African Experiments in Health and Healing: Science from the Home and Homestead

Abstract

Through five ethnographic stories, this article rethinks science from the African home and homestead. Focused on our interlocutors’ efforts to heal and protect themselves and their families, these stories of experimentation challenge the ways science is often understood in science studies. Drawing on the literature on science and technology studies (STS) in Africa, postcolonial and feminist STS, medical pluralism, and ontological approaches to health, we argue that rooting our analysis in the worlds of our interlocutors and the practices through which they heal forces a rethinking of what we mean by science. In its place, we offer a science that attends to ontological multiplicity and exceeds and expands on more traditional definitions of science, which for Africa have been aligned with the field experiment and the laboratory. We conclude with the stakes of this intervention, arguing that a more unsettled science studies will decenter the Global North, universalisms, and whiteness, reshaping how we understand science.