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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Show panel list
Subjects of Counselling: Religion, HIV/AIDS and the Management of Everyday Life
| Panel |
15. Reconfiguring the Religion-HIV/AIDS connection: challenges and opportunities
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| Paper ID | 572 |
| Author(s) |
Burchardt, Marian
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | According to recent UNAIDS statistics, South Africa continues to experience increasing rates of HIV infection and has not managed yet to turn the tide of the epidemic. However, the network of actors that emerged in reaction to the AIDS crisis is currently undergoing some significant changes. After an initial phase of silence, inaction, and institutional inertia, churches, faith-based organizations (FBOs), and religious communities now belong to most active and engaged actors in organizing responses to HIV/AIDS. They are running countless support groups for infected people and hospices specifically designed for the needs of AIDS patients; they provide medical, psychological, and spiritual counselling and have made their way into public education institutions, offering “life skills-education-courses” that are essentially organized around themes such as intimate relationships, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS. Forming part of a nascent post-Apartheid civil society movement, FBOs operate partly at critical distance to governmental institutions, and partly in cooperation with them.
Most research into the moral politics of FBOs in the struggle against HIV/AIDS is characterized by a rather narrow focus on their contribution to prevention campaigning and their attempts to shape the sexual practices and attitudes towards intimate relationships within their constituencies. Contrary to that, in this paper I will argue that the engagement of FBOs in fighting AIDS and managing its consequences is fundamentally concerned with the production of culturally new models of moral responsibility whose scope goes well beyond the emphasis on disciplined sexualities. The production of such models of responsible decision-making, which incorporates Christian concepts of ‘good life’, is primarily carried out through the promotion of healthy and responsible ‘lifestyles’. I suggest that by employing a discursive framework of individual ethics, FBOs contribute to the establishment of managerial relationships of individuals towards their own bodies and lives, in which every health-related choice is an investment into a healthy future, an act of ‘responsibilized self-governance, and an exercise in the rational management of everyday life.
By combining theoretical perspectives from the sociology of health and illness and the sociology of religion, I demonstrate how this process unfolds in HIV-related counselling practices and counselling relationships as manifest in the work of a variety of FBOs. The paper is focused on the critical analysis of counselling communication and views such setting as primary loci for the negotiation of cultural change. The paper discusses the results of nine months of field research in the South African city of Cape Town in 2006 and follows a grounded theory approach.
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