From object to subject: Deconstructing anthropology and HIV/AIDS in South Africa

Abstract

South Africa has the highest burden of HIV/AIDS in the world. Theories that account for this are wide-ranging. This article argues that anthropological theories advanced to speak to the widespread nature and particular patterning of HIV vulnerability revert to problematic notions that betray age-old prejudices that once characterised the discipline. I argue that these theories do not, in fact, go to the root cause debates that are more contemporary and thus credible in accounting for HIV/AIDS in South Africa. South Africa has some glaring properties that cannot be ignored when accounting for its HIV/AIDS epicentre status. This article is a critical appraisal of anthropological HIV/AIDS discourse in South Africa. I argue that, in fact, such discourse serves ubiquitous purposes that can be duly read when one considers the history of the discipline, practices in the discipline and the power dynamics that reside in and arise from scholarly interventions.

Keywords

Anthropology HIV/AIDS scholarship sexuality South Africa

Introduction

At the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, South Africa witnessed unprecedented research activity. This was a responsible response by the research fraternity as the scale of the problem warranted such a reaction. However, in this frenzy of HIV/AIDS research activity several noteworthy trends that need mentioning emerged, least of which was the conflation of public health concerns with sociological ones. In this vein, the dominant trend was to look to the individual for answers as the individual was seen as both a source of information from which theories of explanation were developed and as the primary site for the implementation of interventions to combat the effects of the epidemic. This had the unfortunate effect of diluting important principles of anthropology such as taking an amalgamation of individual utterances as representative of community life and ideologies. For reasons I will explore in this article, anthropological theory and practice reverted to the notion that ethnicity and thus ‘culture’ is a set of elements and traits embedded in the hearts and minds of individuals who make up a bounded and discrete community (Klimaszewski et al., 2012). This reification of ethnicity as embodying a truth that researchers could unearth and from which explanations for the spread of HIV/AIDS could be fashioned was a reversion to an anthropology whose relevance has elapsed. I write this article as an anthropologist and my critique is levelled against the discipline and its practices in South Africa during this time. The thoughts and arguments made in this paper came to the fore during my doctoral studies. More than ever, I was conscious of straddling the divide between those who are traditionally objects of anthropological study and those whose gaze is directed at them. Questions of complicity in the dominant discourses of the discipline and asserting a voice based on my lived experience as a black, female anthropologist were accentuated. It is from this consciousness that I write.

The advent of the HIV and AIDS epidemic highlighted lack of knowledge about human sexuality and was also seen as an opportunity to rectify this. Although strides have been made to understand human sexuality, the advent of HIV/AIDS introduced particular challenges, which are the subject of this article. For instance, Bolton (1999) argues that the urgency to resolve HIV-related questions engendered practices that are detrimental to the social sciences in general and to anthropology in particular. These include the tendency to artificially extricate sexual behaviour, for instance, from the relations of power and meaning that animate it. Here, the focus of analysis becomes individual sexual behaviour rather than the systems of relations that underlie and shape it. Singer (1990) in a piece titled: Reinventing medical anthropology: toward a critical realignment attributes the tendency in medical anthropology to ‘see trees and not the forest’ to its location in anthropology with its colonial tendencies as well as it being a service sector for biomedicine. He argues that the combination of these factors results in ‘a field that has holism as its mantle but fragmentation as its product’ (Singer, 1990: 1). From this point of view, a critical analysis of the discipline of medical anthropology and its relationship to biomedicine as well as of its resultant products is called for. This article is an attempt to critically appraise this relationship.

Biomedicine is, by definition, concerned with individual diagnosis and prognosis. In a similar vein, public health focuses on individual behaviour in the spread and containment of disease.¹ These concerns have infiltrated medical anthropology in one way or another, as argued earlier.² In particular, the conceptualisation of the aetiology of HIV and AIDS and its management has favoured these biomedical propensities. As Fassin (2007), Stillwagon (2006), Patton (2003), Farmer (2001), Treichler (1999), Singer (1997) and Wilton (1997) argue, the tendency to conceptualise HIV/AIDS in individual terms masks crucial factors that shape individual behaviour as well as the overall patterning of the alleged behaviour. The arguments made by these scholars draw from an established body of work that is concerned with the making of an ‘African’ (sexuality) through colonial discourse (see Gilman, 1985; McClintock, 1995; Rutherford, 1988; Vaughan, 1991). For instance, Rutherford (1988: 61) characterises colonial discourse as an intricate system of ‘language of racist stereotypes and meanings that have tied white men into a way of seeing the black man that subordinates, silences and often threatens to destroy him’. He goes on to say that in this discourse whiteness is the ‘order of things’ to which the black man is constructed as Other (Rutherford, 1988). In particular, the works of McClintock (1995), Vaughan (1991) and Gilman (1985) deconstruct the processes of the creation and objectification of the Other through the politics of knowledge production in the realm of sexuality. Underlying the arguments made by the above authors is that colonial medical discourse operates by locating difference and differences in the body, thereby, pathologising and naturalising these differences (McClintock, 1995; Vaughan, 1991; Gilman, 1985). This focus on the body and the concomitant discourses mask particular political considerations, especially that ideas about the body and its purported state are socially constructed. Also disguised by these discourses is that history lives on in bodies, and the consequences thereof are material (Du Bois, 1999; Fassin, 2007; Marshall, 2005). From this point of view then, I juxtapose the two poles from which the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been theorised; the ‘culture thesis’ that underscores individual and group sexual practices and the political economy framework that locates HIV/AIDS vulnerability in structural factors. Although these are not mutually exclusive, I argue that HIV/AIDS theorisation in South Africa has generally tended to separate them. I argue against this and take issue with the motivations that inform this tendency. I seek instead to explore the relationship between macro-processes and micro-practices (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992).

This article is, therefore, a critical reflection on the methodological, ideological and political dimensions of HIV/AIDS research in South Africa.³ It is the objective of this paper to explore the factors that conspired to form a canonical lens through which the HIV/AIDS epidemic was interpreted and informed, what Treichler (1999) calls ‘the official story of HIV/AIDS’. This is a worthwhile undertaking as lessons learnt from how the HIV/AIDS pandemic was theorised has implications not only for health-related issues in the country but for other types of relationships as well. The argument made here is three-pronged; HIV/AIDS has exposed the fault-lines of human organisation from the global to the local. Therefore, how HIV/AIDS was theorised is a critical lens through which class (and thus race)⁴ relations in South Africa can be understood. Second, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has made unprecedented demands on theoretical and methodological concerns in both the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences. The ‘soft’ sciences, from which I write, showed partisan tendencies whose implications are the subject of this article. Finally, HIV/AIDS is an epidemic of signification whose implications are wide-ranging and ubiquitous.

