Paper short abstract:

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.