AIDS Doesn't Show Its Face: Inequality, Morality, and Social Change in Nigeria - Tapa dura

"Drawing on more than twenty years of fieldwork, Smith effectively uses popular reactions to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Nigeria as a lens through which to observe and analyze social change there. He successfully shows that things are not as simple as they might seem to outsiders-even the best-intentioned outsiders-and that much of the public health messaging that emphasizes individual responsibility is simply off the mark." (Adam Ashforth, University of Michigan)"

AIDS and Africa are indelibly linked in popular consciousness, but despite widespread awareness of the epidemic, much of the story remains hidden beneath a superficial focus on condoms, sex workers, and antiretrovirals. Africa gets lost in this equation, Daniel Jordan Smith argues, transformed into a mere vehicle to explain AIDS, and in AIDS Doesn't Show Its Face, he offers a powerful reversal, using AIDS as a lens through which to view Africa. Drawing on twenty years of fieldwork in Nigeria, Smith tells a story of dramatic social changes, ones implicated in the same inequalities that also factor into local perceptions about AIDS - inequalities of gender, generation, and social class. Nigerians, he shows, view both social inequality and the presence of AIDS in moral terms, as kinds of ethical failure. Mixing ethnographies that describe everyday life with pointed analyses of public health interventions, he demonstrates just how powerful these paired anxieties - medical and social - are, and how the world might better alleviate them through a more sensitive understanding of their relationship.