Ethnography and AIDS

Paper Summary:

This paper, after a very brief overview of the position of ethnography within the larger practice of traditional anthropology, examines the ways in which ethnographic methodology and concerns can be brought to bear on the question of AIDS in either First World or Third World (or both) societies as a way of explaining people's behaviors in the face of the pandemic. In this sense, ethnographies of communities stricken by AIDS are much the same as traditional ethnographies, for they seek to help explain the customs, beliefs, behaviors, history and cultural institutions of a group of natives. The paper describes two types of ethnographies and demonstrates that ethnography can be done in a way that is consistent with scholarly rigor and yet at the same time is non-exploitative and even helpful of the subject community, an essential service to those communities already struggling with a deadly virus.

From the Paper:

"One of the fascinating possibilities for ethnographic research on AIDS would be to look at how the scientific community has been changed by it, something that has not yet been studied. The ethnographic research that has been done on AIDS so far has been to look at communities that have been affected by the disease in terms of its members? being sick and dying, and certainly these communities can be better understood and helped through the application of ethnographic techniques. But the worlds of high-tech medicine, of high-stakes pharmacology, and of public health work have also been transformed. While excellent, intelligent accounts of some of these changes have been written about (such as Randy Shilts's 1987 And the Band Played On: People, Politics and the AIDS Epidemic) there have been no thickly descriptive ethnographic accounts of, for example, a pharmaceutical company trying to find an AIDS vaccine."

More papers on Ethnography and AIDS:

• Essay # 88118 : "Feminism and AIDS"
• Essay # 87817 : "Foster Care and AIDS Drugs"
• Book Review # 139909 : "Ethnography and "Life Lived Like a Story"

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