Synopses & Reviews
AIDS and Africa are indelibly linked in popular consciousness, but despite widespread awareness of the epidemic, much of the story remains hidden beneath a superficial focus on condoms, sex workers, and antiretrovirals. Africa gets lost in this equation, Daniel Jordan Smith argues, transformed into a mere vehicle to explain AIDS, and inand#160;
AIDS Doesnand#8217;t Show Its Face, he offers a powerful reversal, using AIDS as a lens through which to view Africa.
Drawing on twenty years of fieldwork in Nigeria, Smith tells a story of dramatic social changes, ones implicated in the same inequalities that also factor into local perceptions about AIDSand#8212;inequalities of gender, generation, and social class. Nigerians, he shows, view both social inequality and the presence of AIDS in moral terms, as kinds of ethical failure. Mixing ethnographies that describe everyday life with pointed analyses of public health interventions, he demonstrates just how powerful these paired anxietiesand#8212;medical and socialand#8212;are, and how the world might better alleviate them through a more sensitive understanding of their relationship.
Review
and#8220;In this masterful book, Daniel Jordan Smith has located crucial points of entry for reimagining AIDS prevention and care amidst Nigeriaand#8217;s entrenched inequality and overwhelming social and moral crises. With its innovative methodological openness and deep insights, AIDS Doesnand#8217;t Show Its Face is a moving testament to the timely role and public significance of anthropology.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;From almost the moment it first appeared in Nigeria, Africaand#8217;s richest and most populous country, AIDS began to rival corruption for a grim distinction: what many citizens see as the most potent symbol of national moral decay. In a place where vast wealth is held by an ever-more remote and powerful few, those of little means are often obliged to entanglements in corruption or exposure to deadly disease. This book is at once a riveting ethnography and an exceptionally well-argued demonstration of how, exactly, inequality can leave people so few alternatives to risk and deception in their most intimate relations.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork, Smith effectively uses popular reactions to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Nigeria as a lens through which to observe and analyze social change there. He successfully shows that things are not as simple as they might seem to outsidersand#8212;even the best-intentioned outsidersand#8212;and that much of the public health messaging that emphasizes individual responsibility is simply off the mark.and#8221;
Synopsis
The popular Nigerian (pidgin) prevention message and#147;AIDS no dey show for faceand#8221; warns that one cannot tell if someone has HIV based on how they look. Extending this metaphor,and#160;AIDS Doesnand#8217;t Show Its Faceand#160;by anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith illustrates how widely held views about Nigeria, Africa, and the disease itself conceal the real faces of the continent. The book counters misguided renderings that portray African societies only through images of exotic and dysfunctional sexualities, overly simplified cultural explanations, and tragic problems of poverty, war, and corruption. Based on over 20 years of fieldwork in Nigeria, this book uses rich ethnographic cases to reverse the usual dynamic in which Africa is a vehicle to explain AIDS. It focuses instead on AIDS as an optic to help understand Africa. Using the life stories of multiple individuals--like Chijioke, a married man and father of five who is regularly unfaithful to his wife but remains committed to staying married, and Chinyere, a young woman in university who has a wealthy married lover that she keeps secret from the young man she dates at school and hopes to marryand#151;Smith shows how men and women negotiate intimacy as an aspect of their larger life projects. Such stories reveal that the fear of AIDS both builds on and exacerbates already widespread worries about deception in Nigerian human relations.and#160;
About the Author
Daniel Jordan Smith
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One. Okada Men, Money, and the Moral Hazards of Urban Inequality
Chapter Two. Gender Inequality, Sexual Morality, and AIDS
Chapter Three. and#147;Come and Receive Your Miracleand#8221;: Pentecostal Christianity and AIDS
Chapter Four. and#147;Feeding Fat on AIDSand#8221;: NGOs, Inequality, and Corruption
Chapter Five. Returning Home to Die: Migration and Kinship in the Era of AIDS
Chapter S. Living with HIV: The Ethical Dilemmas of Building a Normal Life
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index