8 - An absence of anthropology: critical reflections on anthropology and AIDS policy and practice in Africa

Summary

Introduction

Gilbert Herdt wrote way back in 1987 ‘thus far, anthropology has had minimal involvement in AIDS prevention and understanding’. He ended on a rhetorical note: ‘But, if we do not take up the challenge to discover and assist, who will?’ Surveying the field 16 years later, the answer in many ways seems to be more or less everyone –except anthropologists. This is not of course to say that anthropologists have not been involved in research on HIV/AIDS. They have, and there are useful surveys of their contribution (e.g. Akeroyd, 1997; Parker, 2001; Schoepf, 2001), but the initial impetus spearheaded in American anthropology by Herdt (1987) has not led to an established place for anthropologists in AIDS prevention, policy and care. At first glance, this might appear a little mystifying if one reads the policy statements of the World Health Organization (WHO) or UNAIDS that now advocate ‘bottom up’ approaches, collaboration, working with rather than against local practice, incorporating traditional healers into prevention programmes, and so on. Yet, just at the place where you might expect to find anthropologists, drawing upon their wealth of ethnographic understanding, translating local knowledge into terms comprehensible by policy makers and vice versa, we are notable by our absence. Indeed, anthropologists seem to be stranded outside the increasingly powerful coalition of interests that is represented in the AIDS industry.

This paper addresses this issue of the relative absence of anthropologists in the formulation of HIV/AIDS policy and research in Africa.