Abstract
While this book focuses on HIV/AIDS and its medical care, it reflects current shifts in the concepts of sickness and the body and in the organization of medicine. Given the rapid changes in the field of HIV/AIDS through the introduction of combination therapies, these shifts became articulated and negotiated through HIV and AIDS due to the fact that they were taking place at an increased speed and on a large scale. I thus aimed at giving an insight into these shifts from the particular point of view that the field of HIV/AIDS provided during what Koenig (1988) described as the experimental phase of treatment. Some of the themes I discussed in my study include the expansion of chronic sickness, the ambivalent embodiment of an asymptomatic condition for people confronted with it, patients’ and physicians’ struggles with autonomy and dependence in medicine, the role of the general practitioner in an increasingly specialized medicine, and the new importance of basic and clinical science in the work of the individual physician. In concluding my text, I reflect on the processes of linking ethnographic work to its broader, even global context before I take up some of the themes discussed in the previous chapters by focusing on changing power relations in the fields of HIV/AIDS and medicine.
“It is not news that medicine and all other health care areas are rapidly changing. (‘The future is already here; it just isn’t evenly distributed yet.’).”
(Sackett et al. 1997: 16)
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In emphasizing the “system-awareness in the everyday consciousness and actions of subjects’ lives”, Marcus evokes the theories developed by Bourdieu (1976) and by Giddens (1984) to overcome the dichotomy between actor and structure.
In fact, as an anthropologist living if certainly not in the global economic periphery, then certainly in the anthropological periphery, I am struck when reading how few leading anthropologists from the center care to challenge the global hegemonic structure of our discipline. In “The Predicament of Culture”, James Clifford (1988) claimed to have challenged ethnographic authority, yet explicitly limited his discussion to English, American and French ethnographic writing while assuming that his observations could be generalized to other disciplinary traditions. George Marcus found it to be “perhaps no accident that exemplars thus far of multi-sited fieldwork have been developed in monolingual (largely Anglo-American) contexts in which fine-grained knowledge of the language is unproblematic for native English speakers. Yet, if such ethnography is to flourish in arenas that anthropology has defined as emblematic interests, it will soon have to become as multilingual as it is multi-sited” (1995: 101). He neither developed ideas on how multi-sited ethnography should become multilingual, nor did he explain why he assumed the anthropologist to be a native English speaker. Gupta and Ferguson limited their reader, similar to Clifford, mainly to “mainstream social/cultural anthropology as practiced in leading departments in the United States and the United Kingdom” (1997: I). Unlike Clifford a decade earlier, they did not claim that this focus could be generalized, and they seemed to feel a need for justification. They justified their focus with the very hegemonic structures in anthropology — whose mechanisms they aptly summarize — which led them to choose it: “Our focus on what one might call the hegemonic centers of the discipline is deliberate and motivated. Since we are concerned, above all, with the mechanisms through which dominant disciplinary norms and conventions are established, we believe there is good reason for paying special attention to those institutional sites and national contexts that, in practice, enjoy a disproportionate say in setting theoretical and methodological agendas and defining what will (and will not) count as ‘real anthropology,’ not only in the U.S. or U.K., but throughout the anthropological world” (ibid.: 40).
As Roche advertised Saquinavir (POZ Magazine, Issue 37, July 1998, p. 114). See chapter 4.2.
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© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kopp, C. (2002). Conclusions. In: The New Era of AIDS. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9860-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9860-6_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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