HIV/AIDS programmes have been running in the informal settlements around Rundu, a town in Northeast Namibia, for more than a decade. Yet in spite of concerted efforts by government agencies and civil society organisations to promote broad and deep participation in these programmes, residents still express little sense of ownership of them. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis describes how different groups of actors within the locale have experienced and interpreted the fight against HIV/AIDS, and in doing so explores the micro-social processes that have hindered the expansion of a sense of ownership of HIV/AIDS programmes beyond a relatively small cadre of actors: programme managers, AIDS activists and prominent volunteers. This thesis presents a thick description of the fight against HIV/AIDS as a tangle of practices, assumptions, affective structures and a system of commonsense reasoning that cohere around a network of loosely affiliated organisations situated within but at the same time often distinguished by respondents from the wider social milieu of Rundu. Drawing on Kleinman’s (1992) concept of local moral worlds, these intersubjectively constructed contexts of shared experience are referred to as the local moral world of the fight against HIV/AIDS in Rundu. The account of the local moral world of the fight against HIV/AIDS presented in this thesis enables the identification of socially embedded structures of conditionality that shape local understandings of where ownership of HIV/AIDS programmes lies. Three main issues are explored: local accounts of differentiated cultural orientation in relation to the local moral world of the fight against HIV/AIDS; the social construction of “legitimate” knowledge and the distribution of symbolic power in relation to HIV/AIDS programmes; and the challenge of building deep trust between actors at the centre and periphery of HIV/AIDS programmes who operate within what are often quite different local moral worlds.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:569286 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Busher, Joel |
| Publisher | University of East Anglia |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/10569/ |
Page generated in 0.0019 seconds