Epilogue: Homegrown in PNG — Rural Responses to HIV and AIDS

Abstract

A three‐years‐long, multi‐sited, multi‐method study conducted throughout Papua New Guinea by the Institute of Medical Research revealed a staggering prevalence of sexually transmitted disease (STD) that threatens an already fragile political‐economy and health services delivery system. Logistics, methodological complexities, and political and especially religious sensitivities hampered conduct of such research. Extremely little HIV social research has been allowed to inform interventions or serosurveillance protocols. Well‐ intended but ill‐conceived international initiatives have promoted a normative AIDS paradigm that misconstrues HIV transmission risk, incites greater fear, increases stigma, and promotes anti‐condom rhetoric. This collection ‘HIV/AIDS in Rural Papua New Guinea’ presents a sustained series of ethnographically based accounts of rural responses. In this epilogue I situate the importance of those responses in a discussion of the great divide between the lived realities of HIV infection and AIDS related suffering on the one hand, and the discursive practices and policies of media, public health, international donors and NGOs on the other.

Great Ancestral Women: Sexuality, Gendered Mobility, and HIV among the Bamu and Gogodala of Papua New Guinea

“…Certain forms of sexuality in PNG, including but not limited to the commoditization of sex, have been identified as increasing the vulnerability of women to infection with HIV in conjunction with high levels of domestic and sexual violence, both of which are widespread in PNG . In this context, sexuality is often cast as the ‘problem’ in terms particularly of the spread of HIV and prevention programs, and sex ‘is treated as a health issue, to be dealt with by experts in disease prevention and health promotion’ (Cornwall, Correa, and Jolly :5; see also Hammar , ). In this kind of formulation, the ‘reasons why many people choose to have sex in the first place – for pleasure, as well as for the many other affective dimensions of intimate relationships – barely make it into the frame’ (Cornwall et al.…”

AIDS and ‘building a wall’ around Christian country in rural Papua New Guinea

“…PNG is facing a crisis with the spread of HIV and AIDS throughout the country: since the first case of HIV ⁄ AIDS was identified in 1987, the AIDS epidemic has become generalised in PNG, only the fourth country in the Asia Pacific region to do so. Despite this, it is difficult to estimate how many people in PNG are infected with HIV ⁄ AIDS; testing is sketchy and nationally unreliable (Jenkins 1997;Hammar 2007). In 2006, it was estimated that up to 100,000 people in PNG may be infected with HIV or living with AIDS, although only 11,800 had been confirmed as infected (The National, 4 April 2006).…”

Mobility, Violence and the Gendering of HIV in Papua New Guinea

“…Violence not only exposes people to possible HIV infection but is often the consequence of living with the virus. Numerous media and anecdotal accounts tell of witchcraft accusations, banishment and violent treatment of people, particularly women, whose HIV status is either known to others or simply assumed (Hammar 2005(Hammar ,2007Dundon 2007;Haley 2008).…”

“…In this paper, I engage the theme of mobility to consider the intersection of gender, sexuality, violence and HIV in the PNG ~o n t e x t .~ My reflections are concerned with the discursive dimension of the epidemic, that is, how HIV is configured by discourses of sexuality, morality, and risk and the meanings people bring to bear on the information they receive (see Treichler 1999). The language of HIV awareness in PNG, and elsewhere, persistently aligns sex with deviance, disease, and death while ignoring the dimensions of sexual desire, consensus, and pleasure (Hammar 2004(Hammar ,2007Lepani 2005). I argue that the spectre of AIDS as a 'killer disease' wrought by sexual excess and transgression might unintentionally serve to legitimate relations of violence and harmful sexual behaviour, and consequently diminish the capacity for positive transformation of gender relations in responding to the epidemic.…”