Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Anthropological research on HIV/AIDS builds on over a century of reporting how cultures ritualize death and dying. Arguably, however, it is the subfield of the anthropology of religion and HIV/AIDS that has most richly probed the deeper significances of suffering to theorize how communities survive despite entrenched inequalities and insurmountable loss. Suffering, and by extension resilience, as articulated by pastors in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) is profoundly marked by local culture and the politics of global health that intersect in religious leaders. For this reason, I have located the proposed paper in community and socialization. Eswatini is site of the world’s highest HIV and TB rates that, in concert with other perilous processes, suppress life expectancy at an estimated 59 years. The scale of suffering wrought by the epidemic, exacerbated by gross inequalities and environmental carnage in the form of drought and famine, challenges the global health frameworks by which death and dying are examined and represented. Analysis of over a decade of field research and interviews with 38 Swazi pastors yields a little-explored insight: pastors, in their daily ministering to the afflicted and who are themselves at times sufferers, often speak against the discursive disarticulation that death, both social and physical, inflicts. Pastors articulate a navigable way of living amidst present-day risks and, through repentance, a better life in the beyond. In the end, many pastors have helped to erase the invisibility experienced by PLWHA in a riddled place where HIV is epidemiologically ubiquitous but about which few speak.