Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Medical anthropological research on HIV/AIDS builds on over a century of reporting how oral-based cultures ritualize death and dying. Arguably, however, it is the anthropology of religion that has most richly probed the deeper significances of suffering to theorize how communities “live” and transform religious texts under duress amidst entrenched inequalities and insurmountable losses. 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 the eloquence of religious leaders to describe their roles and experiences in Eswatini, 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, but also the resilient responses, challenges the global health frameworks by which death and dying are represented absent religion. 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 of diverse Christian traditions articulate a navigable way of living and, through repentance, a better life in the beyond. In the end, many pastors have helped to erase the invisibility experienced by People Living With HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in a riddled place where HIV is epidemiologically ubiquitous but about which few speak.