African Experiments in Health and Healing: Science from the Home and Homestead

Abstract

Through five ethnographic stories, this article rethinks science from the African home and homestead. Focused on our interlocutors’ efforts to heal and protect themselves and their families, these stories of experimentation challenge the ways science is often understood in science studies. Drawing on the literature on science and technology studies (STS) in Africa, postcolonial and feminist STS, medical pluralism, and ontological approaches to health, we argue that rooting our analysis in the worlds of our interlocutors and the practices through which they heal forces a rethinking of what we mean by science. In its place, we offer a science that attends to ontological multiplicity and exceeds and expands on more traditional definitions of science, which for Africa have been aligned with the field experiment and the laboratory. We conclude with the stakes of this intervention, arguing that a more unsettled science studies will decenter the Global North, universalisms, and whiteness, reshaping how we understand science.

Keywords

ontological multiplicity medical pluralism Africa stories postcolonial STS

Introduction

In the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, a family I, Laura, had been interviewing about bodily afflictions for two years faced a witchcraft attack that culminated in their teenage daughter being abducted and replaced for several months by a jini (jinn or spirit) who was a fake replica of the girl. This “fake” was discovered through embodied practices of reading signs on bodies and in dreams and by strange happenings in the home. Having spent years working and being educated as a scientist abroad, the girl’s father, Isaac, was deeply concerned that my colleagues back in the United States would not take the family’s experiences seriously.¹ To challenge this epistemic inequality, he surprised me one day by arriving at my home with a booklet he had painstakingly typed, printed, and collated. The document recounts what happened to his family and argues that witchcraft affliction should be understood as a legitimate ailment. In it, Isaac writes: “there are several other things (apart from witchcrafts) which are happening in this world of science and technology that they do happen but they cannot be proved scientifically in the laboratory.” Taking this provocation as our starting point, we ask what would be required for science and technology studies (STS) scholars to take seriously the claim that phenomena in the “world of science and technology” might be apprehended through means other than laboratory science. Doing so would lead to broadening current understandings of “science” by recognizing the ontological multiplicity that shapes scientific practices within multiple worlds and their divergent epistemic affordances.

Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research in Africa, this piece seeks to rethink science from the multiple worlds of our interlocutors. To do so, we start in the home and homestead as important loci for more-than-human social relationships and as sites where experimentation is carried out in everyday life. Our larger research projects investigate practices of health and healing, including biomedicine and traditional medicine. Through this lens, we examine questions of science, ontology, and healing. We contend that the scholarly emphasis on clinical definitions of health and laboratory notions of science that animate critical approaches to STS in Africa may be foreclosing other questions about the multiple ontological and sociological lifeworlds through which medicine and science are constituted in Africa and beyond.² This piece explores how STS approaches might account for the enactment of scientific and medical practices in multiple worlds. How might we integrate critical attention to biomedical interventions with accounts of other therapeutic practices (often glossed as “traditional” or “religious”), diversely situated places (homes and homesteads), multiple nonhuman and more-than-human actors, and varied forms of harm against which medical practice is enacted? In other words, what happens to our accounts of science and medicine if we alter the sites where our analysis begins?

Starting in the home and homestead and centering the worlds, experiences, and knowledge of our interlocutors, we explore the entwining of multiple modalities of harm and healing through stories drawn from our ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa and Tanzania. To do this, we first ground our analysis and contribution within the broader scholarship on STS, medical pluralism, and ontological multiplicity in Africa. We then offer a brief note on the ethnographic methods we employ in our research and their analytical value. Next, we present four stories of experimentation told from the homes and homesteads of our interlocutors. We discuss in detail how the near daily experimentation of our interlocutors—who seek to gain and maintain health in a context of ontological multiplicity—forces a rethinking of the practice of science. We develop this argument in conversation with Isabelle Stengers, Karen Barad, Clapperton Mavhunga, and Katherine McKittrick, among others. We argue that centering forms of experimentation outside biomedical sites opens STS to other epistemologies and to the worlds in which they are enacted, while contributing to more robust accounts of health and medicine. Finally, we conclude by examining the stakes of our intervention for decentering the Global North, universalisms, and whiteness in understandings of science more generally. We contend that African experiments in health and healing unsettle science studies by both exceeding and expanding what we understand as “science.”

