"We Are All Going to Die": Kinship, Belonging, and the Morality of HIV/AIDS-Related Illnesses and Deaths in Rural Tanzania

This article explores how moral perceptions of HIV/AIDS-related illness and death in rural Tanzania are related to social and cultural practices of disease interpretation, patient caring and burial in the context of rural-urban migration and HIV/AIDS. Drawing on anthropological discussions of the relationship between death, social reproduction, and HIV/AIDS I argue that moral discourses and practices surrounding the epidemic in Northwest Tanzania are intimately intertwined with local notions of order and disorder. Furthermore, they are tied to individual and collective concerns about the implications that the high numbers of premature deaths among young men and women are perceived to have on the continuity of whole families and communities. Focusing on the case studies of several young HIV-infected women and men who finally died from the consequences of AIDS I show that the infected persons themselves, as well as their relatives, draw on a wide range of-sometimes mutually contradictory-strategies in dealing with the disease in cultural, religious, or moral terms (including the reference to witchcraft or the violation of ritual prescriptions). In conclusion, I argue that the various strategies and practices surrounding HIV/AIDS-related illnesses and deaths have become an integral part of the negotiation of kinship relations in rural Tanzania, as well as of the moral state of "modern" society in general.