The Contexts of Witnessing of HIV/AIDS in South Africa

When Bodies Remember is an extraordinary book that takes readers inside South Africa’s HIV/AIDS pandemic in more comprehensive ways than any other text I know. While there has been some excellent ethnographic scholarly work that focuses on HIV/AIDS intervention programs (e.g., Catherine Campbell’s Letting Them Die or Jonny Steinberg’s marvelous Sizwe’s Test, which tells the story of one young man’s decision about whether to get tested for HIV), Fassin’s book is the only one to contextualize policy interventions and personal decisions within the long histories of the current South African state, by insisting that “the mark of apartheid is still deeply inscribed in bodies” (28).¹ The book makes good on the juxtaposition of experiences and politics in its subtitle while powerfully arguing for why anthropologists and citizens of the world should care about the pandemic.

This juxtaposition of experiences and politics is sustained throughout, resulting in a fascinating dialogue between policy and subjective experience; sometimes the two are rendered homologous, sometimes tragic irony intervenes. When Bodies Remember gives narrative and social meaning to the pandemic’s overwhelming statistics while keeping its political determinants and the contested interpretations of these determinants firmly in sight:

In this respect rather than insist on the relationship between poverty and AIDS, as is usually done, it is probably more relevant to analyze the situation in terms of social inequalities understood as being economic, racial and also gender-defined. Even if it is not the most appropriate tool to grasp inequality, ethnography confirms and refines these remarks. In particular it allows one to apprehend the diversity and complexity of the mechanisms through which social actors insinuate themselves into the body, and more precisely how history inscribes it with AIDS. This means renouncing simplistic determinisms and statistical reasoning.

(192)

In the introduction, Fassin follows a virtuosic reading of President Thabo Mbeki’s speech at the Thirteenth International AIDS Conference in Durban in 2000 with an analysis of a brief testimonial of a young woman—named Puleng—dying of AIDS in Alexandra, Johannesburg. The reading of the Mbeki speech anticipates much of the argument in the following chapter, “An Epidemic of Disputes,” where Fassin makes brilliantly clear both the stakes and the inadequacy of the commonplace description of Mbeki’s controversial positions on AIDS as “denialism.” Meditative arguments on the place of memories and histories—both public and private—form the link between Puleng’s simple story and Mbeki’s nuanced and difficult political arguments.

I have two concerns with this pathbreaking book. Fassin frames his account with a claim of global neglect of or indifference to South Africa. In a book scrupulously concerned with memory, this claim strikes me as simplistic. In the book itself it becomes clearer that interest in South Africa, highly stratified as it must be, is much more complex. There was a massive international antiapartheid movement. South Africa’s place in the moral economy of a global imaginary is overdetermined, I would argue, by deep investments in containing a global drama of racial difference in the national space of South Africa (with its attendant mis-recognitions), a desire to make South Africa both exceptional and exemplary in a postcolonial world order (Fassin glosses this), and Western schadenfreude over the failure of the South African government to combat the epidemic, to name just three. These international investments emerge in the details of the book’s analyses, complicating the frame of neglect or indifference. Relatedly, for much of the book, politics is national politics, with the important exception of careful discussions of the multinational pharmaceutical industry’s battles in South African courts, and I wish the superb discussions of the mining industry in South Africa—its role in producing the conditions for the pandemic to take hold and its current attempts at redress—broke a national frame more often. Fassin is insistent on the question of global inequalities in the suffering...