Centering Africa in Accounts of Science and Medicine

STS and Africa

Our paper builds upon a burgeoning literature about STS in Africa which has long explored questions of health and medicine, technological and economic development, and modes of knowledge and expertise. Much of this work is explicitly concerned with Western or metropolitan scientific and technological practices as they are enacted in or constituted in Africa (Hecht 2012; Mitchell 2002; Osseo-Asare 2014) to emphasize the co-constitutive nature of “global” science with colonial or postcolonial places. Accounts of STS and global health in Africa also emphasize how scientific, biomedical, and technological practices extend, depart from, and interrupt models of scientific practice formed elsewhere (Biruk 2018; Geissler and Tousignant 2016; Peterson 2014; Pollock 2019; Rottenburg 2009). In these accounts, African laboratory workers, scientists, researchers, clinicians, and patients manage distinctions between African settings and global techno-science as they inhabit a world shaped by both (Benton 2015; Crane 2013; Droney 2014; Fullwiley 2011). Still, other scholars like Helen Tilley (2011) write about Africa as a “living laboratory” where scientific practices have long been unsettled—even in the context of colonial regimes, colonial scientists recognized and sometimes embraced “vernacular” scientific practices. In this telling, science not only consolidated and enabled colonial rule but also destabilized it. We build on this point as we consider how local experimental practices in contemporary Tanzania and South Africa challenge the presumptions of universalism embedded in biomedicine and science more generally (see also Livingston 2012; McKay 2018a; Wendland 2010).

Following recent work by feminist and postcolonial STS scholars of Africa such as Stacey Langwick (2011) and Clapperton Mavhunga and colleagues (2017), we suggest that there are significant political and ethnographic stakes to expanding the terms of what “matters” in accounts of science and medicine beyond definitions rooted in Eurocentric or colonial genealogies (Pollock and Subramaniam 2016, 961). As Mavhunga (2017) insists, “the arbitrary restriction of what constitutes technology to measurable things and experiments in the built laboratory performed only by those with mastery over them constitutes not just an epistemological exclusion, but also an ontological and sociological one” (p. 5). To imagine a different science—from the home and homestead—we draw on scholarship that employs more capacious definitions of science. First, following postcolonial scholar-activist Vandana Shiva (2016), we recognize science as diverse, attending to multiple ontologies and lifeworlds (see also Pollock and Subramaniam 2016; Verran 2001; Willey 2016). Second, we think with the concept of “fugitive science” from Britt Rusert’s (2017) work on the experimental practices of nineteenth-century African Americans whose scientific interventions were often conducted outside spaces of institutionalized science, and which drew upon wide-ranging forms of empiricism, challenging the racist “science” of the time. Following Rusert, we define science broadly as all forms of empirical experimentation, and we attend to how such science opens bodies, practices, and technologies to new potentialities rather than reducing and classifying what is or might be.

Medical Pluralism and Ontological Multiplicity

To consider the multiplicity of healing in Africa, we draw on earlier scholarship on medical pluralism, which reveals that in plural medical contexts, the boundaries between discrete categories of knowledge and practice are often blurred and ambiguous for both patients and healers (Dilger, Kane, and Langwick 2012; Flint 2008). These scholars critique the notion of distinct epistemic categories, demonstrate that health and healing are always socially produced, and analyze how biomedicine and traditional medicine are co-constituted in Africa and beyond through conditions of colonization, missionization, apartheid, international development, structural adjustment, racial capitalism, and global health (Fassin 2007; Geissler and Molyneux 2011; Langwick 2011; Meek 2021; Moran-Thomas 2019; Neely 2021b; Tilley 2011). Scholarship on medical pluralism in Africa shows how patients and their families move between healing traditions, “experimenting” in the search for therapeutic efficacy (Feierman 1985; Feierman and Janzen 1992; Janzen 1987).³ Attending to forms of “improvising” (Livingston 2012) within and among diverse modalities of healing, more recent literature focuses on how different healing regimes commingle and produce new entanglements (Mol 2003; Rottenburg 2009).

Finally, we draw on feminist STS approaches, which emphasize that knowledge is enacted (de la Cadena 2015; Fullwiley 2011; Haraway 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Verran 2001) and entangled with relations and ontologies, producing “ethico-onto-epistemologies” (Barad 2007, 185) or “worlds” (de la Cadena and Blaser 2018). To do this work, scholars like Annemarie Mol and John Law (2004) and Arturo Escobar (1998) suggest a focus on practices, recognizing that bodies, things, and worlds come into being through practices. As Woolgar and Lezaun (2013) put it, the concept of enactment “emphasizes the generative power of the practices involved in the constitution of reality” (p. 324). The practices we follow here are multiple and coterminous forms of trial-and-error or experimentation in the pursuit of health and protection from illness and misfortune.

