HIV/AIDS and Cultural Form

The global HIV/AIDS pandemic poses profound conceptual challenges for those who seek to understand the dynamic relationship between cultural form, political economy and struggles for social justice. By virtue of its massive global impact, the disease has often seemed to render irrelevant earlier conceptions of discrete culture-bound localities.

For some scholars and activists working in the wake of HIV/AIDS, the entire concept of “culture” has become politically and analytically suspect. At the same time, profound regional and social variations in the consequences and pathways of the disease have led others to emphasize the importance of cultural inflection and symbolic mediation.

AIDS is associated with profound transformations of consciousness and cultural practice on local and global stages, across a wide range of media, including profound shifts in understandings of the body, sexuality, visuality, social accountabililty, memorialization and the meanings of art. Increasingly, public-health and development practitioners have sought to mobilize the domain of “culture” in the struggle against AIDS; in many AIDS-ravaged communities in the global south, popular arts and crafts are widely promoted as educational interventions and income-generating resources for impoverished persons with AIDS.

Important theoretical and practical issues include:

  • How are we to theorize the relationship between visuality and power in struggles against HIV/AIDS?
  • What are the uses and misuses on the concept of culture in understanding risk, promoting prevention, and providing treatment? Is it useful to speak of “cultural factors” contributing to the spread of HIV/AIDS? Can one legitimately speak, for example, of a “culture of promiscuity,” or are patterns of sexual interaction primarily determined by underlying social and economic relations and conditions?
  • How are “culturally appropriate” forms to be developed in AIDS education campaigns in different locales and social formations?
  • How has HIV/AIDS shaped perceptions of the body in different places and at different points in the trajectory of the epidemic?
  • How have material forms, including bodies themselves, been harnessed and reconfigured in response to the pandemic to protest, witness and memorialize?
  • How are memorializations from the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt in the United States to memory boxes and body maps in sub-Saharan Africa contributing to local and global understandings of and responses to the pandemic?

Specialists and Resource Persons

  • Mark Auslander (Anthropology)
  • Scott Edmiston (Office of the Arts)
  • Nina Kammerer (Anthropology and Heller School for Social Policy and Management)
  • Tom King (English and American Literature)
  • Joan Kauffman (Heller School for Social Policy and Management)
  • Sarah Lamb (Anthropology)
  • Paul Morrison (English and American Literature)
  • Carol Prost (Heller School for Social Policy and Management)
  • Ellen Schattschneider (Anthropology)

Related Courses at Brandeis

  • AIDS, Activism and Representation (Eng 58b)
  • AIDS in Anthropological Perspective (Anth 142a)
  • Anthropology of the Body (Anth 145a)
  • Topics in Sustainable Development (HS 259f, section 5, HIV/AIDS as a Public Policy Issue)

Related Organizations at Brandeis

The AIDS Study Group (ASG).
Contact Nina Kammerer or Joan Kaufman.

 The Student Global AIDS Campaign (SGAC)
http://my.brandeis.edu/clubs/sgac
 https://lists.brandeis.edu/wws/info/sgac (sign up for listserv)

Related Online Resources

AIDS Memorial Quilt
http://www.aidsquilt.org

 Artery: The AIDS-Art Forum
http://www.artistswithaids.org/artery/index1.html

 Black AIDS Institute
http://www.blackaids.org (homepage has sign up for e-mailing list)

Canadian AIDS Memorial Quilt
http://www.quilt.ca

 Global Dialogues: Scenarios from Africa
http://www.globaldialogues.org/

 Health Action AIDS (Physicians for Human Rights and Partners in Health)
http://www.phrusa.org/campaigns/aids/
Student Global AIDS Campaign (National, Brandeis SGAC is a chartered club)
http://www.fightglobalaids.org/

 Visual AIDS
http://www.visualaids.org

E-Forums         

Discuss AIDS and Media
http://culturalproduction.wikispaces.com/AIDS+Media

 Gender-AIDS
gender-aids@eforums.healthdev.org

For details of how to access discussion archives:
www.healthdev.org/eforums/gender-aids

SEA-AIDS
www.healthdev.org/eforums/cms/individual.asp?sid=96&sname=SEA-AIDS