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In view of persistent global inequalities in scientific knowledge production with clear centers and peripheries, this paper examines a lingering concern for many scientists in the Global South: why is it, at times, so hard to have scientific insights from the South recognized? This paper addresses this big question from within a long-term field immersion in a Ugandan–Australian scientific collaboration in molecular biology. I show how disciplinary hierarchies of value affect the distribution of labor between Uganda and Australia and thematize the role of place and its affective atmospheres that texture the quotidian scientific work in this project. Unsurprisingly, they tend to devalue Ugandan sites and contributions, and turn Uganda into a rather unlikely site for new insights to emerge. However, in spite of doing devalued and outsourced “menial” labor such as fieldwork, Ugandan biologists’ fieldwork involves affective encounters with their experimental banana plants that thereby become differently thinkable. The paper argues that attending to affective atmospheres that infuse research sites offers clues about scientists’ position in global hierarchies and at the same time can help make room for insights that emanate from unexpected places.

Cooking bananas ( matooke) are a main staple in central Uganda and are very important to well-being and health. Recently, matooke have also been associated with micronutrient deficiencies among children and women. For a number of years, this fruit has been at the heart of a public health strategy that seeks to create ‘better bananas’, that is, biofortified or nutritionally enriched bananas. The efforts to biofortify food crops are part of a recent trend in the nutrition world towards improving the quality and not only the quantity of food. This article unpacks recent configurations of philanthropy, plant science and global public health and the ways in which they make conventional food crops thinkable, for instance, as cost-effective medicines. This emergent and economized form of valuing bananas is in tension with how Ugandans appreciate bananas in everyday life. I show that emerging valuations of food matter but still should not be mistaken for changes on the ground. This article thereby searches for a middle ground between critiques of global public health and everyday practice in Uganda as well as between praxeological and structuralist/culturalist approaches to food. Instead of dismissing this banana as part of a mere paternalistic project, I show that it also is ‘good’ conceptually in that it makes bananas and health thinkable in new ways.

This article complicates romances of infrastructural improvisation by describing infrastructural failures that expose researchers to hazardous chemicals in a Ugandan molecular biology lab. To meet project deadlines, to make careers and to participate in transnational collaborative projects, Ugandan biologists have to stand in for decaying or absent infrastructures with their bodies. Ugandan biologists hide such sacrifices from their international scientific partners and direct the blame elsewhere. An unclear culpability results precisely from the ways in which power works and is distributed across transnational scientific infrastructures.

How does one know a toxic substance? Perhaps paradoxically, through contact with it, as I show ethnographically from a molecular biology laboratory in Uganda, a site where people routinely handle a range of chemicals, including potentially hazardous toxicants. I analyse an everyday situation in which researchers worked with ethidium bromide, a substance regularly used to stain DNA bands in gels at this Ugandan lab but also in many comparable labs elsewhere. Ethidium bromide is one of the most fear‐inspiring chemicals at this lab; it is considered a potent mutagen and thus counts as highly carcinogenic. While the lab has clear safety procedures concerning how to handle this substance correctly, these are often not implemented in a hard‐to‐control lab setting marked by both material deprivation and a steady flow of unremunerated volunteers who seek to gain practical experience. I show how experienced Ugandan scientists have learned to mitigate their own risk of exposure to ethidium bromide by developing choreographed routines that prevent them from inadvertently touching it. I examine this as a way of ‘handling’ a dangerous substance, developing and habituating skilled movements of hands and bodies that then are passed on to other researchers. It is not an abstract knowledge of a substance's chemical properties that counts here; instead, knowing a toxic substance implies practical routines of handling. How does one know a toxic substance? Perhaps paradoxically, through contact with it, as I show ethnographically from a molecular biology laboratory in Uganda, a site where people routinely handle a range of chemicals, including potentially hazardous toxicants. I analyse an everyday situation in which researchers worked with ethidium bromide, a substance regularly used to stain DNA bands in gels at this Ugandan lab but also in many comparable labs elsewhere. Ethidium bromide is one of the most fear‐inspiring chemicals at this lab; it is considered a potent mutagen and thus counts as highly carcinogenic. While the lab has clear safety procedures concerning how to handle this substance correctly, these are often not implemented in a hard‐to‐control lab setting marked by both material deprivation and a steady flow of unremunerated volunteers who seek to gain practical experience. I show how experienced Ugandan scientists have learned to mitigate their own risk of exposure to ethidium bromide by developing choreographed routines that prevent them from inadvertently touching it. I examine this as a way of ‘handling’ a dangerous substance, developing and habituating skilled movements of hands and bodies that then are passed on to other researchers. It is not an abstract knowledge of a substance's chemical properties that counts here; instead, knowing a toxic substance implies practical routines of handling.