Methods and Study Sites

This article and our individual research are rooted in ethnography on health-related practices and lived experiences of illness and healing in Africa. To do this work, we sat with people; joined them on visits to healers, doctors, and pharmacists; ruminated with them over cures and treatment; provided emergency transportation; and used our whiteness to negotiate access to better biomedicine. We listened and learnt. Much of this learning was through participant observation, though our participation varied by situation. We also conducted interviews with healers from a wide range of medical traditions and collected illness narratives from current and former patients. The stories we offer in this essay are taken from experiences with some of our closest interlocutors, all of whom we have come to know well through years of shared experiences.

More specifically, since the beginning of 2008, I (Abby) have been conducting long-term ethnographic research in three communities in what is locally known as the Pholela region of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Pholela is a rural, Zulu-speaking area made up of a checkerboard of former African Homeland areas and former white-owned farms, which has long been integrated into the larger economy of South Africa. I conducted the vast majority of my ethnographic research with Thokozile Nguse.⁴ We spent time with many people, but most of our work, especially in my longest fieldwork period, involved eight households with whom we conducted detailed oral histories. These oral histories helped form the relationships that are the key to ethnographic research.

Since 2011, I (Laura) have been conducting long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Iringa, a regional capital in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania with a population of approximately 113,000 people. This semi-urban area is ethnically diverse, but Swahili is the most widely spoken language, and the one I used in interviews and interactions. My interlocutors include traditional healers specializing in herbal remedies and those who treat witchcraft; biomedical doctors, nurses, and pharmacists; pastors who heal through exorcism of demons; and elder women providing counsel and remedies for the neighborhood. The following stories are drawn from experiences with my host family, with whom I lived for two years, and from visits to healers with members of twelve other families across Iringa.

Of equal importance to the details and stories gathered here is the analytical perspective enabled by “ethnographic sitting” (Pigg 2013). In our analysis, we follow a long line of feminist scholars who contest both relativism and universalism (Haraway 1988) and start from the position that our interlocutors’ stories and experiences represent realities (see Hunt 2014). We contend that listing to these accounts requires an attunement to the places and people from which they emerge: a willingness to sit with epistemic disconcertment (Verran 2001) because these stories “tell the world differently” (McKittrick 2021, 7). This orientation shaped the informal conversations we participated in and the observations we have made since the late 2000s, and this analytic sensibility provides the basis for our understanding of science from these homes and homesteads.

Therapeutic Experimentation in the Home and Homestead

In this section, we offer four stories of the search for and experimentation with treatment, cure, and prevention of illness and misfortune. Rooted in the home and homestead, sometimes quite literally, these stories offer examples of science in the most capacious sense, including examples of fugitive science in their refusal of biomedicine’s “call to order” (Harney and Moten 2013, 131). As these stories also demonstrate, “staying with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) in our respective field sites requires thinking differently about experimental practices and medical efficacy. It demands that we accept that practices like witchcraft and faith healing—that exist beyond what is commonly thought of as science—make people sick and better, endanger, and protect. For this reason, our interlocutors’ pursuit of health and healing entails, even requires, empirical and embodied forms of experimentation with ontologically multiple therapeutic possibilities.

* * * * *

I (Abby) sat chatting with Mkhulu Hlela (mkhulu is Zulu for grandfather) in his cool, round mud-brick home as he used his whole body to tell me about the three encounters he had had with lightning, all of which had been at the hands of an umthakathi (a person who sends witchcraft; plural abathakathi). The first had actually struck him and it had been so bad that he woke up in a large hospital more than two hours’ drive away. The other two encounters were close but neither had done much damage. After the third, Mkhulu decided it was time to start protecting his home.

Mkhulu went to the umthandazi (faith healer) to get some holy water or, as he called it, umuthi (medicine or potion). This water, prayed over and blessed by a minister, receives much of its potency from ancestors—both the umthandazi’s and Mkhulu’s. Mkhulu explained that after collecting the umuthi, he returned to his home and sprinkled it around the perimeter, as the umthandazi had told him to do. This ritual sprinkling enlisted the help of his ancestors to protect him, his home, and his family from illness and misfortune, including lightning, at the hands of abathakathi. Late one night, he and his wife had also sprinkled some of the water into small incisions they cut all over their body. They did this to ensure they would carry the protection with them when they left their home. Mkhulu finished by explaining that since he started using the umuthi, they had far fewer problems with lightning and witchcraft illnesses. This was proof that the protection was working.

In the center of the homestead sat the umsamo, the thatch-roofed round building where the ancestors reside and where Gogo (grandma) and Mkhulu applied the protection that traveled with them. Just behind the umsamo stood a long wooden pole taller than the thatched roof in front of it. It was topped with what looked almost like a metal antenna, with a wire running down to the ground. This, another mkhulu had explained to me, was a lightning rod. The strategy was to attract and ground the lightning so it did not ignite the thatched roof adjacent to it and burn down the building. I learnt that this protective practice was oriented toward lightning from storms, lightning that is not sent by an umthakathi. In the summer, intense thunderstorms are common in Pholela. These storms are not the product of intent; they are just weather, so families need to protect themselves from this kind of lightning in a different way.

