central to this very dissertation project. These ethical dilemmas force one to ask: “What is the point?” and “Who is this project for?” Both of which strike me as being at the heart of any dissertation.
Ethical quandaries and questions began almost immediately upon my arrival in South Africa. For example, I am conducting my research in three communities in the area formerly known as the Pholela District. I chose two of these communities because they were the first two communities absorbed into the focus area of the Pholela Community Health Centre in the 1940s. As a result, they have the longest set of historical records. I chose the third community because I wanted a place that was outside of the Pholela catchment and because I had heard that the people in that place still relied heavily on subsistence agriculture. By choosing three communities I felt like I was making my study *somewhat* more representative than had I chosen just one community. However, by choosing only three communities I have given only three groups of people a voice in the academic world. On a practical level I had little choice, but on a moral level I must recognize that this choice has consequences.
I confront other ethical questions almost daily. For example, not two days ago I was visiting one of the Mkhulus (Grandfathers) whom I regularly go and see. He and his wife were weeding their garden in anticipation of planting beans. We (Thokozile, my research assistant, and I) came by to talk to him about life, agriculture, health, and witchcraft in the mid-1950s. Because he was working we decided to just ask him questions as he weeded. We came to the topic of gardens and asked him what was in his garden in the 1950s and he listed several things. So we followed up by asking if they had planted any vegetables back then. He said no and that even now they could not plant vegetables because they did not have a consistent water supply. He said that a number of families in his section of Nomondlovu wanted to buy some pipes and a couple of tanks to deliver a continuous water supply, which would enable them to irrigate their fields. However, it will cost R40,000 (or just over US$4,000). Predictably, the conversation immediately turned to me and whether I can help them get this money, either by giving a donation myself (though there is some recognition that I could not give them R40,000), or by telling my friends and family overseas “how poor they are,” or, and this is the most favored approach, by leveraging my education, experience, and most importantly my whiteness to get the government to give them “the pipes for free.” After going through all the ways they could raise money for water pipes, this Mkhulu went on to say that I should give them a donation to show that I am not just using them for their knowledge and rather that I recognize that they are poor and need help.
And this Mkhulu is, of course, right; on so many levels.
First, I must fully recognize and accept (and hope) that I will gain professionally and as a result financially from this experience. (I have already and continue to gain personally.) And moreover, the people of these communities, especially the older people who I spend most of my time with, will likely not benefit financially from this experience. Second, I do have access to international financial resources that these people would never have access to without my presence. Third, these people are poor and though there are certainly degrees of poverty, poor is poor, and I am not poor. And finally, by virtue of my status (as a well-educated, white, American woman) I *might* be able to at least raise some awareness and interest with the government.
But there are other ethical concerns as well. When I received approval from the University of Wisconsin’s Internal Review Board (IRB), I agreed that I would not compensate my research “subjects;” that participation would be entirely voluntary. When I was conducting the household survey and taking 90 minutes of a person’s time, this seemed reasonable. Now I tend to spend most of my time talking to, working with, and learning from a handful of families. They have invited me into their lives largely because they are interested in my project, enjoy my company, and are happy to talk about their lives and their gardens. But I also suspect that many of them see the continued presence and interest of a white American as leading to benefits for their communities and possibly even themselves.
I have done everything right according to the IRB. I have explained what me research is, told people that participation is completely voluntary and that they can stop at any point, and explained that I have no money to compensate them. Everything is supposedly clear. There will be no compensation. At least today.
But the hope continues with the eight families I visit weekly and the communities they come from that by working with me, letting me enter into their lives, and teaching me about health and agriculture in these areas there will be a direct (monetary) benefit to the community.
This hope, this belief is ever present as I conduct research, both in a very direct way as in the case of the Mkhulu asking me to donate money for his pipes, and in indirect ways as people constantly ask Thokozile if she will go overseas with me and ask when my book will be published that will make them famous. The omnipresence of these expectations reminds me that I have a responsibility to these communities that goes beyond the academic realm. As a result, my dissertation must be meaningful to both academic debates about nature and society as well as to the improved living conditions of those societies and natures. While this adds a layer of challenge to the dissertation project, it also makes for richer work.
And although facing these expectations day after day can make me want to curl up in my bed with a novel, I know that with good work comes great responsibility and I can only hope that the enormous gift of time and friendship that these people have given me, which will no doubt launch my career, can in some way be rewarded with some help to their communities.
Those of us who work in places far from home and in situations completely different from the ones we are accustomed to constantly face a mismatch of expectations between the people we work with, the rules of the ethics review boards, and, to be honest, ourselves. But to do good work is not to choose one set of expectations over the other, it is to strive to fulfill them all. For as scholars it is both our professional responsibility to honestly represent the people and places we research and our moral responsibility to ensure that we give back to the very people who have given us so much.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
What is Agriculture?
At first this question likely seems ridiculous, at least to my sensibilities.
Conceptually agriculture is unlike health. It does not include physical and mental aspects. It does not vary in meaning (though it almost certainly varies in practice) between places. It is the production of food.
But is it really that simple?
Shortly after my Christmas break I went to spend nine days in one of the communities where I am conducting research. I stayed with my research assistant at her home and had the opportunity to experience all facets of rural life. I helped to fetch water from a protected spring, wrote my field notes out long hand by candle light, bathed in a bucket, and helped to cook over the open fire. During our free time we visited with Thokozile’s (my research assistant) friends and family, we attended a funeral on Friday and Saturday, and church on Sunday.
In addition to experiencing every day life, we continued to conduct our research going with a couple of the Gogos to collect their monthly government pension, weeding in one family’s garden, and spending a day walking to the forest to collect muthis (traditional medicines) with a sangoma (traditional healer).
While invaluable in providing me with insight into the rhythms of rural life and into health and agriculture in this area, I had anticipated all of these experiences.
However, there was something very unexpected: food.
I hadn’t thought about it. I mean, of course I had anticipated (with a bit of anxiety) an unsettled stomach. However, I hadn’t thought much about how much I would learn by simply eating. I hadn’t really thought about how connected the act of eating is with agriculture itself. I hadn’t really connected production to consumption.
As we walked from household to household chatting with different people we would invariably stop and pull a peach off of one of their trees to see if it was ripe. As we visited different households, one family would give us a couple of plums to eat and another would give us a pear. It turns out that those trees that often line the periphery of a household’s garden are actually an important source of seasonal nutrition.