Rejoinder to Whyte, Sue Reynolds, Michael Whyte, and David Kyanddondo. 2018. “Technologies of inquiry: HIV tests and divination.” Hau : Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1): 97–108

Biofortification of staple crops has been proposed as a strategy to address micronutrient malnutrition, particularly with respect to insufficient intake of vitamin A, iron, zinc, and folate. The World Health Organization, in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science at the New York Academy of Sciences, convened a technical consultation entitled "Staple Crops Biofortified with Vitamins and Minerals: Considerations for a Public Health Strategy" in April 2016. Participants of the consultation reviewed the definition of biofortification of staple crops, patterns of crops production, processing, consumption, seed varieties, and micronutrient stability and bioavailability, as well as farmers' adoption and acceptability of the modified crops. Also discussed were economic, environmental, safety, and equity aspects of biofortified crops, as well as legal, policy, regulatory, and ethical issues for the implementation of biofortification strategies in agriculture and nutrition. Consultation working groups identified important and emerging technical issues, lessons learned, and research priorities to better support the evidence of improved nutrition and unintended adverse effects of biofortification. This paper provides the background and rationale of the technical consultation, synopsizes the presentations, and provides a summary of the main considerations proposed by the working groups.

Recently an ancient resource—gold—gained new importance in Sudan. To inquire into the making of values and their negotiation at a time of national economic reorientation, I explore the emergence of a resource category, so-called clean gold, and link this to the introduction of a new prospecting technology—metal detectors. I follow the translation of metal detectors to Sudan and explore them in relation to a broader techno-economic infrastructure of artisanal gold mining that enables the extractive practice and circulates new forms of moral reasoning. Not only has a new resource category emerged but I argue that these devices and the moral worlds they have coconstituted have also enabled younger men to test and challenge the economic and moral authority of an older generation of men.

All social theory emphasises that institutions universally play a crucial role in organising the ways in which people live together. At the same time the concept is vaguely defined and used in different ways. Inspired by the pragmatic sociology of critique, we emphasise how institutions enable people and things to hold together and provide important references for action in settings with limited predictability for everyday life. We first analyse how the concept of institutions has been used in scholarship on land tenure in Sudan. We then suggest, using a case study, that increased attention to the different ways in which actors validate or challenge institutions helps to examine the precariousness of institutional orders in the Sudans. This can move Sudan Studies beyond some of the limitations of previous scholarship, such as a tendency towards interpretations that reiterate institutions as timeless, discrete and immutable units such as “traditional” or “modern”.

