The popular Nigerian (pidgin) prevention message AIDS no dey show for face warns that one cannot tell if someone has HIV based on how they look. Extending this metaphor, "AIDS Doesn t Show Its Face"by anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith illustrates how widely held views about Nigeria, Africa, and the disease itself conceal the real faces of the continent. The book counters misguided renderings that portray African societies only through images of exotic and dysfunctional sexualities, overly simplified cultural explanations, ...
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The popular Nigerian (pidgin) prevention message AIDS no dey show for face warns that one cannot tell if someone has HIV based on how they look. Extending this metaphor, "AIDS Doesn t Show Its Face"by anthropologist Daniel Jordan Smith illustrates how widely held views about Nigeria, Africa, and the disease itself conceal the real faces of the continent. The book counters misguided renderings that portray African societies only through images of exotic and dysfunctional sexualities, overly simplified cultural explanations, and tragic problems of poverty, war, and corruption. Based on over 20 years of fieldwork in Nigeria, this book uses rich ethnographic cases to reverse the usual dynamic in which Africa is a vehicle to explain AIDS. It focuses instead on AIDS as an optic to help understand Africa. Using the life stories of multiple individuals--like Chijioke, a married man and father of five who is regularly unfaithful to his wife but remains committed to staying married, and Chinyere, a young woman in university who has a wealthy married lover that she keeps secret from the young man she dates at school and hopes to marrySmith shows how men and women negotiate intimacy as an aspect of their larger life projects. Such stories reveal that the fear of AIDS both builds on and exacerbates already widespread worries about deception in Nigerian human relations."
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