Overview

This book offers an original anthropological approach to the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, demonstrating why AIDS interventions in the former homeland of Venda have failed - and possibly even been counterproductive. It does so through a series of ethnographic encounters, from kings to condoms, which expose the ways in which biomedical understanding of the virus have been rejected by - and incorporated into - local understandings of health, illness, sex and death. Through the songs of female initiation, AIDS education and wandering minstrels, the book argues that music is central to understanding how AIDS interventions operate. This book elucidates a hidden world of meaning in which people sing about what they cannot talk about, where educators are blamed for spreading the virus, and in which condoms are often thought to cause AIDS. The policy implications are clear: African worldviews must be taken seriously if AIDS interventions in Africa are to become successful.

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9780511842580

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Reviews

'McNeill shows wonderfully well how music works in everyday contexts not only to demarcate the identities of particular social groups, but also how musicians and everyday singers - and even AIDS-awareness educators - transform musical genres to suit a multitude of purposes that, ultimately, drive social and cultural change.' Adam Ashforth, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute McNeill's book brings fresh, illuminating, and, at times, revelatory material to a host of questions: the impact of chronic unemployment on the moral lives of the young; the politics of tradition in post-apartheid South Africa; and, of course, the highly contested meanings of HIV/AIDS. For anyone interested in the African HIV/AIDS pandemic, indeed, for anyone interested in Africa, this is essential reading. - Jonny Steinberg, author of Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic This eloquent ethnography exposes the contours of everyday life in the age of AIDS. McNeill reveals, with uncommon sensitivity, how the pandemic pervades existence in the Venda region of post-apartheid South Africa, how it makes visible long-standing tensions and forces new conflicts between `tradition' and technology, privation and promise, censorship and song. AIDS, he shows, is perversely productive: while it sharpens a crisis of social reproduction in the countryside, it also opens up new domains of possibility, knowledge, and creativity. As such, it is both a sign and a vector of uncertain, postcolonial times. - Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago This is the best analysis I've read of how the performance arts play a role on the confounding terrain of AIDS prevention and care in the context of poverty. McNeill neither singles out song, dance, and theater as the answer to the problem nor dismisses them as ineffective. Through careful ethnography of performance events and lyrics, he demonstrates that the failures of HIV/AIDS intervention in Venda lie in the intersection of global conventions of peer education with the politics of traditionalism. This is a humanizing text that keeps a political framework active in every chapter. The author's immersion in the community (and dedicated `hanging out') registers in his passing humor, nuanced local insights, and incisive thinking. - Louise Meintjes, Duke University ...this book is significant in depicting the bigger picture of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and compels the reader to consider the future of HIV/AIDS intervention. -Yemurai Matibe, South African Journal of Musicology

'McNeill shows wonderfully well how music works in everyday contexts not only to demarcate the identities of particular social groups, but also how musicians and everyday singers - and even AIDS-awareness educators - transform musical genres to suit a multitude of purposes that, ultimately, drive social and cultural change.' Adam Ashforth, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute

'McNeill shows wonderfully well how music works in everyday contexts not only to demarcate the identities of particular social groups, but also how musicians and everyday singers - and even AIDS-awareness educators - transform musical genres to suit a multitude of purposes that, ultimately, drive social and cultural change.' Adam Ashforth, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute McNeill's book brings fresh, illuminating, and, at times, revelatory material to a host of questions: the impact of chronic unemployment on the moral lives of the young; the politics of tradition in post-apartheid South Africa; and, of course, the highly contested meanings of HIV/AIDS. For anyone interested in the African HIV/AIDS pandemic, indeed, for anyone interested in Africa, this is essential reading. - Jonny Steinberg, author of Sizwe's Test: A Young Man's Journey Through Africa's AIDS Epidemic This eloquent ethnography exposes the contours of everyday life in the age of AIDS. McNeill reveals, with uncommon sensitivity, how the pandemic pervades existence in the Venda region of post-apartheid South Africa, how it makes visible long-standing tensions and forces new conflicts between 'tradition' and technology, privation and promise, censorship and song. AIDS, he shows, is perversely productive: while it sharpens a crisis of social reproduction in the countryside, it also opens up new domains of possibility, knowledge, and creativity. As such, it is both a sign and a vector of uncertain, postcolonial times. - Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago This is the best analysis I've read of how the performance arts play a role on the confounding terrain of AIDS prevention and care in the context of poverty. McNeill neither singles out song, dance, and theater as the answer to the problem nor dismisses them as ineffective. Through careful ethnography of performance events and lyrics, he demonstrates that the failures of HIV/AIDS intervention in Venda lie in the intersection of global conventions of peer education with the politics of traditionalism. This is a humanizing text that keeps a political framework active in every chapter. The author's immersion in the community (and dedicated 'hanging out') registers in his passing humor, nuanced local insights, and incisive thinking. - Louise Meintjes, Duke University ...this book is significant in depicting the bigger picture of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and compels the reader to consider the future of HIV/AIDS intervention. -Yemurai Matibe, South African Journal of Musicology

Author Information

Dr Fraser G. McNeill is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He was awarded a Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics in 2007 and received the Audrey Richards Prize from the African Studies Association in 2008 for his thesis. He is a co-author of the 2009 AIDS Review for the Centre for the Study of AIDS at the University of Pretoria and has published articles in African Affairs and South African Music Studies, as well as chapters in several edited volumes.

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