Reflections on a field across time and space: the emergent medical and health humanities in South Africa

Abstract

In this paper, we draw on our own cross-cultural experience of engaging with different incarnations of the medical and health humanities (MHH) in the UK and South Africa to reflect on what is distinct and the same about MHH in these locations. MHH spaces, whether departments, programmes or networks, have espoused a common critique of biomedical dualism and reductionism, a celebration of qualitative evidence and the value of visual and performative arts for their research, therapeutic and transformative social potential. However, there have also been differences, and importantly a different ‘identity’ among some leading South African scholars and practitioners, who have felt that if MHH were to speak from the South as opposed to the North, they would say something quite different. We seek to contextualise our personal reflections on the development of the field in South Africa over recent years within wider debates about MHH in the context of South African academia and practice, drawing in part on interviews conducted by one of the authors with South African researchers and practitioners and our own reflections as ‘Northerners’ in the ‘South’.

Inheriting Mary Ainsworth and the Strange Situation: Questions of Legacy, Authority, and Methodology for Contemporary Developmental Attachment Researchers

“…His own doctoral supervisor was the former doctoral student of one of the interviewees 25 years earlier, but there had been no prior contact between RS and this interviewee. Reflexivity was helped by being based in South Africa, away from the centers of gravity of attachment research and their institutional influence (Hume & Wainwright, 2018). RS was supported by regular meetings and discussions with RD, a historian based in the United Kingdom, who provided feedback on the analysis and paper draft.…”

Biomedicine and the humanities: growing pains

“…There is a long history, too, of the arts’ conjunction with health, but the arts as health research , in particular, is a concept in its infancy 8. The work of medical anthropologists and historians in locations such as the USA, and of arts practitioners in the USA and the UK, suggests that this is more familiar territory in some countries than others.…”

“…Besides the schools one might expect to find in South African Universities, Wits somewhat unusually houses social sciences and, more unexpectedly, speech pathology, audiology and psychology within the ‘humanities’. Equally rare in sub-Saharan Africa universities is the formal presence of the MH, except at the University of Cape Town8 and in a research stream within the broader multidisciplinary work of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. As this SI suggests, there are many scholars working in areas that might broadly fall within the ‘MH’ rubric across different schools and research units across the region, however.…”