Paper short abstract:

This presentation synthesizes scholarship on language ideologies of scale, transnational aid amid neoliberal governance, and embodied experience to discuss how the experienced pragmatics of everyday performance were linked to the development of HIV support amid stigma and inequality in South Africa.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation synthesizes scholarship on language ideologies of scale, transnational aid amid neoliberal governance, and embodied experience to suggest a model of the linguistic constitution of "support." This is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Durban, South Africa with a Zulu gospel choir that was an HIV support group, activist organization and performance troupe. The choir was notable as a success story amid stigma and inequality. Still, group members were peripheral to the uneven global circulation of money, medication, and discourses associated with the AIDS pandemic. Access to these resources was mediated by gatekeepers—doctors, international aid workers, and researchers—who valued choir members' abilities to perform "traditional" Zulu music and disclose their HIV positive statuses. Aid, research, and biomedicine thus opened up spaces for communication amid stigma and the "scaling up" of HIV discourses while simultaneously constraining linguistic practices in those spaces.

The presentation examines how choir members joked, told stories and sang about HIV, drawing from ideological resources associated with biomedicine and international aid. Building on phenomenologically oriented scholarship on attentional modification, medical ethnomusicology work on healing and flexibility, and now-classic literature on the anthropology of performance, the presentation suggests a model of how the experienced pragmatics of everyday performance were linked to the long-term development of support amid stigma and inequality. This contributes a perspective on the experience of performance, and more generally on the moment-to-moment temporal "unfolding" of communication and healing, to an emerging body of research at the intersection of linguistic, psychological and medical anthropology.