Marlee Tichenor
I began conducting ethnographic research on health policy production and implementation in Senegal in 2011, first on how to understand and control malaria and then on the movement for universal health coverage. During my first summer in Senegal, I took a trip to the much greener and more sparsely populated southeast corner of the country, and while there, my everyday role of toubab/white-American-anthropologist-patron-visitor in Dakar became entangled with unexpected new responsibilities, including, as can be seen below, that of providing ethical expertise.
While in green, green Kédougou taking time off from researching health policy in Dakar, Senegal, I ran into a family of Catalan tourists. I joined them on a quest for hippos, and a group of children from the local village volunteered to join us.
The Catalan mother turned to me, at one point, and asked: “What do you think of giving the begging children candy?”
It was obviously something she and her partner had been debating at length, and they had very different opinions than each other on the matter. But their worries were ones I had not yet considered. Although I had often reflected on the ethics of giving while conducting ethnographic research, I wasn’t sure that I could be relied on for a better answer than them.
“I hear,” she said, “that it is better if you play with them, if you give them love and attention.”
The hippos appear. Photo courtesy of author.
By that point, we had been giving the children attention, all along our hippo adventure. We trudged through the forest along the river, before finally happening upon the twitching ears and sprays of water from a nose that hinted at the creatures that sat under the surface of the water. I had been giving our volunteer companions attention without question, without thinking about it, really—one of those few moments when I was just doing rather than running a constant list of pros and cons in my head. We held their hands, lifted them over creeks, helped them climb over logs. I spoke French to them, and they spoke Pulaar back to me, sprinkled with ouis and nons, neither of us really understanding the other but enjoying our language dance, nonetheless. At the end of our hippo journey, as we were climbing back into the tourist van, the kids were asking for presents. And this is when the mother turned to me to ask what I, as an anthropologist, thought about giving the children candy. What was my expert, ethical opinion?
I had no opinion on the ethics of giving candy versus attention and love. I had plenty of opinions on giving candy versus money, but that had mostly to do with the children I encountered in Dakar who attended Quranic schools and begged on the streets—known as talibés or “students” in Arabic—who would then have to give over their earnings to their teachers rather than enjoy something themselves, directly. It seemed to me, perhaps naively, that children in rural regions might have more control over their spoils. Nonetheless, I responded that I often gave candy as a gift and didn’t find anything morally reprehensible in doing so. At this point it became clear that she was also worried about what the candy would do to their teeth, out there, so far from a medical center. She voiced these concerns as she watched her partner gleefully hand out a bagful of candy to ready hands, his opinion now reinforced by my supposed expert one.
I thought about how challenging it is to navigate so many layers of need. Which things do you worry about? The enjoyment the kids would get out of the candy might be worth the possible cavities. But how many tourist groups did they join on these quests for hippos? How many visitors gave candy or money or nothing at all? And how could we not give? Yes, the attention might be nice, but I was certainly not assuming these children were starved for attention. And I superimposed onto the Catalan mother’s worries some of my own: how aware we were of how insufficient anything we could give would be; how my own research, or my own being in Senegal, was a form of extraction that no gift could possibly remunerate; and how giving entangled us in relations of enough or not enough care. Nor did I put so much value in my own company to think that holding a little girl in my lap as we sat in a bar in the jungle could do anything more for that child but allow us to be humans, together, for one brief moment.
Postscript Reflection
The process of isolating a single moment that might speak coherently to the topic of responsibility from my research, detailing the story in order to correctly open up the thorny issues to be found there, discussing my choices and their implications with my colleagues over a couple of glorious days in September 2023, and iteratively refining this story over the following years have been more difficult and more rewarding than I could have ever imagined. Sitting with my colleagues in Durham in Northern England, we discussed again and again our complicated positionalities with regards to global health knowledge production and the various ways that we were interpellated by those we talked to in the course of our research—as authority, as witness, as expert, as (un)welcome guest—and the discomfort we felt as we navigated our expectations and the expectations of those around us. The universality of this discomfort allowed us to get to the more nuanced ways that we feel responsible and are held accountable in our own research, and I am grateful for the opportunity to allow the thorny issues to open out rather than close down, like hippo ears hinting at what we might find below the surface.
Marlee Tichenor is a medical anthropologist at the University of Edinburgh who teaches and writes about the impact of quantification in global governance, the production of global health knowledge, and our affective relationship with quantified data.
This essay is part of the series “Flashes of Responsibility: Craft, Ethics, and Impact in Global Health Ethnography,” co-edited by Liana Chase,* Marlee Tichenor,* and Sienna Craig.
*Chase and Tichenor are co-first editors of the series.