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

总体而言，南非，特别是夸祖鲁-纳塔尔地区，令人震惊的艾滋病毒感染率反映了种族隔离带来的不平衡的种族、经济和环境遗产，政府在如何最好地治疗这种流行病上继续摇摆不定。事实上，艾滋病毒/艾滋病正在影响南非社会的几乎每一个阶层，包括大小规模的环境管理人员。通过自然资源管理，包括放牧和园艺的日常任务，由于健康不佳而导致的行为改变有助于将艾滋病毒/艾滋病大流行列入南非的版图。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关系将南非最贫穷和最脆弱公民的生计置于极大的危险之中。然后，这一风险位于更大的时空背景中，地方、国家和全球行为者作为该区域环境和流行病历史的产物，正在应对当今的挑战。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对环境健康的概念。该项目通过试图理解健康与自然之间的关系来推动环境健康的界限，因为健康和自然之间的关系是具有多种含义的复杂概念，具有生物物理和意识形态成分。在南非的背景下，这个项目提出了三个关键问题：健康和自然是如何联系在一起的？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)在连接健康和自然方面的作用是什么？将采用多种方法完成这一项目，包括从口头和书面来源进行定性和定量分析。方法将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，包括关于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，这些来源将被结合起来，以提供从1940年到现在对夸祖鲁-纳塔尔Pholela的健康和自然的完整和细微的了解。为了了解Pholela目前的艾滋病毒/艾滋病流行和景观是如何成为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，通过将健康与自然的框架不仅作为疾病和环境，而且作为更大的社会网络和信仰系统的一部分，该项目将使人们能够更广泛地了解这两个类别。在这一点上，学者和实践者往往把重点放在疟疾等简单的环境健康状况上。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。这个项目位于环境历史、医疗健康和治疗历史以及政治生态的交叉点，将通过将健康纳入人与环境相互作用的分析来探索环境历史和政治生态的边界。它还将鼓励关于非洲健康和治疗的文献将生物物理学方面纳入对社会文化背景的分析。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态与人们自身健康之间的物质和思想联系。该项目准备帮助改变整个撒哈拉以南非洲地区学术界和实践者解决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，它将提供一种方法来研究人类与环境健康之间的联系如何在时间和空间上发生变化。

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.