And so begins research via the stomach.
Through the simple act of snacking my original concept of agriculture as grain and vegetable crops in fields and gardens combined with livestock production expands.
Continuing on, in trying to understand the connections between consumption and production, we turn to food preparation.
Food preparation begins with gathering the ingredients. Because it is summer, almost every meal includes food from the garden as well as food from the shop. This much I expected. What I didn’t expect was the number of meals that included wild vegetables. These imifinos (green leafy vegetables) form the accidental ground cover of gardens, grow alongside rivers, and exist in forests. In summer they contribute valuable vitamins to people’s diets and are an integral part of a family’s summer menu.
Here again my stomach led me to an expanded understanding of cultivation; the inclusion of wild cultivars as a part of the subsistence side of a family’s diet expands ideas about subsistence agriculture to include non-cultivated, or wild foods.
Take this expansion of food and cultivation a step further and all of a sudden agricultural landscapes look very different.
Already some of these gardens seem quite different from the neat, rational, and scientific agricultural spaces of monocropped fields; they seem unkempt, even random in their planting patterns and varietals. If you add to this the trees on their periphery and the forests and rivers that sit on the edges of the community, suddenly the agricultural landscape is unrecognizable.
This newly expanded agricultural landscape brings us back to the question that we started with: What is agriculture? Does it require active cultivation on the part of people? If so, who is to say that by harvesting wild imifinos people aren’t “cultivating,” aren’t manipulating the environment so that imifinos grow consistently in these wild spaces? Does agriculture assume a limited spatial extent? If so, then are some wild imifinos (the ones that grow on their own in the garden) part of the agriculture system while others are not?
As seems to be the case more often than not, I’m not sure I have a good answer to this question. What I do know, however, is that when trying to understand how subsistence activities contribute to a household’s diet, and through that to their health, crops that grow in the garden, fruit that comes from trees, and wild imifinos gathered from the forest, the river, and the garden all must be included. So perhaps then agriculture does include wild spaces along with wild foods. Thoughts?
Conceptually agriculture is unlike health. It does not include physical and mental aspects. It does not vary in meaning (though it almost certainly varies in practice) between places. It is the production of food.
But is it really that simple?
Shortly after my Christmas break I went to spend nine days in one of the communities where I am conducting research. I stayed with my research assistant at her home and had the opportunity to experience all facets of rural life. I helped to fetch water from a protected spring, wrote my field notes out long hand by candle light, bathed in a bucket, and helped to cook over the open fire. During our free time we visited with Thokozile’s (my research assistant) friends and family, we attended a funeral on Friday and Saturday, and church on Sunday.
In addition to experiencing every day life, we continued to conduct our research going with a couple of the Gogos to collect their monthly government pension, weeding in one family’s garden, and spending a day walking to the forest to collect muthis (traditional medicines) with a sangoma (traditional healer).
While invaluable in providing me with insight into the rhythms of rural life and into health and agriculture in this area, I had anticipated all of these experiences.
However, there was something very unexpected: food.
I hadn’t thought about it. I mean, of course I had anticipated (with a bit of anxiety) an unsettled stomach. However, I hadn’t thought much about how much I would learn by simply eating. I hadn’t really thought about how connected the act of eating is with agriculture itself. I hadn’t really connected production to consumption.
As we walked from household to household chatting with different people we would invariably stop and pull a peach off of one of their trees to see if it was ripe. As we visited different households, one family would give us a couple of plums to eat and another would give us a pear. It turns out that those trees that often line the periphery of a household’s garden are actually an important source of seasonal nutrition.
And so begins research via the stomach.
Through the simple act of snacking my original concept of agriculture as grain and vegetable crops in fields and gardens combined with livestock production expands.
Continuing on, in trying to understand the connections between consumption and production, we turn to food preparation.
Food preparation begins with gathering the ingredients. Because it is summer, almost every meal includes food from the garden as well as food from the shop. This much I expected. What I didn’t expect was the number of meals that included wild vegetables. These imifinos (green leafy vegetables) form the accidental ground cover of gardens, grow alongside rivers, and exist in forests. In summer they contribute valuable vitamins to people’s diets and are an integral part of a family’s summer menu.
Here again my stomach led me to an expanded understanding of cultivation; the inclusion of wild cultivars as a part of the subsistence side of a family’s diet expands ideas about subsistence agriculture to include non-cultivated, or wild foods.
Take this expansion of food and cultivation a step further and all of a sudden agricultural landscapes look very different.
Already some of these gardens seem quite different from the neat, rational, and scientific agricultural spaces of monocropped fields; they seem unkempt, even random in their planting patterns and varietals. If you add to this the trees on their periphery and the forests and rivers that sit on the edges of the community, suddenly the agricultural landscape is unrecognizable.
This newly expanded agricultural landscape brings us back to the question that we started with: What is agriculture? Does it require active cultivation on the part of people? If so, who is to say that by harvesting wild imifinos people aren’t “cultivating,” aren’t manipulating the environment so that imifinos grow consistently in these wild spaces? Does agriculture assume a limited spatial extent? If so, then are some wild imifinos (the ones that grow on their own in the garden) part of the agriculture system while others are not?
As seems to be the case more often than not, I’m not sure I have a good answer to this question. What I do know, however, is that when trying to understand how subsistence activities contribute to a household’s diet, and through that to their health, crops that grow in the garden, fruit that comes from trees, and wild imifinos gathered from the forest, the river, and the garden all must be included. So perhaps then agriculture does include wild spaces along with wild foods. Thoughts?
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
What is Health?
What is health? Where is health located? Is it in our individual cells? In our body parts – the liver, the kidney, the heart? Is it in each of us as individuals? Or is it located in our families? Our homes? Our gardens? Our kraals?
In conducting my research the question “What is health?” is very important. Indeed, it is fundamental to trying to understand how health and agriculture are related.
It is not, however, obvious.
From a biomedical perspective (the one that I am the most familiar with), health is located in the interaction between cells in individual bodies. To have HIV is to have a virus in your blood that attacks the CD-4 T-cells in your white blood cells, thereby compromising your immune system and making you more susceptible to opportunistic infections and ill health. If one could prevent this virus from replicating then one could stop HIV from affecting people. Medication is the answer.
