spirit and healing in africa - University of the Free State

within a specific society. The acknowledgement that the existence of HIV/AIDS is not only a
matter of viral transmission, but also a matter of culture, politics, economy, gender relations,
poverty and globalization, is the most crucial part of the gravity shift within the discourse. The
human factor in the epidemic has received increasing attention, steering the direction of the
discussion towards human rights, community-based responses at a grass roots level, personal
narratives of people suffering from HIV/AIDS and local understandings of HIV/AIDS. Topdown
approaches, in which a selected group of people determines what is best for the majority
(as in national policies and biomedical prevention programs), are being challenged by a growing
number of alternative perspectives which claim that religion, local knowledge, music and
empowerment play an important role in the fight against HIV/AIDS.
In the following paragraphs, these ‘beyond epidemiology’ approaches will be discussed in more
detail and the existence of alternative or popular explanations of HIV/AIDS will be explored in
general. How do such constructions come into being, and what is the relevance of popular
HIV/AIDS constructs for the ones who keep them intact? After a general introduction into nonepidemiological
HIV/AIDS constructions there follows a more specific focus on the
understanding of HIV/AIDS in relation to Christian faith. This link between religion and
HIV/AIDS is a somewhat separate, yet important, category within the ‘beyond epidemiology’
discourse. In the African context, daily life is infused with Christian faith and church praxis. No
wonder church and theology are heavily involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS, sometimes
implicitly and sometimes explicitly (with all inherent matters of dispute). A focus on the relation
of Christian faith and HIV/AIDS constructions (of which HIV/AIDS theologies are part) will
bring about the importance and necessity of ‘beyond epidemiology’ approaches within the
discourse on HIV/AIDS in Africa.
4.3.1 Social representations of HIV/AIDS
The way in which people talk about illness, and how they consider the origin and spread of
HIV/AIDS, has become an important area of attention within the HIV/AIDS discourse, because
it reveals how people make sense of HIV/AIDS within their own frame of reference. Those who
are involved in HIV prevention measures and policies may especially benefit from social science
research on lay people’s perceptions and actions pertaining to HIV/AIDS in Africa.
In social science jargon, the way people interpret and respond to social threats (like HIV/AIDS)
is called social representation. What happens in the process of social representation is that
people who belong to the same social category apply familiar concepts, ideas, and images to the
social threat. For example, the social representations of HIV/AIDS by men in Southern Malawi
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