Kamat, Vinay R.

DR. VINAY R. KAMAT, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in April 2011 to aid research and writing on 'Childhood Malaria and Child Survival in Africa: The Medicalization of Malaria Control in Tanzania.' Silent Violence is a monograph that demonstrates how the persistence of childhood malaria in Tanzania can be better explained from an anthropological perspective by framing it within a critique of neoliberal global discourses on malaria control and elimination. The monograph explores the persistence of childhood malaria in Tanzania as a form of structural violence that derives from historically situated structured inequality, and the resultant human suffering. It illuminates the processes that are closely tied to structural inequalities, and hegemonic global discourses on malaria control that are increasingly becoming biomedicine-based, technological fixes. Case studies, illness narratives and life histories, highlight not just the social burden of malaria, as mothers who are single/previously married experience it, but the salience of the diversity of experiences within a specific socio-cultural context. The monograph brings people's lived experience with malaria and the local context in which malaria-related social suffering is embedded, to the attention of a global audience, readership, and policy makers, to demonstrate how 'top down' policies are locally experienced. Silent Violence argues that global efforts to deal with malaria have achieved limited success because malaria is increasingly being cast as a bureaucratic, managerial problem and the core of the problem depoliticized.