AIDS Doesn't Show Its Face: Inequality, Morality, and Social Change in Nigeria

AIDS Doesn't Show Its Face: Inequality, Morality, and Social Change in Nigeria
ISBN-10
022610897X
ISBN-13
9780226108971
Category
Social Science
Pages
208
Language
English
Published
2014-03-28
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Author
Daniel Jordan Smith

Description

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.

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