The myths that underpin the character of HIV/AIDS scholarship in South Africa

Foucault’s (1978) assertion is instructive. He posits that even as Western society is given to verbosity about sexuality, this is accompanied by an incessant will to ignorance about its political economy. The implication of this is that, in general, attention is focused on the micro-politics of sexuality – who does what, with whom, how often, how and why. This occurs to the neglect of macro-analyses that seek to deconstruct the role and influence of bio-powers such as religion, the state, biomedicine and the social sciences in how and why sexuality assumes the kind of aura that it does. These institutions are culpable, to varying degrees, in the framing of African sexuality, for instance (Packard, 1989; Vaughan, 1991; Wilton, 1997). More than that, questions relating to how sexuality is influenced by politics and the economy remain largely hidden from analyses (Farmer, 2001; Fassin, 2007; Hickel, 2012; Hunter, 2010; Treichler, 1999; Wenham et al., 2009). Instead, discounting these factors has fed racist discourses on black sexuality and is a cause of deep-rooted and widespread prejudices (Horne, 2010; Packard, 1989; Vaughan, 1991; Wenham et al., 2009). Bawa (2005) asserts that while race and gender are discussed, neither racism nor sexuality have yet been properly examined in terms of their place as fundamental underpinnings of South Africa’s scholarly conversations. Critically then, Eagleton (1976: 34–35) posits that it is in the significant silences of the text, in its gaps and absences that the presence of ideology can be most positively felt.

Conversely, the scramble to study ‘African AIDS’ is an indication of the belief that the dynamics that ferment HIV/AIDS in Africa are different from those of the rest of the world. Implied by such tendencies is the idea that HIV/AIDS prevalence in Africa is a function of particular, situated knowledge systems and concomitant behaviours and practices and not so much a question of political economy that would necessarily direct attention to the inequitable distribution of global and country resources (see Packard and Epstein, 1992; Patton, 2003; Singer, 1997). The slew of research in Africa in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that sought to explain it in cultural and individual terms to the neglect of the socioeconomic backdrop that give them a particular shape is a case in point.⁵ The conclusion that HIV/AIDS in Africa, or anywhere else for that matter, can be explained through simplistic notions of culture and individual choice is a product of a particular worldview that in turn informs a particular power dynamic, feeding a cycle that self-perpetuates. I argue in line with Farmer (2001), Marshall (2005), Du Bois (1999) and others that, generally as a perceptible trend, the incessant gaze on Africa by western scholars⁶ is not only informed by a particular way of thinking, but is also self-interested in that it cements the prevailing power dynamics. In Power/Knowledge Foucault (1980) asserts that discourses are linked to the power structure in society which grant legitimacy and authority to some discourses to the exclusion of others. In HIV/AIDS, discourse centred on ‘problematic’ African cultural practices such as ‘promiscuous’ sexual practices (Wenham et al. 2009). This emphasis deflected attention from co-determinants of vulnerability that give rise to the particular patterning of the epidemic.

Following Foucault’s injunction that discourse analysis should per force interrogate who speaks and for whom, this section is an attempt to account for the fact that sex is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking and the positions and viewpoints from which they speak. This is an important consideration for the arguments made in this paper owing to the often hidden centrality of the researcher in works done in the name of anthropology particularly in South Africa.⁷ Very few researchers declare themselves as social actors in the research project.⁸ This observation is also made by Wilson (1988) and Comaroff (1985) that the conventional acknowledgements of authors tell little about the authors themselves as well as the processes that shape the final product. For instance, the much-acclaimed partnership between Wood and Jewkes⁹ (1997, 2001, 2006) is silent on the fact that both researchers hail from the United Kingdom and on how this could have influenced the lenses through which they interpreted data (collected in a language and at a setting whose intricacies were not immediately apparent or accessible to them). This work is silent on how they, as researchers, were perceived by their research informants and how this may have influenced the kind of data that they were able to gather¹⁰ (see Wilson, 1988; for example for her deconstruction of these issues). In general, the section on methodology in most South African HIV/AIDS literature largely explains methods and fails to talk to questions of ‘methodology’ which entail the thinking process in the methods chosen and the interpretations arrived at (see Mafeje, 1998). The methods section usually goes something like: ‘This research was based on ethnographic fieldwork that took place primarily between 1996 and 1998 in the greater Marianhill area of Durban. An open-ended questionnaire was used as a guide for in-depth interviews with key informants representing a wide cross-section of members from the Marianhill community’ (Leclerc-Madlala, 2002b: 4). Very little is said about who the researcher was to those studied, how she/he grappled with ‘the field’ and how this influenced the resultant products. This approach then engenders arguments that are couched in neutral, objective terms that hide their partiality.¹¹

I argue that this is an ideological choice. It is one that seeks to hide the power dynamics embedded in the arguments made. For instance, in my view, it cannot be an inconsequential matter that in South Africa, notorious for its racist tendencies, the dominant discourses on black people’s lives remain that of white scholars. More than that, many of the dominant scholars in the field of HIV/AIDS and sexuality/gender including Leclerc-Madlala (in general), Wood and Jewkes (in general), and Posel et al. (2007), for instance, lack reflexivity. They write from ‘a position of unrecognized specificity’ (Lorenz-Meyer, 2004: 8). In other words, these practices entrench a tradition where scholars fail to do what Brayton (1993) calls ‘accounting for one’s investments’ – declaring their private and public interests and reflecting on how these influence their worldview and thus impact their work. Instead, the embodied, situated and subjective researcher carrying out the research and its analysis is rendered invisible as are the interpersonal, social and institutional factors that bear on both processes. As a result, issues of power in interpretation and analysis are obscured. From this point of view then, such South African scholarship has conveniently ignored the radical democratisation of knowledge that dictates that the class, race, culture and gender beliefs of the inquirer be placed on the same critical plane as the subjects of inquiry (Tedlock, 1991: 80). In a similar vein, Brayton (1993) argues that questions about the motivations for the researcher to study women of other races, cultures, ages, abilities and classes need to be addressed as part of the research process.

In sum, South African scholarship on sexuality is characterised by three important characteristics: (a) the expert voice on black sexuality is predominantly white;¹² (b) the scholars seldom write themselves in their findings such that their politics are hidden from view and (c) their explanation of black sexuality seldom includes issues of political economy which necessarily implicate them as beneficiaries from the ills associated with black sexuality about which they write.¹³ In other words, I argue, that these scholars do what Barthe (1957), below, says about myth:

Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them, simply. It purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them natural and eternal justification, it gives them clarity which is not that of explanation but that of a statement of fact. The myth of masculinity is to pass itself off as natural, universal, free of problems (cited in Rutherford, 1988: 23; my emphasis).

So, while there is a legion of scholarship on sexual behaviour, sexuality and gender relations in South Africa, especially following the HIV/AIDS epidemic, its character is the same: white scholars writing about black sexuality in terms that are not only simplistic, but also hide the lenses through which they come to know. It is thus my view that South African scholarship on black sexuality gives ‘clarity which is not that of explanation but that of a statement of fact’. For, if clarity was of explanation, then the forces that have conspired to engender what I call ‘black sexuality’, for lack of a better term, would per force form the basis of analysis and explanation, at the centre of which is apartheid. Instead, these scholars engage in fantastical statements of fact about the importance of ‘black culture’ in the making and shaping of ‘black sexuality’.¹⁴ Much like Farmer below posits:

Culture is now being taken up wholesale to explain, justify and excuse non-existent, inadequate or failed intervention campaigns and the research base that spawns them. Culture is becoming a favoured invocation of such projects which are usually grounded in traditional social science theory focused on individual behavioural change or in information campaigns developed in pristine ignorance of structural factors and the myriad material environments in which behaviour acquires shape, meaning and consequence (Farmer, 2001: 74; my emphasis).

