Unimagined Community
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20th century south african history
20th century ugandan history
A01=Robert Thornton
african history
aids
aids in africa
aids prevention
aids transmission
anthropology
Author_Robert Thornton
Category=JBFN
Category=JHMC
civil society
disease
doctor
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
family structure
fertility rate
global disaster
healthcare
hiv
hiv prevalence
individual behavior
local knowledge
medicine
mobility
omission
political authority
political response
politics
property
sex
sexual networks
sexual transmission
social status
south africa
uganda
Product details
- ISBN 9780520255531
- Weight: 408g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 02 Sep 2008
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This groundbreaking work, with its unique anthropological approach, sheds new light on a central conundrum surrounding AIDS in Africa and in so doing, reframes current debates about the disease. Robert J. Thornton explores why HIV prevalence fell during the 1990s in Uganda despite that country's having one of Africa's highest fertility rates, while, during the same period, HIV prevalence rose in South Africa, a country with Africa's lowest fertility rate. Using anthropological, epidemiological, and mathematical methods, Thornton finds that culturally and socially determined differences in the structure of sexual networks - rather than changes in individual behavior - were responsible for these radical differences in HIV prevalence. His study exposes these invisible networks, or unimagined communities, unseen both by those who participate in them and by the social sciences, and opens a new area of investigation - the sexual network as social structure.
Incorporating such factors as property, mobility, social status, and political authority into our understanding of AIDS transmission, Thornton offers a fresh vision of the disease, one that suggests new avenues for fighting it worldwide.
Robert J. Thornton is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and author of The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski and Space, Time, and Culture among the Iraqw of Tanzania. His articles have appeared in Current Anthropology and American Ethnologist.
