Fieldnotes | Reflections | Ethnography
This post reflects on tentative and malleable forms of personhood--a construct we often consider to be given and fixed throughout life. This is an enhanced version of material originally appearing in Spirit Children: Illness, Poverty, and Infanticide in Northern Ghana. [1,300 words] Elijah and I sat chatting with three elder men outside a compound. Earlier we …
This piece moves further into how culture shapes our our interpersonal concerns. [2,900 words] I must have seemed unhinged. I was in the midst of an extended period of fieldwork and appearing irrational, anxious, and paranoid to outsiders. Julien, a visiting Swiss vaccine researcher, joked that I might "go bush" if I was not careful. …
I'm working on a collection of essays and experimenting with different forms of writing. Readability and narrative will be privileged over theory and abstraction. In other words, the book consists of mostly the good parts. [1800 words] In rural Northern Ghana if you have a vehicle you likely hold a powerful position or are successful. Using …
