Abstract
This paper is an extended meditation on a pith helmet that appears incongruously in a portrait taken in the 1920s at Domasi Mission, known for its provision of medical services, in colonial Malawi. In the photograph, taken by Malawi’s first professional African photographer M.M. Chisuse, an African hospital assistant poses with his wife and daughter in ‘western’ dress. A pith helmet, blindingly white against the image’s sepia tones, sits casually, rather inexplicably, out of place on the dirt near his feet. Chief symbol of white settler identity, pith helmets were worn by Europeans who feared the potentially deadly tropical sun. Following Tina Campt (2017), I attempt to trace the social life of a photograph by “listening” to the image. I ask: What is the pith helmet doing there? How might it stage the aspirations and ambivalences of subjects (sitters and photographer) caught up in the mission’s imperial-religious economy? The paper considers, for instance, how Chisuse’s consortion with freedom-fighter John Chilembwe (whose famous violent anti-colonial rebellion was partly a rejoinder to dictums that Malawian subjects “remove their hats” in white settlers’ presence) may have motivated his aesthetic choices in this portrait of a “new African.” I seek to untether critical interpretation from received structures of reading colonial images like this one. Throughout, I consider how and why this mysteriously placed pith helmet so enraptures a medical anthropologist who stumbled across it by chance a century later, reflecting on my own attempts to trace the helmet and the photographer in present-day archives and secondary literature.
Bio
Cal Biruk (she/they) is an Associate Professor in Anthropology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences, at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. Their research interests are at the intersection of medical anthropology, critical global health studies, and critical data studies. Biruk is, along with Nicole Dalmer, a co-applicant on a grant examining the datafication of aging, and how data and technologies such as wearables produce new kinds of relations, self-fashioning, and configurations of care and harm. They are especially interested in the materialities, relations, and engagements that constitute older adults’ experiences of data and data objects. Their larger body of research and work examines the datafication of global health through the lens of technologies of audit and quantified metrics of health in southern Africa, examining shifts in ways of measuring and understanding ‘health’ since the colonial period. They are also working on a project, in collaboration with Lyndsey Beutin, that centers the experience of Type 1 diabetics who engage with surveillance and navigate datafication as part of diabetes care protocols in North America. They are the author of Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (2018) and numerous articles in journals such as Critical Public Health, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, American Ethnologist, and Gay and Lesbian Quarterly. They are also working on a co-authored book that examines the practices, politics, and history of recreational birding, under contract with Duke University Press.