Unimagined Community: Sex, Networks, and AIDS in Uganda and South Africa

"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... Read more

"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" Less