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

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

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.