Aids Doesn T Show Its Face

AIDS and Africa are indelibly linked in popular consciousness, but despite widespread awareness of the epidemic, much of the story remains hidden beneath a superficial focus on condoms, sex workers, and antiretrovirals. Africa gets lost in this equation, Daniel Jordan Smith argues, transformed into a mere vehicle to explain AIDS, and in AIDS Doesn’t Show Its Face, he offers a powerful reversal, using AIDS as a lens through which to view Africa. Drawing on twenty years of fieldwork in Nigeria, Smith tells a story of dramatic social changes, ones implicated in the same inequalities that also factor into local perceptions about AIDS—inequalities of gender, generation, and social class. Nigerians, he shows, view both social inequality and the presence of AIDS in moral terms, as kinds of ethical failure. Mixing ethnographies that describe everyday life with pointed analyses of public health interventions, he demonstrates just how powerful these paired anxieties—medical and social—are, and how the world might better alleviate them through a more sensitive understanding of their relationship.

This book describes how Christian communities in South Africa have responded to HIV/AIDS and how these responses have affected the lives HIV-positive people, youth and broader communities. Drawing on Foucault and the sociology of knowledge, it explains how religion became influential in reshaping ideas about sexuality, medicine and modernity.

This moving and beautiful book offers unprecedented insight into the astounding strength of the human spirit when confronted with illness, pain, loss, and death. Features 75 black-and-white photographs. Carolyn Jones's vivid and life-affirming portraits capture people from all backgrounds—children and grandmothers, men and women of all races—living with HIV and AIDS. It is estimated that over one million people in the United States would test positive for the Human Immune Virus, and many others are already suffering from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. A common-and harmful-misconception holds that AIDS is an instant death sentence but, in fact, testing positive for HIV does not mean immediate illness. Carolyn Jones has collaborated with George DeSipio, Jr., and Michael Liberatore (co-founders of the project), and the seventy-three people who volunteered to pose for these photographs in an inspiring effort to change the way we think about AIDS. Jones's compelling portraits have the power to profoundly alter perceptions about this disease, and about the way we all live and die. AIDS poses challenging questions that we must each grapple with, whether healthy or not. These captivating pictures illustrate the self-confidence and wisdom of ordinary people coping with an extraordinary fate, facing their mortality, questioning their priorities, and living life to the fullest. Their energy, courage, and dignity in the face of such adversity offer a vital lesson in how to embrace life, day by day. Their faces and their stories are proof that AIDS doesn't look like anyone—it looks like, and ultimately is, all of us. Design Industries Foundation for AIDS (DIFFA) is the sole recipient of the royalties from the sale of Living Proof. For additional information regarding Living Proof and the Design Industries Foundation for AIDS, please call DIFFA: (212) 727-3100.

All I Eat Is Medicine charts the lives of individuals and the operation of institutions in the thick of the AIDS epidemic in Mozambique during the global scale-up of treatment for HIV/AIDS at the turn of the twenty-first century. Even as the AIDS treatment scale-up saved lives, it perpetuated the exploitation and exclusion that was implicated in the propagation of the epidemic in the first place. This book calls attention to the global social commitments and responsibilities that a truly therapeutic global health requires.

Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research, two hundred fifty interviews, and over three hundred youth love letters, author Shanti Parikh uses lively vignettes to provide a rare window into young people's heterosexual desires and practices in Uganda. In chapters entitled "Unbreak my heart," "I miss you like a desert missing rain," and "You're just playing with my head," she invites readers into the world of secret longings, disappointments, and anxieties of young Ugandans as they grapple with everyday difficulties while creatively imagining romantic futures and possibilities. Parikh also examines the unintended consequences of Uganda's aggressive HIV campaigns that thrust sexuality and anxieties about it into the public sphere. In a context of economic precarity and generational tension that constantly complicates young people's notions of consumption-based romance, communities experience the dilemmas of protecting and policing young people from reputational and health dangers of sexual activity. "They arrested me for loving a school girl" is the title of a chapter on controlling delinquent daughters and punishing defiant boyfriends for attempting to undermine patriarchal authority by asserting their adolescent romantic agency. Sex education programs struggle between risk and pleasure amidst morally charged debates among international donors and community elders, transforming the youthful female body into a platform for public critique and concern. The many sides of this research constitute an eloquently executed critical anthropology of intervention.

This book considers the response to the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa by examining family planning programs and HIV prevention efforts.

From boys to men: learning to love women and money -- Expensive intimacies: courtship, marriage, and fatherhood -- "Money problem": work, class, consumption, and men's social status -- "Ahhheee club": money, intimacy, and male peer groups -- Masculinity gone awry: intimate partner violence, crime, and insecurity -- Becoming an elder, burying one's father.

This ethnography takes the reader into the Australian suburbs to learn about food, eating and bodies during the highly political context of one of Australia’s largest childhood obesity interventions. While there is ample evidence about the number of people who are overweight or obese and an abundance of information about what and how to eat, obesity remains ‘a problem’ in high-income countries such as Australia. Rather than rely on common assumptions that people are making all the wrong choices, this volume reveals the challenges of ‘eating healthy’ when money is scarce and how, different versions of being fat and doing fat happen in everyday worlds of precarity. Without acknowledgement of the multiple realities of fatness and obesity, interventions will continue to have limited reach.