Books by Helen Macdonald
Witchcraft Accusations from Central India: The Fragmented Urn, 2021
This book unravels the institutions surrounding witchcraft in the central Indian state of Chhatti... more This book unravels the institutions surrounding witchcraft in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh through theoretical and empirical research on witchcraft, violence and modernity in contemporary times. The author pieces together 'fragments' of stories gathered utilising ethnographic methods to examine the meanings associated with witches and witchcraft, and how they connect with social relations, gender, notions of agency, law, media and the state. The volume uses the metaphor of the shattered urn to tell the story of the accusations, punishment, rescue and the aftermath of the events of the trial of women accused of being witches. It situates the ṭonhī or witch as a key elaborating symbol that orders behaviour to determine who the socially included and excluded are in communities. Through the personal interviews and other ethnographic methods conducted over the course of many years, the author delves into the stories and practices related to witchcraft, its relations with modernity, and the relationship between violence and ideological norms in society. Insightful and detailed, this book will be of great interest to academics and researchers of anthropology, development studies, sociology, history, violence, gender studies, tribal studies and psychology. It will also be useful for readers in both historic and contemporary witchcraft practices as well as policy makers.
Tuberculosis and its Control, 2019
Over the last two decades, attempts to control the problem of tuberculosis have become increasing... more Over the last two decades, attempts to control the problem of tuberculosis have become increasingly more complex, as countries adopt and adapt to evolving global TB strategies. Significant funding has also increased apace, diagnostic possibilities have evolved, and greater attention is being paid to developing broader health systems. Against this background, this book examines tuberculosis control through an anthropological lens. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from China, India, Nepal, South Africa, Romania, Brazil, Ghana and France, the volume considers: the relationship between global and national policies and their unintended effects; the emergence and impact of introducing new diagnostics; the reliance on and use of statistical numbers for representing tuberculosis, and the politics of this; the impact of the disease on health workers, as well as patients; the rise of drug-resistant forms; and issues of attempted control. Together, the examples showcase the value of an anthropological understanding to demonstrate the broader bio-political and social dimensions of tuberculosis and attempts to deal with it.
Papers by Helen Macdonald
Current Anthropology, 2018
This article explores the quotidian politics of community vigilantism over women involved in inte... more This article explores the quotidian politics of community vigilantism over women involved in interreligious love affairs in two radicalized Indian slums. Using a Hindu nationalist slum in Mumbai and a communally sensitive Muslimdominated slum in Hyderabad as ethnographic landscapes, I show how women and children (and peripheral state actors) used secret surveillance, exclusionary party politics, public shaming rituals, and physical punishment to rein in poor women's sexual permissiveness. Some women in deviant relationships displayed excessive loyalty to their community to compensate for their transgressions. Some others legitimized their radical position by branding honor policing as primitive and unfit for an urban citizenry. By advancing an analytical discussion on this bargaining space between vigilantes and their victims, I argue that women and children in slums, ghettos, and shantytowns play a central role in producing, managing, and violently enforcing uncertainties related to poverty and urban security, even if they are recast through religiopolitical discourses of female honor and religious purity.
Waste & Wealth: New Views on the Byproducts of Mining, MLiA , 2017
The mines eat men. Even when you have left them the mines may be eating you.
[Sotho miner’s song,... more The mines eat men. Even when you have left them the mines may be eating you.
[Sotho miner’s song, cited in Roberts 2003:149]
We are just like a bubble gum to the mining company. Once the flavour is gone they spit us out, there is no need for us anymore. We are only of use to them when we are healthy and can still make money for them.
[Loyiso – Research Participant]
And when the miners are deemed too sick to work, they are simply sent home. Like disposable human tools that have lost the sharpness of their edges… How much longer, can we simply watch them, sent home to die.