Pholela’s residents approach protecting themselves, their homes, and their families from lightning with something of a precautionary principle: since they do not know what kind of lightning will come for them, they protect against as much lightning as they can. And as in the case of Mkhulu Hlela both kinds of protection work, which confirms and affirms the experimental procedures enacted to remain healthy and safe.

* * * * *

During my (Laura’s) fieldwork, my Lutheran host family played the television station Emmanuel TV most evenings, commenting on the miraculous cures performed by the famous Nigerian prophet T. B. Joshua. His ministrations could even heal home audiences as the television acted as a medium for bringing the Holy Spirit closer. Thus, Emmanuel TV often remained on—even when no one was watching it—in an effort to protect the household. Meanwhile, Akina, the family’s live-in housekeeper, became enamored with Nigerian films, which often portray moral transgressions like betrayal, witchcraft attacks, and demonic possession. Although Akina could not understand the films’ languages, she was fascinated by their spectacular portrayals of uchawi (witchcraft) and sometimes snuck into the living room to watch them. At the time, I thought her secrecy stemmed from the fact that she was shirking her daily tasks. Only later did I come to understand that her actions would have been interpreted by my host family as endangering the household. This danger arises from the power of images and sounds to bring beings closer, including both the divine (as with Emmanuel TV) and also nefarious beings like the jinn and demons that animate Nigerian films.

Akina’s interest in these films ceased abruptly one day. After stepping on a mwiba (thorn) in the garden, Akina developed a wound on her foot that grew increasingly red and swollen, leading her to suspect that the mwiba must have contained sumu (poison). This prompted her to seek treatment at a biomedical clinic where a doctor cut into her foot to drain the pus and gave her antibiotics but reported that no thorn could be found. With this new evidence in hand, Akina hypothesized that perhaps the (invisible) mwiba was actually a witchcraft object. As she explained to me, witches can poison their victims by afflicting them with “fake” illnesses that mimic the symptoms of biomedical diseases. Declaring “I want this to be a religious home” (Nataka nyumbani hii kuwa nyumbani ya dini), Akina abruptly gave up Nigerian films and began using her cell phone to listen to prayer sermons and Christian music instead. When I inquired why, she replied: “to protect myself,” using the Swahili word jufunga which literally translates as “to close myself.” Akina’s new practice transformed her cell phone—much like the television broadcasting Emmanuel TV—into an object with the power to ward off harm by enacting a divine presence. This not only helped to cure her foot but also protected her from future afflictions: despite Akina’s love of going barefoot, she never stepped on another mwiba during our years together.

Protecting the home is one way to prevent illness and misfortune. As spaces with porous thresholds, homes—like bodies—can be weakened and strengthened. In this case, Akina was able to shift the technologically mediated divine presence surrounding the home, joining in the practices of her Lutheran employers. In so doing, her cell phone became another potent object to be experimented with in everyday therapeutic routines: it was enacted as a healing technology that conjoined antibiotics in a complex experimental practice of health-seeking.

* * * * *

On the other side of Mkhulu Hlela’s community, there is a homestead that I (Abby) visited frequently. It belonged to Gogo Ngcobo, an old woman who had grown up some forty-five kilometers away in the catchment of the Pholela Community Health Centre. When she was a child in the 1940s and 1950s, community health workers came to her home to teach about hygiene, nutrition, and communicable diseases, among other things. These workers encouraged her mother and grandmother to build compost and rubbish pits, to dig a pit latrine, to improve ventilation in the buildings of the homestead, and to plant new micronutrient-packed vegetables in the garden. Central to this work were scientific lessons.

Visiting Gogo Ngcobo more than a half century later, traces of the health center’s teachings were everywhere from her neat garden with separate beds planted in rows to the pit latrine in the corner. She took clear pride in a homestead that exemplified scientific teachings, explaining to me why she had planted various vegetables (for the nutrients, which make one healthy) and what they would do for her health (make her blood healthier so it could fight off diseases). She knew this because she had learned it from the health center, and also because she was healthy, as had been her family. This experiment with nutrition had worked.