More than that, ‘black culture’ is a hold-all for social norms that condone violence (Wood et al., 1998), pressure to prove fertility (Jewkes et al., 2000), multiple concurrent sexual relationships (Leclerc-Madlala S. 2003, unpublished data), virgin cleansing myth (Leclerc-Madlala, 2002a) and sex for gifts (Leclerc-Madlala S. 2003, unpublished data). For instance, Leclerc-Madlala’s work, as does the work of other prominent anthropology scholars on issues of sexuality in South Africa, emphasises and gets stuck at what she calls ‘local explanatory models’ (Leclerc-Madlala, 2002a: 28). She invests a lot of energy explicating the role of what she calls ‘Zulu cosmology’ about body dirt, ‘vaginal anomalies’, cleansing cures and the like to ‘reveal the systematic logic upon which is based the idea of virginity cleansing as a therapeutic response to HIV/AIDS amongst people who self-identify as Zulu’ (Leclerc-Madlala, 2002a, 2002b: 1). In other words, she finds justification for child rape in ‘Zulu culture’. This is contrary to a measured analysis that does not take for granted that ‘Zulu culture’ is essentially different from hers as a white anthropologist with European origins, that there could be no justification in ‘Zulu culture’ for this crime, as she calls it. Posel (2005), on the other hand, posits that the virgin cleansing myth is more a sign of a moral panic in the wake of democracy than a practice embedded in and justifiable by cultural belief.¹⁵ So, to the question why gender relationships among black teenagers are violent, Wood and Jewkes refer to ‘social norms’¹⁶ that I surmise are spawned by ‘black culture’. Their analyses inevitably blame ‘black culture’ that is inherently violent:

violence in dating-relationships must be understood in the broader context of life in Ngangelizwe where beating was used in a whole variety of contexts as a strategy for punishment and a way of gaining ascendancy and control over others. Thus girls fought with other girls, neighbours with neighbours, boys with other boys, husbands beat wives, parents beat children, and teachers and circumcision school leaders beat their pupils. In this way the use of violence was ‘normal’.

This analysis fails to highlight the various interconnections between apartheid planning and its legacies that perpetuate an untenable and perilous livelihood for black men and black women and the impact on gender relations (Moffett, 2006; Posel, 2005). The analysis lacks a historical perspective. The authors foreground the local and thus fail to situate values and practices in their proper context. Events are looked at for their own sake rather than being interpreted as meaningful practice spawned and influenced by a particular context. The above analysis fails to connect the relationship between social structure and human agency, how macro-processes influence micro-practices (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992), how the past can be read in the present (Fassin, 2007; Schneider, 2002) and how the individual’s body is linked to the body politic (Fassin, 2007; Scheper-Hughes and Locke, 1987). The myth is also made by the simplistic frameworks through which black sexuality has come to gain its ontological form – what Treichler (1999: 39) calls the ‘official story’ of what HIV/AIDS ‘really’ means.¹⁷ The nesting of HIV/AIDS on to the well-established, discursively constructed, racist landscape has provided convenient and what seems like ‘common sense’ explanations for an epidemic whose roots are complex. The scholars whose writing I argue against write from a point of view of being outside the making of ‘black sexuality’ (see Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992 for instance). These tactics (of writing about issues as if we are socially outside of them and thus impartial) essentially obscure the fact that we are situated knowers whose politics are implicated in the things we (have) come to know (Mama, 1995). From this point of view, the knower is inevitably involved in the struggle for legitimate naming which underscores the symbolic power that comes from this act-practice and is further underscored by it (see Bourdieu, 1989). The monologue that characterised HIV/AIDS scholarship benefitted an inner circle of scholars and helped cement both their authority and their conceptions of HIV/AIDS to the exclusion of other views. Nyamnjoh’s (2012) Divining the future of anthropology in Africa warns against the ‘danger of a single story’ to account for social reality. He argues that this continues to be the case in anthropology in general.

Singer (1997: 62) argues that while articulating the linkages between micro and macro levels is not easy, it remains ‘a most promising area for current research and theory building’. In the same vein, Fassin (2007), Farmer (2001) and Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1987) urge that anthropological works should speak to how social forces come to be embodied as individual pathology. From this point of view then, I argue that failure to properly contextualise any story, in particular those of the people we study, renders it just that – a story. More than that, ‘the story’ cannot speak for itself, it is subjected to a particular canon and may thus do more than ‘represent’, it also ‘evokes’ (Tyler, 1986). Therefore, discourses are human constructs which bring an object into being or produce a social reality. Therein emanate the racist tendencies that seek to advance as fact, based on an ‘immutable’ premise of ‘black culture’, the patterns apparent in ‘black sexuality’ that differ along racial lines in South Africa. The myth in such scholarship is to pass itself off as impartial and free of politics, an observation especially damning in view of the role of anthropology in the construction of the Other and related prejudices.¹⁸ In this vein, a case can be made that the construction of the Other is mirrored by the simultaneous construction of the Self and cannot thus be value free. This simultaneous construction of the self in the construction of the Other is perhaps an apt beginning for deconstructing scholarly HIV/AIDS discourse in South Africa.

The relationship between power and knowledge is central to any anthropological enterprise and to sever this relationship is also a political ploy. Foucault (1978) argues that power sustains itself by hiding how it functions. Therefore, by circumventing the imperative to ‘account for one’s investments’, scholars essentially hide the relationship between power-position and power-knowledge thereby ensuring that their work sidesteps challenging at an ideological level. The salience of this ‘politricking’ in sexuality studies cannot be overemphasised given the violence that has been wrought by racist discourses through which the sexuality of black people has been framed.

HIV/AIDS, sexuality and power-knowledge

HIV/AIDS is not only a biological disease. Like all other epidemics it has social, political and economic dimensions. Echenberg (2011), Marks (2002), Lurie (1992) and Packard (1989) show that ‘South Africa’s epidemiological record demonstrates how the politics of race has always been inextricably linked to public health issues’. HIV/AIDS as a sexually transmitted disease carries yet another burden as sex and sexuality have historically been used as mechanisms of oppression. Knowledge on sexuality is particularly politically charged as it is invested with ‘excess of significance’ (Rubin, 1984) that has constitutive power. That is, knowledge associated with sexuality has the ability to impact group consciousness, stunting, what Gilman (1985) calls, their ‘realization’ in relation to other groups. The potency of the meaning-making found in sexuality lies in Bourdieu’s (1989: 23) assertion that symbolic power makes things with words. Sexuality is imbued with the ultimate meaning of what it means to be human (Vaughan, 1991). It is thus instructive to also link the symbolic implications of HIV/AIDS discourse with politics, particularly if we consider Foucault’s assertion that knowledge can be deployed to cement unequal power relations (Foucault, 1978). This assertion is much in the vein of critical anthropology. Here, discourse is not only ideological but is intimately linked to the distribution of and wrestling for power. This, as argued by Bourdieu (1989: 21), ‘objective relations of power tend to reproduce themselves in relations of symbolic power.’ Critically, then, ‘ideology is ideas with a weapon’ (Verrips, 2012: 49). So, when a discourse is backed by institutionalised force the meaning and order it imposes on the aspects of the world profoundly influence thought and social practice. I like to put this notion thus: the words I speak to you are spirit and life. Following this realisation, Du Bois (1999: 15) characterises the effects of (white) scholarship on black souls: ‘while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of vast despair’. Again, I reiterate the identity-making potential of sexuality – herein is said to be found the ultimate meaning of humanness (Vaughan, 1991). The eventual consequence of this lack of self-recognition and self-realisation is that it cements white supremacist ideas as argued by the quotation below:

And the nation echoed and enforced this criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need for higher culture for half-men? … and behold the suicide of a race! (Du Bois, 1999: 14–15).

