In my paper I explore the cases of two orphaned patients at a public hospital in Tanzania to look at the constructions of vital relationships through practices of care. By reading across domains such as public/private and state/kinship I intend to reveal the relational aspects of the state.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic research in the department of health including the public hospital and social welfare office of a small district in Tanzania, I investigate the case of a patient on the male ward, a young man who could be best described as 'socially naked' (Howell 2006): picked up on the street by the police and suffering from advanced HIV/AIDS which made him unable to communicate verbally, he appeared as an unrelational individual without past. By focusing on the daily practices of care I want to explore the ways in which hospital staff and social workers, as agents of the state (Fassin 2015), created significant and - in a double sense - vital relationships with him over the course of his ongoing hospitalization. Following recent calls of a relational (state) anthropology (McKinnon/Cannell 2013; Thelen 2015) the constructions and negotiations of these relationships, often expressed in kin terms, show the mediation between different realms such as public/private or state/kinship and thus pose a vivid example to read across social domains (McKinnon/Cannell 2013). Including a second case of a another patient, a day laborer without relatives, and his eventual death on the male ward prompts further questions of (political) belonging, (un)deservingness, and the boundary work of the state.