At the same time, Gogo lamented not having the money to pay an isangoma (a healer who works in consultation with the ancestors; plural izangoma) to protect her home. Like abathandazi, izangoma produce a liquid umuthi strengthened by the ancestors, which is spread around homes and cut into bodies for protection. Without this protection, Gogo, her family, and her homestead were left vulnerable to witchcraft. Although nothing had happened recently, Gogo worried she was rolling the dice, experimenting with her own vulnerability. For Gogo, the vegetables and the separation of waste from food and drinking water were certainly important for protecting her health, but they were not enough—like Mkhulu Hlela and Akina, she needed specific protection against witchcraft.

* * * * *

The importance of such protection was similarly stressed by Mark, a young man from a pastoralist Maasai family who grew up on an Italian Catholic mission in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania. As a baby, he suffered from degedege (translated into biomedicine as malaria—see Langwick 2007), followed by worsening seizures from the age of two. He was vehemently cautioned by the mission’s nuns not to seek treatment from traditional healers (waganga; singular mganga) due to the nuns’ perception that demonic powers are at work in such practices. Growing up, Mark followed this religious counsel, accessing treatment from a wide range of biomedical practitioners instead. He eventually traveled with the mission’s bishop to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital, where he underwent numerous procedures and tests at the preeminent Muhimbili National Hospital. There he was diagnosed with kifafa (epilepsy) and prescribed phenobarbital. However, his condition did not improve; not until his mother finally convinced him to experiment with other healing practices.

Mark’s mother is herself an mganga who treats a wide range of ailments with mitishamba (herbal remedies), though she is not able to cure the most intractable conditions like kifafa. Together with his mother, Mark—now in his early twenties—traveled again across Tanzania, this time to seek the counsel of a renowned Maasai mganga to whom Mark gave a worn shirt and some money he had spat on. These potent objects with their direct connection to Mark’s body assisted the mganga to see Mark’s affliction in his njozi (dream/vision). The healer identified another wife of Mark’s (polygamous) father who had bewitched Mark out of jealousy for his good fortune in being raised on the mission, where he received free education, and room and board, from childhood. As treatment, this mganga prescribed Mark several conditions to follow for one year in order to remove the uchawi (witchcraft) from his body. These conditions included limitations on spending money, avoidance of certain foods, taking a higher dose of phenobarbital, and vomiting each morning to remove the sumu (poison) that the witch had fed him in his dreams.

Open to experimenting with this ontologically multiple treatment regime, Mark followed the conditions fastidiously. When I (Laura) first met him in 2015, he was undergoing this treatment, and by 2017, he no longer suffered from seizures. To this day, Mark insists that he never had “epilepsy” and that pharmaceuticals alone could not have healed his kifafa—these drugs simply “cooled down” the heat of bewitchment in his body. Continuing to experiment with ways to safeguard his well-being, Mark mixes mitishamba (herbal remedies) and phenobarbital to protect himself from future uchawi.

Multiple Sciences, Experimentation, and World-making

How might we think with and from these stories of health and healing as emerging in experimentation that is grounded in people’s homes? How can science studies help us do this? And what can attention to such stories teach science studies in return?

To answer the first question, scholarship on medical pluralism and ontological multiplicity offers a starting point. As we describe above, this work posits that we must understand all healing practices through their particular, situated epistemologies; epistemologies that—we argue following Mavhunga (2018)—are always located in the social worlds of homes and homesteads. This approach also reveals that healing practices are deeply social. Embodied practices of trial-and-error, of hypothesizing about illness etiologies, and of experimenting with treatments are all rooted in social worlds that include family, friends, enemies, and nonhumans (Corin 1998; Dilger, Kane, and Langwick 2012; Feierman and Janzen 1992; Meek 2020; Neely 2019, 2021b; Parish 2011). The pursuit of health and protection from harm unfolds within these spaces, the same social worlds from which witchcraft (and the illnesses it creates) emerge.

As these stories demonstrate, our interlocutors seek out multiple healers including a wide array of biomedical doctors, faith healers, and traditional healers, as they actively experiment with various treatments. Frequently, this experimentation involves creative deployments of multiple interventions simultaneously: sprinkling umuthi, constructing lightning rods, and growing nutrient-rich vegetables; increasing phenobarbital dosage and purging the body of witchcraft; and enabling a technologically mediated divine presence and taking antibiotics. People judge the efficacy of their experimentations with these treatments by their embodied experience: Do they still have seizures? Has lightning visited their homestead? In their experiments, our interlocutors are doing science.

