This book critically interrogates emerging interconnections between religion and biomedicine in Africa in the era of antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. Highlighting the complex relationships between religious ideologies, practices and organizations on the one hand, and biomedical treatment programmes and the scientific languages and public health institutions that sustain them on the other, this anthology charts largely uncovered terrain in the social science study of the Aids epidemic. Spanning different regions of Africa, the authors offer unique access to issues at the interface of religion and medical humanitarianism and the manifold therapeutic traditions, religious practices and moralities as they co-evolve in situations of AIDS treatment. This book also sheds new light on how religious spaces are formed in response to the dilemmas people face with the introduction of life-prolonging treatment programmes.

Christian and Muslim schools have become important target points in families and pupils' quests for new study opportunities and securing a 'good life' in Tanzania. These schools combine secular education with the moral (self-)formation of young people, triggering new realignments of the fields of education with interreligious co-existence and class formation in the country's urban centres. Hansjoerg Dilger explores the emerging entanglements of faith, morality, and the educational market in Dar es Salaam, thereby shedding light on processes of religious institutionalisation and their individual and collective embodiment. By contextualising these dynamics through analysis of the politics of Christian-Muslim relations in postcolonial Tanzania, this book shows how the field of education has shaped the positions of these highly diverse religious communities in diverging ways. In doing so, Dilger suggests that students and teachers' religious experience and practice in faith-oriented schools are shaped by the search for socio-moral belonging as well as by the power relations and inequalities of an interconnected world.

This book critically interrogates emerging interconnections between religion and biomedicine in Africa in the era of antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. Highlighting the complex relationships between religious ideologies, practices and organizations on the one hand, and biomedical treatment programmes and the scientific languages and public health institutions that sustain them on the other, this anthology charts largely uncovered terrain in the social science study of the Aids epidemic. Spanning different regions of Africa, the authors offer unique access to issues at the interface of religion and medical humanitarianism and the manifold therapeutic traditions, religious practices and moralities as they co-evolve in situations of AIDS treatment. This book also sheds new light on how religious spaces are formed in response to the dilemmas people face with the introduction of life-prolonging treatment programmes.

"We have come to expect that an emergent disease, once the initial hysteria it sparks has died down, will either be eradicated by money and medicine, or it will settle into the prosaic landscape of ordinary maladies with attendant routines, inconveniences, and bureaucratic exasperations. In Africa, AIDS has not followed either pathway. This outstanding collection of essays takes explicit aim at the tensions that this 'non-resolution' has generated in the world region that has felt the greatest impact of the disease: eastern and southern Africa. In these papers, we see vividly how the potential death warrant that AIDS presents to couples, households, children, has institutionalized new forms of social stigma and, at the same time, new levels of collective resilience and courage." . Caroline Bledsoe, Northwestern University

"This volume brings together some of the best, most thoughtful scholarship on AIDS in Africa. The essays are grounded in the troubling economic realities and intimate moral politics of daily life amid widespread existential angst. Together they offer novel insights into contemporary African social processes and experiences. Paying careful attention to the ways people create and tend to local moral worlds, Dilger and Luig have made a compelling, important book." . Julie Livingston, Rutgers University

" This book offers] a set of reports on how a whole range of issues in daily social life in Africa have been shaped by the presence of AIDS. Even more powerfully, these chapters about experience in the age of AIDS tell us about how ordinary people have re-created their social and cultural worlds under the threat of a new disease, and also in the face of extremely challenging economic conditions...an extremely valuable book." . Steven Feierman, University of Pennsylvania

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa has been addressed and perceived predominantly through the broad perspectives of social and economic theories as well as public health and development discourses. This volume however, focuses on the micro-politics of illness, treatment and death in order to offer innovative insights into the complex processes that shape individual and community responses to AIDS. The contributions describe the dilemmas that families, communities and health professionals face and shed new light on the transformation of social and moral orders in African societies, which have been increasingly marginalised in the context of global modernity.

Hansjorg Dilger is Junior Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Freie Universitat Berlin. Between 1995 and 2003, he carried out long-term fieldwork on AIDS and social relationships in rural and urban Tanzania. He is the author of Living with Aids. Illness, Death and Social Relationships in Africa. An Ethnography (Campus, 2005 in German). His recent research has focused on histories of social and religious inequality and the growing presence of Christian and Muslim schools in Dar es Salaam.

