| | A critical consideration of the way social class is defined in studies of HIV/AIDS in Africa exposes the inadequacies of 'indexical' accounts in which class is reduced to a statistical category (the predominant mode of analysis in epidemiological research). It compares this to relational accounts which view class as a set of dynamic interactions between groups struggling to assert or defend social positions relating to livelihoods. Arguing that class relations frame both the transmission and the response to the AIDS epidemic in Africa, it looks at the evidence which can be drawn from both indexical and relational accounts of the particular significance of class in this situation, noting its crucial intersection with gender relations and taking Tanzania as its key case. |
