Loading...
Please wait, while we are loading the content...
Similar Documents
A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa. By Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi+280. $35.00.
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Swiss, Liam |
| Copyright Year | 2018 |
| Abstract | Few books can claim to address a social problem involving billions of dollars withmillions of lives hanging in the balance, but Swidler andWatkins’s AFraught Embrace does just that. Dissecting the role of foreign altruists and local brokers in aid efforts to stem the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa generally, and Malawi more specifically, this book makes a compelling sociological contribution to the study of foreign aid—a field of research more often reserved for economists and international development studies scholars. Swidler and Watkins turn a nearly 20-year research engagement on these issues inMalawi into a revealing ethnography of foreign aid to combat AIDS that introduces readers to the many actors, aims, and approaches involved in these efforts. They begin by introducing the context of theHIV/AIDS epidemic and development in Malawi. Next, they turn to the key players in both the global and local contexts: the altruists (institutional and individual) and brokers (cosmopolitan/national, district, and local/interstitial) who awkwardly negotiate myriad clashing “fantasies” to translate their competing aims and priorities into reality. It is in this clash that we find the titular “fraught embrace” in which altruists “long” for the right broker to connect themwith deservingprojectbeneficiaries in thevillageandbrokerswho “pine” foraltruists fromwhom they canderive livelihoods and enduring patronage. Though the romantic embrace metaphor might rub some readers the wrong way, Swidler andWatkins’s focus on the gaps in understanding between altruists and brokers is its richest contribution. The book then turns from the actors to the aims and approaches of AIDS altruism. Here, readers learn of the discordance among altruists and brokers over many issues on which they work (stigma, orphans, women’s empowerment, and harmful cultural practices), in approaches to address the epidemic (training, training, and more training!), and on how they measure what they have achieved (performance monitoring and evaluation). Chapters 7–10 weave a convincing narrative of how altruists and brokers never seem to mean or expect the same thing when discussing these aims and approaches. Even the Malawian brokers share widely divergent understandings of the aid industry and its role in fighting the epidemic, depending on which organizations they work for, whether they are urban elites or in the village, andwhere they are in the hierarchical “aid chain” Swidler andWatkins describe. Thesemanydisagreements andmisunderstandings leave theauthors “disheartened by theworkings of theAIDS enterprise” (p. 204). In response, they conclude by admonishing the aid industry (large and small) to try to better American Journal of Sociology |
| Starting Page | 1844 |
| Ending Page | 1846 |
| Page Count | 3 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1086/696854 |
| Volume Number | 123 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~lswiss/pdf/Swiss-AJS2018.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1086/696854 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
