AIDS and religious practice in Africa / / edited by Felicitas Becker and P. Wenzel Geissler.

• Superior document: Studies of religion in Africa, v. 36
• TeilnehmendeR: Becker, Felicitas, 1971-; Geissler, Wenzel.
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Studies on religion in Africa ; 36.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (416 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

This volume explores how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS. Examining the social production, and productivity, of AIDS - linking bodily and spiritual experiences, and religious, medical, political and economic discourses - the papers counter simplified notions of causal effects of AIDS on religion (or vice versa). Instead, they display people’s resourcefulness in their struggle to move ahead in spite of adversity. This relativises the vision of doom widely associated with the African AIDS epidemic; and it allows to see AIDS, instead of a singular event, as the culmination of a century-long process of changing livelihoods, bodily well-being and spiritual imaginaries.

Table of Contents

The rise of occult powers, AIDS and the Roman Catholic church in western Uganda / Heike Behrend -- Christian salvation and Luo tradition : arguments of faith in a time of death in western Kenya / Ruth Prince -- The new wives of Christ : paradoxes and potentials in the remaking of widow lives in Uganda / Catrine Christiansen -- AIDS and the power of God : narratives of decline and coping strategies in Zanzibar / Nadine Beckmann -- Competing explanations and treatment choices : Muslims, AIDS and ARVs in Tanzania / Felicitas Becker -- 'Muslims have instructions' : HIV/AIDS, modernity and Islamic religious education in Kisumu, Kenya / Jonas Svensson -- 'Keeping up appearances' : sex and religion amongst university students in Uganda / Jo Sadgrove -- Healing the wounds of modernity : salvation, community and care in a Neo-Pentecostal church in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania / Hansjorg Dilger -- Gloves in times of AIDS : Pentecostalism, hair and social distancing in Botswana / Rijk van Dijk -- Leprosy of a deadlier kind : Christian conceptions of AIDS in the South African Lowveld / Isak Niehaus -- Subjects of counselling : religion, HIV/AIDS and the management of everyday life in South Africa / Marian Burchardt -- Therapeutic evangelism : confessional technologies, antiretrovirals and biospiritual transformation in the fight against AIDS in West Africa / Vinh-Kim Nguyen.