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“With AIDS I am happier than I have ever been before”
Author(s) -
Wardlow Holly
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the australian journal of anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.245
H-Index - 25
eISSN - 1757-6547
pISSN - 1035-8811
DOI - 10.1111/taja.12304
Subject(s) - kindness , counterpoint , sociology , new guinea , generative grammar , ethnography , human immunodeficiency virus (hiv) , gender studies , social psychology , psychology , anthropology , law , political science , ethnology , medicine , philosophy , pedagogy , linguistics , family medicine
In her 2016 article Sherry Ortner discusses what she calls the rise of ‘dark anthropology’: that is, ethnographic work that analyses situations of domination, dispossession, and violence. She, like Joel Robbins ([Robbins, J., 2013]), posits as a counterpoint the emergence of ‘anthropologies of the good,’ which emphasise care and ethics. In this paper I put these two anthropological projects into generative tension through an analysis of HIV ‐positive women's lives in Papua New Guinea. In the first part of the paper I demonstrate the ways in which resource extraction has created vulnerabilities to HIV —in part through the coerced marriages of women to powerful landowners. In the second, I discuss ways in which the antiretroviral era has made possible unexpected forms of kindness towards HIV ‐positive women. I end the paper with a discussion of what HIV ‐positive women mean when they claim that they are happier now than in their pre‐diagnosis lives.