Faculty Member Mirka Prazak Continues Rare Field Research in Kenya with Grant from Wenner-Gren Foundation

In 1984, while working towards her doctorate degree in anthropology at Yale University, Bennington faculty member Miroslava Prazak went into the field to study the effects of economic development on Kuria society in rural Kenya. More than twenty-years later, five years of dedicated field research, and funding from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and now the Wenner-Gren Foundation—Prazak will return to Kenya in order to study the resilience of Kuria families as they struggle to meet the needs of some of the estimated 1.1 million children orphaned by HIV/AIDS as a result of the global AIDS pandemic. Just before departing, Prazak discussed her longitudinal research.

How did you chose Kenya as a place to center your anthropological investigations?

I had a general interest in the impact of economic development on indigenous cultures, and wanted to work in a farming society. I made two exploratory trips and began studying the language by becoming immersed in the everyday life of people in this rural, agricultural area of southwestern Kenya. Within the preceding decade, a multinational tobacco company had come into the area, bringing in large amounts of money to the community in the forms of loans to set up tobacco operations, ushering a period of major economic change. Even though Kuria people had sold their excess crops and cattle previously, and grown coffee for the market, this was the first exclusively commercial farming enterprise.

What draws you to continue to study the people of Kenya and what can we learn?

It is not possible to study change by focusing only on one point in time. Even through I had done a great deal of research in the national archives in Kenya, the initial fieldwork experience only allowed me to document a baseline. I think that it’s important to understand how people who are at the very margins of a global capitalist system are able to continue to sustain themselves, when in fact all the odds are stacked against them. They are among the poorest people in the world. They have no electricity. They have no paved roads. There really isn’t any kind of infrastructure that we associate as being essential to a modern economy and yet they not only subsist, they produce a surplus that enables them to send their kids to school, to university if they get accepted, and to live and enjoy fulfilling lives.

What will the focus of your research be when you return? How will your work relate to other studies in Kenya?

My research is carried out in Nyanza Province, one of the regions of Kenya most affected by the AIDS pandemic. The number of children orphaned by AIDS in Kenya stood at 890,000 in 2002, the third highest in the world. The same year, 2.5 million adults in the country were living with the disease. The number of children orphaned by AIDS is growing steadily in a culture where customarily children had their place within an extended family if their birth parents died. The data I collect does not exist elsewhere. I provide ground-level reporting of adult mortality and its impact on children where data is not available due to the lack of vital registry and limited access to clinics and hospitals. These kinds of studies are rare. The work done to-date on the AIDS epidemic has largely reflected the agendas of biomedical research with a narrow mandate that relies on concepts and models carried over from the western AIDS experience. My work focuses on the lives of people and their experiences where the most severe impact of the epidemic is being borne. And since I know the communities and people in them well, over an extended period of time, I can gain access to people’s understandings and strategies. I want to find out what options are available to orphaned children now. How are the obligations and expectations between family members changing in response to the growing number of orphans? What are some of the survival strategies employed by children and caregivers? What is the quality of their lives?

How does your work inform what and how you teach at Bennington?

As an anthropologist what I’m trying to teach my students is that the world is incredibly diverse and people in different societies have very different life strategies. They have different sets of constraints and they create and respond to opportunities by making decisions according to cultural templates that are often completely different from ours, or are a combination of received wisdoms passed down in their particular cultural milieu, mixed with perspectives learned through a formal educational western curriculum. The kids in rural Kenya are fluent in their own culture and language and the culture and language they have access to through formal education, through the radio, and other means of global communication. They understand how their lives work and how our lives work. This scope is a real advantage in a globalized world. We sit at the pinnacle of the system but don’t necessarily know how other people live, we don’t know what informs the decisions they make and that can be a major disadvantage to us. We have a narrow world view, even though we sit at the top. So I teach students how other people live, how their decisions are shaped, and how they carry out their lives. And the students are very receptive, eager to explore the perspectives of others, or simply embrace a more open, more widely informed perspective with which to approach their own lives. Learning about cultures has spurred many of my students to anthropological and cultural investigations as a focus of their senior theses, or to carrying out important humanitarian work after graduation by joining the Peace Corps or working with agencies such as the International Rescue Committee. Perhaps most significantly, students acquire an awareness of and respect for diversity that helps them develop the necessary intellectual and social skills for becoming responsible, culturally aware, and socially sensitive adults.

To read more about Miroslava Prazak's courses, click here.