For Foucault, sexuality is an ‘especially dense transfer point for relations of power’ (1978: 103), i.e. power produces sexuality and gives it meaning. The notion of sex being ‘put into discourse’ reflects the interplay between power and knowledge. Ideas about sexuality are shaped by (and shape) discourse and feed the politics of representation. In other words, ‘sexuality’ cannot be taken at face value, it necessarily invites a dialogue. Further, Foucault (1978) argues that the question to ask about sex is not so much whether one says yes or no to sex, whether sex is thought of as important with far reaching consequences or not. Rather, according to Foucault (1978), the central issue is to account for the fact that sex is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak. From this point of view, Foucault elevates sex from individual politics to broader politics about sociopolitical power and influence.

So, Foucault’s (1978) idea of the ‘deployment of sexuality’ and that of ‘a network or regime of sexuality’ suggests that sexuality is being used, through sex, to consolidate its power with the end result of subjugating every other individual attribute to it. It is thus that sexuality gains its regulatory, meaning and identity-making ability. Implicit in this argument is a presence that is orchestrating and influencing the interplay between sex (biology) and sexuality (socio-political identity). Foucault (1978) refers ominously to this presence as ‘the invisible hand’ whose purpose is to cement the status quo. It invests the relationship between sex and sexuality with particular meanings, the end result of which is the definition of what is normal and what is not is an expression of power. From this point of view, sexuality ceases to be a private matter of individual choice and becomes a public matter to be administered and regulated by ‘bio-powers’ interested in achieving a particular end. Sex is here made to foreground and thus totalise one’s identity.

I, therefore, assert that the discursive frame in which sexuality is embedded is a strategic lever for symbolic power. Sexuality is fraught with symbolism. Theories on sexuality more than inform, they perform a political role. Therefore the overdetermined ‘culture thesis’ (see Farmer, 2001; Fassin, 2007; Hunter, 2010) deployed to explain the rampant spread of HIV/AIDS in South Africa highlights the assertion that knowledge production is imbued with the politics of representation and discursive practice that enacts, entrenches and promotes a particular worldview.¹⁹ (Farmer, 2001; Fassin, 2007; Gilman, 1985; Hall, 1997; Hooks, 1981; Lidchi, 1997; Marshall, 2005; Rabinow, 1986; Vaughan, 1991). For, why have the sexual practices of individuals and groups that implicate their unique, unchanging and dangerous ‘culture’ been overplayed at the expense of the social, political and economical determinants of HIV/AIDS (Farmer, 2001; Fassin, 2007; Hickel, 2012; Hunter, 2010; Treichler, 1999; and others)? I argue that this tendency is neither innocent nor is it coincidental. It serves particular interests even as it is presented as ‘scientific knowledge’ (Farmer, 2001; Fassin, 2007; Hickel, 2012). For example, Treichler (1999: 35) argues that HIV/AIDS (which implicates sex, sexual behaviour, sexuality) is a story of metaphor in that it attaches itself to and invigorates discursive dichotomies of self – not self, first world – third world, civilised – not civilised. In other words, the subtext in AIDS literature plays into and reinforces pre-existing social divisions (also see Stillwagon, 2006) that HIV/AIDS has resurrected colonial discourses of an ‘African sexuality’ (Ahlberg, 1994; Farmer, 2001; Fassin, 2007; Heald, 1995; Treichler, 1999; Wilton, 1997). Writing cannot thus be reduced to method (and content) (Clifford, 1986: 2). Texts do more than inform, importantly, they perform (Treichler, 1999). Treichler (1999) argues that like AIDS in the first world, AIDS in the third world is readily articulated to pre-existing interests and agendas. This begs the question; how and why are black South Africans imagined through the prevailing discourse? How is HIV/AIDS discourse abjection (Kristeva, 1982)?

Foucault’s (1978) thesis of ‘power-knowledge’ is apt in beginning to explore why anthropology as practised in South Africa generally tended towards concepts and theories that essentially blamed the victims while obscuring the bigger dynamics complicit in fuelling the epidemic. I argue that while the units of analysis of anthropology have traditionally been ‘closed, discrete communities’, the reversion to these units of analysis in explaining HIV/AIDS was an ideological choice. The emic view was seldom balanced with the etic view where the ethnographer begins to juxtapose fieldwork participant utterances and silences with broader socioeconomic and political issues in line with critical anthropology principles that underscore the political economy of disease distribution. This is in contrast to Campbell’s (1997) analysis of mineworker utterances, for instance, that went further to give an etic understanding to account for and explain them. I argue that anthropology as practised in South Africa at the height of the epidemic blatantly and inconceivably ignored the very sensible injunction to, while opting to ‘study down’, should also ‘study up, sideways and through’ (Nader, 1972) to map possible links between these sectors of society. If contemporary anthropological theory is that communities are not discrete, bounded and unchanging, how come such a view of the most affected communities in South Africa was favoured? What interests and agendas could possibly be served by resurrecting ‘the Zulu man’ embroiled in and blinded by ‘Zulu culture’ (Leclerc-Madlala, 2002a, 2002b)? Here, the use of the culture concept borders on the Enlightenment evolutionary sense and not the contemporary sense as meaning-making and as signifying practice (see Garuba and Raditlhalo, 2008). Such work was characterised by a rural focus in search of ‘culture’ of people who are as different from the researcher as possible. Did this then justify this difference, I ask? There seemed to be a deliberate and systematic simplification of people’s utterances which were characterised as ‘the voices of the poor’ with no real attempt to understand the social factors that kept the poor that way and what the social implications of these are. I argue that this intellectual laziness that bought into the very first insular theory that was devoid of intellectual rigour and thus failed to make connections even where these were not immediately apparent was in fact ideological. Where the emic view was balanced with the etic view, the etic view was lazy and stubbornly ignorant of diverse theories that account for HIV/AIDS.²⁰ Important works of the time harped on the same theme, finding fault at the individual/community level and attributing this to ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’. They focused and stagnated on the worldview of their informants, what then of their expert, informed view of society? What about their knowledge of the historical relationship between sex(uality), ideas about disease, scholarship and repression (Lurie, 1992; Packard, 1989; Vaughan, 1991)? These silences need deconstruction.

