Main description:

This book explores how HIV/AIDS is understood in South African townships, where infection continues apace despite extensive educational efforts and where AIDS deaths continue despite the availability of antiretroviral treatment. The book focuses on nonscientific or alternative understandings of AIDS-the folk and lay theories that circulate within African communities. It describes how these local theories constitute a plural belief structure that underlies and supports the de facto plural health-care system operating in South Africa, a system that is readily acknowledged but rarely seriously engaged. Three major folk theories of AIDS are explored: religious, traditional African, and racial constructions of the disease. A range of lay theories, primarily ways of outsmarting the disease, are also described and explained. The book teases out the construction of these varied beliefs within the lives of township residents by weaving together an action research project in which HIV/AIDS peer educators reported on what was being said about HIV/AIDS in their communities and from in-depth accounts from township residents infected or affected by AIDS. The book's approach constitutes a respectful, engaging, and unsettling investigation into how the wide spectrum of alternative explanations of AIDS continue to flourish despite massive and prolonged public health campaigns based on and promoting the biomedical understanding of the disease. This is a wake-up call over the comfortable but flawed approaches to AIDS education that have delivered so little for three decades.