As for the significance of this storied experimentation to science studies, we see hints of an attunement to the multiple worlds of science and experimentation within feminist and postcolonial STS. In such work, an attention to knowledge produced by marginalized peoples—women, former and current colonized subjects, the economically disenfranchised, racialized individuals, and others—offers a different understanding of science and even different sciences, as Sandra Harding (2009) and others have posited (Escobar 1998; Haraway 1988, 2016; Rusert 2017). Significantly, these scholars understand science beyond its articulation in hegemonic institutions and spaces of centralized (white) power, arguing that we live in a world with multiple “sciences” rather than a unitary and universal, unmarked (and implicitly white) “science” (Mavhunga 2017, 2018; McKittrick 2021; Shiva 2016). This means that the choice of which sciences we engage with and what we count as science matters; the stakes are political, epistemological, and ontological (Keshet and Popper-Giveon 2013; Neely 2021b; Pollock and Subramaniam 2016; Subramaniam and Willey 2017; Verran 2001). We take up this provocation by calling for a shift in the sites that count as spaces of scientific knowledge production within STS, from the laboratory to the homestead, as well as a broadening of the actors we recognize as producing science, to include people like Mkhulu Hlela, Akina, Gogo Ngcobo, and Mark and his mother. This shift requires both opening up science as we understand it and rearticulating STS to view spaces like homes and homesteads as central, rather than peripheral.

As we unsettle and expand our conceptualization of science(s), so too we must think more expansively about the sites where science takes place. Most contemporary STS scholarship on medicine, health, and healing is concentrated in biomedical spaces like clinics, laboratories, global health interventions, and hospitals. As China Scherz (2018, 543) has argued for the African context, this tendency risks rendering invisible a large swath of health practices and the “other ways of healing, knowing, and being” that they entail. Further, as Abigail Neely and Alex Nading (2017) contend, incorporating the healing practices that are carried out in the home forces us to rethink our presumptions about whether medical or scientific practices are universal or global in the first place—what counts as “global” health? This effort is aligned with recent scholarly efforts to attend to homes and houses, infrastructure and urban spaces, shelters and other dwellings, and practices of “house-ing” as critical for understandings of personhood, relations, health, and well-being more broadly (Biehl and Neiburg 2021; Carsten 2018; McKay 2018b; Moran-Thomas 2019). We build on these interventions through the stories shared in this article, which are so deeply rooted in the home and homestead that they are in fact about these spaces. By starting in the home and homestead, these stories stay trained on the forms of therapeutic experimentation most central to our interlocutors’ lives, which are often obscured by a focus on more common (e.g., hegemonic, white) understandings of both science and health.

Rooting our analysis in the homes of our interlocutors and the social worlds embodied within them forces us to recognize that social worlds include more than people. In both Mkhulu Hlela’s and Gogo Ngcobo’s homesteads, potent objects and other nonhuman actors (vegetables, waste disposal pits, lightning rods, imithi) acted together with people (healers, residents, and ancestors) to protect the homestead and its residents from illness and misfortune due to weather, poverty, disease, and witchcraft. Likewise, in the home Akina kept, televisions, cell phones, the Holy Spirit, and fake and real thorns in the garden were all a part of the social world of harm and healing. Meanwhile, for Mark, it was precisely because certain forms of experimentation with healing were excised from the space of the Catholic mission that he spent his youth afflicted with seizures and stymied in his experimental practice. Attending to place thus allows us to see how our interlocutors’ worlds are ordered and organized, rooted in and routed through homes and homesteads, to both engender and limit their health and that of their loved ones. It also pushes us to recognize that these worlds are enacted by human, nonhuman, and more-than-human beings together (de la Cadena and Blaser 2018; Haraway 2016; Langwick 2011; Neely 2021a, 2021b; Wiener 2013).

It is through such entwined practices among diverse actors, experimenting with being/transforming together, that worlds take shape. In using the term “worlds,” we follow scholars like de la Cadena and Blaser (2018) who explore how divergent knowledges and practices compose a “pluriverse” of many worlds, calling forth what Isabelle Stengers (2010) calls a “cosmopolitics.” We also think with Karen Barad’s (2007) writing on “intra-action” (p. 141) in which agency emerges through the relationships of various human and nonhuman actors, producing situated “ethico-onto-epistemologies” (p. 185) through which scientific practices come to matter, in both senses of the word. This is clearly the case for our interlocutors where acts of experimentation are ontologizing worlding practices that intervene in realities and transform them: a cell phone playing gospel music makes a home safe just as an umuthi does. In these stories, health is preserved through practices that enlist ancestors, the Holy Spirit, technologies, and treatments. This ontologizing force shapes all forms of science—not just the scientific practices storied here. When we as STS scholars impose distinctions between science and other modalities of knowing/experimenting, this elides the open-ended and worlding nature of science itself, the ways that scientific practices make, not just merely represent, worlds. One need look no further than Gogo Ngcobo’s homestead and garden to see this.

