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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:'Condoms cause AIDS': poison, prevention and denial in Venda, South Africa
Author:McNeill, Fraser G.
Year:2009
Periodical:African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society
Volume:108
Issue:432
Pages:353-370
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:AIDS
Venda
popular beliefs
death
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/40388395
Abstract:This article presents a critique of the position that South Africans are engaged in a process of collective HIV/AIDS denial. Ex-President Mbeki's well-documented belief that HIV does not lead to AIDS, and that South Africans are not dying of AIDS-related disease, has been used by academics and journalists to explain the widespread public silence around the pandemic. The article argues that the complex social processes employed to create and maintain the avoidance of open conversation around HIV/AIDS are rooted, not in Mbeki's denialism, but rather in conventions through which causes of death can, and cannot, be spoken about. Through case studies of poisonings and public performances by HIV/AIDS educators in Venda, the article demonstrates that by invoking public silence and coded language, 'degrees of separation' are constructed that create social distance between individuals and the unnatural cause of another's death. Far from a collective denial, acts of public silence and obfuscation should be read as protestations of innocence: attempts to drive a wedge between open, public knowledge of death and potential implication in the increasing number of AIDS-related fatalities. HIV/AIDS prevention policies based on inadequate understandings of this wider context have given rise to the social construction of peer educators - and condoms as their central symbol of prevention - as vectors of the virus. Notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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