The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS (Body, Commodity, Text) - Hardcover

Nguyen, Vinh-Kim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822348624 ISBN 13: 9780822348627

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2010

Synopsis

The Republic of Therapy tells the story of the global response to the HIV epidemic from the perspective of community organizers, activists, and people living with HIV in West Africa. Drawing on his experiences as a physician and anthropologist in Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire, Vinh-Kim Nguyen focuses on the period between 1994, when effective antiretroviral treatments for HIV were discovered, and 2000, when the global health community acknowledged a right to treatment, making the drugs more available. During the intervening years, when antiretrovirals were scarce in Africa, triage decisions were made determining who would receive lifesaving treatment. Nguyen explains how those decisions altered social relations in West Africa. In 1994, anxious to “break the silence” and “put a face to the epidemic,” international agencies unwittingly created a market in which stories about being HIV positive could be bartered for access to limited medical resources. Being able to talk about oneself became a matter of life or death. Tracing the cultural and political logic of triage back to colonial classification systems, Nguyen shows how it persists in contemporary attempts to design, fund, and implement mass treatment programs in the developing world. He argues that as an enactment of decisions about who may live, triage constitutes a partial, mobile form of sovereignty: what might be called therapeutic sovereignty.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"The activist, physician, and anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen has written an engaged, rigorous, and compelling account of the years when, in West Africa, AIDS treatment started to become available and persons living with HIV began to organize. With insight and sympathy, he explores how new political forms were thus invented in Cote d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso, combining therapeutic sovereignty and health democracy, triage of patients and empowerment of communities, confessions and accusations."--Didier Fassin, author of "When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa"

About the Author:

Vinh-Kim Nguyen is Associate Professor of Social and Preventive Medicine in the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0822348624
• ISBN 13: 9780822348627
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256