Description:
- Comprehensive ethnographic case studies of people living with HIV and ARVs. In-depth observations of the infrastructural conditions and social dynamics shaping day-to-day work routines at Tanzanian HIV treatment centers. Focus on the financial and infrastructural fragilities of treatment provision at the global and national level (Tanzania). In-depth exploration of the often-disregarded interference of religious and 'traditional' healing practices with biomedical HIV-treatment.
Brief description:
Dominik Mattes is a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Center "Affective Societies" and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His research interests include medical anthropology, critical global health, anthropology of religion, as well as anthropology of affect and emotion.
Review Quotes:
"Dominik Mattes's stunning new book will remain relevant for those interested in why and how vertical global health interventions often fail (and how they might succeed). This book effectively illustrates how to translate the global to the local and the structural to the personal. Mattes also provides a blueprint for ethnographic research that aims to examine a problem from multiple, often contradictory, angles. Fierce Medicines, Fragile Socialities is a must read for those interested in HIV/AIDS, global health interventions, and ethnographic methods." - Medical Anthropology Quarterly
"This is an important contribution to existing research on HIV and its treatment in Africa. The book is unique in combining perspectives on providing, and on living, life with HIV treatment. The observations are acute, and the case studies of patients and families are illuminating." - Susan Reynolds Whyte, University of Copenhagen