But what about a public health perspective? From a public health perspective HIV is a sexually transmitted disease that needs to be addressed on the level of education and prevention. From this perspective working at the level of the community is crucial. Community education is the answer.
One would be loathe to find a medical professional that disagreed with either of these statements. Practitioners might not agree on where the emphasis should be placed, but they would agree that HIV must be addressed at the community, individual, and cellular levels. In this example, health is present on three levels.
As a geographer I spend a lot of time thinking about scale, and though it might take a moment of contemplation, I am confident that health can exists on multiple scales at the same time. This HIV-biomedical example makes this much clear. We can all see how microbes interact with individual bodies and individuals with each other to make an epidemic.
But what about other ways of understanding health and healing? What if a single medical practitioner, a sangoma, could treat an individual, a family, a garden, and a herd?
Last month, rather unexpectedly, I found myself interviewing a sangoma. We were talking about various health conditions and muthis (medicines) that she uses to treat them. More specifically, we were talking about how she protects the family; where she puts the muthi that helps prevent lightning and what she needs to do to spread it. And then I asked, “Is there a muthi to protect the garden?” And she said, “Yes.” And then, “Is there a muthi to protect the herd?” “Yes” again. Interesting. So the same medical practitioner that treats an individual’s illness also treats certain problems in the garden or with the livestock.
This, of course, makes less sense to my biomedically-oriented perspective. But surely there are alternative ways of understanding healing. And perhaps this sangoma provides a key link to help me understand how health and agriculture might be related
I am looking at nutrition, at the impact of vegetable gardens on people’s ability to fight of disease and on the relationship between home grown food, store bought food, and nutrition-related health. This is, of course, an important avenue for investigation, as nutrition has real affects on people’s health, and if agriculture is supplying those calories then agriculture has a real affect on people’s health.
So then, what about this notion that one healer can heal a person, a home, a garden, and a kraal? Does this idea even matter?
I would argue yes, if for no other reason than it motivates particular types of behavior, particular agricultural and herding decisions. Health affects agriculture.
If we accept the idea that understandings of health, which include agricultural health, for wont of a better term, can affect the decisions people make about their gardens and herds AND we accept that the nutrition people get out of their agriculture affects their health then we’re certainly moving toward some sort of agriculture-health relationship. However, we still haven’t answered the question: what is health?
Is it both biomedical and local understandings? Certainly. But what happens when the two come into conflict? Must we choose one over the other? Is one conception of health “more correct” than another? How can we combine them? Must we combine them?
The best answer I can give is that I don’t know. Surely at various moments one conception of health is better than another. But the conception that is better also surely changes depending on the particular moment. Both systems motivate practices, and the actions that result from those systems in turn affect agriculture and health.
So what is the way forward?
To talk to people. To stop talking to sangomas or doctors and to talk to the people who plant in their gardens, tend their livestock, and visit sangomas, inyangas, nurses, and doctors. For their understanding of health is more expansive than either the sangoma’s or the medical doctor’s; it includes both.
In conducting my research the question “What is health?” is very important. Indeed, it is fundamental to trying to understand how health and agriculture are related.
It is not, however, obvious.
From a biomedical perspective (the one that I am the most familiar with), health is located in the interaction between cells in individual bodies. To have HIV is to have a virus in your blood that attacks the CD-4 T-cells in your white blood cells, thereby compromising your immune system and making you more susceptible to opportunistic infections and ill health. If one could prevent this virus from replicating then one could stop HIV from affecting people. Medication is the answer.
But what about a public health perspective? From a public health perspective HIV is a sexually transmitted disease that needs to be addressed on the level of education and prevention. From this perspective working at the level of the community is crucial. Community education is the answer.
One would be loathe to find a medical professional that disagreed with either of these statements. Practitioners might not agree on where the emphasis should be placed, but they would agree that HIV must be addressed at the community, individual, and cellular levels. In this example, health is present on three levels.
As a geographer I spend a lot of time thinking about scale, and though it might take a moment of contemplation, I am confident that health can exists on multiple scales at the same time. This HIV-biomedical example makes this much clear. We can all see how microbes interact with individual bodies and individuals with each other to make an epidemic.
But what about other ways of understanding health and healing? What if a single medical practitioner, a sangoma, could treat an individual, a family, a garden, and a herd?
Last month, rather unexpectedly, I found myself interviewing a sangoma. We were talking about various health conditions and muthis (medicines) that she uses to treat them. More specifically, we were talking about how she protects the family; where she puts the muthi that helps prevent lightning and what she needs to do to spread it. And then I asked, “Is there a muthi to protect the garden?” And she said, “Yes.” And then, “Is there a muthi to protect the herd?” “Yes” again. Interesting. So the same medical practitioner that treats an individual’s illness also treats certain problems in the garden or with the livestock.
This, of course, makes less sense to my biomedically-oriented perspective. But surely there are alternative ways of understanding healing. And perhaps this sangoma provides a key link to help me understand how health and agriculture might be related
I am looking at nutrition, at the impact of vegetable gardens on people’s ability to fight of disease and on the relationship between home grown food, store bought food, and nutrition-related health. This is, of course, an important avenue for investigation, as nutrition has real affects on people’s health, and if agriculture is supplying those calories then agriculture has a real affect on people’s health.
So then, what about this notion that one healer can heal a person, a home, a garden, and a kraal? Does this idea even matter?
I would argue yes, if for no other reason than it motivates particular types of behavior, particular agricultural and herding decisions. Health affects agriculture.
If we accept the idea that understandings of health, which include agricultural health, for wont of a better term, can affect the decisions people make about their gardens and herds AND we accept that the nutrition people get out of their agriculture affects their health then we’re certainly moving toward some sort of agriculture-health relationship. However, we still haven’t answered the question: what is health?
Is it both biomedical and local understandings? Certainly. But what happens when the two come into conflict? Must we choose one over the other? Is one conception of health “more correct” than another? How can we combine them? Must we combine them?
The best answer I can give is that I don’t know. Surely at various moments one conception of health is better than another. But the conception that is better also surely changes depending on the particular moment. Both systems motivate practices, and the actions that result from those systems in turn affect agriculture and health.
So what is the way forward?
