Premium
How to do things to children with words: Language, ritual, and apocalypse in pediatric HIV treatment in Botswana
Author(s) -
BRADA BETSEY BEHR
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1111/amet.12031
Subject(s) - silence , conviction , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) , medical diagnosis , transparency (behavior) , object (grammar) , intervention (counseling) , medicine , psychology , pediatrics , family medicine , linguistics , psychiatry , aesthetics , law , pathology , philosophy , political science
Concerned that children understood the word AIDS to portend their imminent deaths, U.S. pediatricians in Botswana used ritual speech to reveal HIV‐positive children's diagnoses to them in an effort to ensure these children took their medications. They relied on euphemisms such as soldier and bad guy, gradually and methodically replacing them with biomedically derived terms. While the ritual was predicated on transparency and accuracy, pediatricians’ conviction that the word AIDS impaired children's ability to manage their infections led them to silence representations of the epidemic as anything other than a manageable condition in order to create a stable object of biomedical intervention.