Global Responses to AIDS

"Bastos (Univ. of Lisbon) writes from an extended experience beginning with a PhD in anthropology and continuing with several types of fieldwork and the processing of their impact. The book is a multilayered, composite approach that involves multisited ethnographic research in different spheres of the collective responses to AIDS: AIDS activism in New York City and the US more generally, the World Health Organization, the nongovernmental organizations in South America, and the clinical settings and research centers for infectious disease in Brazil. The book begins with an overview of biomedical knowledge and social commentary, followed by an analysis of the social movement generated by the inability of the medical establishment to respond to the AIDS crisis efficiently. The narrative moves to the growing awareness of the global dimensions of the epidemic and efforts of international agencies to launch an effective global response. A field setting offers contradictions and asymmetries of the contemporary world. Finally, Bastos attempts to evaluate the extent to which global responses to AIDS led to the creation of interactive structures. For graduate students and faculty.July 2000"—J. M. Howe, AIDS Information Center, VA Headquarters (DC)