| Drawing on nine months of intensive ethnographic research in the town of Mahali (a pseudonym), situated along the trans-African highway in western Kenya, this dissertation explores the social and structural roots of stigma within the contexts of globalization, insecurity, ethnic and political conflict, extreme inequality, and rapid social change. I critically engage with and place at the center of the analysis the circulation of all kinds of information about HIV/AIDS---from HIV/AIDS statistics, biomedical knowledge and technologies (e.g. antiretroviral therapies), to media reports, illness narratives, eulogies, memories, and local gossip and rumors---that all worked their way into local narratives or what I refer to as viral stories. I argue that as local logics and experiences and global knowledge about HIV/AIDS collided, they produced friction and therefore unexpected outcomes. In the following pages, I demonstrate the power of words---as people circulated, processed, and expressed them---in fueling AIDS-related stigma, and in reconfiguring not only everyday social and cultural life, but actual understandings of and experiences with the epidemic.;Gaining theoretical momentum from Yang et al. (2007), who contend that stigma is essentially a moral issue, revealing "what is most at stake" for both the stigmatized and the stigmatizers sharing a local moral world, I argue that through viral stories we are able to "see" how stigma distinctly operationalized in this part of the world. In so doing, I write against the notion of a universality of experiences with HIV/AIDS and stigma, and therefore also the idea that standardized health practices, programs, and policies addressing the epidemic (and stigma) can adequately solve problem's across the world's myriad range of local experiences and identities. This study offers two broad contributions. The first is directed at anthropologists and other social scientists interested in the ethnographic study of stigma, as well as the social and cultural impacts of biomedicine in the everyday lives of people and changes in biomedicine as it moves about the globe. The second is perhaps more relevant to researchers, policy makers, and practitioners working to ameliorate the AIDS epidemic and its associated stigma in sub-Saharan Africa. |
