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Key Words sexual practices, cultural analysis, political economy
* Abstract This article examines the development of anthropological research in response to AIDS. During the first decade of the epidemic, most social science research focused on the behavioral correlates of HIV infection among individuals and failed to examine broader social and cultural factors. By the late 1980s, however, pioneering work by anthropologists began to raise the importance of cultural systems in shaping sexual practices relevant to HIV transmission and prevention. Since the start of the 1990s, this emphasis on cultural analysis has taken shape alongside a growing anthropological research focus on structural factors shaping vulnerability to HIV infection. Work on social inequality and the political economy of HIV and AIDS has been especially important. Much current research seeks to integrate both cultural and structural concerns in providing an alternative to more individualistic behavioral research paradigms.
INTRODUCTION
Like many other disciplines, anthropology largely failed to distinguish itself in its initial responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemics. Certain other social science disciplines-in particular, psychology-were quick to mobilize themselves internally during the mid-1980s in order to lobby the U.S. federal government for funding and to offer institutional responses to the epidemic through the foundation of HIV/AIDS research centers (typically based in academic departments of psychiatry or psychology and well-integrated into largely epidemiological research efforts). However, anthropologists for the most part contributed only irregularly to such early research mobilization, largely on the basis of their own individual research initiatives and publications rather than as part of a formal or organized research response. This is not to say that no important anthropological contributions were made to the study of HIV and AIDS during this time (e.g., Bolognone 1986; Conant 1988a,b; Feldman 1985; Feldman & Johnson 1986; Feldman et al 1987; E. Gorman 1986; M. Gorman 1986; Herdt 1987; Lang 1986; Nachmann & Dreyfuss 1986; Sindzingre & Jourdain 1987; Stall 1986; for further references to early anthropological work on HIV/AIDS, see Bolton et al 1991). But the dominant paradigm for the organization and conduct of AIDS research-both in the United States, where the epidemic was most intense at the time, and internationally, where its size and shape were only beginning to be perceived-was established in large part independently of anthropological contributions....