Theorising difference and anthropology

Anthropology and its units of analysis that emphasise cultural tradition deny ‘natives’ history that has seen them engage as unequal and exploited parties in the making of the South African economy as domestic, farm, factory and mine workers. It is common cause that there is an overrepresentation of such unskilled labour in HIV/AIDS.²¹ Labour relations are characterised by super-exploitation and precarious living in settings and industries that attract and employ unskilled labour. Hickel (2012) reminds us that these conditions are neither natural nor inevitable, rather they are a product of processes of class power and of policies that govern resource distribution. Tellingly, in the same way that biomedical discourse overemphasises behaviour change through knowledge and awareness, anthropology fetishises so-called cultural and traditional practices and locates responsibility for the spread of HIV/AIDS on these. HIV/AIDS anthropological discourse is something akin to the making of the Zulu man. For example, Leclerc-Madlala’s (1997, 2002a, 2002b) work goes to all sorts of lengths to depict and locate the perpetuation of HIV/AIDS in KwaZulu-Natal in the practices of Zuluness. Jewkes and Wood’s (2001, 2007) work generally also stagnates at what has been called ‘local explanatory models’ to the neglect of other theories of explanation. These local explanatory models give a sense of an exotic Other detached from the rest.

In a similar vein, Stillwagon (2006), Farmer (2001), Wilton (1997) and Treichler (1999) argue that the explanation for African AIDS emerged from a characterisation of Africans as the social Other, vastly different from Europeans in culture and social norms. The especially crude and reductionist notions of culture that form the substance of AIDS literature in Africa find a ready articulation in the idea of culture in Western scientific racism (Gilroy, 1992). Stories about witchcraft (Ashforth, 2002), conspiracy theories (Niehaus, 2005) and sex rituals (the virgin cleansing myth) are clearly catchy and reaffirm many readers’ notions of an exotic Africa. Farmer (2001) asserts that the anthropologic literature on Haiti has tended towards the exotic. He argues that such literature follows a template that generates a discourse of the Other. I argue that the same is generally true of South African AIDS literature. This literature follows the maxim, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ – it has not caught up with the evolution from cultural meaning to structural violence (see Hunter, 2010) to account for HIV/AIDS. This raises a number of conceptual issues about the theories that have been used to explain the epidemic of HIV/AIDS. These conceptual concerns arise from a particular understanding of anthropological knowledge. Such work, informed by ethnographic principles that emphasise bottom-up knowledge that assumes transparency of representation, was stubbornly oblivious to both advances in anthropological theory that explicitly rebut these views and to the work done in other disciplines that opened up HIV/AIDS theorising beyond the narrow vistas of traditional anthropological knowledge.

From this point of view then, to respond to questions that pertain to the making and remaking of a people the tendency was to look to culture or history as if the two are mutually exclusive. On the contrary, history and culture imply one another as implied by the following quotation: ‘culture is a historically situated, historically unfolding ensemble of signifiers in action, signifiers at once material and symbolic’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992: 27). In a similar vein, cultural analysis is inadequate without a consideration of the social structural context in which cultural phenomena are embedded. This is underscored by the assertion that ‘[a] theory of society which is not also a theory of history, or vice-versa, is hardly a theory at all’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992: 13). Thornton (1988) goes on to say that it has been tempting for anthropology to explain cultural differences in evolutionary terms. Comaroff and Comaroff (1992: 5) argue that these tendencies are informed by a need of the discipline to preserve enclaves of tradition. So the question to ask is: if X and Y have an equal innate disposition to HIV vulnerability, for instance, how do we account for the discrepancies in the actual affliction with HIV? Do we look to ‘culture’, individual choices made or not made, or to structural inequalities that confound both culture and individual behaviour? Do we revert to the crude simplicity of biomedical discourses that blame the individual (Vaughan, 1991)? This is why the role that power plays in social definition and in the interpretation of both the past and the present merits deconstruction. There is thus a need to examine the basic processes of power, not merely its end pathologies (Hickel, 2012). Hence, anthropological theory cannot afford to dispose of a historical lens if it hopes to remain relevant (Mafeje, 1998). Anthropology needs to also reflect more deeply on its basic tenets and what ideological standpoints these feed.

HIV/AIDS in South Africa: Towards understanding why South Africa is the capital of HIV/AIDS

South Africa occupies the unenviable position of being the most unequal society on earth (Bosch et al., 2010). Coupled to this, South Africa carries the highest burden of the twin epidemics of HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) in the world. These two considerations alone are enough of a starting point in theorising the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa. HIV/AIDS vulnerability follows, without compromise, the faultlines bequeathed by the philosophy and practice of unequal development – apartheid.²² Other social ills, be they in education and attendant life prospects, health and life expectancy, housing, et cetera, follow this patterning. South Africa is one of the few countries in which maternal and child mortality rates are increasing.²³ These indicators say all we need to know about the disproportional representation of HIV/AIDS among poor black South Africans.²⁴ It is thus not constructive to treat HIV/AIDS as an isolated, special story. Our burden as social scientists is to explain the factors that collude and conspire to yield and foment its patterning.

Nations marked by severe inequality have greater public health risks and lower life expectancy than more egalitarian societies regardless of overall wealth. In other words ‘inequalities kill’ (Hickel, 2012: 515). These inequalities persist beyond the 1994 settlement and have, in fact, increased and continue to reflect what former president Mbeki termed ‘two nations’ that characterise South Africa. So while the discourses and policies show partiality towards individual choice and behaviour, the reality is that deepening levels of inequality have compromised individuals’ ability to control and influence their health outcomes (Hickel, 2012).²⁵ The following section will speak briefly to some of the major social, political and economic factors that together conspire to fuel the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa. Fassin (2007) delineates these with reference to South Africa: socioeconomic inequality, violence and migration. Political turmoil and transition also played a critical part in the spread of the epidemic (Benatar, 2001). Carael (2006) adds to the list chaotic urbanisation, crises in rural areas and the general deterioration following structural adjustment policies that affected education, health, infant mortality and life expectancy. While sociologists like Gilbert and Walker (2002) and historians like Marks (2002) have spoken eloquently to these, anthropological theory reverted to what Comaroff and Comaroff (1992) warned against – the foolish fascination with the exotic that deny the natives history in the making of an unequal society.

I argue, in line with Fassin (2007) and Schneider (2002), that any sociological question in South Africa today, be it teenage pregnancy, gender relations, or HIV risk and vulnerability cannot escape the prism of apartheid logic and consequence. Therefore, to understand contemporary South Africa, one needs to understand the history of South Africa which Terreblanche (2002) characterises as – from slavery, to systematic exploitation to structural exclusion. Try as we may to divorce these social ills from these historical processes, we cannot, as evidenced by their uncompromising racial overtones. In this vein then, society and sexuality cannot be conceived of as separate and thus independent realms of analysis. Sexuality does not exist as a separate realm of human interaction; it is interconnected with other spheres of social life. From this point of view, sexuality is a classical example of the feminist assertion that the personal is political (Hanisch, 1961). I argue, following Rubin (1984), that sexual acts carry ‘excess of significance’ that permeate cultural, political and economic spaces. This is in the same vein that Weeks (2002: 34) asserts: ‘as sex goes, so goes society’. This point is also made by Hunter (2010: 36) that to understand sex we need to simultaneously focus on it and de-centre it to investigate its constructions as an apparently distinct domain but also to explore under-researched arenas that help to construct it and were constructed by it. The question to ask, then, is what is the anthropological conception of ‘community’ that is favoured by HIV/AIDS discourse in South Africa, and why is that the case? The biological and cultural discourses that are privileged by public health practitioners and anthropologists respectively work to efface the social production of health outcomes and shroud the relationship between class and disease (Farmer, 2001; Hickel, 2012). The theories that are privileged to explain a phenomenon betray the ideological standpoint of the discipline and its practitioners (Wenham et al., 2009). The framing of sexuality is an exercise in the politics of sexuality in the same vein that HIV/AIDS discourse ‘has been built around a set of assumptions about the causes of the epidemic that misperceive and depoliticize the problem’ (Hickel, 2012: 514). Following Comaroff and Comaroff (1992: 31), I argue that is important to explore ‘the processes that make and transform particular worlds – processes that reciprocally shape subjects and contexts that allow certain things to be said and done’. Labour migration whose wide-ranging and long-lasting effects are a necessary and pivotal starting point to begin to understand the nature and patterning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic will be the focus of the following section.

