Para-States and Medical Science

P. Wenzel Geissler is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. He is the coauthor (with R. J. Prince) of The Land Is Dying and coeditor of a number of books, including Evidence, Ethos and Experiment.

“Para-States and Medical Science is an exceptional and engaging book that will be of interest to anthropologists, Africanists and historians as well as those interested in science and technology, post-colonial and development studies.” - Mary-Anne Decatur (Anthropology Book Forum) "Individual chapters focus specifically on processes of medical research, not health care delivery, but in so doing provide an often overlooked perspective on the types of medical work undertaken in Africa.... Summing up: Recommended." - M. M. Heaton (Choice) "I highly recommend this volume for anyone interested in the social relations of biomedicine, and particularly biomedical research, in Africa. As an interdisciplinary anthropologist who works on this topic, I found the book’s provocation to pay attention to the persistence of the African state extremely useful-suddenly, I am seeing the state in places in my work that I had formerly overlooked. I also appreciated this volume’s empirical documentation of the numerous ways in which, despite persistent inequalities, African actors-states, institutions, and individuals-shape global health partnerships and the knowledge they produce." - Johanna Crane (Medical Anthropology Quarterly) "Para-States and Medical Science is an impressive volume and a welcome addition to work on critical global health in Africa. The collection provides a much needed re-reading of contemporary biopolitical regimes in Africa, which neither fit old models of biopower nor conform to neoliberal forms found elsewhere. ... this work makes an original and innovative contribution to scholarship on the shifting relations between state, public, private and corporate interests in health care in Africa, and makes inroads for anthropologists, historians and STS scholars to move beyond standard narratives of 'development' and 'neoliberalism' in African contexts." - Michelle Pentecost (New Genetics and Society) "The volume should become mandatory reading for scholars and students interested in the new configurations and possibilities that emerge on the African continent in the context of medical globalization, and which demonstrate (once more) that rigid distinctions between the global, national and local, public and private, state and non-state have become untenable, if not useless." - Hansjörg Dilger (Africa)

• Introduction: A Life Science in Its African Para-State / P. Wenzel Geissler 1Part I: Rupture, Continuity 1. Treating to Prevent HIV: Population Trials and Experimental Societies / Vinh-Kim Nguyen 472. Trialing Drugs, Creating Publics: Medical Research, Leprosy Control, and the Construction of a Public Health Sphere in Post-1945 Nigeria / John Manton 78Part II: Pasts, Futures 3. Lessons in Medical Nihilism: Virus Hunters, Neoliberalism, and the AIDs Crisis in Cameroon / Guillaume Lachenal 1034. What Future Remains? Remembering an African Place of Science / P. Wenzel Geissler 142Part III: State Remains 6. International Health and the Proliferation of "Partnerships": (Un)Intended Boost for State Institutions in Tanzania? / Rene Gerrets 1796. Working and Surviving: Government Employees on ART in Uganda / Susan Reynolds Whyte 207Part IV: Affective Wholes 7. Molecular and Municipal Politics: Research and Regulation in Dakar / Branwyn Poleykett 2378. The Work of the Virus: Cutting and Creating Relations in an ART Project / Lotte Meinert 257Part V: Struggling Nation 9. The Blue Warriors: Ecology, Participation, and Public Health in Malaria Control Experiments / Ulrike Beisel 28110. The Territory of Medical Research: Experimentation in Africa's Smallest State / Ann H. Kelly 30311. Adventures of African Nevirapine: The Political Biography of a Magic Bullet / Didier Fassin 333Contributors 355Index 357