Ute Luig Ute Luig is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Freie Universitat Berlin. She has conducted long-term field work in Uganda, Ivory Coast and Zambia on gender, AIDS, religion and modernity. She is co-editor of Spirit Possession, Modernity and Power in Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 1999). At present she is involved in a project analysing the role of Buddhism in the reconciliation process in Cambodia after the civil war."

The contributors to Affective Trajectories examine the mutual and highly complex entwinements between religion and affect in urban Africa in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic research throughout the continent and in African diasporic communities abroad, they trace the myriad ways religious ideas, practices, and materialities interact with affect to configure life in urban spaces. Whether examining the affective force of the built urban environment or how religious practices contribute to new forms of attachment, identification, and place-making, they illustrate the force of affect as it is shaped by temporality and spatiality in the religious lives of individuals and communities. Among other topics, they explore Masowe Apostolic Christianity in relation to experiences of displacement in Harare, Zimbabwe; Muslim identity, belonging, and the global ummah in Ghana; crime, emotions, and conversion to neo-Pentecostalism in Cape Town; and spiritual cleansing in a Congolese branch of a Japanese religious movement. In so doing, the contributors demonstrate how the social and material living conditions of African cities generate diverse affective forms of religious experiences in ways that foster both localized and transnational paths of emotional knowledge. Contributors. Astrid Bochow, Marian Burchardt, Rafael Cazarin, Hansjoerg Dilger, Alessandro Gusman, Murtala Ibrahim, Peter Lambertz, Isabelle L. Lange, Isabel Mukonyora, Benedikt Pontzen, Hanspeter Reihling, Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon

The contributors to Affective Trajectories examine the mutual and highly complex entwinements between religion and affect in urban Africa in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on ethnographic research throughout the continent and in African diasporic communities abroad, they trace the myriad ways religious ideas, practices, and materialities interact with affect to configure life in urban spaces. Whether examining the affective force of the built urban environment or how religious practices contribute to new forms of attachment, identification, and place-making, they illustrate the force of affect as it is shaped by temporality and spatiality in the religious lives of individuals and communities. Among other topics, they explore Masowe Apostolic Christianity in relation to experiences of displacement in Harare, Zimbabwe; Muslim identity, belonging, and the global ummah in Ghana; crime, emotions, and conversion to neo-Pentecostalism in Cape Town; and spiritual cleansing in a Congolese branch of a Japanese religious movement. In so doing, the contributors demonstrate how the social and material living conditions of African cities generate diverse affective forms of religious experiences in ways that foster both localized and transnational paths of emotional knowledge. Contributors. Astrid Bochow, Marian Burchardt, Rafael Cazarin, Hansjoerg Dilger, Alessandro Gusman, Murtala Ibrahim, Peter Lambertz, Isabelle L. Lange, Isabel Mukonyora, Benedikt Pontzen, Hanspeter Reihling, Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon

The HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa has been addressed and perceived predominantly through the broad perspectives of social and economic theories as well as public health and development discourses. This volume however, focuses on the micro-politics of illness, treatment and death in order to offer innovative insights into the complex processes that shape individual and community responses to AIDS. The contributions describe the dilemmas that families, communities and health professionals face and shed new light on the transformation of social and moral orders in African societies, which have been increasingly marginalised in the context of global modernity.

Recent political, social, and economic changes in Africa have provoked radical shifts in the landscape of health and healthcare. Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa captures the multiple dynamics of a globalized world and its impact on medicine, health, and the delivery of healthcare in Africa--and beyond. Essays by an international group of contributors take on intractable problems such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and insufficient access to healthcare, drugs, resources, hospitals, and technologies. The movements of people and resources described here expose the growing challenges of poverty and public health, but they also show how new opportunities have been created for transforming healthcare and promoting care and healing.

Recent political, social, and economic changes in Africa have provoked radical shifts in the landscape of health and healthcare. Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa captures the multiple dynamics of a globalized world and its impact on medicine, health, and the delivery of healthcare in Africa--and beyond. Essays by an international group of contributors take on intractable problems such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and insufficient access to healthcare, drugs, resources, hospitals, and technologies. The movements of people and resources described here expose the growing challenges of poverty and public health, but they also show how new opportunities have been created for transforming healthcare and promoting care and healing.