How people make sense of illness is, in part, culturally determined. Existing community beliefs and presuppositions are organized as cultural models, which “make meaning” of new situations such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These cultural constructions can also contribute to the spread of the epidemic. This volume examines the meaning and cultural contexts of HIV/AIDS in Nepal, where AIDS is relatively new and rapidly growing. -- David K. Beine
There is an inherently powerful and complex paradox underlying HIV/AIDS prevention—between the focus on collective advocacy mobilized to combat global HIV/AIDS and the staggeringly disproportionate rates of HIV/AIDS in many places. In Treating AIDS, Thurka Sangaramoorthy examines the everyday practices of HIV/AIDS prevention in the United States from the perspective of AIDS experts and Haitian immigrants in South Florida. Although there is worldwide emphasis on the universality of HIV/AIDS as a social, political, economic, and biomedical problem, developments in HIV/AIDS prevention are rooted in and focused exclusively on disparities in HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality framed through the rubric of race, ethnicity, and nationality. Everyone is at equal risk for contracting HIV/AIDS, Sangaramoorthy notes, but the ways in which people experience and manage that risk—and the disease itself—is highly dependent on race, ethnic identity, sexuality, gender, immigration status, and other notions of “difference.” Sangaramoorthy documents in detail the work of AIDS prevention programs and their effect on the health and well-being of Haitians, a transnational community long plagued by the stigma of being stereotyped in public discourse as disease carriers. By tracing the ways in which public knowledge of AIDS prevention science circulates from sites of surveillance and regulation, to various clinics and hospitals, to the social worlds embraced by this immigrant community, she ultimately demonstrates the ways in which AIDS prevention programs help to reinforce categories of individual and collective difference, and how they continue to sustain the persistent and pernicious idea of race and ethnicity as risk factors for the disease.
PANDEMIC presents a 20-year retrospective of AIDS through the work of over 75 artists from 50 nations. These powerful images in the photographic medium document the lives and harsh realities of people living with AIDS.
This volume focuses on the role of language in the construction of knowledge about HIV/AIDS. The authors draw on discourse analysis, ethnography, and social semiotics to interpret meaning-making practices in formal and informal HIV/AIDS education in Australia, Cambodia, Burkina Faso, Hong Kong, India, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, and Uganda.
This volume discusses the many advances in HIV research, new initiatives and their promise for application in the Asian region. It highlights the critical need for national commitment and adequate resources, and for addressing the underlying HIV-risk related behaviours and vulnerabilities. The contributors also examine the concept of comprehensive care - from home and from the community to the institutional level - as well as providing up to date information on HIV drug and vaccine development.
AIDS in Asia provides a thorough introduction to the social and economic issues surrounding the AIDS epidemic in Asia including: * Geographic obstacles to health care * Gender inequality and human trafficking * Political turmoil and poor leadership * Asia's role in the sex and drug trade * Economic conditions and exploitation At the crucial moment when the spread of AIDS in this region is beginning to gain worldwide recognition, distinguished expert Susan Hunter makes clear the catastrophic threat AIDS poses to Asia and the world, and draws on her experience to discuss the potential policy implications.
Based on in-depth fieldwork, research, and personal interviews, this comprehensive ethnographic study of the Bajju people of southern Kaduna State in Nigeria covers their origins, history, culture, religious beliefs, and practices. Bajju precolonial political-religious organization, economy, legal system, social organization, and values are described. Also included are chapters on the Hausa-Fulani, the colonial context, the Christian era, and cultural change. Ethnologists, missiologists, development personnel, and the Bajju themselves will find this a rich resource. For me as a Bajju scholar, this study is as important as E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s classic study, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937). For that reason, all Bajju sons and daughters must read this important work (from the foreword by Dr. Samuel Waje Kunhiyop). Baranzan’s People: An Ethnohistory of the Bajju of the Middle Belt of Nigeria is a companion volume to Bajju Christian Conversion in the Middle Belt of Nigeria, published by SIL International® 2019.
African Friends and Money Matters grew out of frustrations that Westerners experience when they travel and work in Africa. Africans have just as many frustrations relating to Westerners in their midst. Each manages money, time, and relationships in very different ways, often creating friction and misunderstanding.
How did two very different language communities encounter and make early choices about Christianity? This book is a historical record of the Dagomba and Konkomba people groups of Northern Ghana as they embraced the Bible translated into their mother tongues. Author Dr. Sumani Sule-Saa employs Professor Lamin Sanneh’s groundbreaking hermeneutic of ‘mission as translation’ as a grid to examine the effect of Bible translation on the lives of these two very important language groups. Sule-Saa first presents a brief history of the Dagomba and Konkomba and describes their very different societal structures. He analyses early Christian mission involvement and documents the role of two Bible translation agencies among these people groups. Through a number of case studies he illustrates the positive impact of the Bible in their mother tongues. Woven throughout, Dr. Sule-Saa discusses to what degree the Christian faith has been indigenised into the ethos and behaviour of the Dagomba and Konkomba. Theological students and those interested in missions will find this book relevant as it deals with missiological issues and serves as a reference on the establishment of Christianity among the Dagomba and Konkomba. Its multi-disciplinary approach will also appeal to a wider audience.
In "Holding On," anthropologist Alyson O Daniel analyzes the abstract debates about health policy for the sickest and most vulnerable Americans as well as the services designated to help them by taking readers into the daily lives of poor African American women living with HIV at the advent of the 2006 Treatment Modernization Act. At a time when social support resources were in decline and publicly funded HIV/AIDS care programs were being re-prioritized, women s daily struggles with chronic poverty, drug addiction, mental health, and neighborhood violence influenced women s lives in sometimes unexpected ways. An ethnographic portrait of HIV-positive black women and their interaction with the U.S. healthcare system, "Holding On" reveals how gradients of poverty and social difference shape women s health care outcomes and, by extension, women s experience of health policy reform. Set among the realities of poverty, addiction, incarceration, and mental illness, the case studies in "Holding On" illustrate how subtle details of daily life affect health and how overlooking them when formulating public health policy has fostered social inequality anew and undermined health in a variety of ways."
