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Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins. 2017. A Fraught Embrace: The Romance and Reality of AIDS Altruism in Africa. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 280 pp.
In A Fraught Embrace, sociologists Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins elucidate the relationship between altruists, aid beneficiaries, and the brokers who connect them using the concept of romance. They note that altruists, brokers, and villagers "[e]ach arous[e] fantasies in the others that cannot be fulfilled," but they develop "working misunderstandings" to get by (p. 123). This compelling metaphor highlights the "clash between noble dreams and everyday reality" in AIDS altruism in Africa (p. xi).
A Fraught Embrace focuses in particular on brokers, who are too often neglected when the literature focuses on donors, projects, and beneficiaries without fully examining the crucial people in between. They describe four different types of brokers at varying levels of the aid chain: cosmopolitan brokers, national brokers, district brokers, and interstitial brokers. Swidler and Watkins also discuss a wide range of altruists, from "behemoths" like the World Bank and UNAIDS to "butterflies," individual altruists or small altruistic organizations that only briefly alight in...