A KINSHIP OF BONES, AIDS, intimacy and care in rural KwaZulu-Natal

254 pp., paperback, Pietermaritzburg, 2012

From 2003 to 2006 Patricia Henderson lived in Okhahlamba in the region of the Northern Drakensberg and recorded the experiences of people living with HIV/AIDS.

"There is remarkably little in the literature on the effects of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Southern Africa about practices of care and relationship. It is as though the disease renders social life impossible to think. In her careful account, Henderson shows how the social is constituted through aesthetic, emotional and embodied relationships of mutuality, and the world re-made in the face of grief and loss. The book is essential reading for all who would understand how ordinary worlds are crafted in the face of massive illness. Written in the interface between anthropology and philosophy, the book asks us to envisage the making of sociality in a world overwritten by technisist interpretations of life and death." Fiona Ross, University of Cape Town

"Taking the reader through landscapes of disease, devastation and hope, Henderson's book is theoretically erudite without her philosophical observations overwriting the words of her respondents. She shows what fidelity means in the fields anthropologists cultivate." Veena Das, John Hopkins University

Patricia Henderson is a senior lecturer in anthropology at Rhodes University.