Negotiating Futures in the Time of AIDS: Contests over Inheritance in Southern Province, Zambia

Abstract

I examine how local decision-making with regard to inheritance has been inextricably altered by and incorporated into larger discourses on international AIDS prevention and modernity in Southern Zambia. I illustrate how the processes of inheritance and approaches towards HIV/AIDS and its prevention have been permeated by local and global notions of modernity in Central and Southern Africa, mutually influencing local perceptions and reactions to each. Within this work I demarcate AIDS as a social process moved beyond the boundaries of a biomedical discourse to openly illuminate the archaeology of meanings incorporated into the framing of AIDS and the AIDS prevention industry. I also examine how Western based NGO initiatives to promote certain behaviors and activities surrounding both inheritance and AIDS prevention, are re-worked at a local level as Zambians pursue or reject a 'modern' and 'global' identity. The issues of AIDS and inheritance have become intertwined for Zambians precisely because the debates surrounding 'appropriate' behaviors are scripted in identical fashion - 'becoming civilized and healthy' or 'remaining primitive and infectious.' Through the examination of how these seemingly disparate social processes have become inseparable, provides a critical lens into how Western notions of modernity have permeated highly personal and charged Zambian domains, fertility and sexuality.

Local renderings of the AIDS pandemic and conflicts over inheritance have become a manifestation of the ways in which Zambians wrestle with an identity of modernity, struggling to make it their own, in a universe where the myth of modernity stands strong. Contests over inheritance have become the sites of struggle between local communities and the state for control over gender roles and women's sexuality. AIDS widows emerge as a contested category in this struggle, as these women struggle to create new options for survival and new roles of womanhood within a devastating pandemic.