Hearsay Ethnography: Conversational Journals as a Method for Studying Culture in Action.

Social scientists have long struggled to develop methods adequate to their theoretical understanding of meaning as collective and dynamic. While culture is widely understood as an emergent property of collectivities, the methods we use keep pulling us back towards interview-situated accounts and an image of culture as located in individual experience. Scholars who seek to access supra-individual semiotic structures by studying public rituals and other collectively-produced texts then have difficulty capturing the dynamic processes through which such meanings are created and changed in situ. To try to capture more effectively the way meaning is produced and re-produced in everyday life, we focus here on conversational interactions-the voices and actions that constitute the relational space among actors. Conversational journals provide us with a method: the analysis of texts produced by cultural insiders who keep journals of who-said-what-to-whom in conversations they overhear or events they participate in during the course of their daily lives. We describe the method, distinguishing it from other approaches and noting its drawbacks. We then illustrate the methodological advantages of conversational journals with examples from our texts. We end with a discussion of the method's potential in our setting as well as in other places and times.

'Teach a Man to Fish': The Doctrine of Sustainability and Its Effects on Three Strata of Malawian Society.

This paper analyzes the social impacts of the commitment to "sustainability" in donor-funded AIDS programs. Using survey, interview, and ethnographic data from rural Malawi, we examine how efforts to mobilize and empower local communities affect three strata of Malawian society: the villagers these programs are meant to help, the insecure local elites whose efforts directly link programs to their intended beneficiaries, and, more briefly, national elites who implement AIDS policies and programs. We describe indirect effects of sustainability on the experiences, identities, and aspirations of Malawians-effects that are much broader and deeper than the direct impacts of funding.

Ties of dependence: AIDS and transactional sex in rural Malawi.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the exchange of sex for material support-labeled "transactional sex" by Western observers--is claimed by some to be a major driver of the AIDS pandemic. Transactional sex is described as akin to prostitution, a degraded form of sexual expression forced on vulnerable women by economic desperation. Using evidence from rural Malawi, we demonstrate that patron-client ties and a moral obligation to support the needy, which are fundamental to African social life, are central elements of transactional sex. We argue that the exchange of sex for money is better understood as one of the many ties of unequal exchange in which Malawians and other Africans engage, an exchange in which the patrons are as important as the clients.