This elegant, field-defining collection of sparkling originality excels as it curates, joining bits about five modern scientific sites in Africa with playful lines. The entire package suggests vital new affective methods for our times. These unruly junctions will productively challenge STS humanists, ethnographic historians, and students of global health practices. In our times of often ungainly, overtheorized immoderations, their innovative ... Read moretraces and tracing enable thinking deeply about relatively affluent African pasts. In these erstwhile spaces of scientific practice and development dreams, much remains not grim, rather bursting still with whims and guile.
Nancy Rose Hunt University of Michigan, author of Colonial Lexicon and A Nervous State There is, of course, a long history of anthropological writing on the subject of the future, but recently the discipline has witnessed a renewed interest in all kinds of futures
distant, near, and very often also irretrievably past. It is the latter kind, that of futures past, that is investigated in this wonderful book. Well informed and researched, and never dull, this edited volume explores various medical research stations and health centers across Africa, thereby offering a delicate contemplation of former ideas of future-oriented colonial science and medicine, and the ways in which they underpinned the ideologies of colonialist modernity and of progress that shaped these places and restructured the worlds around them. Combining various voices and modes of writing with original visual ethnographic explorations, this book reflects upon memory, nostalgia, and the passing of time, and as such it offers a delicate and often poetic and intimate but always insightful analysis of how the various times of the colonial past convert into the space of the now. A must read!
Filip de Boek author of Urban Now: City Life in Congo and Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City In an astonishing series of reports, engagements, and reflections, this book offers a powerful and often brilliant evocation of the sites and populations of a group of ruined, abandoned, or transient scientific and medical establishments in west and east Africa. Layout and imagery, as well as intelligent analysis and story-telling, build up a compelling picture of modern ambitions and their fates. Without ever lapsing into nostalgia or condescension, Traces of the Future is a pathbreaking and exemplary project to help the objects and subjects of African scientific and medical worlds follow their own novel pathways.
Simon Schaffer University of Cambridge, author of Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle & the Experimental Life Scientific laboratories do more than produce scientific knowledge. They also restructure space, build communities, inspire hopes, store junk, and facilitate interpersonal relationships. When the science stops, these traces remain, continuing to shape local physical and social environments. Through a focus on five defunct or transformed medical research centers in sub-Saharan Africa, this book attempts something of an ethnography of these modern ruins. From the musical compositions of a patient at the Uzuakoli leprosarium in Nigeria to the dispersed bricks of demolished hospital buildings in Ayos, Cameroon, to late night digs inspired by rumors of buried treasure in abandoned buildings at the Amani malaria research institute in Tanzania, the authors carefully curate hundreds of examples of the remnants of 20th-century dreams of modernization gone but not forgotten. The book is mostly a bricolage of images, snippets of recorded conversations, field notes, and biographical sketches designed to provoke an affective response more than to offer any kind of historical or ethnographic analysis. At times it tries too hard to mystify the mundane, but mostly it offers an intriguing window into the breadth and depth of social and cultural effects of medical research. Recommended.
Choice The team of editors who compiled Traces of the Future have produced a work unusual in design, original in character, and difficult to unravel in summary fashion. Part biographic picture book, part fragmented transcript, part meta-archival scrapbook, and part reflective memoir, the text demands much of its reader
and overall this is much to the good.
Isis Show Less