Temporality and Positive Living in the Age of HIV/AIDS: A Multisited Ethnography

Benton, Adia; Sangaramoorthy, Thurka; Kalofonos, Ippolytos

doi:10.1086/692825

Cited by 51 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 64 publications

(42 reference statements)

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“…This entails a historical consideration of how colonial ideas about the ‘backwardness’ and ‘uncivilised’ behaviours of colonised peoples continues to shape global health policy and interventions today 44 45. For example, when clean water is not made available to certain populations,46 when public hospitals are underfunded and left to decline and make do without necessary products and materials,47 or when affordable housing is inaccessible, and people’s solutions to housing crises—like informal settlements—are deemed ‘illegal’ and ‘disordered’,48 access to sanitary infrastructure is made unequal.…”

Section: Quick Fix For Hygiene and Inequalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Quick fix for care, productivity, hygiene and inequality: reframing the entrenched problem of antibiotic overuse

2019

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Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major challenge of our time. A key global objective is to reduce antibiotic use (ABU), in order to reduce resistance caused by antimicrobial pressure. This is often set as a ‘behaviour change’ issue, locating intervention efforts in the knowledge and attitudes of individual prescribers and users of medicines. Such approaches have had limited impact and fall short of addressing wider drivers of antibiotic use. To address the magnitude of antibiotic overuse requires a wider lens to view our relationships with these medicines.This article draws on ethnographic research from East Africa to answer the question of what roles antibiotics play beyond their immediate curative effects. We carried out interviews, participant observation and documentary analysis over a decade in northeast Tanzania and eastern and central Uganda. Our findings suggest that antibiotics have become a ‘quick fix’ in our modern societies. They are a quick fix for care in fractured health systems; a quick fix for productivity at local and global scales, for humans, animals and crops; a quick fix for hygiene in settings of minimised resources; and a quick fix for inequality in landscapes scarred by political and economic violence. Conceptualising antibiotic use as a ‘quick fix’ infrastructure shifts attention to the structural dimensions of AMR and antimicrobial use (AMU) and raises our line of sight into the longer term, generating more systemic solutions that have greater chance of achieving equitable impact.

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Section: Quick Fix For Hygiene and Inequalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Quick fix for care, productivity, hygiene and inequality: reframing the entrenched problem of antibiotic overuse

2019

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“…Like heritage work, medicalization is another context through which time is self‐consciously managed. Adia Benton, Thurka Sangaramoorthy, and Ippolytos Kalofonos ()—in their comparative multisited ethnography of “positive living” interventions in the lives of HIV‐positive people in Chimoio, Mozambique; Miami, Florida; and Freetown, Sierra Leone—argue that temporality is constitutive of HIV/AIDS interventions and that ultimately the HIV/AIDS crisis is a crisis of time. Time is central to other medical interventions as well; as Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen () demonstrates, a politics of potentiality infuses elder care in Denmark such that successful aging is defined by one's pursuit of activity and pleasure into an infinite future in which one's potential might (still, eventually) be realized.…”

