Re-examining the early years of anti-retroviral treatment in South Africa

A taste for medicine

Bibliographic Data

ID6022030
AuthorsJonny Steinberg (0000-0002-6957-7735, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume116
Issue462
Pages60-79
Publication date2017-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican Affairs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0001-9909 • E-ISSN: 1468-2621
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/afraf/adw026
OpenAlexW2514793164
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Antiretroviral treatment (ART) has become a ubiquitous feature of South African life. By early 2015, three million people had begun ART in South Africa. In light of widespread positive responses to the availability of treatment, early ethnographies that stressed suspicion, fear and resentment need to be revisited. In this article, I re-examine my own data on an early encounter between the technologies of ART and the population of a rural district in the Eastern Cape province. I also return to Didier Fassin’s ethnography in which he placed ordinary people’s responses to AIDS in a history of suspicion and resentment. The article focuses in particular on the support groups that ART users formed and argues that they were the sites of creative responses to ART in which ordinary people, primarily women, bent the new technologies and esoteric languages they encountered to an array of endogenous purposes. The article concludes that ART was incorporated into a politics of hopeful expectation rather than a politics of resentment.

Antiretroviral medication · Antiretroviral therapy · Biology · Geography · Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) · Sociology · Taste · Traditional medicine · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · HIV Research and Treatment · HIV/AIDS Research and Interventions · Medicine · Neuroscience · Virology

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access