HIV/AIDS

HIV/AIDS is among the most intensively studied health topics in anthropology. Given that it is a stigmatized disease associated with promiscuity, drug use, poverty, and death, preventing and treating HIV is as much a social puzzle as a biomedical one. The sociality of HIV/AIDS presents serious challenges for public health officials, pharmaceutical companies, and health care practitioners, leading to the emergence of community‐based responses, treatment activism, patient rights groups, and unlikely partnerships between people with HIV and biomedicine. Anthropological research has contributed to improving societal understandings of the social, economic, and political factors that make particular populations vulnerable to HIV; HIV‐related stigma; the relationship between unprotected sex and economic, gender, and age‐based inequalities; the “cultural baggage” embedded in public and global health interventions; and the new social forms that have arisen in the context of prevention, care, and treatment interventions.