The impact of HIV/AIDS on concepts relating to risk and culture within British community epidemiology: Candidates or targets for prevention

The social and cultural responses to the AIDS/HIV epidemic focus attention both on the limitations of reification in biomedicine and on the deficiencies of many interpretations of culture in anthropology. Within clinical medicine the focus on disease and isolated aspects of the patient's somatic body alienates the patient's person, the body incarnate. AIDS/HIV infection reveals deficiencies in much epidemiological theorising insofar as it is merely regarded as either making possible or carrying out interventions on the health practice of individual others whether practitioners or patients. It also draws attention to the gap between the site of research and knowledge production about the abstract characteristics of populations and the application of this knowledge to the concrete reality of patients in the world. Reifications of culture by anthropologists themselves may confirm rather than weaken clinical reifications of disease and epidemiological reifications of risk group. Styles of epidemiology in Britain are examined in relation to anthropological writings to see the extent to which both need to overcome these practical and theoretical problems.