[Extract from Clint Smith’s spoken word Welcome to the Mines]
American Anthropologist, 2021
Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2009
The Indian state of Chhattisgarh has been continually confronted with violent assaults and murder... more The Indian state of Chhattisgarh has been continually confronted with violent assaults and murder targeting individuals who are believed to practice witchcraft. By sketching the murder of accused witch, Kulwantin Bai Nishad, in 1995, I highlight the way prevailing assumptions about witchcraft, long held by the media, police and state, were contested. Intersecting with a national and state discourse of modernist ideals, witch-related violence has been transformed into a politicised object that signals extreme underdevelopment in a state whose legitimacy depends upon progress and development. The Indian Police Service (IPS), the foremost organisation to contend with these issues, maintains a crucial role in administering the citizen–state encounter. Commonly associated with attributes of corruption, misuse of authority, violence and partisan politics, the police official emerged in the findings as an ordinary citizen having a special and sometimes difficult public job. By examining a discretionary ‘practice’ at work in police dealings with witchcraft accusations, I argue that power shapes what is recognised as criminal behaviour, the significance assigned to a crime and therefore, practices of policing. This article concludes that discretionary power opens up a terrain of unpredictability and ‘formlessness’ that lends hope for citizen rights.
Macdonald, H. 2009. Handled with discretion: Shaping policing practices through witch accusations, Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 43(2): 285–315
Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, 2015
To understand the workings of medicine, healing, placebo, belief and rationality, medical anthrop... more To understand the workings of medicine, healing, placebo, belief and rationality, medical anthropologists need to pay attention to the complex relations of various forms of revelation, contemplation, and responding revelation that attach to illness and healing. In this article two performances of a healing technique located in the agricultural plain of Chhattisgarh, central India, are compared: one representing scientific rationality; the other ‘blind’ superstition. In both performances the practitioner’s aim is to reveal: the local healer reveals witchcraft objects from the afflicted body; the local rationalist society reveals the healer’s technique as a fraudulent trick. Each performance shares ‘an aesthetics of revelation’—they rely on seeing or revealing to obtain their social effect. The interplay between forms of revelation, a reliance of aesthetics for the revelation and the ways of seeing can indicate how distinctions are made (or not) between doctor and quack, expertise and gimmickry, and truth and falsehood.
Anthropology Southern Africa, 2005
One characteristic of violence is the unmaking of language and fracturing of the victim’s social ... more One characteristic of violence is the unmaking of language and fracturing of the victim’s social world. In recent theorising, narrative is posited to play an important role in restoring the victim to his/her status as a social person. Fiona Ross (2003) has argued that it is naïve to assume the ‘speaking self equates with the healed self’. She shows that individuals can be harmed when they lose control over their narratives circulated in the public sphere. Using an encounter with a woman accused of witchcraft, my article traces the way her experience has been appropriated by her family and in broader spaces of engagement between villagers, police, media and finally, the anthropologist. The article raises questions about the contexts in which there is no voice for a woman to assert her control. Seeking to contribute to an ethical theory of risk and vulnerability, this paper suggests that closer attention should be paid to the processes of forgetting and grieving as forms of control articulated through the body.
Anthropology Southern Africa, 2018
Despite a steady global decline in the incidence of tuberculosis (TB), progress towards health ta... more Despite a steady global decline in the incidence of tuberculosis (TB), progress towards health targets has been slow and a crisis of drug-resistant strains of TB continues unabated. The United Nations high-level meeting on TB in September 2018 resulted in a renewed push to invest in drugs, diagnostics and vaccines to “reach” those most vulnerable to the disease. Yet, an overriding focus on biomedical technologies to manage TB at the expense of meaningful engagement with the social threatens to further consolidate its reputation as a “silent killer.” Drawing on anthropological contributions from South Africa and one from neighbouring Zimbabwe, this special issue explores how human action produces, shapes, names, experiences and resists the disease in its fullest breadth within local conditions. The articles recognise TB as a “global” object of biomedical knowledge and intervention, on the one hand, and as intricately tied to a legacy of colonial and apartheid governance, on the other. Each article deals with different aspects of understanding the interface between global and national policies and their unintended effects in local worlds.
