I’m currently reading Paul Farmer’s Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues, for tomorrow night’s meeting of the Green Book Club that I’m probably now not going to make. (Sorry folks!)
I’ve anyway only read the first chapter, but its intellectual foundations, at the junction of participatory anthropology and medicine (the author being fully qualified in both), are spectacular illuminatory.
I’ve been musing all day on this passage:
This conflation of structural violence and cultural difference has marred much commentary on AIDS, especially when that commentary focuses on the chief victims of the disease: the poor. A related trend is the exaggeration of the agency of those most likely to become infected. Often such exaggeration is tantamount to blaming the victim. Explorations of AIDS have involved intense scrutiny of local factors and local actors, including the natives’ conceptions and stated motives. But it is possible to explain the distribution of HIV by discussing only attitude or cognition? After more than 15 years in Haiti, I would not hazard to comment on the psychological makeup specific to Haitians with AIDS… On the makeup of Haiti’s changing social conditions and their relation to Aids, however, much can be said. (p. 9 California Press 1999 edition)
It seemed particularly apt on a day when the Tories have found a new way to approach “back-to-basics”. They aren’t attacking single mothers this time – just cohabiting ones, and their partners for good measure. So the problems underlying the British underclass, in the Tory view, are economic – it is because they aren’t behaving, are exercising the limited agency available to them bady, by not trotting up to the altar. That nicely lets the economy and government off the hook then…
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