Understanding culture and HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

Early in the study of HIV/AIDS; culture was invoked to explain differences in the disease patterns between sub-Saharan Africa and Western countries. Unfortunately; in an attempt to explain the statistics; many of the presumed risk factors were impugned in the absence of evidence. Many cultural practices were stripped of their meanings; societal context and historical positioning and transformed into cofactors of disease. Other supposedly beneficial cultural traits were used to explain the absence of disease in certain populations; implicitly blaming victims in other groups. Despite years of study; assumptions about culture as a cofactor in the spread of HIV/AIDS have persisted; despite a lack of empirical evidence. In recent years; more and more ideas about cultural causality have been called into question; and often disproved by studies. Thus; in light of new evidence; a review of purported cultural causes of disease; enhanced by an understanding of the differences between individual and population risks; is both warranted and long overdue. The preponderance of evidence suggests that culture as a singular determinant in the African epidemic of HIV/AIDS falls flat when disabused of its biased and ethnocentric assumptions