ABSTRACT
The specific nature of the AIDS epidemic varies from place to place, depending on historical circumstance, cultural context and contemporary political economy. Moreover, within any given locality it may appear as a series of superimposed epidemics (Lindenbaum, 1992), marking out fractures along lines of gender, generation or other social divisions. As Kreniske (1997) has observed, disease is a social event, which expresses the central realities of the society in which it occurs. Given its social embeddedness, this applies with particular transparency in the case of AIDS. As well as highlighting internal flaws and weak points in the social fabric (Santana, 1997), however, AIDS also exposes relations of dependence between countries, particularly where poverty makes some susceptible to the ostensibly benevolent, but also potentially intrusive, influence of donors and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) As Lindenbaum (1992:330) suggests, a full rendering of the epidemic requires that it be placed not just in local context, but within the ‘geopolitics of competing international communities’.
