Sustaining Life. Theodore Powers

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      Anthropology, it is often said, attempts to bridge social and cultural difference in order to make ideas and practices from the Global South seem more familiar to those living in the Global North. In this characterization, anthropologists are seen to act as mediators who engage with “the other” in order to make their lives more comprehensible to northern publics. In doing so, anthropologists are imagined as bringing a set of academic practices to bear relative to the question of cultural variation by brandishing an expertise of a particular sort. Inherent in this formulation is a hierarchy regarding academic knowledge and an understanding of the broader context within which ideas and practices are situated, purportedly the purview of the anthropologist.

      The situation that I encountered as I began research on the politics of the South African HIV/AIDS epidemic did not cohere with the generalized understanding of anthropological fieldwork described above. If anything, the hierarchy of expertise relative to the HIV/AIDS epidemic was reversed, as some research participants had contributed to publications in esteemed academic journals such as the Lancet. But, as I was to learn, the inverse relationship between researcher and expertise was not isolated to debates on epidemiology; it extended far beyond to the social dynamics that drove HIV infection, the politics that limited the public sector HIV/AIDS response, and the material privations that community-based HIV/AIDS activists navigated as part of their everyday lives.

      Indeed, while my name may appear on the cover of this book, it is the knowledge and experiences of those who opened their lives to me that has provided the basis for the ethnography that follows. I was, and remain, a student of South African society, and those whose lives are outlined in this book are, and continue to be, my teachers. This book would not have been possible without their generosity, patience, and understanding as I learned about the everyday challenges of HIV/AIDS and the political struggle required to expand HIV/AIDS treatment access in South Africa. However, the contributions of my research participants were not limited to the gathering of data. They were also central to the research design that I employed in my work. As I describe in detail in Chapter 1, I followed the life pathways of research participants in order to locate field sites where politics, policy, and HIV/AIDS treatment access were negotiated. Thus, rather than a predetermined conception of the field and research sites, my project grew out of the lived experiences of those navigating the landscape of HIV/AIDS politics in South Africa.

      Following people involved with the campaign for HIV/AIDS treatment access shed light onto how transnational forces articulate with HIV/AIDS politics, how debates on AIDS dissidence manifested in the townships of the Cape Flats, and how HIV/AIDS activists occupied the state to transform treatment access. This project—and the insights that it offers relative to academic debates on transnationalism, social movements, and the state—largely belongs to those who fought for HIV/AIDS treatment access in South Africa. I offer my deep thanks for their contributions, and I hope that I have done justice to their life histories and political campaigns in the pages that follow.

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