Doctoral Dissertation Research: Health and Nature in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Zululand

博士论文研究：二十世纪和二十一世纪祖鲁兰的健康与自然

• 批准号: 0802741
• 负责人: William Cronon
• 金额: $ 1.2万
• 依托单位: University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-04-01 至 2010-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0802741&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Health; Nature

South Africa in general, and KwaZulu-Natal specifically, is a place where staggering HIV prevalence rates reflect the uneven racial, economic, and environmental legacy of Apartheid, and where the government continues to waffle on how best to treat the epidemic. Indeed, HIV/AIDS is affecting nearly every segment of South Africa society, including large and small-scale environmental managers. Through natural resource management, which includes the everyday tasks of herding and gardening, behavioral modifications due to ill health are helping to inscribe the HIV/AIDS pandemic on the South African landscape. As the environment changes, so too does the health of the people. This HIV/AIDS-environment nexus puts the livelihoods of South Africa's poorest and most vulnerable citizens at great risk. This risk is then situated in a larger spatial and temporal context where local, state, and global actors are responding to today's challenges as a product of the region's environmental and epidemiological histories. Understanding HIV/AIDS and other health predicaments as environmental health conditions requires scholars and policy makers to broaden their conception of environmental health. This project pushes the boundaries of environmental health by attempting to understand the relationships between health and nature, as complex concepts that have multiple meanings, with biophysical and ideological components. Working in this South African context, this project poses three key questions: How are health and nature related? How have health and nature evolved from the mid-twentieth century to the present? What is the role of labor (via natural resource management) in connecting health and nature? A wide variety of methods will be employed to complete this project including qualitative and quantitative analyses from both oral and written sources. Methods will include the collection of life and oral histories, a historical re-survey, focus groups, landcover change analysis, and archival research. These methods will gather a large amount of data including qualitative information on local environmental and health changes, scientific reports, policy documents, historical aerial photographs, and longitudinal agricultural and epidemiological data. These sources will then be combined to provide a complete and nuanced understanding of health and nature in Pholela, KwaZulu-Natal from 1940 to the present.In order to understand how Pholela's current HIV/AIDS epidemic and landscape are a result of a larger cultural and historical context this project combines information gathered through archival sources, oral histories, and landcover change analysis. Further, by using a framework of health and nature as not just disease and environment, but as parts of larger social networks and systems of belief, this project will enable a broader understanding of both categories. To this point scholars and practitioners have tended to focus on straightforward environmental health conditions like malaria. As a result, the complete relationship between conditions like HIV/AIDS and the environment has seldom, if ever, been addressed. Sitting at the intersection of environmental history, medical and health and healing history, and political ecology, this project will explore the boundaries of environmental history and political ecology, by incorporating health into analyses of human-environment interactions. It will also encourage the literature on health and healing in Africa to incorporate biophysical aspects into analyses of socio-cultural context. To conduct this research the investigators will employ a mixed methodology. By broadening the idea of environmental health, this study will help scholars and policy makers see physical and ideological connections between the state of the environment in which people live and the health of the people themselves. This project stands poised to help alter the way both academics and practitioners address health and environmental concerns throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Finally, because this study stresses spatial and historical perspective, it will offer a way to look at how connections between human and environmental health change over both time and space.

总体而言，南非，特别是夸祖鲁-纳塔尔省，艾滋病毒感染率惊人，反映出种族隔离遗留下来的种族、经济和环境不平衡的问题，而且政府继续在如何最好地治疗这一流行病问题上胡思乱想。 事实上，艾滋病毒/艾滋病几乎影响着南非社会的每一个阶层，包括大大小小的环境管理者。 通过自然资源管理，包括放牧和园艺的日常任务，由于健康状况不佳而导致的行为改变正在帮助艾滋病毒/艾滋病流行病进入南非的土地。 随着环境的变化，人们的健康也会发生变化。 艾滋病毒/艾滋病与环境的这种联系使南非最贫穷和最脆弱公民的生计面临巨大风险。 这种风险被置于更大的时空背景下，地方、州和全球参与者正在应对当今的挑战，作为该地区环境和流行病学历史的产物。 将艾滋病毒/艾滋病和其他健康困境理解为环境健康状况需要学者和政策制定者拓宽他们的环境健康概念。 该项目试图理解健康与自然之间的关系，将其视为具有多种含义、具有生物物理和意识形态成分的复杂概念，从而突破了环境健康的界限。 在南非的背景下，该项目提出了三个关键问题：健康与自然有何关系？ 从二十世纪中叶到现在，健康和自然是如何演变的？ 劳动力（通过自然资源管理）在连接健康与自然方面发挥什么作用？ 将采用多种方法来完成该项目，包括来自口头和书面来源的定性和定量分析。 方法包括收集生活和口述历史、历史重新调查、焦点小组、土地覆盖变化分析和档案研究。 这些方法将收集大量数据，包括当地环境和健康变化的定性信息、科学报告、政策文件、历史航空照片以及纵向农业和流行病学数据。 然后将这些来源结合起来，以提供对 1940 年至今夸祖鲁-纳塔尔省 Pholela 的健康和自然的完整而细致的了解。为了了解 Pholela 目前的艾滋病毒/艾滋病流行和景观如何是更大的文化和历史背景的结果，该项目结合了通过档案来源、口述历史和土地覆盖变化分析收集的信息。 此外，通过使用健康和自然的框架，不仅将其视为疾病和环境，而且将其作为更大的社交网络和信仰体系的一部分，该项目将使人们对这两个类别有更广泛的理解。 到目前为止，学者和从业者倾向于关注疟疾等直接的环境健康状况。 因此，艾滋病毒/艾滋病等疾病与环境之间的完整关系很少得到解决。 该项目处于环境史、医疗健康和治疗史以及政治生态学的交叉点，将通过将健康纳入人类与环境相互作用的分析中，探索环境史和政治生态学的界限。 它还将鼓励有关非洲健康和治疗的文献将生物物理方面纳入社会文化背景的分析中。 为了进行这项研究，研究人员将采用混合方法。 通过拓宽环境健康的概念，这项研究将帮助学者和政策制定者看到人们生活的环境状况与人们自身健康之间的物理和意识形态联系。 该项目有望帮助改变学者和实践者解决整个撒哈拉以南非洲地区健康和环境问题的方式。 最后，由于这项研究强调空间和历史视角，它将提供一种研究人类与环境健康之间的联系如何随时间和空间变化的方法。