1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910411922703321

Autore

Mogensen Hanne Overgaard

Titolo

Secrecy and Responsibility in the Era of an Epidemic : Letters from Uganda / / by Hanne Overgaard Mogensen

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2020

ISBN

3-030-47523-9

Edizione

[1st ed. 2020.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (262 pages) : illustrations

Collana

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology

Disciplina

967.6104

300

Soggetti

Ethnology

Medical anthropology

Ethnography

Ethnology—Africa

Social Anthropology

Medical Anthropology

African Culture

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Preface -- Chapter 1: The Missing Letters -- Chapter 2: Girls with Fast Legs -- Chapter 3: Women on the Move -- Chapter 4: Intersecting Trajectories -- Chapter 5: Questions of Belonging -- Chapter 6: Stories that Alter Life -- Chapter 7: Dying Poor -- Chapter 8: Feeling Stuck -- Chapter 9: Closeness and Distance -- Chapter 10: Knowing what to Hide -- Chapter 11: The Order of Secrecy -- Chapter 12: Shifting Secrets -- Chapter 13: Whose Responsibility – and what Happened to the Letters? -- Chapter 14: Moving on.

Sommario/riassunto

‘This is a beautiful, sad, hopeful, thought-provoking book that reads like a novel and is one of the best texts I know on the intricacies of doing close-in ethnographic fieldwork. It is rare to find such rich ethnography together with such a superb account of how it was assembled. It sensitively considers ethical dilemmas of doing fieldwork with people who are poor, sick and concerned with maintaining control over knowledge about their lives.' —Susan Reynolds Whyte, Professor of



Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark A narrative ethnography about a Ugandan woman and her relatives, this novelistic, fine-grained volume shows how global questions of responsibility and inequity travel in family networks and confront people with decisions about life and death. It is a story of existence under extremely challenging conditions, about belonging and marginalization, about the opacity and ambiguity of social relations, and about growing up in a country haunted by violence and civil war only to be later lifted by optimism and devastated anew by the AIDS epidemic. The story draws on long-term fieldwork and letters from the woman who takes centre stage in the story, while at once providing unique and privileged insight into the ethical challenges of a research method that demands personal involvement that is ultimately withdrawn for scholarly analysis. .