Synopses & Reviews
In the years since the end of apartheid, South Africans have enjoyed a progressive constitution, considerable access to social services for the poor and sick, and a booming economy that has made their nation into one of the wealthiest on the continent. At the same time, South Africa experiences extremely unequal income distribution, and its citizens suffer the highest prevalence of HIV in the world. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu has noted, “AIDS is South Africa’s new apartheid.”
In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Laurier Decoteau backs up Tutu’s assertion with powerful arguments about how this came to pass. Decoteau traces the historical shifts in health policy after apartheid and describes their effects, detailing, in particular, the changing relationship between biomedical and indigenous health care, both at the national and the local level. Decoteau tells this story from the perspective of those living with and dying from AIDS in Johannesburg’s squatter camps. At the same time, she exposes the complex and often contradictory ways that the South African government has failed to balance the demands of neoliberal capital with the considerable health needs of its population.
Review
“In Ancestors and Antiretrovirals, Claire Decoteau draws together ethnographic fieldwork, unique insights into the experience of people suffering from AIDS at a time of callous governmental indifference, and a thorough reading of cultural politics to situate South Africa in the global economic system. Decoteau not only illuminates the many still baffling aspects of the epidemic and post-apartheid politics in South Africa, but challenges some of the core assumptions of Western social science. This is essential reading.” author of Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Human
Review
“Claire Laurier Decoteau is at the forefront of the new global sociology. Her articulation of analysis with ethnographic detail is expert, yet reads effortlessly; her ability to view the political complexities of South Africa from a new theoretical angle is admirable; and her depth of understanding about what is at stake in the fight over AIDS is relevant to anyone who wonders how power works all over the globe. Ancestors and Antiretrovirals will be an iconic text for a new generation of global work, and marks the emergence of a bold new theoretical voice in sociology.” Isaac Ariail Reed
Review
"Decoteau has undertaken ten years of research in South Africa, artfully presenting the lived experience of people infected with HIV/AIDS residing in the shantytowns around Johannesburg, and interweaving them with a sophisticated theoretical discussion of the complex issues surrounding the politics of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. She does a fantastic job in giving voice to the people caught in the middle of a multitude of crisscrossing processes and structures." Choice
Review
"Ancestors and Antiretrovirals is a highly accessible book for non-sociologists that does not sacrifice analytic rigor in its presentation of peoples lives. Decoteau is a gifted photographer and purveyor of mixed methods who skillfully interlaces seemingly divergent theorists to articulate complex distinctions and integrations of tradition and modernity." Transcriptions
Review
"Decoteau eloquently traces the politics of HIV and AIDS from 1994 through 2010 in Post-Apartheid South Africa. She describes important shifts in health policy and nestles them in real-life stories of people living with HIV and dying from AIDS. Her ethnographic data, collected over ten years, highlights several key issues including the changing relationship between indigenous and biomedical health care and the complex and often contradictory way that the South African government failed to balance a neoliberal existence (i.e., political movement beginning in the 1960s that blends traditional liberal concerns for social justice with an emphasis on economic growth.) with the health needs of its citizens." USAID
Review
"Decoteaus ambitious project spans a 14-year history (1996-2010) during which South Africas national HIV/AIDS policies swung between extremes as the countrys leaders attempted to find a way forward amid deepening inequalities and a worsening epidemic."
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
About the Author
Claire Laurier Decoteau is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she teaches courses in social theory, the sociology of knowledge, and health and medicine. She is also a research associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She lives in Chicago.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Terminology
Abbreviations
Introduction Postcolonial Paradox
1 The Struggle for Life in South Africas Slums
2 A State in Denial
3 Biomedical Citizenship
4 The Politicization of Sexuality
5 Hybridity
Coda Life Strategies
Notes
Glossary
References
Index