In the first two volumes of this work, Paul Ricoeur examined the relations between time and narrative in historical writing, fiction, and theories of literature. This final volume, a comprehensive reexamination and synthesis of the ideas developed in volumes 1 and 2, stands as Ricoeur's most complete and satisfying presentation of his own philosophy.

Time and Narrative

South Africa has experienced declining marriage rates and the increasing practice of cohabitation without marriage. This study aims to improve the understanding of the relationship between marital status and HIV in South Africa, an HIV hyperendemic country, through an analysis of findings from the 2012 South African National HIV Prevalence, Incidence and Behaviour Survey. The nationally representative population-based cross-sectional survey collected data on HIV and socio-demographic and behavioural determinants in South Africa. This analysis considered respondents aged 16 years and older who consented to participate in the survey and provided dried blood spot specimens for HIV testing (N = 17,356). After controlling for age, race, having multiple sexual partners, condom use at last sex, urban/rural dwelling and level of household income, those who were married living with their spouse had significantly reduced odds of being HIV-positive compared to all other marital spouses groups. HIV incidence was 0.27% among respondents who were married living with their spouses; the highest HIV incidence was found in the cohabiting group (2.91%). Later marriage (after age 24) was associated with increased odds of HIV prevalence. Our analysis suggests an association between marital status and HIV prevalence and incidence in contemporary South Africa, where odds of being HIV-positive were found to be lower among married individuals who lived with their spouses compared to all other marital status groups. HIV prevention messages therefore need to be targeted to unmarried populations, especially cohabitating populations. As low socio-economic status, low social cohesion and the resulting destabilization of sexual relationships may explain the increased risk of HIV among unmarried populations, it is necessary to address structural issues including poverty that create an environment unfavourable to stable sexual relationships.

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Does marital status matter in an HIV hyperendemic country? Findings from the 2012 South African National HIV Prevalence, Incidence and Behaviour Survey.

Anthropologists engaged in post-colonial studies are increasingly adopting an historical perspective and using archives. Yet their archival activity tends to remain more an extractive than an ethnographic one. Documents are thus still invoked piecemeal to confirm the colonial invention of certain practices or to underscore cultural claims, silent. Yet such mining of thecontent of government commissions, reports, and other archival sources rarely pays attention to their peculiar placement andform. Scholars need to move from archive-assource to archive-as-subject. This article, using document production in the Dutch East Indies as an illustration, argues that scholars should view archives not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography. This requires a sustained engagement with archives as cultural agents of “fact” production, of taxonomies in the making, and of state authority. What constitutes the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of classification and epistemology signal at specific times are (and reflect) critical features of colonial politics and state power. The archive was the supreme technology of the late nineteenth-century imperial state, a repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections between secrecy, the law, and power.

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Colonial archives and the arts of governance

Diligence and a strong sense of mission have shaped how Paul Farmer, a well-published anthropologist physician, undertook the study of Do Kay, a small Haitian village struck by the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). His method of research goes beyond his being the participant observer who conducted interviews and recorded what he saw and heard over a period of almost a decade. Farmer evidently identified with the Do Kay community, winning the confidence of its people, becoming the trusted recipient of their intimate insights and disclosures. Casual discussions, rumors, complaints, spontaneous reactions to radio and TV broadcasts, political and religious opinions are all ably assimilated and interwoven into the narrative. Thus this work supersedes the limitations normally attached to the rigors of scientific objectivity. Even if this approach departs somewhat from the conventions of traditional anthropology and closes the door on the likelihood of its ever being replicated, the work is

AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame

Inspired by Sweetness and Power, in which Sidney Mintz traces the colonial and mercantilist routes of enslaving tastes and artificial needs, this paper maps a late‐20th‐century global trade in bodies, body parts, desires, and invented scarcities. Organ transplant takes place today in a transnational space with surgeons, patients, organ donors, recipients, brokers, and intermediaries—some with criminal connections—following new paths of capital and technology in the global economy. The stakes are high, for the technologies and practices of transplant surgery have demonstrated their power to reconceptualize the human body and the relations of body parts to the whole and to the person and of people and bodies to each other. The phenomenal spread of these technologies and the artificial needs, scarcities, and new commodities (i.e., fresh organs) that they inspire—especially within the context of a triumphant neoliberalism—raise many issues central to anthropology's concern with global dominations and local re...