Section: Temporality Mobility and Sovereigntymentioning

confidence: 99%

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

Tamarkin

2018

American Anthropologist

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This essay reviews work produced in predominantly US cultural anthropology publications throughout 2017. It asks: What makes an anthropological inquiry timely, what sorts of relationalities command anthropological attention, and to what end? Noting our ongoing methodological commitment to long-term ethnography alongside increasingly important online forums for reaching broader publics and responding quickly to emerging issues, it expands the range of work surveyed to include some online-only short essays alongside the larger collection of traditionally published research articles. Characterized by empathic inquiry, frequently drawing on years of ethnographic and personal experience with the places, people, and other entities that we write about, and often attentive to histories at multiple scales, cultural anthropology of this moment, however published, grapples with dark times while it also offers ways of imagining other, better futures and ways of being in relation to others. Two thematic clusters organize this essay: the first considers temporality alongside mobility and sovereignty, and the second considers relationality alongside subjectivity and mediation. Together, all of these concerns-that are both of the moment and long standing-build a varied body of work that grapples with the interrelationalities that constitute power, place, and possibility. I argue that what makes an anthropological inquiry timely is the extent to which it is relationally informed and attuned to care for worlds that we inhabit and imagine, together. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, temporality, mobility, sovereignty, relationality, subjectivity, mediation] RESUMEN Este ensayo revisa el trabajo producido en publicaciones de antropología cultural predominantemente estadounidenses durante 2017. Pregunta: ¿Qué hace la investigación antropológica oportuna, y qué tipos de relacionalidades comandan la atención antropológica, y con qué fin? Notando nuestro compromiso metodológico continuo con una etnografía de largo plazo junto a foros en línea cada vez más importantes para llegar a públicos más amplios y respondiendo rápidamente a cuestiones emergentes, expande el rango del trabajo evaluado para incluir algunos ensayos cortos sólo en línea junto a la mayor colección de artículos de investigación publicados tradicionalmente. Caracterizada por una investigación empática, frecuentemente extrayendo de años de experiencia etnográfica y personal con los lugares, la gente, y otras entidades sobre las que escribimos, y a menudo atentos a historias a escalas múltiples, la antropología cultural de este momento, independientemente de cómo sea publicada, lucha contra tiempos oscuros mientras ofrece maneras de imaginar otros, mejores futuros y formas de estar en relación con otros. Dos grupos temáticos organizan este ensayo: el primero considera temporalidad junto a movilidad y soberanía, y el segundo considera relacionalidad junto a subjetividad y mediación. Juntas, todas estas preocupaciones-que son tanto del momento como de larga d...

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“…Taken together, these concepts account for the growing influence of the biomedical sciences and biopharmaceutical treatments as part of a biopolitical form of governance -'a system of claims and ethical projects that arise out of the conjugation of techniques used to govern populations and manage individual bodies' (Nguyen, 2005, p. 126). Benton et al (2017) have argued that 'conceptions of time and temporality configure and reflect power relations in global health' (p. 454), thereby rendering temporal regimes central to understanding notions of difference, health and the self. With the concept 'temporal regimes,' we refer to provisional and situated modes of governance that are dependent on shared understandings of time, experiences in time and orientations to time (Poell, 2020).…”

Section: Citizenship and Temporalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The temporal regimes of HIV/AIDS activism in Europe: chrono-citizenship, biomedicine and its others

Dziuban

Sekuler

2020

Critical Public Health

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HIV/AIDS is known to have fundamentally transformed fields of biomedical research, the governance of health, and state-citizen relations. Based on research that was developed to analyze these transformations within HIV/AIDS activism at the European-level, we offer the term chronocitizenship to describe the influence of time in constructs of citizenship. We argue that the temporal regime of biomedicine, or modes of governance that depend on biomedical understandings of time, have come to dominate HIV/AIDS narratives, policies and programs. Building on oral histories and three years of fieldwork in spaces of European-level networks and health-governing bodies, we suggest that citizenship in the field of HIV/AIDS has been defined through multiple, intersecting and, at times, antagonistic temporal regimes. To illustrate this, we expose the regime of loss, through which mourning, often denied space in the present, bears potential for new forms of subjectivity and community; the regime of sustainability, which centers the planning and surveillance of budgets over service provision in a climate unfriendly to human rights; and the regime of chronic crisis, in which persistence becomes a form of political agency against ongoing exclusion and disappointment. As we show, unearthing varied temporalities helps to denaturalize biomedical understandings of time, and invites a rethinking of the foundations needed to reach the 'end of AIDS' sought by civil society, UNAIDS and other health-governing bodies.

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Temporality and Positive Living in the Age of HIV/AIDS: A Multisited Ethnography

Cited by 51 publications

References 64 publications

Quick fix for care, productivity, hygiene and inequality: reframing the entrenched problem of antibiotic overuse

Quick fix for care, productivity, hygiene and inequality: reframing the entrenched problem of antibiotic overuse

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

The temporal regimes of HIV/AIDS activism in Europe: chrono-citizenship, biomedicine and its others

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