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Ethical fields in Africa
Introduction
Taking inspiration from an interview with Gilles Deleuze shortly before his death, in an essay entitled 'Ethics of survival', Didier Fassin (2010) reflects on what the confrontation with near death does to people's views on life. He notes that the vulnerability of life and its need for protection have inspired political theory from Arendt to Agamben. These authors examine what state protection does to quality of life as well as what the imperative to protect life does to the nature of political power. While political theory has 'unveiled' this, and has shown how 'individuals and groups, even entire nations, have been treated by power, the market or the state, during the colonial period as well as in the contemporary era' (ibid.: 93), Fassin critiques these theories for falling into the trap of reducing human life to its physical aspects: that is, the constraints of survival and the physical vulnerability of the body. Beyond that reasoning, he shows that the ways in which people express their views on life and their desire for survival are in fact ethical statements. He concludes by calling for an ethnographic practice that is sensitive to these ethics as they evolve in confrontation with near-death experiences.
Fassin's essay serves as an inspiration for this article, which deals with the emergence of new ethical fields in HIV prevention in Botswana, in a similar way to that outlined in the introduction to this special issue. Its main argument is born out of my growing frustration with a number of studies on social practices in the context of HIV/AIDS in African societies that stress the enduring reluctance of people to comply with HIV prevention messages, particularly those of safe sex (cf. Hunter 2002; 2010; Kaufman and Stavrou 2004). These studies suggest a mismatch between institutionally pursued HIV education and social practices of local morals on the ground, which allow people to have sex with multiple partners without using condoms, as deploying barrier methods would arouse suspicions of infidelity (cf. Hirsch et al. 2010). These studies propose that local moralities make it impossible for people to accept or integrate HIV/AIDS prevention into their lives.
On the other hand, there are also studies that highlight how HIV prevention...