Sensing sleeping sickness: local symptom-making in South Sudan

The field of sensorial anthropology emphasises that different cultures extend the senses in different directions and use different cognitive metaphors to translate abnormal sensations into symptoms of illness. Undertaken in collaboration with Merlin and the London School
of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s RECAP project, this study investigated the local sense-making processes involved in sensing and detecting cases of human African trypanosomiasis (HAT, or sleeping sickness) in Nimule, South Sudan.

This study employed a sensorial anthropological lens which focuses on the interfaces between objective/ subjective and individual/collective knowledge. It investigated how people share syndromic information in communal disease discourses and drew on them to connect partial, disparate and even nonsensical experiences of individual symptoms to diagnosis of a complete disease.