Anthropology Southern Africa, 2018
Miners working on South African mines suffer from the highest rate of tuberculosis (TB) in the wo... more Miners working on South African mines suffer from the highest rate of tuberculosis (TB) in the world. The prevalence of tuberculosis among miners is four to seven times higher than for the general population of South Africa, a country with the second highest rate of tuberculosis in the world. It is against this background that we explore ideas about tuberculosis infection and management among gold and platinum miners in two South African mineworker communities. Using ethnographic methods, we explore the key organising metaphors used by miners to understand TB in relation to infection and the impact it has on their lives, among them “dust” and “we are like bubblegum.” Drawing on Robert Nixon’s (2011) model of “slow violence,” we argue that miners understand TB less in terms of a bacterial infection and more in terms of conditions of life underground. Their concept of “dust” demonstrates that there is an inter-relationship between tuberculosis and dusty working environments regardless of the mineral that is being extracted. Miners’ anxiety of being discarded, like a bubblegum that has lost its flavour, reflects their relationship to the capitalist system in which they are caught.
Qualitative Health Research, 2016
Haunted by a legacy of apartheid governance that left millions in material poverty, South Africa ... more Haunted by a legacy of apartheid governance that left millions in material poverty, South Africa has among the highest tuberculosis (TB) morbidity and mortality rates in the world. Our Social Markers of TB research project shared a vision of working with ethnographic research methods to understand TB-infected persons, their families, care providers, and social networks. We argue that felt and enacted TB stigma and the related HIV-TB stigma impaired our ability to collect the necessary data for a full portrait of TB-infected persons and their lived conditions. To circumvent this limitation, each researcher improvised and augmented conventional anthropological methods with more creative,
directed, and at times destabilizing methods. We present three case studies as useful illustrations of the complexities and challenges we encountered in our attempts to conduct ethically sound TB research. We discuss the implications of our call for “improvisation” for the politics of research and ethical oversight.
South African Journal of Physiotherapy, 2013
Since the 1980s physiotherapy has shifted concerns towards cultural, economic, philosophical, pol... more Since the 1980s physiotherapy has shifted concerns towards cultural, economic, philosophical, political and social questions, and more flexible ways of speaking about and practicing physiotherapy. In response to both global shifts and local demands, the Physiotherapy Division at the University of Cape Town (UCT) approached their Social Anthropology colleagues to teach a broader range of perspectives to their physiotherapy students. The objective of this research was to explore the changes experienced by UCT physiotherapy students exposed to a cross-disciplinary teaching environment, and discuss the possible role of the course in affecting their experience. A qualitative research design drew data from multiple sources and was analysed using an interpretive content analysis method. Using an anthropological model of transformation, the changes experienced by students were categorised into three sub-categories of ‘separation’, ‘transition’ and ‘incorporation’. Emotional and cognitive changes were attributable to the course material. By attending to their emotional discomfort, physiotherapy students not only successfully incorporated anthropological concepts to healthcare but also improved their professional identities and personal self-worth.
Anthropology Southern Africa, 2009
Subaltern Studies emerged at the end of the 1970s among a collective of English and Indian histor... more Subaltern Studies emerged at the end of the 1970s among a collective of English and Indian historians of South Asia, and developed into a creative and malleable reworking of knowledge(s). Importantly, the subalternists contributed to an interdisciplinarity that displayed a commitment to the recovery of subaltern or ‘indigenous’ histories and knowledges. The idea of identity-based knowledge is necessarily decentred in a transnational enterprise such as Subaltern Studies, and concomitantly, geographical spaces, although relevant, are no longer central in determining power relations. However, changes of practice, globalisation and shifting localities, and critical awareness do not make the marginalities at the heart of the apparatus of knowledge production and its global division of labour disappear altogether. As a corpus of knowledge intellectual cohesiveness has never been a main concern for Subaltern Studies and here lies its main strength for South African anthropology. The project should be viewed as an evolving dialogue, one that privileges creative possibilities of a mutually constitutive ‘conversation’.
