Two weeks after the first Kenyan COVID-19 case was detected (a young women who had returned from the US to Nairobi), the unfamiliar, inverted directionality of this epidemic began to sink in. Contrary to conventional pandemic imaginaries (e.g., Lachenal 2015), this threat was moving from the metropolis to the periphery, from foreigners and middle classes to the urban and rural …
While the AAAs were winding up in Chicago, participants in the workshop, A Home for Science: the Anthropology of Tropical and Arctic Field-Stations, started to make their way north to an even colder part of the world. Hosted by the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo, co-organized by Wenzel Geissler, John Manton, Ann Kelly and Gro …
This article is part of the following series: The archaeology of past futures, or fieldwork by fragments
This series is an exercise in fieldwork through material fragments – of coming to grips with the present pasts of scientific institutions in the ‘tropics’. It is about what biomedicine leaves behind – rusted instruments, congealed and unlabeled bloods slides – and the losses, pleasures, failures, and desires these leftovers relay. It is about photographs, blueprints, monuments and archives – …