An Entanglement Of Crises: A Symmetrical Analysis Of HIV/AIDS In South Africa

This thesis provides a symmetrical analysis of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Divergent realities of disease illustrate the existence of synchronic crises: the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the social crisis. I argue that these crises cannot be understand independently. The social crisis stems from historical trauma and continues through structural violence. The orientation of this thesis lays in ethnography and history. Global Health, as a universalizing paradigm, fails to account for local realities. Local accounts of biomedicine, witchcraft and traditional healing will be analyzed in order to illustrate their entanglements, and subsequent impacts on the HIV/AIDS epidemic.