Click here to listen to This American Life's radio program on the Malawian Journals Project (Originally aired 08.26.2011).
In the Malawian Journals Project, now in its twelfth year, young
Malawians have been keeping diaries recording conversations among rural
residents pertaining to AIDS, love, sex, illness, life, death, and more
– much more.[1] This observational
field journal project provides a rare picture of responses to the AIDS
epidemic. The project has transcribed so far more than 1200 journals;
the approximately 900 journals written before 2008 have been anonymized
and de-identified for public use (available for download below). The journals were produced by a total
of 22 writers, each containing about 10-15 pages of single-spaced text.
These texts constitute a unique archive not only of the epidemic in
Africa but also of everyday life in rural villages at the turn of the
millennium.
Until 2008, the journals project, led by Susan Watkins, was part of
the larger Malawi Diffusion
and Ideational Change Project at the
University of Pennsylvania; and was, and continues to be, maintained by
Invest in Knowledge. Subsequently, the project moved to the University
of Michigan, where it is directed by Adam
Ashforth of the Center for
African American and African Studies and benefits from funding by the
Center for African Studies, both at the University of Michigan.
Currently five journalists are working in Malawi, three women and two
men. All have been working with the project since the beginning and all
are, in their very different ways, gifted observers of life in their
communities. One, for example, is a drinker who harvests stories from
the bars and kachaso dens of Balaka Town in between bouts as a Born
Again Christian when he regales us in detail with the goings on in his
church; another is a devout Muslim to whom women gravitate with tales of
the hardships of life. Three of the journalists now work full-time as
interviewers for a large HIV/AIDS research project funded by the
National Institutes of Health. One has a small stall in a village
market. The fifth is otherwise unemployed. The money they receive from
writing journals, though a modest sum, is crucial to their
livelihoods.
In the coming year, the archive of journals written prior to 2008
will be made publicly available under the auspices of the University of
Michigan through the International Consortium for Social and Political
Research. More details are available in an Introduction to the
Journals, written by Amy Kaler and Susan Watkins early in the project’s
life; another document, Guidelines to the Journals, provides important
remarks on confidentiality and editing.
Click HERE to download all 897 journals available for
public use.
[1] For a description of the
methodology, see Susan Watkins and Ann Swidler, “Hearsay ethnography: conversational journals as a
method for studying culture in action,” Poetics, 37 (2009) pp.
162-184.
For examples of publications drawing on this material, see
Kaler, Amy and Susan C. Watkins. 2010. "Asking God About the
Date You Will Die: HIV Testing As a Zone of Uncertainty in Rural
Malawi." Demographic Research 32: 905-932.
Swidler, Ann and Susan C. Watkins. 2006. "Ties of Dependence: AIDS and Transactional Sex
in Rural Malawi." Studies in Family Planning 38(3):
147-162.
Kaler, Amy. 2006. "'When They See Money and
They Think It's Life': Money, Modernity and Morality in Two
Sites in Rural Malawi." Journal of Southern African Studies
32(2):335-49.
Watkins, Susan C. 2004. "Navigating AIDS in Rural
Malawi," Population and Development Review, 30 (4):
673-705.
Kaler, Amy. 2004. "AIDS-Talk in Everyday Life: the
Presence of HIV/AIDS in Men's Informal Conversation in Southern
Malawi." Social Science & Medicine 59(2):285-97.
Kaler, Amy. 2004. "The Moral Lens of Population Control: Condoms and
Controversies in Southern Malawi." Studies in Family Planning
35(2):105-15.