To talk to people. To stop talking to sangomas or doctors and to talk to the people who plant in their gardens, tend their livestock, and visit sangomas, inyangas, nurses, and doctors. For their understanding of health is more expansive than either the sangoma’s or the medical doctor’s; it includes both.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Defining Context and Gaining Focus
Over the last couple of months I have been struggling mightily with my dissertation project. As I switched from the field to the archive, from the oral to the written, I switched from collecting information that I think is important to sifting through information that other people thought was important (to investigate, write down, and preserve). This has its benefits; things that I never would have thought to ask about suddenly appear – sites of cattle dipping tanks, government subsidized maize schemes, the first beetroot plant. And I can experiment methodologically with tangential data collection without tiring out interviewees.
The archives have also helped to remind me that this small, remote, rural area is a part of a much larger network and country. Indeed, the archive at the University of Witwatersrand contains information from the National Health Services Commission, which used Pholela as a model for the rest of the country. And the archive of the Rockefeller Foundation in Tarrytown, New York houses an Annual Report from Pholela and letters from its founders, showcasing Pholela’s global reach. This larger footprint is indeed exciting; however, it also leads to problems – defining the context of this project.
No single dissertation can do everything. Or at least that’s what our advisors tell us when we begin this process. Sitting in my office on the fifth floor of Science Hall in Madison I was convinced they were wrong; my dissertation could and would do everything. I would trace the global impact of Pholela while understanding the intricacies of the labor migration patterns as related to industrial capitalism while also understanding how topography, crops, and nutrition all interact in the bodies of HIV+ young women.
Sound ridiculous? It was.
Therefore, after ten and a half months of research, I have been convinced, once again, that my advisors are correct. No single dissertation can do everything. And it is this realization that brings us to the subject of this post: how does one define context and gain focus (in the middle of the project)?
I spent the first six months of my research wandering through the rural areas of Pholela, volunteering, conducting a household survey, and interviewing various people from sangomas (traditional healers) to old housewives. While attempting to keep some focus on health and nature broadly, I spent these first months doing what one of my advisors referred to as “getting lost.” I collected lots of information, much of which I still do not know what to do with. But while I collected this information I asked questions. There were, of course, unexpected answers, but my question guided the conversation.
I then spent much of the month of September working in the archives during the day and compiling my field notes at night in an effort to figure out what exactly my dissertation is about. My notes covered topics as disparate as stories of monster snakes, 1940s plowing techniques, and how much money a household earns from government grants. Once I compiled all of this information I spent hours trying to figure out how it all fit together and then how it related to the things I was finding in the archives. And guess what I discovered: it doesn’t all fit, at least not into a single, cohesive, and well-argued dissertation.
This epiphany was not an end in itself, rather it was and is the beginning…of a lot of work. I have spent the past two months working to retool my focus; to find a core that is manageable. This has resulted in two new central questions: why has small-scale agriculture in the Pholela region of South African changed from 1936 to the present? And how have changes in human health and ideas about health evolved with changes in agriculture? These questions are specific and focused, yet broad enough to show something interesting.
But what does this mean for actually conducting research?
First it means that I must define the context, or the extent, of my project. And I can do this by asking more specific questions. For instance, does WHO policy on global health affect the Pholela Community Health Centre? Perhaps. But is it directly relevant to changing agricultural patterns in the area? Probably not. Does the mineral content of the soil affect agricultural practices in this area? Probably. But is it relevant to understanding how ideas of health, even nutrition-related ideas of health, are related to agriculture? Probably not. Do labor migration patterns from the late nineteenth century affect agricultural patterns in the mid-twentieth century? Certainly. Would in depth, primary research of the late nineteenth century seriously enhance a story that starts in the middle of the twentieth century? Probably not. Or do scientific ideas and experiments about nutrition have a bearing on the health of people in the Pholela area? Undoubtedly. But to what extent should one do primary research on scientific debates in distant cities like Johannesburg and Pretoria? Probably not to a large extent.
Defining context is about setting limits, necessary limits, on what you will research. These limits can be geographical – I am focusing on three small rural communities that are within 40km of each other. They can be temporal – though I recognize that history does not begin in 1936, my story starts then because it was the moment the government took an interest in the environmental health of the area. There can be methodological and research time limits – I would love to know about soil, but I neither have the knowledge to take soil samples nor do I have the time to take and analyze them properly. Defining context is also about knowing your focus and setting limits on how much primary research you conduct on areas peripheral to your core interests. For example, while historical scientific debates on nutrition are fascinating, the results of those debates – the lessons that health assistants brought in to the homes of Pholela’s residents – are far more important for my project than the various papers published on nutrition.
Defining one’s context is especially important in working in the archives. But as I return to the communities to continue my oral history collection and ethnographic observation I find myself faced with the flip side of the context question: what is the core focus of this research? As one moves and interacts in these communities it is clear that there is a larger geographic, temporal, and ideological context to agriculture and human health. However, following this larger context would likely take away from more specific understandings, from the focus of the research. I need to know my focus in order to direct conversations and observation. For example, following from the key questions, detailing and understanding agricultural change is at the core of my project; helping in fields and with livestock must be primary objectives. However, agriculture is only a part of the livelihood system in this area. As a result, going with people to collect their monthly pensions and to shop for food (to supplement agricultural yields) will also be important. But there are limits. Remittance income from family members working in urban areas supplements household livelihoods. However, I do not have unlimited time and so I likely will not go to cities to interview those family members about their income and what it is spent on. If agriculture is my focus, time would be better spent on interviewing people from the Department of Agriculture, rather than following remittance flows, even though both likely affect agricultural decisions.
What I have discovered over the last couple of months working through field notes and finding archival documents is that focus and context are intimately related. Without knowing your focus, you cannot set the limits of your context. And without knowing the contextual limits of things like geography, time, and subject one cannot understand what is most important to focus on.
As I switch gears from extensive to intensive collecting mode I know that I will continue to find new and interesting ideas, which will challenge my focus and my context. I will adapt to some of these, as they help to strengthen my project, and others I will note in a place designated for future projects. I have come to realize that without these limits this project would fail to say anything meaningful, and this would do great injustice to the very people who are giving so much to help me understand their agriculture and their health.
The archives have also helped to remind me that this small, remote, rural area is a part of a much larger network and country. Indeed, the archive at the University of Witwatersrand contains information from the National Health Services Commission, which used Pholela as a model for the rest of the country. And the archive of the Rockefeller Foundation in Tarrytown, New York houses an Annual Report from Pholela and letters from its founders, showcasing Pholela’s global reach. This larger footprint is indeed exciting; however, it also leads to problems – defining the context of this project.
