Soap, Bloodsuckers, and Surveys: Moral Economies of AIDS Survey Research in Malawi

A talk by anthropologist Crystal Biruk, from Oberlin College.

Venue: WISER Seminar Room, 6th Floor Richard Ward Building, Main Campus

Abstract: On a single day in June, hundreds of rural Malawian research participants are given a gift of red Lifebuoy soap in exchange for their responses to a three-hour survey administered by a foreign-led AIDS research team. These researchers return year after year to collect information and cheek swabs for HIV tests; their continued presence in Malawi marks the small landlocked country as “research saturated” or “over researched.” Yet even as interactions between research projects and the researched become scripted and familiar, research participants mobilize tactics to express their displeasure with the transactions that comprise data collection: complaining about the soap-gift, hiding from researchers, and circulating rumors that cast project teams as opopa magazi (bloodsuckers). In elaborating the competing logics of ethical compensation and moral obligation through which researchers and the researched interpret the soap-for-information exchange, I disassemble a facile distinction between globally codified research ethics and a local moral economy. I argue that logics of proper exchange are intersubjective, processual, and historically embedded—in this case, in ongoing encounters between insiders and outsiders in rural Malawi. This paper complements anthropological accounts of global health and other biopolitical interventions in Africa by drawing together the political economies (circulation of statistics and other data, flows of research funding, e.g.) and moral economies (losses, gains, reciprocity, and everyday moral calculus) of AIDS research and then showing how the two are co-produced. I draw on twenty months of participant observation with AIDS survey projects in Malawi and analysis of archival data and human subjects research protocols.