Journal of Higher Education in Africa, 2010
This paper emerges out of an ethnographic study conducted at the University of Cape Town that exp... more This paper emerges out of an ethnographic study conducted at the University of Cape Town that explored the dynamics of an intervention providing a 'safe space' for university staff to engage in alternative ways with South Africa's apartheid past, the university's institutional culture and with each other. This paper focuses on the social politics that arose between the intervention, its participants and imagined non-participants in relation to the university's 'transformation' vision. The interventionist intention was reworked by participants at a ground level into key symbols by which participants shaped the patterns of their behaviours and gave meaning to their experiences. Utilising Ortner's (1973) model for recognising and using key symbols, I argue that 'transformation' and 'safe space' are elaborating symbols in that they have conceptual and action elaborating power. These elaborating symbols operate in relay with a kind of logic that 'crystallises commitment' from participants to the intervention in an emotionally powerful and relatively undifferentiated manner. In so doing, they render the intervention a 'summarising' symbol capable of expressing what their experience means to them as an imagined community in relation to others.
Anthropology Southern Africa, 2013
Increasingly, North based graduate students are seeking South based institutional homes whilst un... more Increasingly, North based graduate students are seeking South based institutional homes whilst undertaking ethnographic research. Looking from a place in the global South, the article considers how requests to host such students influence, and are influenced by, both local and northern research ethics procedures. In particular the article focuses on the globalisation of the Institutional Review Board principle in defining much of the international landscape of ethical oversight, mainly because so much international health research funding is linked to northern institutions. We draw on a case study, the setting being an anthropological investigation by a northern researcher into health issues conducted in South Africa. The northern institution made a large investment in ethical oversight, but oriented it entirely towards limiting its legal liability. It was little concerned by ethical considerations posed by South African colleagues. This appears to have occurred because they were working from seemingly incommensurable reference points. We argue that, if we are to benefit from transnational excursions, debate about ethics must occur at a cross-national level. With research becoming globalised, and with varying actors across the globe, we are offered the possibility of transforming the currently dominant paradigm, based as it is on a logic of a northern donor and southern recipients of knowledge, to a more collaborative and equitable process.
Macdonald, H. and A. Spiegel. 2013. ‘Distraction from the real difficulties’: Ethical deliberations in international health research, Anthropology Southern Africa, 36(3&4): 146-154.
Teaching in Higher Education, 2013
This article examines the potential and limitations of Megan Boler's ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ in ... more This article examines the potential and limitations of Megan Boler's ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ in a post-apartheid yet heavily racialised South Africa. Taking an ‘ethnographic sensibility’ to anthropological teaching, this paper sketches the social and historical context of discomfort produced by everyday classroom practices at a historically privileged university. This paper argues that new patterns of thought, if achieved at all in the course of learning through ‘discomfort’, are deeply embedded within uneasy social relationships.
Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 2017
In recent decades physiotherapists have become concerned with cultural, economic, philosophical, ... more In recent decades physiotherapists have become concerned with cultural, economic, philosophical, political and social questions and have been exploring more flexible ways of speaking about and practicing physiotherapy. The shifts taking place are mirrored elsewhere as other health professionals examine their professional boundaries and previously entrenched positions, and open up to the possibility of broader epistemologies. Drawing on comparative case studies from South Africa and New Zealand, this paper examines the body’s role in defining physiotherapy education and practice. The respective authors—from differing disciplinary backgrounds—first introduced new curricula to their respective physiotherapy students in 2011. An ethnographic approach was taken to data collection and findings were interpreted through a social constructivist view of the 'performance' of physiotherapy in practise. We explore whether biomedicine’s inherent power to socialise students to contemporary physiotherapy practise was disrupted. We suggest that students were able to explore physiotherapy’s relation to the body and the profession's historical inattention towards the body as a philosophical/theoretical construct. Our aims were not so much to displace dominant theories of the body, as to challenge them to bring about a more diverse and inclusive approach of embodiment; one that we argue will be needed in the future.
Chapters by Helen Macdonald
Understanding tuberculosis and its control, 2019
Over the last two decades attempts to control the problem of tuberculosis have become increasingl... more Over the last two decades attempts to control the problem of tuberculosis have become increasingly more complex, as counties adopt and adapt to evolving global TB strategies, particularly those of the WHO. In this time significant increased funding has also increased apace; diagnostic possibilities have evolved; and greater attention is being paid to developing broader health systems. The evolution and development of TB programmes thus speaks to the specifics of the emergence of “global health” through attempts to control this infectious disease.
