In Their Own Words

Unimagined Community examines the social-structural and cultural contexts and forces that shape the radical differences between prevalence trends in Uganda and South Africa from the late 1970s to the present. This book is not, however, about statistics, demography, or epidemiology of HIV trends or AIDS, or about the social, cultural, and economic consequences of HIV and AIDS.

Instead, it shifts our focus away from the personal/individual aspects of sexual behavior and risk to the large-scale social-structural issues. In line with this shift in scale of analysis, the principle theoretical innovation is to demonstrate that sexual networks can be understood as social structures, albeit invisible or "unimagined" ones. These, in turn, are part of the social contexts in which they form and are partly determined by them. Kinship, family property and inheritance regimes, population mobility, local-level and "traditional" authority, national-level political structures, and systems of traditional healing are all examined and brought into relation with one another in order to explain the specific differences in the configuration or topology of sexual networks.

This comparative anthropological investigation is focused on explaining how differences between large-scale patterns of sexual networks can advance our knowledge of the large differences that exist between HIV prevalence and trends in different regions.