A focus on homes, social worlds, and marginalized epistemologies raises questions about how to understand science and medicine more expansively, as a set of practices that simultaneously create and intervene in ontological realities—realities where jealous neighbors and relatives compromise health just as lack of access to medicine or nutritious food does. To trace how science intervenes in multiple ontologies and how experimentation is rooted in the home and homestead, we take seriously the stories of our interlocutors. In so doing, we recognize the act of storytelling as a rigorous method and a generative tool for world-making (Hunt 2014). As Katherine McKittrick (2021, 7) asserts, storytelling performs an ontological intervention into what counts as science and medicine because

…the story cannot tell itself without our willingness to imagine what it cannot tell. The story asks that we live with what cannot be explained…rather than reams of positivist evidence. The story opens the door to curiosity; the reams of evidence dissipate as we tell the world differently, with a creative precision. The story asks that we live with the difficult and frustrating ways of knowing differentially.

Similarly, the stories we share ask the reader to suspend disbelief and to imagine science, medicine, bodies, and worlds otherwise. In Mark and his mother’s search for a cure for his seizures and in Mkhulu Hlela’s efforts to protect his home from lightning we glimpse the multiple worlds of health and healing that our interlocutors inhabit and enact. As they actively search for treatment or protection, they too practice knowing “differentially,” experimenting with a “partially connected” (de la Cadena 2015; Strathern 2004) multiplicity of healing modalities: a pharmaceutical and the purging of witchcraft, blessed water and a lightning rod. All are part of the search for health and safety. All have a bearing on the lives of our interlocutors. All are examples of science, enacted otherwise.

Crucially, while the worlds enacted through scientific experimentation are ontologically multiple, they are also “partially connected” (de la Cadena 2015, drawing on Strathern 2004). Annemarie Mol (2014) reminds us that “the difficult aspect of ontological multiplicity [is] that while there is more reality than one, its different versions are variously entangled with one another, so that there are less than many” (2014, para. 7; see also Law and Joks 2019). Much as Mol (2003) elucidates in her work on atherosclerosis and Langwick (2011) explores in relation to therapeutic objects and maladies in Tanzania, our stories demonstrate that multiple actors enact bodies and illness in different ways, such that a given affliction—Mark’s kifafa, for example—is itself multiple. This multiplicity of bodies and ailments does not imply that these different enactments are separate from one another; instead, they are partially connected, shaping one another, just as the different worlds of health and healing our interlocutors occupy shape each other too (Langwick 2008). One need look no further than Mkhulu Hlela’s homestead with umuthi and a lightning rod or Akina’s gospel songs and antibiotics. It is this attunement to discerning multiple entangled etiologies of disease and harm that propels an ongoing experimental process that is not geared toward a horizon of totalizing knowledge but is instead attentive to ever-shifting porous boundaries, human and more-than-human relations, vulnerable thresholds, and epistemic and ontological multiplicity. As with all experimental practice, science must take into account the conditions of its enactment: phenobarbital affected Mark differently under different conditions, as revealed by his years of experimenting with its affordances and situated potencies; household income helps determine whether Gogo Ngcobo can experiment with protective umuthi.

Scientific knowledge can never be totalizing—as our interlocutors so deftly remind us—because science itself is a worlding or ontologizing process, one that is never complete nor universal, but one that is alive in our interlocutors’ homes and homesteads, even as it is not and cannot be the only worlding process at work in those spaces. This is what we mean when we write that our interlocutors’ experiments both exceed and expand science, and it is what Isaac understood when he wrote Laura the booklet explaining his daughter’s affliction. Having trained, worked, and lived as a scientist in North America and Europe, Isaac frequently faced the epistemic violence of a (white) hegemonic science that was wielded to cancel other beings, agencies, and worlds. He lamented that this hierarchy followed him even back home to Tanzania, where he worked at a non-governmental organization (NGO) run by foreigners who did not “believe” the stories of his daughter’s affliction and thus considered his need to care for her to be an insufficient reason for his absence from work. Aggrieved by the coloniality of this application of scientific epistemology, Isaac took it upon himself (unprompted) to write an entire booklet explaining and insisting that phenomena “happening in this world of science and technology” exceed that which can be “proved scientifically in the laboratory.” Such phenomena refuses the colonial, white supremacist, modernist/positivist imperative to classify, contain, master, and thus reduce what is or can be. Isaac’s vision of science, and the experimental practices storied above, augment and transform worlds in the act of producing knowledge about them. In the process, they demand that we unsettle and expand our own understandings of science and experimentation, and of health and healing, too.

