Righteous Dopefiend and Aids, Sex, and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa

This essay offers a comparative reading of two ethnographies, Ida Susser\u27s AIDS, Sex, and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa (2009), a multisited text focused on community responses to dynamics of HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment in Southern Africa, and Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg\u27s Righteous Dopefiend (2009), a photo-ethnographic exploration of lumpen subjectivity within an encampment of homeless drug addicts in San Francisco. Pointing out these texts\u27 common focus on circumstances of the precarious and marginal poor under conditions of neoliberalization, social conditions shaping dynamics of HIV prevention, and poor people\u27s negotiations of affliction and structural violence, this essay highlights the theoretical and practical effects of these books\u27 divergent methodologies, scopes of analysis, and differing degrees of emphasis on subjective experience as well as women\u27s experiences. It also considers a key commonality across these texts: their attention to the role of historical experience and political-economic context in shaping responses to affliction and structural violence