AIDS-talk and the constitution of cultural models

Paul Farmer

Social Science & Medicine, 1994, vol. 38, issue 6, 801-809

Abstract: In a village in rural Haiti, a cohort of 20 adults was interviewed annually in order to trace the development of a cultural model of AIDS. It was possible to document the initial lack of a cultural model of AIDS followed by the elaboration over time of a widely shared representation of the new disorder. A number of steps important to this process were identified: exposure to illness or rumor of it; a high ranking in a hierarchy of percieved stress leading to sustained attention; and the generation of illness stories. It is argued that these stories provide the matrix within which nascent representations were anchored. The significance of intercurrent 'large-scale' political changes in the process of narratization is also underlined.

Keywords: AIDS; illness; narratives; cultural; models; explanatory; models; Haiti (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1994
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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