AntiRetrovirals in Africa
In Africa, the treatment of AIDS by Highly Active AntiRetroviral Therapy first depends on economic considerations that limit access to medicines to a minority of people. What are the cultural effects of the availability of these medicines? AntiRetrovirals are not only “indigenized” as are some other medicines ; they are the substratum of patients’ experience that, beyond adherence, leads them to change their social relationships ; they become disclosers for “politics of life” antagonistic from global to local levels, through arousing categorizations in access to medicines ; they polarize the health system and lead to redefine legitimacies at the border between the biomedical, traditional and popular sectors. The impact of these treatments in terms of changes in perceptions, practices and social relationships, goes beyond the biomedical sector, as they arouse the production of neo-traditional medicines the legitimacy of which is built through borrowing to biomedicine, on spaces left vacant in the fields of identity and accessibility, in a process promoted by globalisation.