ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ideas pertaining to the coalescence of ‘substance’ as an analytical trope for the evocation of persons in HIV prevention in India. Based on fieldwork in community-based health promotion projects in West Bengal, the chapter explores substantiation of queer relations into object forms and sites of evidence making. This involves thinking about how substance has been an important trope for conceiving of relations in Indian anthropology and sociology. The work of McKim Marriott, for example, connects conceptualisation of substance to ‘dividualism’ – persons imagined as always partial; substance of others and other things. The chapter considers Marilyn Strathern’s borrowing from Marriott as a link to conceiving of ‘dividuals’ against the individually focused imperatives of (contemporary) HIV prevention research and actions. Against this background Strathern’s conceptualisations of ethnographic perspective and postplurality are employed as means to re-contextualise sexual subjects of HIV prevention as they come into view, and recede, across shifting knowledge domains.