Conclusion

Examining science from the home and homestead matters for reasons beyond understanding the lives of our interlocutors. As postcolonial and feminist STS has taught us, science is always constitutive of wider power structures—structures that have positioned Africa in particular as an object of study and intervention, a site of supposed epistemic lack amid ongoing epistemic extractivism (Mavhunga 2017; Mbembe 2001). And yet, while these power structures both limit scientific knowledge and the way critical scholars understand science, they have not extinguished the forms of minor and fugitive science practiced by Mark and his mother, Mkhulu Hlela and Gogo Ngcobo, and Akina, as they experiment with protection and healing. This is why our analysis starts with these stories, these actors, and their homes and homesteads.

Part of the political significance of this minor and fugitive science (Rusert 2017) lies in the fact that actors in the Global South have long been—and continue to be—the objects of Western scientific experiments. Tilley (2011) describes colonial Africa as a “living laboratory” of scientific research, development experiments, and social engineering. And, as the COVID-19 pandemic and the AIDS pandemic before it make clear, in much of the continent, clinical trials are conducted on populations who will almost certainly never be able to afford the medicines their bodies bring to market. Meanwhile, following the Enlightenment tradition’s hierarchical construction of race, African knowledges have been variously characterized as traditional, mystic, intuitive, practical, sensuous, superstitious, and experiential—but never “scientific.” Under colonization, the “‘natives’ became samples, specimens, data, and, at best, informants, rather than intellectual agents in their own right” (Mavhunga 2018, 14). Against this backdrop, and following Rusert (2017), we read the experiments of our interlocutors as counterhegemonic articulations of science, rather than merely its objects of analysis.

To that end, our decision not to interpret our interlocutors’ experiences in the familiar terrain of “belief”—or even “culture”—stems from our conviction that doing so would only reproduce the longue durée of neo/colonial epistemological and ontological violence in Africa, as elsewhere in the Global South, and for racialized and marginalized populations in the Global North. It would not only discount but obliterate our interlocutors’ experiences of illness and health. Suspending this impulse requires a displacement of our habitual categories of analysis. It is a decision to cultivate what Isabelle Stengers (2008) calls “discrimination”—the ability to learn the particular forms of attention and attunement that a given situation demands (p. 44). As she explains, this does not mean that we must start “believing” in witchcraft or religion; such “conversion” would only reproduce modernist dualities by “surrendering our own attachments in the name of a demand that would then transcend them” (p. 45). Transcendent critiques reproduce colonial, white supremacist, modern logics by assuming that there can only be one final truth. Instead, what we offer here is a suspension of the impulse to explain away and thus to render certain practices, substances, and relations ineffectual in our analysis (Wiener 2013). We enact a commitment to acknowledge that which is acting and affecting others, even though we may not be able to recognize it (as real; de la Cadena 2015). And, in so doing, we suggest an approach to STS that broadens our understanding of science(s) while simultaneously leaving open the frictions and entanglements with that which exceeds it.

We propose unsettling science studies in order to take seriously the lives of our interlocutors, their homes, and their practices. We strive to open possibilities for different stories and their theorizations—including the science(s) of Isaac’s detection of jini—within a pluriverse of worlds that matter, their capacious science(s) arising from and intervening in these spaces. To do this, we must apprehend our interlocutors’ ontologically multiple forms of empirical experimentation as scientific practices—practices that serve as the primary therapeutic techniques for many in Eastern and Southern Africa, and for many others in the Majority World as well.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We are deeply indebted to our friends and collocutors who share their lives with us in South Africa and Tanzania. To Akina and our Iringa household, Issac and his daughter, Mark and his mother [pseudonyms]—nawashukuru sana mno. To Mkhulu and Gogo Hlela and Gogo Kgcobo, ngiyabonga kakhulu, and the same to Thokozile Nguse for research assistance and collaboration for so many years now. We also offer our deep gratitude to Ramah McKay who contributed greatly to the conceptualization and development of this argument.

Our own intellectual partnership has its roots in the National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored Workshop on STS on/in Africa at the 2018 Annual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science in Sydney, Australia, and we thank the organizers, Tolu Odumosu and Anne Pollock, for creating the space that brought us together.

Abby’s research was made possible by the NSF, Universities of Wisconsin–Madison and Minnesota, Yale University’s Agrarian Studies Program, and Dartmouth College. Laura’s research was made possible by the generous financial support of the Reimagining Indian Ocean Worlds Mellon Research Initiative; University of California, Davis; University of Hong Kong; US NSF; and Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Finally, many thanks to the two anonymous reviewers, whose detailed comments greatly improved this article, and to the editors of Science, Technology, & Human Values for their guidance and support.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Abigail H. Neely

Laura A. Meek

Notes

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