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The Global Traffic in Human Organs1

How does democracy fare when the people governed insist they live in a world with witches? If the government of a people afflicted by witchcraft refuses to punish witches, how does it avoid becoming alienated from the perceived needs of its people or, worse, seen as being in league with witches? In Soweto, South Africa, the constant threat of violent crime, the increase in black socio-economic inequality, the AIDS pandemic, and a widespread fear of witchcraft have converged to create a pervasive sense of insecurity among citizens and a unique public policy problem for government. In "Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa, " Adam Ashforth examines how people in Soweto and other parts of post-apartheid South Africa manage their fear of 'evil forces' such as witchcraft. Ashforth examines the dynamics of insecurity in the everyday life of Soweto at the turn of the twenty-first century. He develops a new framework for understanding occult violence as a form of spiritual insecurity and documents new patterns of interpretation attributing agency to evil forces. Finally, he analyzes the response of post-apartheid governments to issues of spiritual insecurity and suggests how these matters pose severe long-term challenges to the legitimacy of the democratic state.

Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa

In this paper I shall begin by outlining some of the political dimensions of the crisis understood in the conventional discourses of public health policy. Then I shall inquire as to how these dimensions might be complicated by the question of witchcraft. My method here will be somewhat abstract and hypothetical. Rather than an ethnographic description of AIDS and witchcraft in concrete circumstances I shall outline a general framework of presumptions and hypotheses within which discussion of matters relating to occult powers typically take place. Given certain elementary propositions concerning the nature and action of invisible power that I shall call the "witchcraft paradigm" (which I shall stress is by no means irrationality or superstition) I shall suggest that it is entirely plausible for people suffering from diseases related to AIDS to interpret their afflictions as a form of witchcraft. I shall examine some of the ways in which HIV/AIDS can in fact be interpreted as witchcraft and shall present preliminary evidence to suggest that many people actually do interpret their illness this way. Following this we shall be in a position to begin investigating possible social and political implications of such modes of interpretation. (excerpt)

An Epidemic of Witchcraft? The Implications of AIDS for the Post-Apartheid State

On political power and political knowledge naming the "natives", designing a state a "permanent cure for an economic evil" different "parts of the same big machine" discovering a different difference reformulating realities for the era of "reform" antinomies of the divided state

The politics of official discourse in twentieth-century South Africa

Adam Ashforth, an Australian who has spent many years in Soweto, finds his longtime friend Madumo in dire circumstances: his family has accused him of using witchcraft to kill his mother and has thrown him out on the street. Convinced that his life is cursed, Madumo seeks help among Soweto's bewildering array of healers and prophets. An inyanga, or traditional healer, confirms that he has indeed been bewitched. Ashforth, skeptical yet supportive, remains by Madumo's side as he embarks upon a physically grueling treatment regimen that he follows religiously - almost to the point of death. Asforth's beautifully written account of Madumo's struggle shows that the problem of witchcraft is not simply superstition but a complex response to spiritual insecurity in a troubling time of political and economic upheaval. Through Madumo's story, Ashforth opens up a world that few have seen, a deeply unsettling place where the question, "Do you believe in witchcraft?" is not a simple one at all. The insights that emerge as Ashforth accompanies his friend on an odyssey through Soweto's supernatural perils have profound implications even for those of us who live in worlds without witches.

Madumo, a Man Bewitched

Drawing upon literature from Australia, Canada, England, India, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States this article offers an alternative framework for the study of Commissions of Inquiry. Conventional understandings of such inquiries as policy-making instruments of Government fail to grasp the significance of their political form. A reading which stresses the symbolic and ritual aspects of their work and analyses the forms of communication which are organized through public inquiries provides a better framework for grasping the place of these institutions in the reproduction of State power. This article argues that public inquiries derive authority from their distinctive legal, social, and epistemological status. The work of such inquiries can be characterized as ‘reckoning schemes of legitimation’, and this work structures political discourse in three phases: investigative, persuasive, and archival. The abiding significance of Commissions lies not simply in the investigation of facts and the recommendation of policy, but in the elaboration of the ‘idea of the state’. Such schemes of legitimation serve in constituting a realm of discourse through which collective action vis-a-vis Society by those who act in the name of the State becomes thinkable, and thereby organizable.

Adam Ashforth

Papers

Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa

An Epidemic of Witchcraft? The Implications of AIDS for the Post-Apartheid State

The politics of official discourse in twentieth-century South Africa

Madumo, a Man Bewitched

Reckoning Schemes of Legitimation: On Commissions of Inquiry as Power/Knowledge Forms