Ways of dying: AIDS care and agency in contemporary urban South Africa

Abstract

In the HIV/AIDS literature, the tendency has been to avoid the agentive concept in favour of an emphasis on structure and subjectivity. Based on research with an HIV/AIDS project in Pretoria, South Africa, this article posits that examining how agency is locally conceptualized forms one route via which the notion may be plausibly inserted into the study of the pandemic. I evoke the figure of the ‘ideal agent’: the imagined AIDS sufferer against whose model actions those of actual AIDS sufferers are measured. Three stages emerge, the first characterized by victimhood, the second by moral transformation, and the third by the choice to ‘go home to one’s relatives’. In view of patients’ impending deaths, local knowledge regarding proper burial and ancestorship, and the limited resources of the project, the ideal agent suggests how AIDS sufferers’ agency is circumscribed and helps to clarify the volatility of the moral rebirth experience.