No single dissertation can do everything. Or at least that’s what our advisors tell us when we begin this process. Sitting in my office on the fifth floor of Science Hall in Madison I was convinced they were wrong; my dissertation could and would do everything. I would trace the global impact of Pholela while understanding the intricacies of the labor migration patterns as related to industrial capitalism while also understanding how topography, crops, and nutrition all interact in the bodies of HIV+ young women.
Sound ridiculous? It was.
Therefore, after ten and a half months of research, I have been convinced, once again, that my advisors are correct. No single dissertation can do everything. And it is this realization that brings us to the subject of this post: how does one define context and gain focus (in the middle of the project)?
I spent the first six months of my research wandering through the rural areas of Pholela, volunteering, conducting a household survey, and interviewing various people from sangomas (traditional healers) to old housewives. While attempting to keep some focus on health and nature broadly, I spent these first months doing what one of my advisors referred to as “getting lost.” I collected lots of information, much of which I still do not know what to do with. But while I collected this information I asked questions. There were, of course, unexpected answers, but my question guided the conversation.
I then spent much of the month of September working in the archives during the day and compiling my field notes at night in an effort to figure out what exactly my dissertation is about. My notes covered topics as disparate as stories of monster snakes, 1940s plowing techniques, and how much money a household earns from government grants. Once I compiled all of this information I spent hours trying to figure out how it all fit together and then how it related to the things I was finding in the archives. And guess what I discovered: it doesn’t all fit, at least not into a single, cohesive, and well-argued dissertation.
This epiphany was not an end in itself, rather it was and is the beginning…of a lot of work. I have spent the past two months working to retool my focus; to find a core that is manageable. This has resulted in two new central questions: why has small-scale agriculture in the Pholela region of South African changed from 1936 to the present? And how have changes in human health and ideas about health evolved with changes in agriculture? These questions are specific and focused, yet broad enough to show something interesting.
But what does this mean for actually conducting research?
First it means that I must define the context, or the extent, of my project. And I can do this by asking more specific questions. For instance, does WHO policy on global health affect the Pholela Community Health Centre? Perhaps. But is it directly relevant to changing agricultural patterns in the area? Probably not. Does the mineral content of the soil affect agricultural practices in this area? Probably. But is it relevant to understanding how ideas of health, even nutrition-related ideas of health, are related to agriculture? Probably not. Do labor migration patterns from the late nineteenth century affect agricultural patterns in the mid-twentieth century? Certainly. Would in depth, primary research of the late nineteenth century seriously enhance a story that starts in the middle of the twentieth century? Probably not. Or do scientific ideas and experiments about nutrition have a bearing on the health of people in the Pholela area? Undoubtedly. But to what extent should one do primary research on scientific debates in distant cities like Johannesburg and Pretoria? Probably not to a large extent.
Defining context is about setting limits, necessary limits, on what you will research. These limits can be geographical – I am focusing on three small rural communities that are within 40km of each other. They can be temporal – though I recognize that history does not begin in 1936, my story starts then because it was the moment the government took an interest in the environmental health of the area. There can be methodological and research time limits – I would love to know about soil, but I neither have the knowledge to take soil samples nor do I have the time to take and analyze them properly. Defining context is also about knowing your focus and setting limits on how much primary research you conduct on areas peripheral to your core interests. For example, while historical scientific debates on nutrition are fascinating, the results of those debates – the lessons that health assistants brought in to the homes of Pholela’s residents – are far more important for my project than the various papers published on nutrition.
Defining one’s context is especially important in working in the archives. But as I return to the communities to continue my oral history collection and ethnographic observation I find myself faced with the flip side of the context question: what is the core focus of this research? As one moves and interacts in these communities it is clear that there is a larger geographic, temporal, and ideological context to agriculture and human health. However, following this larger context would likely take away from more specific understandings, from the focus of the research. I need to know my focus in order to direct conversations and observation. For example, following from the key questions, detailing and understanding agricultural change is at the core of my project; helping in fields and with livestock must be primary objectives. However, agriculture is only a part of the livelihood system in this area. As a result, going with people to collect their monthly pensions and to shop for food (to supplement agricultural yields) will also be important. But there are limits. Remittance income from family members working in urban areas supplements household livelihoods. However, I do not have unlimited time and so I likely will not go to cities to interview those family members about their income and what it is spent on. If agriculture is my focus, time would be better spent on interviewing people from the Department of Agriculture, rather than following remittance flows, even though both likely affect agricultural decisions.
What I have discovered over the last couple of months working through field notes and finding archival documents is that focus and context are intimately related. Without knowing your focus, you cannot set the limits of your context. And without knowing the contextual limits of things like geography, time, and subject one cannot understand what is most important to focus on.
As I switch gears from extensive to intensive collecting mode I know that I will continue to find new and interesting ideas, which will challenge my focus and my context. I will adapt to some of these, as they help to strengthen my project, and others I will note in a place designated for future projects. I have come to realize that without these limits this project would fail to say anything meaningful, and this would do great injustice to the very people who are giving so much to help me understand their agriculture and their health.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
A Tragic Lesson
In planning this long overdue blog post, I had been thinking a lot about the process of conducting a large academic project like a dissertation – about setting the parameters of research and forming an academically suitable argument. This was going to be a very academic post. Therefore, as I was driving to the University of Witwatersrand’s Historical Papers Archive on Monday morning I was thinking about what the limits and extent of “context” are; I was constructing the post in my mind.
And then the phone rang.
Against my better judgment (I was driving through Johannesburg in rush hour), I answered the phone. It was one of my dear friends from Bulwer, Esther. As I answered, she said, “Hello dear. Have you heard any news from Bulwer?”
Since I had just spoken with her on Saturday, I replied, “No, nothing new.”
And she said, “Oh, OK. It’s Les.” Les is Dr. Les Pitt, the HIV doctor for the district who has spent a lifetime working with rural Zulu-speaking people.
Esther went on, “There’s been a terrible accident…”
The rest of the ride was a blur. I listened to Esther talk about how deep a loss the passing of Dr. Pitt would be for the communities in the Pholela area and for her personally. But all I could think was, “Not Les. Surely not Les.”
Then, like any good researcher I spent the day at the archives. But, like any normal person, I spent very little time actually working.
