Exceptional Life: Moral Statehood, Subjectivity and the Politics of HIV Care in Freetown, Sierra Leone - A talk by Adia Benton October 6, 2011

In 2002, Sierra Leone emerged from a decade-long civil war portrayed in mainstream media as a resource war, and characterized by widespread sexual violence, amputations, and massive displacement. In the regions most affected by conflict, nearly 80% of infrastructure was destroyed; approximately one-third of the nation’s population was displaced. With a low HIV prevalence of 1.5% in the war’s aftermath, the disease could have easily received little government funding and international attention. Yet global funding trends, assumptions about how war disrupts social life and shifts sexual norms — coupled with pervasive ideas about Africa as a site where high HIV prevalence, disorder and chaos co-mingle — elevated HIV/AIDS to exceptional status in post-conflict Sierra Leone. Drawing on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Freetown, Sierra Leone (2006-2007), Prof. Benton outlines how an industry premised on HIV/AIDS’ exceptional status affected health systems, shaped HIV-positive individuals’ lives, and brought to relief critical concerns around global governance of health programs and state legitimacy.

Adia Benton is a a medical anthropologist and visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Oberlin College. She received her PhD in social (medical) anthropology at Harvard University. Her research has focused on HIV treatment, care and support efforts in Freetown, Sierra Leone, examining how HIV treatment, care, and support in a low-prevalence, post-conflict setting reflects, engenders and reproduces novel forms of “exception”-- in terms of subjectivities, professional practice, and in knowledge production within, about, and for Africa. Dr. Benton will be in residence in fall 2011 with the Health & Society group of Quadrant.

Official Website: http://www.ias.umn.edu/thursdayscalf11.php