| Popis: |
Over the past two decades of HIV/AIDS disease, there has been a range of research perspectives concentrating on the health related concerns of the epidemic. Parker (2001) stated that like many other disciplines, anthropology failed to distinguish itself in its initial responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Furthermore, anthropologists, especially in Africa, contributed only irregularly to such early research and mobilisation was on the basis of their own individual research initiatives and publications rather than as part of a formal or organised research response. This is evidenced in the paucity of ethnographic empirical research focusing on the management of HIV/AIDS in public schools. This does not mean that there were no important and valuable contributions made by anthropologists to the study of HIV/AIDS (Bolognone 1986). The dominant paradigm for the organisation and conduct of AIDS research in Sub-Saharan Africa has begun to be perceptible in the past decades. The paradigm that characterised the prevailing studies during this time had a mainly biomedical emphasis and a largely individualistic bias in relation to the ways in which the social sciences might contribute meaningfully to the development and implementation of an HIV/AIDS research agenda (Parker, 2001). Much of the social sciences research activity that emerged in response to HIV/AIDS in SubSaharan Africa during the mid 80s to late 90s, and up to the present, focused on surveys of risk-related behaviours and on the knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about sexuality that are HIV risk associated. The aims of these studies were in Parker’s terms, to collect quantifiable data on numbers of sexual partners, the frequency of different sexually transmitted diseases, and any number of other similar issues that were understood to contribute to the spread of HIV infection (Carballo, Cleland, Carael, & Albrecht, 1989; Cleland and Ferry, 1995). Thus, such studies could only pave the way for prevention policies and intervention programmes designed by government to reduce HIV-related risk behaviours. The limitations of behavioural intervention based on information and reasoned persuasion as a stimulus for risk reduction became evident. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the emergence of cultural studies that have some traces of ethnographic characteristics began to emerge among researchers in Uganda and South Africa. By the late 1990s, it became clear that a far more complex and wider set of social, structural and cultural factors are likely to mediate |
