From "Rights" to "Ritual": AIDS Activism in South Africa

• Published in: American anthropologist Vol. 108; no. 2; pp. 312 - 323
• Main Author: Robins, Steven
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK American Anthropological Association 01-06-2006; Blackwell Publishing Ltd
• Subjects: Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome; Activism; Africa; AIDS; Anthropological research; Citizenship; Cognitive problems, arts and sciences, folk traditions, folklore; Death; Death & dying; Diseases; Ethnology; HIV; Human immunodeficiency virus; Illnesses; Meaning; Mediation; Morality; Near death experiences; Politics; Public health; Rights; Ritual; Rituals; Social activism; Social movements; Social relations. Intercultural and interethnic relations. Collective identity; Social stigma; Social structure and social relations; South Africa; Stigma; Subjectivity; Traditional and modern medicine; public health; Traditional sciences and medicine; Trauma; Turner, Victor; South Africa; Activism; Construction; Disease; Ritual; Citizenship; Patient; AIDS; Sufferance; Citizen Rights; Stigmatization; Survival; Wrestling; Mobilization; Experience; Commitment; Identity
• ISSN: 0002-7294; 1548-1433
• DOI: 10.1525/aa.2006.108.2.312

In this article, I investigate how the moral politics of HIV/AIDS activism in South Africa is contributing toward new forms of citizenship that are concerned with both rights-based struggles and with creating collectively shared meanings of the extreme experiences of illness and stigmatization of individual HIV/AIDS sufferers. I argue that it is precisely the extremity of the "near death" experiences of full-blown AIDS, and the profound stigma and "social death" associated with the later stages of the disease, that produce the conditions for HIV/AIDS survivors' commitment to "new life" and social activism. It is the activist mediation and retelling of these traumatic experiences that facilitates HIV/AIDS activist commitment and grassroots mobilization. It is also the profound negativity of stigma and social death that animates the activist's construction of a new positive HIV-positive identity and understanding of what it means to be a citizen-activist and member of a social movement.