In 2006, while attending the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion, I sat in on a well-attended “Roundtable Discussion on HIV/AIDS in Africa.” Inspired to be there by my recent fieldwork in Uganda, I remember feeling uncomfortable when one of the panelists began a jeremiad against “backward” local practices—particularly the belief that for men, sex with a virgin (often a baby) could cure AIDS—that undercut internationally sponsored anti-AIDS campaigns. Similar rumors in Uganda, with a comparably condescending tone and lack of specific cases, implicitly indicted things “African” while reinforcing the fitness of Western biomedical interventions. In both places, moreover, the comments went without challenge, ostensibly passing off rumor as fact.

My reaction was hardly unique: over the next several years social science-trained scholars such as Gregory Barz, Deborah James, and Fraser MacNeill produced a counterliterature describing Africans’ own articulate reception and critique of both internationally-sponsored interventions and rumors of “backward” practices. Joining foundational literature in medical anthropology by Paul Farmer, and work in folklore by Diane Goldstein, these ethnographic studies revealed a complex dialogue on the ground that more-instrumentalized health-based project reports often neglected. Over time, these ethnography-based studies have situated themselves as a meaningful response to scientific research, with the best constructively outlining ideas for revised research designs, methods, and interpretive parameters. Anika Wilson’s thoughtful study follows in this vein, presenting extended fieldwork and creative mixed methods to interrogate the nature of rumor, family, and gender in northern Malawi—with the country’s decades-long HIV/AIDS epidemic woven deeply into the discursive fabric.

Wilson’s study employs a research model that uniquely balances social science’s “lone ethnographer” paradigm with the health sciences’ prevalent team-based approach. In her introduction, she describes how a long-term relationship with the NIH/Rockefeller Foundation-funded Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP) introduced her to the field and also supported return trips over several years (x). During this time, Wilson appears to have conducted her research as a parallel, semi-independent project with her own research assistant that maintained connections with the MDICP’s core research community, and seemingly included sharing both data and research participants. This relationship in turn influenced Wilson’s research design, particularly her use of “journalers”—subsidiary fieldworkers deeply involved in the local community who are paid to record relevant conversations in notebooks—as key informants and data collectors for her work (6-14). The overlap between her project and the larger one, in other words, allowed Wilson access to resources and methods that ultimately deepened the project, while situating Wilson comfortably between the conventions of health research and the professional needs of ethnographically-oriented fields.

This relationship extends to the topic itself, as MDICP also “focused on the influence of social networks on the adoption of family planning and on AIDS-related attitudes and behaviors” in rural northern Malawi (http://malawi.pop.upenn.edu/about-malawi). While MDICP drew on other kinds of quantitative and qualitative data, however, Wilson built her study on materials that bring out her strength as a folklorist: examining the different ways that rural women (especially) mediate kinship, social, and media-based networks with the practical challenges they face as girls, wives, and mothers in a sea of information about sexuality and AIDS. Though Wilson does not specifically bring HIV/AIDS into the center of her discussion, the epidemic inescapably factors into the narratives she tells, whether as an open threat born of marital infidelity, a symbol of a woman’s vulnerability, a point of comparison to new sexually transmitted diseases, or the subject of ubiquitous media campaigns.

Wilson’s study gains interest and momentum as it progresses. The introduction and first two chapters (and frankly much of the rest) bear the whiff of a dissertation, still dutifully going through necessary background and literature, and occasionally repeating information from chapter to chapter. It’s fine, serviceable stuff that fulfills genre conventions, but tends toward academic competence over inspiring reading. Chapter 1, for example, examines the role of advice in marital distress, and through sober analysis comes to the somewhat intuitive conclusion that different family members give and receive advice that largely serves their own self-interests. Chapter 2 largely explains how women who publicly fight with each over husbands/lovers are both expressing forms of vulnerability. Even in a slim book these chapters feel more like logical exercises meant to set up the more interesting case studies to come—though I can also see Wilson’s attempts to speak to health science researchers in each chapter’s concluding “Discussion” section, where she emphasizes the complex real-life choices that the target populations of interventional campaign-based messages regularly face.

Once these chapters are in rear-view, however, Wilson ramps up her discussion considerably with a pair of unique and interesting case studies, the first analyzing short-lived rumors identifying the urban emergence of a sexually transmitted disease far more virulent than AIDS, and the second addressing the role of media, politics, and community networks in mass accounts of erotic visitation dreams. The longitudinal, team-based nature of Wilson’s project provides great benefit here, as she situates these fascinating episodes in specific political and developmental contexts, juxtaposing, for example, an increase in media stories about “gender-based violence” (134; a standardized term also used by non-governmental organizations, or NGOs), the introduction of Malawian women’s rights legislation aimed at curbing such violence, and the “traditional medicine” practice of mgoneko (here meant to induce deep slumber as a setup for sexual violation) in order to understand community-based accounts of nighttime sexual visitation and changing expectations of women’s ability to control their own sexuality in a culture where “sexual abuse is routine, culturally embedded, invisible, or unacknowledged and unpunished” (160). Dutiful corroboration of the relevant folklore literature, including facile discussions of moral panic, rumor, gossip, and advice, adds scholarly breadth and bona fides to the discussion; but at times it comes off as a lead weight that bogs down Wilson’s lively, relevant, and provocative material.

Rather than offering an endstop conclusion, Wilson’s brief final statement points to a broader project that expands her discursive circles: examining how domestic disputes interact with the state-based court system amid this study’s established, multilayered landscape of rumor and narrative. Ultimately, such a worthy future endeavor will continue to add depth to her larger point that “the prevailing public health AIDS messages and education crafted around the notion of individual decision making fall not on deaf ears but on ears listening to many tunes” (62). Indeed, Wilson effectively shows how rumor and its related discourses can contribute to a valuable dialogue with health researchers and other advocates, illuminating the often collaborative work of NGOs, government institutions, and media outlets as but part of a conversation that must be balanced with greater attention to the interactions people encounter in their everyday lives. And on that front, Folklore, Gender and AIDS in Malawi nicely brings folklore into closer proximity with larger, better funded, and more impactful fields—to mutually beneficial results.

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[Review length: 1129 words • Review posted on October 20, 2015]