Migrant labour

Migrant labour is a cornerstone of the South African economy and was the mainstay of the ideology and practice of separate and unequal development between rural and mainly black and urban and mainly white areas. It is characterised by increasingly young unskilled men leaving their rural homes and being thrown into the throes of super-exploitative relations in the mining and other sectors.²⁶ In their words, and in the words of Campbell (2001) going underground (where according to Campbell safety standards are well below international standards) is like playing Russian roulette with one’s life. This kind of worldview is conceivably carried to other aspects of one’s life as the working and living conditions in the mines make unprotected sex with multiple partners such as compelling behavioural option – a recipe for living – for migrant workers (Campbell, 2001, my emphasis). Hence Hickel (2012) laments the dissonance between a worldview (in particular the neoliberal worldview) that favours a ‘survival of the fittest in a jungle’ ethos and at the same time blames individuals for their negative health outcomes. Lurie et al. (2003) assert that migration is an independent risk factor for HIV infection among men. They argue that it is not so much the movement itself that increases vulnerability to HIV/AIDS but rather the conditions and structure of the migration process.²⁷ Because of circular migration, those who leave the rural areas in search of work and those who remain behind but participate in the same sexual networks are as vulnerable. For instance, Lurie et al. (2003) show that almost 62% of adult men in the Hlabisa district of KwaZulu-Natal spent the majority of nights away from their rural homes and relationships. Wilson (2006) conceptualises the relationship between apartheid and HIV by pointing to the vicious cycle of taking young men away from their families, housing them in same-sex hostels where life is bleak and dehumanising and encourages alcohol abuse and commercial sex. He argues that these are the seeds that gave rise to the HIV epidemic in South Africa today. Similar conclusions were reached by Campbell (2001) in Going underground and going after women: masculinity and HIV transmission amongst black workers on the gold mines. Mechanic (1990) portends that in the final analysis HIV is a social problem insofar as those with the poorest health experiences the world over are generally those who come from the most disrupted social settings, and are the least constrained or protected by family, and community expectations. HIV in South Africa is no exception to this rule. These arguments ‘make sociological sense’ (Auerbach et al., 2011) and are contrary to the uniquely anthropological motivations that sent ethnographers in droves to kwaHlabisa in search of ‘Zulu culture’ to explain the high prevalence rates of HIV/AIDS in this district.²⁸ The political and economic dimensions that are inherent in migration have been neglected by anthropological theory that sought to explain the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa.

The violence visited against the black majority in South Africa in the perpetuation of white privilege, of which forced migrant labour is a significant part, destabilised family and other structures that lent to social cohesion. From this point of view then gender relations in rural South Africa are not a product of ‘culture and tradition’ as purported by anthropology but are a reflection of migrant labour system and related processes (Hickel, 2012). This can be argued for the masculinity that is aggressive and violent that has been the subject of anthropological work (Wood and Jewkes, 1997, 2001) as argued by Campbell (2001). While the generations of men under study by these scholars are different, it is a fallacy to draw an invisible line between the violence visited on the fathers and the violence perpetuated by their children. Scholarship that is reductionist and myopic is in fact dangerous as it has the unfortunate consequence of perpetuating inequalities while it disguises itself as ‘science’ and thus non-partisan. In response to this trend, Farmer (2001) argues that the lasting effect of these tendencies is to reduce a political issue to one in which individuals attract charitable donations of blankets, food parcels, et cetera. The effects of apartheid will haunt South Africa for some time, and therefore redressive and just scholarship will seek not to obscure these webs of significance, but will seek to speak to them in ways that would discourage their perpetuation in any manner or form.

Anthropology and its construction of knowledge

In this section, I hone specifically into uniquely anthropological issues in the quest to explain why anthropological theories of HIV/AIDS in South African took a particular turn. It is almost common cause in anthropological circles that anthropology lacks a common paradigm. This recognition prompted Comaroff (2010) to ask, in his seminal work The end of anthropology, again: on the future of an in/discipline, a question along the lines of ‘which anthropology’²⁹ – traditional anthropology, critical anthropology or the new critical anthropology? This view that there are many epistemologies from which disparate anthropologists position their work should not obscure the fact that anthropological thought has evolved away from certain problematic propensities over time. Two considerations merit attention for the arguments made in this article. First, anthropology carries a burdensome history of being the handmaiden of colonialism by justifying unequal power relations through its conceptions of difference (Fabian, 2002; Grimshaw and Hart, 1996).³⁰ The evolution of anthropological theory over time was informed by and sought to correct this history among other issues. Secondly and following from the above consideration, anthropological units of analysis and concepts have had to recognise the interconnectedness of the world. In this vein, anthropological theory has had to shed ‘the native’ who is burdened and hamstrung by tradition and culture, once anthropological notions par excellence, and speak to how communities are made and unmade by broader and seemingly unrelated dynamics. The anthropological unit of analysis – the community – has had to undergo a similar review. In the following section, I look at how prevalent anthropological notions deployed to explain the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa are contrary to these developments.

