Studying Trial Communities: Anthropological and Historical Inquiries into Ethos, Politics and Economy of Medical Research in Africa

Excerpt

This book is about medical research carried out in Africa, by African institutions and their collaborators from Europe and the USA. It is thus about what used to be called ‘overseas’ medical research, a term which – unlike more recent terms such as ‘transnational’ or ‘collaborative’ – recalls its imperial origins as well as the assymetrical topography of power and resources it still involves. Overseas research is shaped by its geographical and political- economic frames, as well as by colonial history and by the process of nation building, and decay, that marked the postcolonial era (or, as Ombongi, below, distinguishes, the ‘postcolonial’ and the ‘post-postcolonial’). This is why the authors of this volume, participants of the conference ‘Studying Trial Communities’, held in 2005 at the Kenyan Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) Centre for Geographical Medicine in Kilifi, Kenya, include historians among the majority of anthropologists, and why many of the anthropologists here draw upon historiography or historical sources for the purpose of their ethnography. Medical research in Africa is an area intensely shaped by history, and the fact that it often is oblivious to its own origins and genesis makes it particularly important that we combine ethnographic and historical-archaeological investigations.