2 - Mortality and the Ethics of Ethnographic Research

Summary

In the presence of death

I wish to sketch briefly the reception of individual deaths in the neighbourhoods in which I came to know people, to create an awareness of the effects of the multiplication of deaths within the society of the living; the ways in which death casts shadows amongst those who survive; the ways in which a preponderance of death is deeply disturbing to people's sense of the world and its proper construction. In the previous chapter, I dealt with how the particular forms of death attendant upon AIDS – preceded as they are by protracted, corporeal suffering, and attached to notions of shame – may realign social relationships. Here, I relate Phumzile's and my ongoing interaction with another young man, Mandla Shabalala, and his family. Through remaining close to our unfolding relationships, I seek to delineate the ways in which questions of ethics, in relation to research and in the face of a particular person's suffering, emerged through time, in careful mutual creation of co-presence. An ethical thread to our interaction could not be presupposed through an appeal to a pre-given set of rules. Instead, it emerged within sensitivities, including the capacity on our part to suspend a particular approach and to reconfigure how to listen to pain and silence at different moments. In short, through our interaction with Mandla, we learned how to accompany a particular person in his suffering. We developed an ethic of suspending too quick an understanding, of holding off the impulse to intervene, or to fill silence with speech, to allow an ill person time in which to engage in ways that they had chosen.

The research, commingling with a certain intimacy, as is the nature of ethnographic work, was increasingly conducted with a weighty sense of the presence and possibility of death. Phumzile and I frequently attended and heard of funerals. In September 2003, Zinhle, the home-based carer of the young man whose story appeared in the previous chapter, compiled a map with me of 68 homesteads out of the hundred in her neighbourhood. We placed a red dot next to 22 out of the 68 homes in which no deaths had occurred from November 1999 to the day on which we drew the map in September 2003.