Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The Regulation, Circulation and Experiences of Novel Nutritive Substances: Rational Governance and the Gut in Contemporary South Africa

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。 这个博士论文研究改进补助金-由NSF的科学，技术社会计划-支持一个项目，该项目旨在了解南非人如何在后殖民民主秩序中对科学的地位进行解释。在艾滋病毒/艾滋病造成的营养和健康危机中，新的营养和治疗物质在南非各地大量出现。这些物质借鉴了免疫系统功能和微量营养素补充的思想，以及关于身体的象征逻辑的历史，这种逻辑纠缠着非洲多种多样的融合愈合系统。这项研究跟踪了围绕营养物质监管的法律的过程和政治辩论。 这些物质引发了全国性的争议，并使有关获得医疗保健、习惯权威和文化差异的宪法权利与种族隔离后政治秩序中的科学和“循证决策”产生了紧张关系。此外，通过探索南非农村一个地方的日常自我护理实践，该项目追踪了营养治疗剂在穿越法律的和科学地形、市场和家庭空间时的运动。该研究项目是对营养、健康和肠道作用知识构建的民族志调查。它考察了各种各样的行为者-科学家、社会活动家、药剂师、消费者和物品本身。由于该项目在南非多个地点跟踪这些物质及其引起的问题，因此重点关注营养物质在夸祖鲁-纳塔尔省Umkhanyakude区个人日常生活中的作用。研究借鉴了一系列民族志方法，包括档案研究，民族志访谈和参与者观察。 追踪科学、政治辩论和日常实践如何塑造关于营养和药理作用对身体的影响的想法，将为理解健康治理和日常健康行为之间的差距提供更广泛的影响。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This doctoral dissertation research improvement grant--by the Science, Technology & Society Program at NSF--supports a project that seeks to understand how South Africans interpret concepts of nourishment amidst contestation over the place of science in the postcolonial democratic order. In the midst of a crisis of nourishment and health in the presence of HIV/AIDS, novel nutritive and curative substances have proliferated across South Africa. The substances draw on ideas of immune system functioning and micronutrient supplementation, as well as on a history of symbolic logics about the body that entangles diverse and syncretic African systems of healing. The study tracks the legal processes and political debates around the regulation of nutritive substances. The substances have provoked national controversy and brought constitutional rights concerning access to health care, customary authority, and cultural difference into tension with science and "evidence-based decision making" in the post-apartheid political order. Further, by exploring the everyday practices of self-care in one locality in rural South Africa, the project traces the movements of the nutritive curatives as they traverse legal and scientific terrains, markets, and domestic spaces. The research project is an ethnographic enquiry into the construction of knowledge around nutrition, health, and the role of the gut. It examines a variety of actors--scientists, social activists, pharmacists, consumers and the objects themselves. As the project follows the substances and the questions they raise across multiple sites in South Africa, it focuses on the role of the nutritive substances in the everyday lives of individuals in the Umkhanyakude district of KwaZulu-Natal province. The research draws on a range of ethnographic methods, including archival research, ethnographic interviews, and participant observation. Tracing the ways science, political debates, and everyday practice shape ideas about sustenance and pharmacological action on the body will provide broader impacts in understanding the gaps between health governance and everyday health behavior.