ABSTRACT
The AIDS epidemic has become anchored not only in the historic and contemporary experience of Zimbabweans but also in their shared thought patterns. A familiar pattern is the suspicion of sorcery. Because sorcery beliefs have worldwide distribution, they are crucial in understanding perceptions of and reactions to misfortune, illness, and death. 1 Diseases tend to elicit sorcery beliefs, which may play a minor role in some societies, but are inseparable from virtually all systems of disease etiology. 2 In regions inundated by HIV/AIDS, we can expect that people will refer to sorcery beliefs as they try to understand the epidemic. My Zimbabwean study illustrates this dynamic.