The last three days have been a mess of emotion. This tragedy has robbed Pholela of a devoted doctor and a trusted civil servant. In this week alone tens of HIV+ people will go to three different clinics in the district to begin medication or to see the doctor and get his opinion about something related to their health. But there will be no doctor. For them, and for literally thousands of other people in the area, the loss of Dr. Pitt spells immeasurable tragedy.
For me, the loss of Dr. Pitt means the loss of a dear friend and trusted mentor. Much of what I learned in my first six months in South Africa I learned through Dr. Pitt. Obviously he taught me about rural medicine; things like what a tubercular pulmonary effusion looks like on a chest x-ray or why certain people get lactic acidosis, how to recognize it, and why it’s important. Dr. Pitt also taught me more subtle things like how to understand a person’s health as a part of his or her larger life and circumstances and how to treat some of the poorest and sickest people in the world with dignity and respect. We literally spent hours talking about my research and about his experiences and observations over 40 years of practicing medicine in rural South Africa. In many ways, as should be the ideal in academic work, my deepest insights came through conversation with Dr. Pitt.
As a result, on top of mourning this tragic loss for the community, and the loss of a dear, dear friend, I must reconcile a deep loss for my dissertation. And this is where it all gets tricky. I had been (foolishly) thinking that I could keep “my life” here in South Africa different from “my work.” For example, I have a system for taking field notes that is designed to keep parallel notes – one set that is more “objective” and therefore research oriented, and the other, which is more about my experience and impressions. I had thought that by keeping separate notes, I could keep my personal experience out of my research. In fact, even in thinking about how I wanted to portray myself and my research process through this blog, I had decided that I would keep it about my professional experience and not about my personal life.
And then tragedy strikes and I am reminded, rather forcefully, that the separation between the personal and the professional is artificial. Dr. Pitt was an important person to me personally, to my experience and comfort level in rural KZN, and to the ways I think about health and nature. He introduced me to many, many people in the community and he challenged me both subtly and overtly to ensure that my work would matter to the communities in which I conduct my research and not just to the academic world. He was an integral part of both “my life” and “my work.”
Dr. Pitt is an important reminder that life is messy, that the compartments we set out to keep things organized and separate rarely make sense. And indeed, why should they? In order to be good at what we do, we, as academics, must pick topics that we are passionate about, that touch us deeply, that make us more humane; even if that means that some days we can’t keep our focus. If there is anything positive that can come out of a senseless tragedy like this one, it is the reminder that if one truly, deeply cares about their professional pursuits then that line between the personal and the professional must disappear. That if we are to be truly humane scholars and compassionate individuals we must allow ourselves to be, to live, without these boundaries. In many ways it is only fitting that this lesson comes once again from Dr. Pitt.
For both my life and my work he will be sorely missed.
And then the phone rang.
Against my better judgment (I was driving through Johannesburg in rush hour), I answered the phone. It was one of my dear friends from Bulwer, Esther. As I answered, she said, “Hello dear. Have you heard any news from Bulwer?”
Since I had just spoken with her on Saturday, I replied, “No, nothing new.”
And she said, “Oh, OK. It’s Les.” Les is Dr. Les Pitt, the HIV doctor for the district who has spent a lifetime working with rural Zulu-speaking people.
Esther went on, “There’s been a terrible accident…”
The rest of the ride was a blur. I listened to Esther talk about how deep a loss the passing of Dr. Pitt would be for the communities in the Pholela area and for her personally. But all I could think was, “Not Les. Surely not Les.”
Then, like any good researcher I spent the day at the archives. But, like any normal person, I spent very little time actually working.
The last three days have been a mess of emotion. This tragedy has robbed Pholela of a devoted doctor and a trusted civil servant. In this week alone tens of HIV+ people will go to three different clinics in the district to begin medication or to see the doctor and get his opinion about something related to their health. But there will be no doctor. For them, and for literally thousands of other people in the area, the loss of Dr. Pitt spells immeasurable tragedy.
For me, the loss of Dr. Pitt means the loss of a dear friend and trusted mentor. Much of what I learned in my first six months in South Africa I learned through Dr. Pitt. Obviously he taught me about rural medicine; things like what a tubercular pulmonary effusion looks like on a chest x-ray or why certain people get lactic acidosis, how to recognize it, and why it’s important. Dr. Pitt also taught me more subtle things like how to understand a person’s health as a part of his or her larger life and circumstances and how to treat some of the poorest and sickest people in the world with dignity and respect. We literally spent hours talking about my research and about his experiences and observations over 40 years of practicing medicine in rural South Africa. In many ways, as should be the ideal in academic work, my deepest insights came through conversation with Dr. Pitt.
As a result, on top of mourning this tragic loss for the community, and the loss of a dear, dear friend, I must reconcile a deep loss for my dissertation. And this is where it all gets tricky. I had been (foolishly) thinking that I could keep “my life” here in South Africa different from “my work.” For example, I have a system for taking field notes that is designed to keep parallel notes – one set that is more “objective” and therefore research oriented, and the other, which is more about my experience and impressions. I had thought that by keeping separate notes, I could keep my personal experience out of my research. In fact, even in thinking about how I wanted to portray myself and my research process through this blog, I had decided that I would keep it about my professional experience and not about my personal life.
And then tragedy strikes and I am reminded, rather forcefully, that the separation between the personal and the professional is artificial. Dr. Pitt was an important person to me personally, to my experience and comfort level in rural KZN, and to the ways I think about health and nature. He introduced me to many, many people in the community and he challenged me both subtly and overtly to ensure that my work would matter to the communities in which I conduct my research and not just to the academic world. He was an integral part of both “my life” and “my work.”
Dr. Pitt is an important reminder that life is messy, that the compartments we set out to keep things organized and separate rarely make sense. And indeed, why should they? In order to be good at what we do, we, as academics, must pick topics that we are passionate about, that touch us deeply, that make us more humane; even if that means that some days we can’t keep our focus. If there is anything positive that can come out of a senseless tragedy like this one, it is the reminder that if one truly, deeply cares about their professional pursuits then that line between the personal and the professional must disappear. That if we are to be truly humane scholars and compassionate individuals we must allow ourselves to be, to live, without these boundaries. In many ways it is only fitting that this lesson comes once again from Dr. Pitt.
For both my life and my work he will be sorely missed.
