A New Look At Thai Aids Perspectives From The Margin

Following the detection of the first hiv infections in the early 1980s, by the 1990s thailand was routinely depicted as having the world’s fastest moving hiv aids epidemic.However, by the early 2000’s the bulk of scholarly and medical aids literature portrayed the epidemic as being largely under control, and claimed that thai aids prevention efforts during the 1990s had been successful.Based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in northern thailand this book makes an in-depth study of the social construction of thailand’s hiv aids epidemic over this period.In addition to his own field research the author draws on an extensive corpus of english and thai language social science and medical hiv aids literature to examine the modeling of thailand’s aids epidemic, and addresses concepts and issues such as risk groups, risk behaviour, alcohol use, gender and class, masculinity, the scapegoating of female prostitutes and men in the underclass, the reporting of the hiv aids epidemic in thailand’s indigenous thai language media, and sexual activity amongst thai youth.The analysis demonstrates the contribution of anthropology as an interpretative social science, and the use of anthropological theory and research methods, to finding alternative ways of framing the problems of thai aids and of posing new questions that will lead to more effective points of intervention.It emphasises the necessity for critically reflexive approaches that question the taken for granted’ and dem...

Following the detection of the first hiv infections in the early 1980s, by the 1990s thailand was routinely depicted as having the world’s fastest moving