Despite impressive advances in biomedical science, the resurgence of infectious diseases poses an emerging threat to global public health. These developments underscore the importance of considering the relationship between biological and social change. This dissertation uses the epicentre of the HIV epidemic in West Africa---Abidjan, Cote-d'Ivoire---as a case study to show how epidemics are "crystallizations" of local biological and social factors. The Abidjan epidemic is accounted for in terms of the city's sexual modernity, rather than the common view that migration and prostitution explain the proportions the epidemic took there early on. This view supports recent epidemiological work demonstrating the importance of networks rather than behaviour in determining the scope of HIV epidemics. This sexual modernity has a complex genealogy that stretches back through the modernisation drive of the postcolonial state to colonial practices of government, including colonial strategies for containing tropical diseases, which shaped how Africans engaged with the modern world. As a result, sexuality became an important strategy for self-fashioning. With the advent of the economic crisis of the 1980s, sexuality became increasingly permeable to economic relations. Likewise, with the crisis, the city's therapeutic economy, heavily weighted towards the consumption of biomedicines, shifted resort for illness from the public health sector to the informal economy. This may have led to inappropriate treatment of sexually transmitted infections and increased re-use of needles, fuelling the epidemic further. Contemporary efforts to address the epidemic demonstrate how "bio-social" crystallizations can further effect social and biological change. The interface between local groups and international organisations is a site where transnational discourses of "empowerment" of people with AIDS, predicated on a western model of "self-help," encounter the local reality of poverty and illn
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.37908 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Nguyen, Vinh-Kim, 1963- |
| Contributors | Lock, Margaret (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Anthropology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001846389, proquestno: NQ75667, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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