External dynamics and processes have long affected the Lower Atbara area of Sudan, and have irreversibly transformed nomadic pastoral livelihood systems. In the context of resource scarcity and recurring conflicts, this paper analyses how Rashayda pastoralists from Um Sayala responded to challenges to their pastoral production. As relative newcomers to Sudan, the Rashayda represent a peculiar case because their access to pastoral resources has been challenged since their arrival in Sudan. But in times of crisis, such as the drought of 1985, their traditionally strong ties to the Gulf States served them as a buffer, mitigating the negative effects of the crisis. This paper highlights five biographies, which reveal individual responses to the catastrophic drought and their outcomes. It concludes by discussing how the Rashayda tackled the competition for sparse resources and resource contractions in times of crisis, and reveals some internal and external consequences for the group. Keywords: Livelihood strategies, pasture contraction, Rashayda, resource conflicts Approaching the problem In past decades the rural population in Sudan, like other North African countries, was subject to watershed changes in political and socio-economic contexts such as land and agricultural reforms, the institution of mega-irrigation projects, the introduction of new technologies, altered marketing conditions and a new dimension of environmental disasters (Muller-Mahn 2001:71, Breuer 2007a: 165-179, 2007b: 11-15, 37ff, Gertel 2007: 15-30). Livestock producers and farmers had to cope with novel challenges, which often limited their access to natural resources. The reaction to such pressures is far from uniform. This article focuses on a group of Rashayda pastoralists from the encampment at Umm Sayala in the Lower Atbara area, where dozens of biographical and key informant interviews were carried out. (1) Starting with the Rashayda's unique role as late arriving immigrants, the research sheds light on the group's specific responses to a major drought crisis. This is contextualized by an introduction to Northern Sudan and the Lower Atbara area, as well as to intertribal resource conflicts and processes of pasture contraction. A brief section will then offer some background information on the Rashayda people and recent political reconfigurations within the framework of the Eastern Sudan Peace Agreement. Embedded in this setting, a selection of biographies reveals the transformations of the main livelihood strategies in response to crises. Building on the strategies employed on an individual and group-specific basis, the paper will end by assessing some internal and external consequences of the Rashayda's reaction to a drought crisis in a setting of resource competition. It will argue that externally, through various strategic alliances, clever tactics and transnational connections, the Rashayda managed to gain ground and bring about a shift of power in the regional tribal canvas, while internally, processes of social differentiation are intensifying. The Lower Atbara area: introduction to a peripheral region Northern Sudan is commonly described as the area between the border to Egypt and Khartoum and is marked by two dominant features: the Nile and its narrow cultivable strip, as well as the desert. The Nile and its tributaries provide the main water source for the predominantly riverside, agrarian population (Nohlen 2002: 751). The arid and semi-arid hinterlands are dominated by mobile pastoralism and/or subsistence agriculture (Nohlen 2002: 751, UNDAF and CCA 2002, FAO 2005). The Lower Atbara area is a peripheral sub-region of Northern Sudan, lying in the River Nile State. Thus far, it has received little academic or other interest. Following Abdel Ati (1985), the Lower Atbara area refers to the territory extending between the village of Al-Mogren at the confluence of the Nile and Atbara in the northwest, the village of Ba'aluk in the southeast and the Wadi Mukabrab in the south. …

Nomaden scheinen aus unserem Alltag fast vollständig verschwunden zu sein. Doch die Abhängigkeit von Mobilität, die Bewältigung finanzieller Unsicherheiten sowie der ausgewogene Umgang mit unserer Umwelt fordern alle, auch ›moderne‹ Gesellschaften heraus. In der Wahrnehmung von Sesshaften verkörpern Nomaden und andere Mobile bis heute allerdings oft das Rückständige, Fremde und Bedrohliche, besonders im Hinblick auf staatliche Ordnungen. Dieser Band zeigt Nomaden hingegen als frühe Globalisierer. Er verdeutlicht, welche Flexibilität sie im Umgang mit widrigen Bedingungen entfalten, wie sie ihr Überleben in karger Umwelt gestalten und wie sie es schaffen, über Jahrtausende nachhaltig mit knappen Ressourcen zu wirtschaften.

A major program for the diagnosis and treatment of specific dyslexia was established in the Marathon County (Wisconsin) Child Guidance Clinic. Funded by the Woodson Foundation and the Mental Hygiene Division of the State of Wisconsin, the clinic has been functioning for nearly two years. This paper reports the experience of the first year of operation of the clinic and analyzes the first fifty completed cases.

The utility of various hypotheses for explaining fertility differentials among religious groups is first considered. Reference is made to the particularistic theology socioeconomic composition and minority status hypotheses. Of the three the particularistic theology hypothesis is shown to be more applicable in explaining reasons for the differential fertility of Mormons in the United States. "Analyses of Mormons in the National Fertility Surveys of 1965 1970 and 1975 indicate that: (1) Mormons are at least as likely to have ever used birth control as are white Protestants; (2) Mormons are less likely to be current users than either Catholics or Protestants; (3) about 50 percent of Mormons delay use until after the first child and 25 percent delay until after the second child; (4) Mormons like the U.S. population as a whole adopt modern effective methods of contraception; and (5) when compared with the less devout more devout Mormons have distinctive patterns of timing contraceptive use." (EXCERPT)