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156 CHAPTER 7 Fitting Condoms on Culture One day in June 2003, I noticed a familiar image on the exterior wall of a newly constructed bukumatula, built by a young unmarried man next to his parent’s house, just across from the church in Orabesi village. The image that caught my attention was the “Show You Care” HIV awareness poster produced by the PNG National AIDS Council Secretariat in 2002 (see Figure 7.1). Aimed at sexually active young people, the poster represents youthful modernity and consensual heterosexuality in a photographic montage of a smiling young woman with a frangipani in her hair and two confident couples in fashionable attire. The text reinforces the ABC hierarchy of HIV prevention (Abstain, Be faithful, or use Condoms ) that is the cornerstone of the national awareness campaign. It states: “There is no cure for AIDS and the best ways to protect yourself are not to have sex or be faithful to one partner who is also faithful to you. But if you decide to take the risk, you must use a condom every time you have sex.” The message goes on to say, “Condoms should be seen as part of making love. They protect against unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. And, in this way, they show your partner you care.” The tagline message at the bottom of the poster states: “So remember . . . . If you’re thinking about sex, think about condoms” (see NACS 2002). The poster implies that sexual activity, while deemed to be risky, involves a process of deliberation and decision making. Notably, the poster allows intimacy and consensual pleasure to be part of an idealized heterosexual experience, countering the widely held perception throughout PNG that condoms represent infidelity and distrust in sexual relationships.1 It is telling that this particular poster found its “target audience” in a Trobriand village, engaging the imagination of a sexually active young man. When I pointed out the poster to the woman I was walking with, she said, “Yes, some of our boys do think about these things. It is like a reminder to his friends.” Sudi, the young man, later told me that he got the poster from the local health center. He said he liked it when he saw it and asked the nurse if he could have it, so she gave it to him on the promise that he would put it up where people could see it. He also told me that he gets condoms from the health center and sometimes uses them with his partners. By displaying the poster on his dwelling, Sudi enhanced the HIV prevention message with contextual signification. Juxtaposed thus, the poster on the bukumatula became a potent symbol of how Trobrianders’ conceptual engagement with HIV is mediated by cultural knowledge and lived experience. Moreover, the Fitting Condoms on Culture 157 signification poses the challenge of reconciling the perturbing relations between notions of “risk,” HIV prevention, and the embodiment of cultural practice. Landscapes of Risk I heard a WHO statistic on the radio, coming up to World AIDS Day on December first. Every fourteen seconds a young person is infected with HIV somewhere in the world. So I am thinking, what is the Trobriand statistic? Every day? Every hour? How long will it take to wipe us out? People are scared when they hear about this disease, the death it brings, but fear does not stay with them when sex is on their minds. People put fear out of mind so they can still act free. Freedom is like a feather in Trobriand hair, our pride. It is young people’s time to enjoy. So it is very hard to change our ways, very hard for us to think of fear when we are enjoying ourselves. But we need to break away from customs that put us at risk in this time of AIDS. [Linda, aged mid-forties, 08 November 2003] “Risk” has become a central cultural construct in industrialized societies to signify not only the probability of an event but also how dangerous or negative its outcome might be, situating the individual agent in relation to an array of choices mediated by societal constraints (Petersen 1997). As a metaphor for danger, risk is increasingly “invoked to protect individuals against encroachments of others” (Douglas 1990:7), inviting a direct association with discourses of regulation and blame. The concept dominates biomedical and epidemiological models for predicting disease Figure 7.1. • Sudi with HIV awareness poster on his bukumatula...

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