In this book tuberculosis control is examined through the lens of the social sciences, in particular anthropology. The examples showcase the value of an anthropological understanding of the disease to demonstrate the broader bio-political and social dimensions of both the disease and attempts to deal with it. Drawing on case studies from China, India, Nepal, South Africa, Romania, Brazil, Ghana and France, it highlights the successes and limitations, the complexities and unintended consequences of countries focusing on this single disease control programme. Through these we better understand the relationship between global and national policies and their unintended effects; of the emergence and impact of introducing new diagnostics; on the effects of the reliance and the use of statistical numbers for representing the disease and the politics of this; to understanding not just the impact of the disease on patients, but also that of the health workers; and to the rise of drug resistant forms and the issues of their attempted control.
Understanding Tuberculosis and its Control, 2019
Chapter 6
Tuberculosis control focuses extensively on measurement of epidemiological data to b... more Chapter 6
Tuberculosis control focuses extensively on measurement of epidemiological data to both understand the problem of tuberculosis and track attempts at intervention. This chapter focuses on the production of these abstracted figures in India and asks how measures are made, and how they work on and transform the lives of TB patients around them. It asks the questions: Where and to whom does measurement matter? What might good measurement look like? Should we be aspiring to non-universal measurement? To do this it focuses on the Indian tuberculosis programme. It examines the ‘performance’ of some numbers and values expressed in government health policy and popular media reports and how complex political, social and health problems are transformed into depoliticised ‘objective facts’. This use of numbers are compared with those of the Jan Swasthya Sahyog (‘People’s Health Movement’), an NGO located in central India, and how they ‘tinker’ with official numbers to achieve their own person centred medical aims. These ‘tinkering with numbers’ shape the contemporary struggles over TB care work in India and how care is negotiated in different ways with different bio-political interests.
Medicine & the Politics of Knowledge, 2012
Using the idea of hybrid scepticism, I argue that villagers are ambivalent about their healers in... more Using the idea of hybrid scepticism, I argue that villagers are ambivalent about their healers in a way that allows for the immersion of modernist criticisms of healers, healing systems and interventionist strategies. What is important is that my informants, like the majority of persons, are not passive believers but sceptical agents with reflexive awareness of their own actions. This chapter calls for a more nuanced investigation of scepticism, an analysis of the sceptical style that does less violence to Chhattisgarhi notions of who they are.
Uploads
Books by Helen Macdonald
Papers by Helen Macdonald
[Sotho miner’s song, cited in Roberts 2003:149]
We are just like a bubble gum to the mining company. Once the flavour is gone they spit us out, there is no need for us anymore. We are only of use to them when we are healthy and can still make money for them.
[Loyiso – Research Participant]
And when the miners are deemed too sick to work, they are simply sent home. Like disposable human tools that have lost the sharpness of their edges… How much longer, can we simply watch them, sent home to die.
[Extract from Clint Smith’s spoken word Welcome to the Mines]
Macdonald, H. 2009. Handled with discretion: Shaping policing practices through witch accusations, Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 43(2): 285–315
directed, and at times destabilizing methods. We present three case studies as useful illustrations of the complexities and challenges we encountered in our attempts to conduct ethically sound TB research. We discuss the implications of our call for “improvisation” for the politics of research and ethical oversight.
Macdonald, H. and A. Spiegel. 2013. ‘Distraction from the real difficulties’: Ethical deliberations in international health research, Anthropology Southern Africa, 36(3&4): 146-154.
