Epilogue

Summary

The book has drawn attention to care as a form of hospitality offered between the relatively well and the ill and dying in Okhahlamba. Forms of care were described in relation to a particular kind of illness, lesisifo, more broadly referred to as HIV and AIDS, that has come to dwell among people in ways that compromise so much of social life and yet that call for its reconstitution. The simultaneous unravelling and remaking of sociality across the boundaries of the living and the dead made up the parameters of care in the region.

Care and its opposite were found at many levels of social organisation, the dimensions of which emerged within detailed accounts of individuals’ journeys towards health and death in relation to their illness. Journeying in search of healing on the part of individuals also encompassed the qualities of variable and transforming social relationships in which they were immersed. The isolation and form of social death Nkosinathi, for example, experienced, as described in Chapter One, became manifest when his experience of extreme suffering remained unacknowledged by some members of his family. Silence and lack of recognition, the withdrawal of touch – that which insists on our humanity and on the possibility of exchange between persons – issued into being a form of profound alienation.

More generally, the unevenness of proffered care became manifest at the level of the state, in hospitals, in clinics, in relation to the comportment of nurses, home-based carers, family members and the self. Care and its intermittent withdrawal were linked to forms of institutional incoherence, where institutions bore the trace of histories of neglect and deliberate discrimination. In the intimate spaces of family, the sometimes refusal of care could be partially understood as due to state interventions within families, where mobility and migration resulted in forms of separation and estrangement – forms of separation where people nevertheless strove to reconstitute rural homes as sites of significance, and as social nodes where senses of particular forms of belonging were located.

The possibility of a degree of suspension of care within the family was also understood in relation to the visceral dimensions of undergoing AIDS, as a form of dismembering, not only of the material body, but of the social body.