Understanding Biomedicine from the Homestead: Knowledge-Being in Multiple Worlds

• In Event: STS Africa: Biomedicine

Abstract

Understanding Biomedicine from the Homestead: Knowledge-Being in Multiple Worlds
What happens if we center our analysis of biomedicine in the homestead instead of the clinic? What lessons will we learn about the possibilities and limitations of science? I start with Sandra Harding’s provocation that to understand science, we must adopt a “standpoint” other than that of Western science. In doing so, I center my analysis of the production of (scientific) knowledge(s) in the household – with the people and their landscapes – of rural Pholela, South Africa in order to rethink the development of a world-famous brand of social medicine. In this story, social medicine is multiple, taking form not just from health care workers, but also from the bodies, lives, healing practices and landscapes of Pholela’s residents. To understand the multiple frameworks of health and healing enacted in Pholela’s homesteads, I employ the concept of multiplicity, drawing on diverse scholarship from feminist STS (Barad 2007; Harding 2009; Mol’s 2002), health and healing in Africa (Feierman 1985, Feierman and Janzen 1992), and the work of multispecies ethnographers (de Castro 1998; Kohn 2013; Ogden 2011) to emphasize the coming together of knowledge and being – the multiple ontologies and worlds of Pholela’s residents. Through this work, I hope to bring the idea of multiplicity – the incorporation of knowledge-being worlds beyond science – into scholarship about STS in Africa. Starting in the homestead and understanding these new worlds builds on recent STS scholarship about Africa (Langwick, 2011; Mavunga 2012; 2017) and promises to teach us much about science, knowledge, and being in Africa and beyond.

Author

• Abigail H Neely, Dartmouth College