TY - JOUR
T1 - Technology and affect
T2 - HIV/AIDS testing in Brazil
AU - Biehl, João
AU - Coutinho, Denise
AU - Outeiro, Ana Luzia
N1 - Funding Information:
Many people in Brazil and in the United States have helped to realize this research and writing. I am very thankful to Denise Coutinho and Ana Luzia Outeiro for their creative and generous participation from the beginning until now, and to CTA’s coodinators, staff and clients for making this work possible in the first place. I am also grateful to Adriana Petryna, Joseph Dumit, Michael Fischer, and Paul Rabinow for carefully reading several drafts of this essay and for their invaluable critical contributions to it. Thank you also to André Patsalides, Arthur Kleinman, Byron Good, Carlos Passarelli, Clara Han, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Lawrence Cohen, Levi Fuller, Michel Desjardins, Maria Inês Dourado, Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good, Martha Fuller, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Naomar de Almeida-Filho, Robert Desjarlais, Robson de Freitas Pereira, Sérgio Cunha, Shigeyuki Eguchi, and Stefania Pandolfo for their engagement in one form or the other with this work. I also want to acknowledge funding from the Brazilian Council of Science and Technology (CNPq) and the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), as well as the institutional support from the Health Institute (ISC) at the Federal University of Bahia, and the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. I am solely responsible for the interpretations expressed here.
PY - 2001/3
Y1 - 2001/3
N2 - Contemporary techno-scientific and medical developments are restructuring social interactions and the very processes by which individual subjectivity is formed. This essay elaborates on the experiential and ethical impact of such transformations from the perspective of people who, in ordinary and unexpected ways, act science and technology out. We carried out ethnographic research in an HIV/AIDS Testing and Counseling Center (CTA) in northeastern Brazil, combining participant observation with epidemiological analyses and clinical survey. We found a high demand for free testing by low-risk clients, largely working and middle class, experiencing anxiety and complaining of AIDS-like symptoms. Most of the clients were sero-negative and many returned for a second and third testing. We understand this to be a new techno-cultural phenomenon and call it imaginary AIDS. Throughout this essay, we describe CTA's routine practices, place these practices in historical, political, economic and cross-cultural perspective, and analyze the subjective data we collected from the clients of our pilot study. We explore how clinical epidemiological expertise and HIV testing technology are integrated into new forms of bio-politics aimed at specific marketable and disease-free populations, and on the affective absorption of bio-technical truth and the engendering of a technoneurosis in this testing center.
AB - Contemporary techno-scientific and medical developments are restructuring social interactions and the very processes by which individual subjectivity is formed. This essay elaborates on the experiential and ethical impact of such transformations from the perspective of people who, in ordinary and unexpected ways, act science and technology out. We carried out ethnographic research in an HIV/AIDS Testing and Counseling Center (CTA) in northeastern Brazil, combining participant observation with epidemiological analyses and clinical survey. We found a high demand for free testing by low-risk clients, largely working and middle class, experiencing anxiety and complaining of AIDS-like symptoms. Most of the clients were sero-negative and many returned for a second and third testing. We understand this to be a new techno-cultural phenomenon and call it imaginary AIDS. Throughout this essay, we describe CTA's routine practices, place these practices in historical, political, economic and cross-cultural perspective, and analyze the subjective data we collected from the clients of our pilot study. We explore how clinical epidemiological expertise and HIV testing technology are integrated into new forms of bio-politics aimed at specific marketable and disease-free populations, and on the affective absorption of bio-technical truth and the engendering of a technoneurosis in this testing center.
KW - Anthropology of science and technology
KW - Brazilian society
KW - Governmentality
KW - HIV/AIDS testing
KW - Subjectivity
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U2 - 10.1023/A:1005690919237
DO - 10.1023/A:1005690919237
M3 - Article
C2 - 11270667
AN - SCOPUS:0035292911
SN - 0165-005X
VL - 25
SP - 87
EP - 129
JO - Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry
JF - Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry
IS - 1
ER -