I isolate the idea of ethnicity to begin to ask why anthropologists and those who purported to do anthropological studies³¹ flew from all over the world to witness and explain the pandemic in its capital. I once again make reference to the frenzy of anthropological research that HIV/AIDS attracted at its height (Schoepf, 1991). I contend that more than historical and sociological studies, for instance, biomedical and epidemiological studies were complemented by anthropological research. This attraction between seemingly unlikely bedfellows can perhaps be explained by a common starting point: that the individual who is a representative of some ethnic identity that informs cultural practice is the locus of HIV/AIDS risk. While the biomedical paradigm fetishises the individual as the locus of both biological and behavioural pathology, anthropology needs to go no further, the group, the community from which the individual ‘gains his or her identity’ must help explain the spread of HIV/AIDS. The leap from the assumption that sexual behaviour is not only an individual choice but a community trait was a logical one from this point of view. Several problematic issues need highlighting here. The concept of ethnicity and ethnic identity espoused by this point of view is long dead in anthropology. Its use can only be understood as an ideological choice. Flowing from the Knowledge, Attitude, Practice and Behaviour (KAPB) model that posits a linear relationship between the above, this choice of explanatory model achieved two objectives.³² Firstly, and related to the frenzied nature of research that was fashionable at the time, not much effort was needed to explain HIV/AIDS beyond implementing what can be best described as ‘hit and run’ research projects undergirded by interview and focus group schedules that remarkably leaned towards survey questionnaires. This kind of research was ‘quick and dirty’ and was instrumental in fast-tracking individual careers in an environment characterised by ‘publish or perish’ pressures. I argue then, that the methodological and ideological flaws carried by this approach betray interests that had little to do with getting to the root causes of the epidemic but had everything to do with fashioning an array of quick fixes that were ultimately detrimental to those on whose behalf anthropologists purport to speak. Second, flowing from the KAPB paradigm, the anthropology that favoured a hit-and-run approach found resonance with biomedical principles and paradigms of disease and health. Anthropology was rescued from its somewhat obscure position in the greater scheme of things (see Mafeje, 1998)³³ and was seen as having something useful to say that is not complicated or long-winded. HIV risk and HIV vulnerability were conflated to mean the same thing. In this way, the individual and the community which the individual ostensibly represents without contradiction became both the root and secondary cause of HIV/AIDS. Consequentially, other critical social drivers that shape vulnerability to HIV/AIDS were thus permanently hidden from view.

The question of ‘which anthropology’ is a real one here. For instance, ethnography is not without its limitations. In basic terms, ethnography is the practice of anthropological research based on direct observation of and reportage of the people’s way of life. Ethnography entails fieldwork and recording data and then the interpretation of those data. Both the methodologies and the outcomes of ethnography as defined as the description of single contemporary culture through fieldwork have been subject of much debate, and are the subject of the book Writing culture: the politics and poetics of ethnography (Tyler, 1986). Let us deconstruct the precepts on which ethnography as method and product is premised. ‘The description of the single contemporary culture’ is a point of contention for, as pointed out earlier in the paper, singular culture that is contained in a space is a fallacy. Spaces do not necessarily make places as Gupta and Ferguson (1997) have so eloquently reminded us. The motivation to seek and find such goes back to the problematic origins of anthropology that sought to emphasise difference, particularly with regard to the West, which then went on to justify hierarchical power relations. While HIV/AIDS research in South Africa went to great lengths to describe the habits and everyday practices of those most affected by the pandemic, it was also at pains not to indicate any particular point of reference. These habits and practices were conceptualised as problematic in and of themselves especially as they lent to the spread of HIV. So, while one cannot accuse such scholarship of explicitly pointing to a specific point of reference in how these practices were thought of, the implications were always there. The point of reference is taken as a matter of course – ‘us’ and ‘them’.³⁴

Another dimension of ethnography that is problematic and whose limitations were underplayed in HIV/AIDS research carried out in the name of anthropology is the idea of ‘fieldwork’. Fieldwork played well into the methodological approaches that emphasised the administration of interview and focus group guides. In essence then, fieldwork translated into gathering as much ‘data’ in the form of utterances whether of an individual or of a group. These data were interpreted and canonised as ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ which fed explanatory models for the spread and patterning of HIV/AIDS. Several issues merit deconstructing here. Firstly, ‘fieldwork’ is not a seamless, transparent process of cause and effect. In other words, fieldwork does not automatically lead to ‘the truth’ being uncovered, no matter how clever the questions asked of the native whose habits and everyday practices are the subject of ethnographic fieldwork.³⁵ Klimaszewski et al. (2012: 480) contend that; ‘[i]n this way, collaborative theory seems epistemologically naive because it ignores the fact that the ‘native’ informant is as immersed in the contextual-bounded ideas about their culture and society as any researcher’. The point here is that fieldwork does not carry transparency of representation. The ‘truth’ is not to be found in the utterances of the informant, the informant is just as caught up in the politics and poetics of representation as the researcher. That is, the utterances of the informant are not unmediated – they are claims made in response to and in a particular sociopolitically fraught relationship. It is thus that Klimaszewski et al. (2012) assert that we must question when, why and how an individual chooses to claim one cultural identity from the many identities or roles available to them which could just as easily include gender, class, education, age, kinship or any number of others. Is it not possible then that ‘this positioning includes assumptions about how the actor should be treated, how they have been treated in the past and why that treatment did/not occur’ (Klimaszewski et al., 2012)?³⁶ This speaks to how ‘common sense’ discourses underpinned by power and authority further disadvantage those already marginalised. This ‘regime of truth’ (Foucault, 1978) constitutes symbolic violence where the marginalised people contribute to their own domination by accepting and internalising discourses that sustain and uphold their exclusion and subjugation (Bourdieu, 1989; 1991). Further, the informant must be operating with the idea that they were targeted for research because they can offer a peculiar idea about themselves which the researcher is not privy to or from which they operate. These possibilities, while divergent, tell us two important things, that informants may exaggerate certain aspects of their lives in order to perform their assumption of what it means to be worthwhile research participants or they could be playing to confirm the very notions that they know research has about them. Besides, ‘their truth’, no matter what their intentions, is also mediated by education, class and other factors. It is thus problematic that researchers chose to take this truth at face value. The balance between the emic and etic viewpoints (which are not necessarily divergent) was dispensed with perhaps guided by the methodological myth that ethnography may ‘function well without a theory to guide it’ (Marcus, 1994 in Comaroff 2010). It is also buttressed by a long-standing chimera: that anthropological wisdom consists of generalisations about the particular that are also particularisations of the general (Marcus, 1994 in Comaroff, 2010).

Further, the idea of ‘the field’ as place feeds the illusion of objectivity, it clouds the situatedness of knowledge irrespective of one’s physical location. That is, the ethnographers’ relations of power to the people that they study as well as the political stances that they assume are more revealing than mere geographical location. The emphasis on geographical location clouds the fact that even the choice of a fieldwork setting is not an innocent one, it feeds into the ethnographer’s larger assumptions. From this point of view, the choice of the field is a strategic intervention that serves and perpetuates a particular end. Related to these considerations is the implicit notion embedded in the politics of ‘the field’ that ‘seeing is believing’ (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992: 8). The adage that ‘seeing is believing’ feeds a particular volarisation that enables the gaze that penetrates in the quest to reveal ‘the secrets of a culture’. The preoccupation with geographical location taken together with the obsession with ‘culture’ as a defining feature of the native Other perpetuate an anthropology that legitimises the tradition that Western scholars, with their particular worldview, speak about a ‘mute’ other. These tendencies fail to problematise the Western gaze that informs anthropology – to highlight its positionality. This failure is especially mind-boggling given the history of the discipline in the colonising processes of the world. This history should compel the practitioners of the discipline to be more reflexive – to consider the implications of the work that we do. As Gupta and Ferguson (1997) argue, the questions ‘by what method’ ‘for whom’ and ‘to what end’ should guide our ‘interventions’. Critically, these should not collude to cement the status quo to the detriment of the people whose lives animate our research interests. As early as the late 1990s, scholars like Hunt (1989: 368) reacting to these tendencies, were proposing a stance – ‘HIV-1 seropositivity and AIDS in Africa must be understood socially, in its historically specific context, or not at all’ – that merited consideration, if nothing else. Ferguson (2006: 38–41) points out that we have yet to see in practice and in a compelling, systematic and widespread manner the sort of scholarship that suggests that debates debunking the myth of an exotic and separate Africa have been embraced and internalised in the conception and implementation of research in and on Africa.

