Embodied history. Uniqueness and exemplarity of South African AIDS (original) (raw)

The embodied past. From paranoid style to politics of memory in South Africa

Social Anthropology, 2008

The post-apartheid period has been marked by a dual relation to memory. On the one hand, the process of reconciliation, nation-building and abolition of the colour line has engaged a definitive rupture with the past. On the other hand, a form of resentment expresses a more ambivalent and painful acknowledgement that the past is still deeply present through racism, inequalities and prejudices. The AIDS crisis both as an objectivethe rapid spread of the infection-and subjective phenomenon-the apprehension of the epidemic through controversies-has revealed this duality. Using Thabo Mbeki's statements on the infection, but also on race relations and national commemorations, I try to analyse beyond the obvious paranoid style a politics of memory which unveils hidden truths. The embodiment of the past thus recovered involves both the historical condition, that is the inscription of social structures in bodies and lives, and the experience of history, understood as the elaboration of representations, discourses and narratives accounting for the course of events. Considered in this light, conspiracy theories become not so much fantasies as factual realities, including genocidal projects under apartheid. The recognition of this unfinished business of time is a necessary step in the construction of a common future.

Science, stigmatisation and afro-pessimism in the South African debate on AIDS 1

This paper examines how certain assumptions concerning sexual behaviour, race and nationality emerge at the core of explanations regarding the origin of HIV. In particular, it returns to discussions of the so-called " AIDS debate " in South Africa in the 2000s. On the one hand, it focuses on how these assumptions reinforce the understanding of AIDS as stigma and " social problem " , to the extent that they emphasise the existence of geographical areas and " risk groups ". On the other, these same assumptions are examined in the light of processes of identification and belonging, given that in the majority of reports, both academic and popular, " Africans " and " Africa " are inexorably understood in pessimistic terms. The purpose is to show how certain aspects of the South African debate refer to the way the global history of AIDS has been constructed over the past three decades. An exhaustive historiographical reconstruction is not attempted here, rather by returning to some works on the genesis of the epidemic, the paper highlights the individual and collective stigmatisation related to the public health discourse on AIDS, particularly such notions as " risk " , " exposure " and " vulnerability ". The proposal is such notions are strongly informed by a moral sense that traverses the dominant cognitive model in the approaches to the global epidemic and the AIDS debate in South Africa. The last part of the article focuses on the tensions that emerge between the explanations of experts from the field of public health and the contributions of social scientists, particularly anthropologists, frequently questioned for their alleged cultural relativism. Keywords: HIV/AIDS in South Africa, Scientific controversies, HIV/AIDS and anthropology 1 The first part of the article is based on the communication Questões preliminares para uma etnografia da controvérsia científica sobre a origem da AIDS [Preliminary questions for an ethnography of the scientific controversy concerning the origin of AIDS], presented by Working Group 44: Ethnographic translations: Anthropology and Science, at the VIII Mercosur Anthropology Meeting (2009). The work corresponds to a modified version of the third chapter of my doctoral thesis, entitled Ciência, justiça e cultura na controvérsia sul-africana sobre as causas e tratamentos da AIDS [Science, justice and culture in the South African controversy on the causes and treatments of AIDS] (PPGAS/ Museu Nacional/UFRJ, 2013). I am grateful to the editor Peter Fry and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

Science, stigmatisation and afro-pessimism in the South African debate on AIDS

Chapter 8: Dispatches from the Pasts/Memories of AIDS (in AIDS and the Distribution of Crises)

AIDS and the Distribution of Crises, 2020

Chapter 8 of the volume AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Duke UP 2020), co-edited by Jih-Fei Cheng, Alexandra Juhasz, and Nishant Shahani. “Dispatches from the Pasts/Memories of AIDS” is a dialogue between artists, activists, social service providers, and scholars Cecilia Aldarondo, Roger Hallas, Pablo Alvarez, Jim Hubbard, and Dredge Byung’chu Kang-Nguyễn, with an Introduction by Jih-Fei Cheng. The conversation figures between individual and collective experiences with HIV/AIDS. Recorded here is pain, fury, resentment, fear, determination, and more. The first prompt for this asynchronous set of “dispatches” commenced in September 2016. The second prompt was initiated in December 2017 and registers the anxiety and impassioned responses to what was then the new election of US president Donald Trump. Whether their edges are left coarse or worn soft, these memories of AIDS refuse to be resembled—to look exactly like one another or simply reflect one another. They also refuse assembly into a singular or coherent past. We trace these memories of shattered pasts with our fingertips. We struggle to love and hold each other with barriers; we struggle to love and hold each other without barriers.

From "Rights" to "Ritual": AIDS Activism in South Africa

American Anthropologist, 2006

In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new forms of citizenship that are concerned with both rights-based struggles and with creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness and stigmatization of individual HIV/AIDS sufferers. I argue that it is precisely the extremity of the "near death" experiences of full-blown AIDS, and the profound stigma and "social death" associated with the later stages of the disease, that produce the conditions for HIV/AIDS survivors' commitment to "new life" and social activism. It is the activist mediation and retelling of these traumatic experiences that facilitates HIV/AIDS activist commitment and grassroots mobilization. It is also the profound negativity of stigma and social death that animates the activist's construction of a new positive HIV-positive identity and understanding of what it means to be a citizen-activist and member of a social movement.

Embodied history. Uniqueness and exemplarity of South African AIDS (original) (raw)

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