Chapters by Helen Macdonald
In this book tuberculosis control is examined through the lens of the social sciences, in particular anthropology. The examples showcase the value of an anthropological understanding of the disease to demonstrate the broader bio-political and social dimensions of both the disease and attempts to deal with it. Drawing on case studies from China, India, Nepal, South Africa, Romania, Brazil, Ghana and France, it highlights the successes and limitations, the complexities and unintended consequences of countries focusing on this single disease control programme. Through these we better understand the relationship between global and national policies and their unintended effects; of the emergence and impact of introducing new diagnostics; on the effects of the reliance and the use of statistical numbers for representing the disease and the politics of this; to understanding not just the impact of the disease on patients, but also that of the health workers; and to the rise of drug resistant forms and the issues of their attempted control.
Tuberculosis control focuses extensively on measurement of epidemiological data to both understand the problem of tuberculosis and track attempts at intervention. This chapter focuses on the production of these abstracted figures in India and asks how measures are made, and how they work on and transform the lives of TB patients around them. It asks the questions: Where and to whom does measurement matter? What might good measurement look like? Should we be aspiring to non-universal measurement? To do this it focuses on the Indian tuberculosis programme. It examines the ‘performance’ of some numbers and values expressed in government health policy and popular media reports and how complex political, social and health problems are transformed into depoliticised ‘objective facts’. This use of numbers are compared with those of the Jan Swasthya Sahyog (‘People’s Health Movement’), an NGO located in central India, and how they ‘tinker’ with official numbers to achieve their own person centred medical aims. These ‘tinkering with numbers’ shape the contemporary struggles over TB care work in India and how care is negotiated in different ways with different bio-political interests.
[Sotho miner’s song, cited in Roberts 2003:149]
We are just like a bubble gum to the mining company. Once the flavour is gone they spit us out, there is no need for us anymore. We are only of use to them when we are healthy and can still make money for them.
[Loyiso – Research Participant]
And when the miners are deemed too sick to work, they are simply sent home. Like disposable human tools that have lost the sharpness of their edges… How much longer, can we simply watch them, sent home to die.
[Extract from Clint Smith’s spoken word Welcome to the Mines]
Macdonald, H. 2009. Handled with discretion: Shaping policing practices through witch accusations, Contributions to Indian Sociology (n.s.) 43(2): 285–315
directed, and at times destabilizing methods. We present three case studies as useful illustrations of the complexities and challenges we encountered in our attempts to conduct ethically sound TB research. We discuss the implications of our call for “improvisation” for the politics of research and ethical oversight.
Macdonald, H. and A. Spiegel. 2013. ‘Distraction from the real difficulties’: Ethical deliberations in international health research, Anthropology Southern Africa, 36(3&4): 146-154.
In this book tuberculosis control is examined through the lens of the social sciences, in particular anthropology. The examples showcase the value of an anthropological understanding of the disease to demonstrate the broader bio-political and social dimensions of both the disease and attempts to deal with it. Drawing on case studies from China, India, Nepal, South Africa, Romania, Brazil, Ghana and France, it highlights the successes and limitations, the complexities and unintended consequences of countries focusing on this single disease control programme. Through these we better understand the relationship between global and national policies and their unintended effects; of the emergence and impact of introducing new diagnostics; on the effects of the reliance and the use of statistical numbers for representing the disease and the politics of this; to understanding not just the impact of the disease on patients, but also that of the health workers; and to the rise of drug resistant forms and the issues of their attempted control.
Tuberculosis control focuses extensively on measurement of epidemiological data to both understand the problem of tuberculosis and track attempts at intervention. This chapter focuses on the production of these abstracted figures in India and asks how measures are made, and how they work on and transform the lives of TB patients around them. It asks the questions: Where and to whom does measurement matter? What might good measurement look like? Should we be aspiring to non-universal measurement? To do this it focuses on the Indian tuberculosis programme. It examines the ‘performance’ of some numbers and values expressed in government health policy and popular media reports and how complex political, social and health problems are transformed into depoliticised ‘objective facts’. This use of numbers are compared with those of the Jan Swasthya Sahyog (‘People’s Health Movement’), an NGO located in central India, and how they ‘tinker’ with official numbers to achieve their own person centred medical aims. These ‘tinkering with numbers’ shape the contemporary struggles over TB care work in India and how care is negotiated in different ways with different bio-political interests.