Book Review: Risiko und HIV/Aids in Botswana. Leben in der Pandemie by Astrid Bochow

Abstract

Since the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, scholars have debated whether it exacerbated existing social inequalities. For many African social scientists, such debates resonated with collective experiences with HIV/AIDS which have disproportionately affected the lower segments of social hierarchies. Yet whereas much has been written about these exclusionary consequences of HIV/ AIDS, we still know relatively little about how members of modern middle classes experience and confront this pandemic. Focusing on the educated urban middle class in Botswana, anthropologist Astrid Bochow’s book fills this lacuna. Based on 10 years of ethnographic research, this passionately written book takes the reader deep into the social world of Setswana urban professionals, their life projects, careers, family crises, and their ways of navigating a world of risks. The book consists of eight chapters including those that outline the main conceptual lenses – risk and body – as well as ethnographic chapters in which the author explores different themes related to HIV/AIDS. In these ethnographic chapters, Bochow describes how middle-class professionals evaluate the risk of HIV infection in relation to problems such as pregnancy and child rearing, their views of adequate healthcare, the possibilities of having a fulfilling sexual life, or the relationships to kin. Conceptually, Bochow’s book makes two interventions: first, drawing on Ulrich Beck’s theory of risk society (Beck 1986), the author suggests viewing risk as a central axis that structures contemporary Botswanan society – and as a lens through which actors evaluate political projects, kin relations and life projects. However, in contrast to the risks linked to high-tech capitalism (e.g. nuclear power), infectious diseases center on the human body. Therefore – and this is the second conceptual move – Bochow argues that we need to understand the ways the body is produced through material practices as at the same time “at risk” and risky, as an object in need of care, and a carrier of pathogens. Because of this fundamental ambivalence of the contagious body, Bochow agrees with new materialist scholars who emphasize agency beyond intentionality and who see bodies as networked within webs of heterogeneous entities including institutions, pathogens, and medical substances. This new emphasis on connections among material substances strongly resonates with earlier