Ahlberg (1994) reacting to Caldwell et al.’s³⁷ (1989) thesis on permissive African sexuality, notes the following: that the Caldwells neglect to (a) acknowledge the limitations associated with sexual behaviour research; (b) to place moral and religious values in context; and (c) to bring a historical perspective to bear on their analysis. So ‘fieldwork’ no matter how rigorous has inherent challenges that need balancing. The observations by Ahlberg take us to the latter part of ethnography, the interpretation of ‘findings’. Holland et al. (1994) comment on the inevitable role that the social scientist plays in making sense of the utterances of research participants. Wilson (1988: 45) argues that the ethnographer’s attempts to write about informants’ experience ‘as if [his visibility] comprised the informant’s perceptions, words, ideas and feelings rather than an account mediated by the ethnographer’s choice’ is key to understanding ‘research findings’. ‘Research findings’ are thus mediated and should be couched as such.

The interpretation of ‘findings’ of ‘studying down’ begins with an intractable challenge, one that obscures that what is ‘discovered’ down has a relationship with what could potentially be discovered by ‘studying up’. Unfortunately, and critically, HIV/AIDS research tended to ‘study down’ thus reifying and ossifying ethnic/race-based difference based on the notion of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’. Both Stillwagon (2006) and Farmer (2001) argue that AIDS literature that foregrounds inequality and political economy is scarce. Most AIDS literature prioritises overdetermined cultural narratives – culture is viewed as the primary domain of signification in the patterning of HIV vulnerability (Farmer, 2001). Nichter and Locke (2002) caution that it is all too easy to misconstrue rates of a disease as traits of a people and when this happens victim blaming is not far off. Bibeaut and Pederson (2002: 158) argue for an urgent reintroduction of the social, political and economic dimensions in interpreting sexuality and the AIDS epidemic in Africa. They argue that analysis has been ‘too heavily biased on the side of biology and culture’ (Bibeaut and Perdeson, 2002: 158). If anthropology is a study of people in context, what of the context do we choose to highlight – culture that is not implicated in and does not implicate history? Herein lies the fundamental limitation of HIV/AIDS research that was done in the name of anthropology – the Zulu is without, and is not a producer and a product of history.

In this tradition, fieldwork data were seen as sufficient in and of itself to explain HIV/AIDS. Hence we find notable anthropologists emphasising ‘local explanatory models’³⁸ for disease patterning, in effect turning the epistemological dyad of the knowing researcher and the unknowing object of study upside down. The only role that the researcher played was to ‘interpret’ data by relying on and referring to local concepts and models. These invariably confirmed Fabian’s (2002) argument in Time and the other: how anthropology makes its objects that anthropology is trapped in portraying its object of study in the ‘there and then’, while it portrays itself in the ‘here and now’. By so doing, anthropology fails to highlight that the traditional object of its study is in a mutually constitutive relationship with its traditional practitioners. In other words, by portraying the objects of its study in terms that do not recognise the relationship between the traditional subjects of anthropological study, the so-called natives, and its traditional practitioners – Western (-derived) scholars – anthropology yields a partial and thus distorted view. For instance, framing so-called natives in terms of ‘there and then’ discounts the many historical processes that lock the natives and the rest in a closely interlinked embrace (Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992). In other words, theories that invoke ‘culture’ as opposed to ‘structural inequality’, for instance, to explain the differential patterning of HIV/AIDS vulnerability cannot help but be caught in this ‘there and then’ worldview of so-called natives. This is a political standpoint whose implications translate into essentialising difference and thus obscuring the many processes that make ‘the native’. It is an act full of violence; it nullifies the pain and its consequences wrought by many processes that should begin to account for HIV/AIDS and thus inform redress mechanisms.

Conclusion: HIV/AIDS looking forward

I always remark that only an outsider with the influence and stature of Didier Fassin could have written the book that he did effectively articulating a pervasive but silenced point of view. Fassin (2007) argues that there existed a disjointed and two-worlds conception of HIV/AIDS – that of the experts based at universities and research institutions and the most affected of whom were black and marginal. Their voices were made more marginal by the concepts and understandings that while they latched on human stories, these were devoid of a context that undergirds them. This was further compounded by incestuous reading and citings that gave rise to canonical writing. Their tenets were unshakeable and remained unshaken resulting in a monologue whose foundation remained unquestioned. The lasting effects of this scholarship were the subject of this paper. This paper argues that dominant conceptions of HIV/AIDS, especially emanating from and as practised by anthropologists (or in the name of anthropology) served to mask the social and structural determinants of HIV/AIDS. Following in this vein, Farmer (2001) posits that the myths and mystifications surrounding discourse on HIV/AIDS often serve powerful interests in spite of the best intentions of the researcher. This is especially the case when structural violence and cultural difference are conflated to account for HIV/AIDS patterning as is the trend in anthropology (Farmer, 2001). Farmer (2001) argues that the lasting legacy of these tendencies which he calls ‘immodest claims to HIV/AIDS aetiology’ is to mask the effects of social inequalities on the distribution of HIV and AIDS and its outcomes. Herein lies the politics of framing HIV/AIDS and, by extension, sexuality in a particular way. It is thus my view that questions of differential access to power and material resources, and dominant discourses that justify these differences and their historical precedents merit consideration to begin to deconstruct the politics of sexuality and thus HIV/AIDS. These considerations are particularly salient in South Africa with its history of apartheid and its continued legacies.

Footnotes

Notes

Author Biography

Nokuthula Hlabangane was awarded a PhD in Anthropology in 2012 by the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Her doctoral thesis is titled ‘The political economy of teenage sexuality in the time of HIV/AIDS: The case of Soweto, South Africa’. Her research interests include Knowledge and power, sexuality, gender and reproductive health, religion and ritual, urbanization, violence and transition, and anthropology of community. So far, her research interests have directed her towards home – she chooses to be a student in her own community – the reasons have been both ideological and practical. Her ethics are about redress and restoration and as such she has a vested interest in decolonizing Anthropology by painting pictures of strength and resilience where others have left bleak images of savagery and inferiority. Her research practices shy away from delving into cultural pluralism, a fascination with the thick description of the mundane-made-exotic. Rather, she attempts to interpret micro-practices through macro-systems. Hence, her analysis does not singularly dwell on local considerations, nor does it dwell on global considerations. It is a tap dance between the two, it is on the edges of both. She believes that the interpretation of ‘findings’ of ‘studying down’ begins with an intractable challenge, one that obscures that what is ‘discovered’ down has a relationship with what could potentially be discovered by ‘studying up’. Lenses through which she interprets ‘data’ are necessarily alive to the intersection of colour, class, sexuality, education, age and other social markers. She is aware of meditations that speak to ‘African anthropologies’ as she is aware of decolonial meditations that places a responsibility for African(ist) intellectuals to see Africa from within. She also gravitates towards multi-disciplinarity in her thinking and research. Hlabangane teaches at the University of South Africa.

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