Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2013 Dec;99:119-26. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2013.04.034. Epub 2013 Jun 5.
The epidemic of AIDS in South Africa has been characterized not only by its rapid progression but also its impassioned controversies. Retrospectively examining a long-term anthropological project and discussing some reactions it elicited, the paper proposes a defense and illustration of a critical ethnography at three moments of the research. Ethnography is first discussed as fieldworks, proposing an alternative to the horizontal multi-sited approach via a vertical multi-layered method using various scales and locations, and thus connecting the disease endured by patients in townships and former homelands with the heated debates in scientific and political forums: this procedure substitutes a political economy of the disease for its cultural and behavioral interpretations. Ethnography is then discussed as writing, suggesting acknowledgment of the social intelligence of the agents as well as the need for a scientific distance: this principle allows the articulation of the objective historical condition of the individuals and their subjective experience of history, both revealed in the development of the epidemic. Ultimately ethnography is considered from the perspective of its afterlife, that is, the continuous process of its translation by readers and commentators, on the one hand, by the author trying to reach beyond the boundaries of the academic realm, on the other, the work of anthropology appearing as a living object open to public conversation and consequently a resource for knowledge and action.
南非艾滋病的流行不仅具有迅速蔓延的特点，还伴随着激烈的争议。本文回顾了一个长期的人类学项目，并讨论了它所引发的一些反应，在研究的三个时刻为批判性民族志提出了辩护和说明。民族志首先被讨论为田野工作，通过使用各种规模和地点的垂直多层次方法，提出了对水平多地点方法的替代方案，从而将城镇和前家园中患者所忍受的疾病与科学和政治论坛中的激烈辩论联系起来：该程序用疾病的政治经济学取代了对其文化和行为的解释。民族志随后被讨论为写作，建议承认代理人的社会智慧以及需要保持科学距离：这一原则允许在流行病的发展过程中，对个人的客观历史条件及其对历史的主观体验进行表述。最终，从其来世的角度考虑民族志，即读者和评论员对其进行翻译的持续过程，一方面是作者试图超越学术领域的界限，另一方面，人类学的工作作为一个可供公众讨论的活体对象出现，从而成为知识和行动的资源。