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Conducting a Household Survey
For the past six weeks I've been working with a team of people from a local NGO called the Turn Table Trust to survey 100 households in three communities around Pholela. Two of those communities were a part of the original focus area for the clinic and the third lies some 45km from the health center.
Visiting 100 different households to gather demographic, health, and agricultural information has been an amazing and eye opening experience. Here are a few photos from the process...
Khulekhani and Jack from Turn Table Trust interview a Gogo at her home.
A typical homestead situated on a steep hillside with a vegetable garden and goat kraal.
One Gogo's door sized garden of green leafy vegetables, growing even in the dry and cold southern Drakensberg winter. She was taught how to make a door sized garden by the local Community Health Worker.
Conducting the survey with a group of Gogos from one of the communities.
An 'Mkhulu (Grandpa) takes his turn answering questions at his home.
Visiting 100 different households to gather demographic, health, and agricultural information has been an amazing and eye opening experience. Here are a few photos from the process...
Khulekhani and Jack from Turn Table Trust interview a Gogo at her home.
A typical homestead situated on a steep hillside with a vegetable garden and goat kraal.
One Gogo's door sized garden of green leafy vegetables, growing even in the dry and cold southern Drakensberg winter. She was taught how to make a door sized garden by the local Community Health Worker.
Conducting the survey with a group of Gogos from one of the communities.
An 'Mkhulu (Grandpa) takes his turn answering questions at his home.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
In Search of the "Local"
As most of you are no doubt aware, South Africa is making headlines across the globe these days. This week the world has seen South Africa as a place where xenophobic mobs chase down poor immigrants from other African countries, looting and burning down their houses and shacks, beating and sometimes killing the inhabitants, and leaving thousands displaced (again). On first glance this most recent spate of violence has basically nothing to do with me and my research. I am working in a rural place, two hours from the closest major city, and my research is very local, focused on a state run health center and two South African communities.
In thinking about my next post 10 days ago I was looking forward to writing for the first time about my very own research. At the end of April I finished volunteering at the health center, then spent a week in Durban catching up on some outstanding work, visiting libraries, and generally enjoying the warmer climate. In the second week of May I returned to Pholela ready to begin conducting research. The first part of my field work is to conduct a comprehensive survey in two communities – one that provided the original focus area for the Pholela Community Health Centre and another that is located much farther from the reach of clinics or hospitals. Part of the idea is to bookend the history of Pholela with basically identical household surveys.
In 1942, in their effort to prove that even the poorest members of South African society could receive quality health care, Drs. Sidney and Emily Kark along with the help of trained Zulu Health Assistants conducted a comprehensive survey of 100 households located along the Umkomaas River, across the road from the health centre. The information gathered through these surveys helped to create targeted home-based interventions, which the doctors hoped would help to improve the overall health of entire families and by extension, the community. This baseline data, which was added to every year thereafter until at least the late 1950s, would also help to determine the efficacy of various health interventions.
My plan all along has been to conduct a resurvey of the area trying to find as many of the initial households as possible. The data collected in 2008 would then help to reveal both community and household differences between 1942 and 2008. This data set would then be one of the richest sets of local data available for a rural community in this part of the world. It would allow for a truly in depth understanding of a local context.
However, as I suspect is the case for all dissertation researchers, data collection is never this easy, nor this straightforward. First, there are the rather obvious issues that many people who were alive in 1942 are no longer alive today, especially in a place noted for ill health. And second, those 1942 (and 1944 and 1956, etc.) are no longer in South Africa.
In 1958 working under a government that no longer cared about the health of the African population and facing increasing surveillance, the Karks left South Africa to continue their work in community oriented primary health care. They first traveled to the US, where Sidney started the epidemiology program at UNC and then to Jerusalem where they helped to found the department of community medicine at the Hebrew University. In their decision to leave, and presumably to take much of the Pholela data with them, the Karks took my wonderfully local study and placed it into a global context.
However, when the Karks left South Africa in 1958 it was not the first time that Pholela garnered international attention. Indeed, throughout the late 1940s and 1950s foreign, and in particular American, doctors came to Pholela to gain an understanding of this pioneering model of primary health care and to conduct research with the local populations. They took the lessons they learned back to their home countries, establishing a network of health centers in the United States based on the Pholela model as a part of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, and becoming leaders in global primary health care. Still other young South African doctors who trained at Pholela left South Africa looking for the freedom to pursue careers in social medicine, some of these doctors went on to change the field of epidemiology others became world renowned scientists teaching at some of the world’s best Universities.
In my first two months at the health center none of this history was obvious. Sure, people talk about the Karks and their history, but it is understood in the context of local health improvements and a clinic and government that used to care more for the health of Pholela’s communities.
It was sitting in my little cottage in tiny Bulwer, connecting to the internet via a terribly slow cell phone modem, that I began to piece together this remarkable international history. I was e-mailing anyone I could think of who might have an idea where the 1942 survey results is located, and only one of these people was in South Africa. In that first week that I was back in Pholela, writing the survey, I had academics at Wits, UNC, Harvard, Columbia, CUNY, and the Hebrew University all wracking their brains to think of where those original surveys might be. While I was physically located in Pholela, the “research” I was pursuing was literally all over the world.
I spent my second week back on Pholela working to lay the local foundation for my research. In a rural place like Pholela, one must get the permission and support of the traditional authorities and the local Inkosi (Chief) in order to conduct research. As a result, with the help of colleagues from the health center, I went first to the tribal court for the community that is far from Pholela to ask for permission to conduct research. After some discussion, confusion, and a few questions, the Inkosi and her (the Inkosi for this area is a woman, which is very unusual) headmen gave me permission. The next day, accompanied by a headman who works at the clinic, I went to visit the Inkosi for Pholela to ask for his permission. After some discussion and some very insightful comments, I had permission and a guarantee of protection. Despite my growing network of international contacts, the time spent organizing to meet and then meeting with the local traditional authorities served as an important reminder that mine is a project that in deeply local.
Working with a team of young people from a local NGO and the Community Health Workers from these two communities, we began conducting the survey this past week. Climbing all over the mountains where these communities are located, walking from one homestead to the next, collecting GPS points, and spending an hour plus with each household head to gather basic demographic data and ask questions of health and environment, this research began to feel again like it was extremely local.
