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HIV and the remaking of hunger and nutrition in South Africa: Biopolitical specification after apartheid

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Abstract

The article seeks to develop an account of the transformation of hunger and the structural violence of Apartheid into biopolitical concerns in South Africa from 1994 to 2010. I argue that the post-Apartheid politics of hunger and nutrition make no sense in South Africa outside of the politics of HIV, and that those histories of hunger and malnutrition have been radically transformed during this period such that it is now not possible to think about nutrition beyond or apart from biomedicalised knowledge of nutrition, immune system functioning and the gut. I show that the gastrointestinal tract has emerged as a central object of concern for the making of credible scientific advances, and at the same time for articulating the symbolic importance of the belly in the development of a biopolitical concern with food, nutrition and HIV. By focusing on one locale in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in which hunger, diet, nutrition and food are conjoined with immune system functioning, treatment regimes and bodily capacity, the article parses out the matters of concern that have produced nutrition, the immune system and the gut as specific nodes of action and enquiry within the particularities of post-Apartheid, ‘epidemic’ South Africa.

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Notes

  1. Flint’s (2008) historiographic work on healing in nineteenth-century Zululand describes the roots of these creative exchanges.

  2. See for example the Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges call for proposals, and the National Academies workshop (2012) on the human micro biome.

  3. On the growing capacity to conduct surveillance of HIV prevalence and incidence and demonstrate the cost effectiveness of pharmaceutical treatment for demonstrable increases in life expectancy (as well as for treatment as prevention), see for example Tanser et al, 2013 and Bor et al, 2013.

  4. The metaphor of the body politic takes the nation as a corporate entity being likened to a human body, comprising all the people in a particular country considered as a single group. The analogy is typically continued by reference to the apex of government as the head of state, but may be extended to other anatomical parts, as in political readings of the Aesop’s fable, “The Belly and the Members”. The metaphor developed in Renaissance times, as the medical knowledge based upon the classical work of Galen was being challenged by new thinkers such as William Harvey. Analogies were made between the supposed causes of disease and disorder and their equivalents in the political field, which were considered to be plagues or infections that might be remedied by purges and nostrums (Harris, 1998).

  5. “The Nongqawuse syndrome is a populist rhetoric and a millenarian form of politics which advocates, uses and legitimises self-destruction, or national suicide, as a means of salvation” (Mbembe, 2006, p. 2)

  6. Body mass index=25 to 30 kg/m2 Labadarios, 2005a.

  7. The Alliance for Children’s Entitlement to Social Security.

  8. The report was titled Castro Hlongwane, Caravans, Cats, Geese, Foot and Mouth and Statistic: HIV/AIDS and the Struggle for the Humanisation of the African. See Fassin (2007) for a fuller discussion of the report. In 2007 it was reported that Gevisser had had a conversation with Mbeki in which he admitted that he was one of the authors of the report and that it reflected his views on AIDS. Also, an updated version of the report was purportedly delivered to Gevisser. The full text of the 2002 version of the document can be found at: http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/ancdoc.htm.

  9. Most critics suggest that the proliferation of such claims has been directly produced by Mbeki’s AIDS denialism (Cullinan and Thom, 2009; Geffen, 2010).

  10. See http://www.drrathresearch.org/, http://www4.dr-rath-foundation.org/, http://www.tac.org.za/community/rath, http://skepdic.com/rath.html.

  11. See http://www.tac.org.za/news/end-matthias-rath-affair (accessed 1 August 2013).

  12. Hypoxis hemerocallidea, shown in a 2005 article in AIDS to significantly weaken the effect of antiretrovirals by altering their concentration in the bloodstream (Mills et al, 2005).

  13. Paula Treichler’s now classic text has helped many scholars of the South African HIV epidemic to make sense of the semiotics of disease in social and political life (see also Sontag, 1977; Treichler, 1987; Colvin and Robins, 2009).

  14. Gevisser (2007, p. 122): “During his stay at the Lenin Institute, Mbeki sent a series of letters to his friend Rhiannon Gooding … . He shared his excitement at having ‘discovered’ Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and tried to convince his British friend that the Roman general was not the tyrant he was generally considered to be in the West, but rather the very prototype for the modern day revolutionary, not unlike Che Guevara. This is a particularly eccentric reading of one of Shakespeare’s darkest tragedies: Coriolanus is generally considered to be a lesson in the dangers of tyranny, its eponymous hero tragically flawed by his own pride and driven by hubris to war against his own people in vengeance for their having exiled him from Rome. But Mbeki saw the general’s contempt for ‘the rabble, the unthinking mob,’ as he put it to Gooding, as part of his heroism. And if purging the rot required destroying the state of Rome, well, then, so be it – that was what made a true revolutionary!”

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Acknowledgements

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation (#0924815). I thank Pamela Reynolds, Aaron Goodfellow, David Sanders, Colleen Crawford and Lindsey Reynolds for their insight and comments in refining the argument of the article.

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Cousins, T. HIV and the remaking of hunger and nutrition in South Africa: Biopolitical specification after apartheid. BioSocieties 10, 143–161 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2015.8

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