Paper short abstract:

Described since its first appearance as the global disease par excellence, HIV/AIDS has often been dealt through internationally coordinated public health programmes. What are the outfalls into locales of the assemblage of global anti-AIDS interventions with local patterns of infection and national apparatuses and regulations?

Paper long abstract:

The one of anthropology with anti-AIDS public-heath programs is to day one of the happiest marriages in the field of applied social sciences. Over the past decades, public health interventions have often relied on anthropological insights into the social, geographical, cultural causes that ease the spread of HIV into locales. With the increasing perception of AIDS as a global disease, the analytical perspective has widen up, causing anthropologists to take the economic and political imbalances of the international scenario into account. The recognition of the global scale of causes has gone hand-to-hand with the globalization of responses to the epidemic. As a set of international principles has begun travelling and being taken up through the world, a compelling question is now emerging, calling anthropologists and public health experts alike for a careful consideration. Taken for granted the urge to unravel the causes of HIV, aren't we leaving something else out of the picture?

What are the outfalls of globalized public health responses to AIDS into locales?

Based on a 12-months fieldwork among patients groups in southwest China, this paper wishes to contribute to the dialogue between anthropology and public health. By exploring the assemblage woven around the implementation of the international principle of Greater Involvement of People with AIDS in China, this work aims to cast a light into the potential of anthropology to dig up not only the causative forces behind the epidemic, but also the generative social and political power of anti-AIDS interventions in the eve of globalization.