Morality, Hope and Grief: Anthropologies of AIDS in Africa

How does AIDS affect communities in African societies and how does it change local moral orders? How do people explain and make sense of an ‘exceptional illness’, of grief, death, and the social costs that come with it? How are the strategies and practices of dealing with AIDS shaped by the broader structures of social life and cultural reproduction through which disease is experienced? And how do experiences of AIDS and the practices of confronting it change over time? It is obviously not the first time that these questions have formed the subject of an edited volume. But it is perhaps the first time that they have been addressed so rigorously, not in terms of the interfaces between interventions and local culture engendered by public health and humanitarianism but in terms of ethnographies of the ordinary institutions of everyday life in specific African localities. Rather than focusing on the workings of home-based care schemes, the authors analyse how care is constructed in the vernacular key and organized in extended family contexts; rather than asking why prevention campaigns succeed or fail, the chapters explore how ordinary people themselves conceptualize the role of sexual relationships for transmission, for example in terms of violations of ritual proscriptions. The ways the ambivalences of these hermeneutic practices are represented in lived experience are indeed cogently captured in the notions of ‘morality, hope, and grief’. It also makes much sense that on the spine of the book one only finds this first part of the title, as the book's perspective and scope go well beyond issues of AIDS in the narrow sense.