Public Anthropologist‘s suggested reading today is All I Eat Is Medicine. Going Hungry in Mozambique’s AIDS Economy.
In times of Covid-19, nuanced ethnographic accounts of therapeutic politics and implications are particularly welcome. In this new book, Ippolytos Kalofonos engages with the different ways in which the scaling up of HIV/AIDS treatment in Mozambique significantly altered the ordinary lives of many people. Although HIV/AIDS treatment arguably saved lives, Kalofonos shows that its forms of implementation also reproduced the exploitation and exclusion that characterized the escalation of the epidemic in the first place.
As the narrative guides the reader through the experiences of individuals and families, we clearly see the interconnection of epidemic, health intervention, hunger, and inequality.