The vertiginous body and social metamorphosis in a context of HIV/AIDS

Abstract

Ethnographic research for this paper was undertaken in the Okhahlamba District in the Drakensberg of South Africa and formed part of an on-going five-year project focussing on people's everyday experience of living with HIV/AIDS in rural communities. The paper explores metamorphoses of the body in relation to HIV/AIDS, showing how the experience of bodily disintegration is expressed, but also how the falling away of the body is linked to social fault-lines. From an in-depth story of one young man—a narrative seeking to confront individual suffering—the paper moves to theoretical concerns. As Mary Douglas and others have argued, those aspects of the body that threaten its coherence—the body's permeability and its fluids—are often linked with pollution. The fluidity and erosion of the individual's body in experiencing AIDS is thus inextricably intertwined with the idea of both bodily and social pollution and their attendant fears and prejudices. In bringing the biological into relation with sociality, the dividing line between the two is blurred. Space, often conceptualised as external to a ‘bounded’ individual, traduces both internal and external landscapes where experience of the body's disintegration interweaves with social relations.