Abstract
This chapter examines a popular pedagogic initiative, the shrine of AIDS Amma in a village in south Karnataka, which combines biomedical ideas of HIV/AIDS with an age-old tradition of disease goddess worship. It discusses AIDS Amma on three aspects: its genealogical descent, ritual structure and epistemological implications. It considers the AIDS Amma initiative as a tactical pedagogy that responds to a local contingency through creative re-articulation of cultural resources and biomedical ideas of disease transmission and prevention.
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Notes
- 1.
“Although we have come to associate docility with the abandonment of agency, the term literally implies the malleability required of someone in order for her to be instructed in a particular skill or knowledge – a meaning that carries less a sense of passivity than one of struggle, effort, exertion, and achievement”. Mahmood adds in a footnote: “One of the meanings listed for docility in the Oxford English Dictionary is: “the quality of teachableness, readiness and willingness to receive instruction, aptness to be taught, amenability to training” (Mahmood 2005, p. 29).
- 2.
Chatterjee presents this argument in the context of postcolonial modernity and subaltern politics. But it is equally valid in the context of the modernisation of health services under colonialism, where a condition of medical pluralism or the existence of multiple therapeutic practices, both traditional and modern, prevails. In both contexts, structures of governance do not limit possibilities of choice and agency on the part of the governed, who may draw upon the structures themselves in tactically manipulating them. In identifying a mode of activity distinct to the governed, Chatterjee’s thesis, like that of Michel de Certeau, distinguishes between the apparatuses of power and the tactics employed by those subjected to it.
- 3.
- 4.
By “cosmological” I mean ideas referring to the natural, social and spiritual environment that we inhabit and which we imagine as being ordered and harmonious. Tambiah explains it as “the body of conceptions that enumerate and classify the phenomena that compose the universe as an ordered whole and the norms and processes that govern it” (Tambiah 1980, p. 21).
- 5.
In a personal communication, Venkat Rao points out that prakriti or ‘nature’ in the Indian context, which is often associated with the figure of the goddess, may generate the body but has no sovereign authority over it in the form of, for instance, causing disease.
- 6.
See, for instance, Kumar (2007).
- 7.
I owe this insight to Venkat Rao.
- 8.
Till 1994, there were only seven reported HIV-positive cases. Between 1993 and 1998, the year the AIDS Amma shrine was established, the number of new cases increased annually from 9 in 1993 to about 50 in 1997 and 1998. Karnataka was identified as a high-prevalence state in 2003; and by 2004 there were 33, 108 persons with HIV/AIDS in the state, of which 2065 were in Mysuru and Mandya districts (Pradhan et al. 2006, pp. 4–5).
- 9.
Rappaport, too, refers to Peirce’s taxonomy of signs, but he assigns different values to the three categories: “The invariance of liturgy may be an icon of the seeming changelessness of the canonical information that it incorporates, or even an index of its actual changelessness, but canonical information itself rests ultimately upon symbols” (Rappaport 1979, p. 182).
- 10.
Cf. Hobsbawm and Ranger: “‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, p. 1).
- 11.
As Austin explains, “The name is derived, of course, from ‘perform’, the usual verb with the noun ‘action’: it indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action” (Austin 1962, p. 6).
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Das, D.K. (2019). AIDS Amma Shrine: Pedagogy as Tactics. In: Teaching AIDS. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6120-3_7
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