1. (Background) Could you say a bit about your own trajectory, and research interests?

My work is mostly concerned with understanding the politics of health science and technology in the context of postcolonial Ghana. A major part of that is thinking about the continuing influence of colonialism on science and medicine, but I’m perhaps even more focused on the ways in which political, economic, and cultural transformations since the end of formal colonialism shape scientific and medical professions in Africa.

My most significant research project to date has been an ethnographic study of the training of medical herbalists in Ghana. I worked with students and faculty involved in a four-year degree program in herbal medicine at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, researchers at the Centre for Plant Medicine Research, and clinicians at a number of private and public clinics that claim to practice a scientific form of herbal medicine.

What I found was that for many of the people involved, scientific vocations were especially meaningful because of the ways they were understood to contribute to a number of projects. Namely, I argue that “science” as a cultural category was shaped most profoundly by the imaginaries of independence and the associated goals of promoting a modern Black identity, transforming class relations, and promoting national sovereignty. These days I spend most of my time thinking about food science and technology, but for the most part there’s a lot of thematic continuity between these studies.

2. (Backstage) What drove you to write this specific article? After that initial impetus, how did you develop your theoretical intervention? 

As I got to work revising my dissertation as a book manuscript, I found that the word “project” was becoming increasingly central to the argument that I wanted to make. For the most part, I understood this term in the way that it’s typically used in everyday English: as a concerted, meaningful endeavor toward some sort of goal. I had taken a very influential class with Sherry Ortner as an undergraduate at UCLA and I remembered that she had written about projects in one of the chapters of her book Anthropology and Social Theory. That chapter was incredibly useful and also led me to look at the concept as developed by Sahlins, Lévi-Strauss, Giddens, and Sartre.

As I kept reading these and other thinkers, I realized that there was another theorization of the concept of project that had not yet been explicitly incorporated into anthropological theory. It was at this point that I started to believe that there was something significant here that could offer something to contemporary debates in anthropological theory, particularly within the anthropology of ethics.

3. (Contribution) In brief, in which set of theoretical discussions the article engages and what is the article’s contribution to those debates?

The article is engaged with three bodies of literature. One body of literature is work in the practice theoretical tradition of anthropological theory concerned with understanding human projects. For these theorists, projects were best understood as a dimension of agency having to do with longer-term goals and aspirations.

A second body of literature is the work of Heidegger and Sartre. Sartre had been a significant influence for the ways in which anthropologists had thought about projects, but reading his work more widely and looking at the ways in which he was in conversation with Heidegger points to a different theorization of projects. In this theorization, projects are fundamental orientations toward the world. This existential understanding of projects isn’t limited to agency but has to do with the structure of being and experience.

Finally, I believe that the concept of project could make a real contribution to the anthropology of ethics, especially work oriented toward understanding the good. The concept offers just one way of getting at what people are engaged in doing when they work toward achieving the good. But, looking at the longer history of its theorization offers an approach that is particularly well suited for addressing some contemporary concerns. Seeing projects as ways of materially engaging with and co-constituting the world puts the anthropology of the good into explicitly political analysis while also acknowledging the ways in which projects are not only things that emerge from already existing, self-possessed subjects.

4. (Expansion) Why does theory matter (to you and/or in a broad sense)?

The most straightforward answer is that theory helps to better achieve the central goals of anthropology: understanding the complexity and diversity of experience. My graduate training encouraged me to see how anthropology was defined by an ethnographic sensibility and, while I’ve largely internalized this perspective, it’s just as important to take care in developing theoretical concepts as it is to approach empirical research with sensitivity and rigor. Paying careful attention to theory enriches ethnography. It can also, one hopes, contribute to anthropological understanding in its own right.