HIV In The Trobriands

There have been many anthropologists, like Bronisław Kasper Malinowski and Annette-Barbara Weiner, whose studies were based on the Trobriand Islanders men, women, and their daily/death traditions. By the late twentieth-century, the only populated information we had of the Trobriand Islanders were from those anthropologists. However, that changed when Katherine Lepani published her book, Islands of Love, Islands of Risk: Culture and HIV in the Trobriands. In her book, Katherine Lepani, critically ranges over the way that ‘culture’ is a concept that has been employed in prevention efforts against HIV/AIDS. Lepani builds upon the work of Bronisław Kasper Malinowski and Annette-Barbara Weiner, and yet she breaks new ground through the exploration …show more content…
Throughout the years Lepani has seen the Trobrianders cultural practices as a risk factors for the spread of HIV/AIDS within the people. During her fieldwork she lived in her mother-in-law’s house and took part in all of the social rituals as a Trobriander, and not as an outsider. The book holds a sense of place and of the people, and is at its strongest whenever Katherine Lepani describes the many layers of the Trobriand people that are connected through social life. She especially mentions the tapiokwa “dances” where the Trobrianders negotiate with their sexual partners. Lepani struggles to surmount that the arguments based on this version of culture take an easy path rather than dealing with the complexities of social structures or as mentioned by Weiner the global economic or political forces. Which have shaped both the spread of HIV infection and methods of testing, treatment and …show more content…
Chapters Four to Seven, Lepani mainly explores the meaning of the subjects like gender and exchange relations, youth sexuality and understandings of illness and HIV. In chapter four, which is titled “‘Because We Can!’ Gendered Agency and Social Reproduction,” Katherine Lepani composes splendidly of the sexual freedom that was provided to young women and states that “sexual autonomy is exercised equally, although differentially, by males and females. Young girls express confidence in their sexuality and have the right to reject the advances of suitors they find undesirable” (p. 71). These are indisputable statements: “equally, although differentially” and “the right to reject.” They also are mysterious of the power that is injustice in relation toward the male and female sexuality and sexual behavior that Lepani tries to reveal throughout the course of her