Avoided Family Care, Diverted Intimacy: How People Living with HIV/AIDS Find New Kinship in Two Ghanaian Hospitals

This article aims at nuancing the discussion of processes of globalization and change through ethnographic research on caregiving in Ghana. It points at a cautious but remarkable shift from traditional family care to care outside the family setting and raises the question how this shift is linked to external and internal processes of change. The presentation of an extended case of avoiding family care by people living with HIV/AIDS serves to suggest a more complex interpretation of social change than is implied in the concept of globalization.

The stigma attached to HIV/AIDS in Ghana induces infected people to hide their condition from their families and seek help from professionals and fellow sufferers. We describe this process through the examples of two Ghanaian communities and two hospitals where two of the coauthors conducted anthropological fieldwork. In hospitals, people living with HIV/AIDS find new (quasi) relatives, to whom they divulge their secret and with whom they freely discuss their problems; these new relatives are other people living with HIV/AIDS, volunteers, and health workers. Strangers thus become safer and more trusted caregivers than family members. We describe in detail how this development precludes the practice of family care.