However, in the pursuit of the original local data, it became clear that Pholela and the health and nature of the people who live here is not simply local. Rather, this small, out-of-the-way, rural place, is connected to the rest of the world in profound ways. As a result, conducting research in a place like Pholela requires the ability to be in contact with some of the world’s most respected medical thinkers as well as many of its poor inhabitants. What these couple of weeks have shown me, what I have only begun to realize, (and unfortunately what the violence in Jo’burg, Cape Town, and Durban reminds us) is that combining the global and the local is a far more difficult task than it seems. Indeed, the scholarship on this area seems to focus either on the far reaching experiment in social medicine that began in Pholela and spread throughout the world, or on something like hypertension in this population of Zulu speaking people. Combining Pholela community history and ideas with Pholela Community Health Centre history and ideas remains a difficult pursuit.
As I open the Sunday papers I am reminded that Pholela and its surprising history and international links are not unique in South Africa. Indeed, in places far more connected to global capital and human flows, like Johannesburg, the impact of South Africa’s place in the larger continental and global context is being violently felt.
In thinking about my next post 10 days ago I was looking forward to writing for the first time about my very own research. At the end of April I finished volunteering at the health center, then spent a week in Durban catching up on some outstanding work, visiting libraries, and generally enjoying the warmer climate. In the second week of May I returned to Pholela ready to begin conducting research. The first part of my field work is to conduct a comprehensive survey in two communities – one that provided the original focus area for the Pholela Community Health Centre and another that is located much farther from the reach of clinics or hospitals. Part of the idea is to bookend the history of Pholela with basically identical household surveys.
In 1942, in their effort to prove that even the poorest members of South African society could receive quality health care, Drs. Sidney and Emily Kark along with the help of trained Zulu Health Assistants conducted a comprehensive survey of 100 households located along the Umkomaas River, across the road from the health centre. The information gathered through these surveys helped to create targeted home-based interventions, which the doctors hoped would help to improve the overall health of entire families and by extension, the community. This baseline data, which was added to every year thereafter until at least the late 1950s, would also help to determine the efficacy of various health interventions.
My plan all along has been to conduct a resurvey of the area trying to find as many of the initial households as possible. The data collected in 2008 would then help to reveal both community and household differences between 1942 and 2008. This data set would then be one of the richest sets of local data available for a rural community in this part of the world. It would allow for a truly in depth understanding of a local context.
However, as I suspect is the case for all dissertation researchers, data collection is never this easy, nor this straightforward. First, there are the rather obvious issues that many people who were alive in 1942 are no longer alive today, especially in a place noted for ill health. And second, those 1942 (and 1944 and 1956, etc.) are no longer in South Africa.
In 1958 working under a government that no longer cared about the health of the African population and facing increasing surveillance, the Karks left South Africa to continue their work in community oriented primary health care. They first traveled to the US, where Sidney started the epidemiology program at UNC and then to Jerusalem where they helped to found the department of community medicine at the Hebrew University. In their decision to leave, and presumably to take much of the Pholela data with them, the Karks took my wonderfully local study and placed it into a global context.
However, when the Karks left South Africa in 1958 it was not the first time that Pholela garnered international attention. Indeed, throughout the late 1940s and 1950s foreign, and in particular American, doctors came to Pholela to gain an understanding of this pioneering model of primary health care and to conduct research with the local populations. They took the lessons they learned back to their home countries, establishing a network of health centers in the United States based on the Pholela model as a part of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, and becoming leaders in global primary health care. Still other young South African doctors who trained at Pholela left South Africa looking for the freedom to pursue careers in social medicine, some of these doctors went on to change the field of epidemiology others became world renowned scientists teaching at some of the world’s best Universities.
In my first two months at the health center none of this history was obvious. Sure, people talk about the Karks and their history, but it is understood in the context of local health improvements and a clinic and government that used to care more for the health of Pholela’s communities.
It was sitting in my little cottage in tiny Bulwer, connecting to the internet via a terribly slow cell phone modem, that I began to piece together this remarkable international history. I was e-mailing anyone I could think of who might have an idea where the 1942 survey results is located, and only one of these people was in South Africa. In that first week that I was back in Pholela, writing the survey, I had academics at Wits, UNC, Harvard, Columbia, CUNY, and the Hebrew University all wracking their brains to think of where those original surveys might be. While I was physically located in Pholela, the “research” I was pursuing was literally all over the world.
I spent my second week back on Pholela working to lay the local foundation for my research. In a rural place like Pholela, one must get the permission and support of the traditional authorities and the local Inkosi (Chief) in order to conduct research. As a result, with the help of colleagues from the health center, I went first to the tribal court for the community that is far from Pholela to ask for permission to conduct research. After some discussion, confusion, and a few questions, the Inkosi and her (the Inkosi for this area is a woman, which is very unusual) headmen gave me permission. The next day, accompanied by a headman who works at the clinic, I went to visit the Inkosi for Pholela to ask for his permission. After some discussion and some very insightful comments, I had permission and a guarantee of protection. Despite my growing network of international contacts, the time spent organizing to meet and then meeting with the local traditional authorities served as an important reminder that mine is a project that in deeply local.
Working with a team of young people from a local NGO and the Community Health Workers from these two communities, we began conducting the survey this past week. Climbing all over the mountains where these communities are located, walking from one homestead to the next, collecting GPS points, and spending an hour plus with each household head to gather basic demographic data and ask questions of health and environment, this research began to feel again like it was extremely local.
However, in the pursuit of the original local data, it became clear that Pholela and the health and nature of the people who live here is not simply local. Rather, this small, out-of-the-way, rural place, is connected to the rest of the world in profound ways. As a result, conducting research in a place like Pholela requires the ability to be in contact with some of the world’s most respected medical thinkers as well as many of its poor inhabitants. What these couple of weeks have shown me, what I have only begun to realize, (and unfortunately what the violence in Jo’burg, Cape Town, and Durban reminds us) is that combining the global and the local is a far more difficult task than it seems. Indeed, the scholarship on this area seems to focus either on the far reaching experiment in social medicine that began in Pholela and spread throughout the world, or on something like hypertension in this population of Zulu speaking people. Combining Pholela community history and ideas with Pholela Community Health Centre history and ideas remains a difficult pursuit.
As I open the Sunday papers I am reminded that Pholela and its surprising history and international links are not unique in South Africa. Indeed, in places far more connected to global capital and human flows, like Johannesburg, the impact of South Africa’s place in the larger continental and global context is being violently felt.
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