1,721,040 research outputs found
Ageing, health and care in rural Tanzania
Full text linkThe PhD thesis explores what “growing into old age” means for women and men in coastal Tanzania and with whom older people engage in order to ensure care. It responds to a call for more medical anthropology research on care rather than cure and contributes to a small but growing body of ethnographic literature on ageing in Africa.
My study formed part of a larger research project with a rural and urban component. I was responsible for the rural component and conducted field research from 2009 to 2011 in the Rufiji District, more precisely in Ikwe Town and Bumba village. Following the comparative qualitative design of the overall research project, I carried out four complementary and partly overlapping sub-studies, moving from a stakeholder study, to a community study, a household study and finally an age group study. By selecting these two settlements, I wanted to find out whether differences in the types and location of the villages affected the older people’s lived experience of ageing, health and care.
A first finding is that older people in both research sites share a multi-dimensional concept of aging which is rooted in a similar way of life, dominated by the physically demanding tasks of farm work. Age was commonly assessed along six social dimensions: 1) the relative position of juniority/seniority along the life course; 2) the social status; 3) the kinship position; 4) the generational position, 5) the health status; and 6) work and leisure. Of critical importance for the (self-)assessment of old age was the link between the 5th and 6th dimensions, i.e. whether one has or does not have the strength to perform gendered routine activities and responsibilities.
With regard to care, I found that older men and women in both research sites actively engage with a flexible, dynamic and often only partly visible care network. At the center of this network are socially close kin members, especially spouses, siblings, and children, whether they live nearby or at a geographical distance. Kinship and gender intersected in defining who could provide which type of care. When these relatives are not present or when they require some practical but not intimate or basic livelihood care, the older people negotiate help with neighbours, and in Ikwe Town also with friends and tenants. A notable exception is the majosti-relationship between older women in Ikwe which allowed a closeness otherwise reserved for kin.
In both villages, few older people with a serious health problem had a biomedical diagnosis, and more older people in Ikwe Town than in Bumba had contact with professional health care providers. Older people experienced the lack of adequate professional health care services in old age care not just as a practical, technical or financial problem. They questioned the new morality of commodity relations which have begun to replace social relations rooted in kinship and religion.
Most of the older persons who participated in this study faced good and bad days in terms of strength. I often became concerned when I saw them struggle but I also learnt to respect their pride and dignity. Older husbands were proud that they could still provide emotional care and company, and the wives and sisters who stayed with them did their best to provide at least some basic care. Older women who had lost their husband due to separation, divorce or death preferred to have a daughter move in with them, but they pointed out that their children also had to fulfil commitments to their own families. The dwellings and material belongings of many older people in both settlements were often modest, also by local standards. Still, they did not complain and emphasized that they were used to a harsh life since childhood
Sexual inter-subjectivity and the quest for social well-being : an ethnographic inquiry of adolescent sexuality in urban Southern Tanzania
Full text linkThis study explores what sexuality means for individual adolescents, by examining how an
why adolescents go about engaging with multiple social and cultural prescriptions or ideals
relation to their sexual lives. Grounded in the refined conceptualization of agency, the study
approaches adolescents as “agents” in themselves and their sexual or reproductive practices “social
actions”. Based on ethnographic methods, the study focuses on sexual and reproductive experiences
of adolescents in Mtwara Town, Southern Tanzania. Central to th analysis is the understanding of
sexual and reproductive actions from the adolescents’ viewpoints. Findings show that sexual
practices during adolescence in Mtwara Town constitute contested social phenomena as they are
simultaneously disapproved and endorsed by different social actors and institutions. In their quest
for social well-being, adolescents inter-subjectively engage with multiple, competing and often
contradictory sexual norms an expectations along with their own aspirations. Fundamentally,
sanctions and rewards attach to adolescents’ sexual practices articulate different forms of social
reputation. Accordingly, sexual respectability is among the key concerns in adolescents’ sexual
practices. Situational shifting between and/or simultaneously combining two or more sexual
formations are common in most of the adolescents’ lived experiences. Moreover, adolescent sexual
activiti are enacted for different purposes rather than simply performed as mere behaviours compell
by some physical or mental urge, or habits. The expectations that adolescents project into sexual
partnership(s) constitute horizons or resolutions of hopes and fears (or “risk” dimensions) which
are often in contrast with the dominant sexual and reproductive health ri discourses. Equally
important, social spaces for adolescents’ sexual practices are enmeshed, or interwoven, in socially
and culturally pre-established practices. In spite of the dominant tendencies in policy and
scholarly discourses to represent adolescents’ sexual practices in universal, essentialist and
normative terms, sexuality means different things for different young people coming of age in the
rapidly changing urban settings of Southern Tanzania. A nuanced understanding of adolescent sexual
practices from the actors’ standpoints is a pre- requisite for adequate intervention programmes
Vulnerabilität, Migration und Altern : medizinethnologische Ansätze im Spannungsfeld von Theorie und Praxis
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Urban planning in Africa and the politics of implementation: contrasting patterns of state intervention in Kampala and Kigali
No full textLiving the city in Africa : processes of invention and intervention
No full textResearch on cities worldwide still takes its cue from cities in Europe and the United States, which are seen as the standard model. However, cities in the global South are undergoing a much more rapid transformation including multiple interlinked transitions, with Africa featuring the highest urbanization rates world-wide. Scholars therefore call for a new approach to urban studies which examines cities from a more global, comparative perspective. This new approach pays added attention to the role societal creativity plays in processes of urbanization, instead of concentrating exclusively on expert-driven planning and intervention. Especially in fast-growing cities with weaker institutional capacity for interventions, the interplay between intervention and invention, between expert and societal agency, becomes more tangible and all the more significant. This raises the question as to what potential lies hidden at this interface, how it can be exploited for future city development and also what we can learn from the fastgrowing and institutionally often weak African cities. The fifteen chapters in this volume focus on politics, transnational urbanism, urban moves and creativity in cities on the continent and thus ask questions as to what the characteristics of living the city in contemporary Africa are, and how they can be explained. The editors are scholars at the Centre for African Studies Basel. Brigit Obrist is a professor of Social Anthropology, Elísio Macamo is a sociologist and professor for African Studies, while Veit Arlt coordinates the Centre. The chapters of this volume emerged from a conference convened for the Europe Africa Group of Interdisciplinary Studies AEGIS
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