Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-06T02:52:25.777Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - Mortality and the Ethics of Ethnographic Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2021

Get access

Summary

In the presence of death

I wish to sketch briefly the reception of individual deaths in the neighbourhoods in which I came to know people, to create an awareness of the effects of the multiplication of deaths within the society of the living; the ways in which death casts shadows amongst those who survive; the ways in which a preponderance of death is deeply disturbing to people's sense of the world and its proper construction. In the previous chapter, I dealt with how the particular forms of death attendant upon AIDS – preceded as they are by protracted, corporeal suffering, and attached to notions of shame – may realign social relationships. Here, I relate Phumzile's and my ongoing interaction with another young man, Mandla Shabalala, and his family. Through remaining close to our unfolding relationships, I seek to delineate the ways in which questions of ethics, in relation to research and in the face of a particular person's suffering, emerged through time, in careful mutual creation of co-presence. An ethical thread to our interaction could not be presupposed through an appeal to a pre-given set of rules. Instead, it emerged within sensitivities, including the capacity on our part to suspend a particular approach and to reconfigure how to listen to pain and silence at different moments. In short, through our interaction with Mandla, we learned how to accompany a particular person in his suffering. We developed an ethic of suspending too quick an understanding, of holding off the impulse to intervene, or to fill silence with speech, to allow an ill person time in which to engage in ways that they had chosen.

The research, commingling with a certain intimacy, as is the nature of ethnographic work, was increasingly conducted with a weighty sense of the presence and possibility of death. Phumzile and I frequently attended and heard of funerals. In September 2003, Zinhle, the home-based carer of the young man whose story appeared in the previous chapter, compiled a map with me of 68 homesteads out of the hundred in her neighbourhood. We placed a red dot next to 22 out of the 68 homes in which no deaths had occurred from November 1999 to the day on which we drew the map in September 2003.

Type
Chapter
Information
AIDS, Intimacy and Care in Rural KwaZulu-Natal
A Kinship of Bones
, pp. 59 - 82
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×