Available From UC Press

This groundbreaking work, with its unique anthropological approach, sheds new light on a central conundrum surrounding AIDS in Africa. Robert J. Thornton explores why HIV prevalence fell during the 1990s in Uganda despite that country's having one of Africa's highest fertility rates, while during the same period HIV prevalence rose in South Africa, the country with Africa's lowest fertility rate. Thornton finds that culturally and socially determined differences in the structure of sexual networks—rather than changes in individual behavior—were responsible for these radical differences in HIV prevalence. Incorporating such factors as property, mobility, social status, and political authority into our understanding of AIDS transmission, Thornton's analysis also suggests new avenues for fighting the disease worldwide.

Robert J. Thornton is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and author of The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski and Space, Time, and Culture among the Iraqw of Tanzania. His articles have appeared in Current Anthropology and American Ethnologist.

"Like Durkheim in Suicide, Robert Thornton's audacious ambition is to reveal the collective causes of intimate personal behavior; and he takes as the critical zone for his investigation the hidden network linking sexual partners to society at large. Unimagined Community succeeds as a compellingly original study of AIDS and as a work of deep anthropology. This book is a tour de force, reflected in the consistently high quality of the writing which never flags."—Keith Hart, author of Money in an Unequal World

"Robert Thornton cuts an original and creative path through the massive AIDS literature assembled since the 1980s. Based on his view that sex is to be seen as a social relationship, not a behavior, he uses this as a building block in his analysis of the different configurations of sexual networks in Uganda and South Africa. Thornton departs from current purely epidemiological, demographic, sociological, and behavioral approaches, and also goes beyond the analysis and proposals for intervention to be found in most medical, public health, and policy studies. It is a study grand in conception and scale."—Shirley Lindenbaum, coauthor of The Time of AIDS