Gunvor Jónsson

Migration and culture

Migration and Culture marks a first in providing a comprehensive collection of published articles linking migration and culture. Prior approaches to migration have often stressed statistical and economic factors. The theoretically challenging and comparative accounts represented here are part of a new wave of thinking which illustrates the meaning of migration and its profound cultural implications. With an original introductory essay by the editors, this volume will be of great interest and value to sociologists, anthropologists, and those interested in cultural studies, diaspora, transnationalism and post-colonialism and the cultural aspects of globalisation.

Dr. Wouter Basson, Americans, and wild beasts: men's conspiracy theories of HIV/AIDS in the South African Lowveld.

ABSTRACT This article investigates HIV/AIDS as a cosmological problem among Northern Sotho and Tsonga-speakers in the South African lowveld. Based on in-depth interviews with 70 informants (35 men and 35 women) I show how the attribution of blame for HIV/AIDS articulates gendered concerns. I suggest that women blamed men and envious nurses for spreading the virus and that these discourses expressed womens ideological association with the domestic domain. By contrast, men invoked conspiracy theories, blaming translocal agents—such as Dr. Wouter Basson, Americans, soldiers, and governments—for the pandemic. I suggest that these theories are informed by mens humiliating experiences of job losses and deindustrialization in the global labour market. My discussion highlights the need for HIV/AIDS interventions in order to address not only womens oppression but also mens gendered concerns.

Theory and the Study of Migration in Africa

This special issue presents a series of articles that examine different aspects of migration, drawing on evidence from the African continent. Their aim is not simply to provide new empirical material but also to offer fresh theoretical insights that can unsettle, challenge and refine existing theories that frame the emerging field of migration studies. By bringing together this collection of papers from Africa, our intention is to help redress the balance of research on migration that is heavily skewed towards the interests and preoccupations of the wealthier regions of the world. In particular, we argue that the basic concepts of migration and the hypotheses concerning linkages between these concepts have been largely developed on the basis of research and experience beyond Africa. As a result, in very general terms, the continent tends to be a consumer of theory, which is produced from the production-line of analysis of migration from Mexico to the USA, across the Mediterranean, to the Gulf, and so on. In Africa, migration theory has tended to be delivered as a package to be empirically tested and proven in the ‘field’. But when it fails, it is taken back to the Western laboratory for further refinement before being shipped out again for another test run.