Abstract
A study was undertaken in Kiribati, a small Pacific island nation, that has a low-level HIV epidemic but a high incidence of STIs among seafarers, their spouses (and children), and those involved in sex work. There are connections between development and dependency and HIV risk in Kiribati. Kiribati is a peripheral and dependent small island state underwritten by conditional aid and financial assistance and advice from donor countries, entwined in, and subject to, external globalising processes. We found two major factors related to Kiribati’s dependency engendered HIV risk. The first is Kiribati’s reliance on transnational seafaring. Long periods away from home, shipboard and port mateship cultures, and infrequent condom use in casual and paid sexual relations while in overseas ports, exacerbated by heavy alcohol use, have rendered i-Kiribati seafarers vulnerable to HIV. The second factor is related to the labour force participation of young women, which is extremely limited. In this context, some young i-Kiribati women choose to work on board, foreign fishing vessels selling sex. They stay with one client while on board a boat—for up to three months—and sex work is not only an economic transaction, but also emotional and affective labour. It is a pattern that makes consistent condom use problematic. Having multiple sequential seafarer partners may in fact generate considerable HIV vulnerability.
Highlights
IntroductionWhat AIDS makes jarringly visible is that these conundrums of inclusion and exclusion, human emancipation and inhuman neglect are caught up in an ongoing dialectic, both positive and negative, of history and
What AIDS makes jarringly visible is that these conundrums of inclusion and exclusion, human emancipation and inhuman neglect are caught up in an ongoing dialectic, both positive and negative, of history andHow to cite this paper: McMillan, K. and Worth, H. (2014) Development, Dependency and HIV Risk in Kiribati
Our article is underpinned by empirical data: data on Kiribati’s economy and social structure; sex workers’ accounts of the negotiation of HIV risk in Kiribati’s mainport town; and second-generation HIV surveillance data of i-Kiribati seafarers
Summary
What AIDS makes jarringly visible is that these conundrums of inclusion and exclusion, human emancipation and inhuman neglect are caught up in an ongoing dialectic, both positive and negative, of history and. We attempt to take up what Jean and John Comaroff call “the challenge involved in grasping, ethnographically; the processes by which those world-historical forces were being made meaningful and tractable by the human beings in question” [17] This approach has a macro-analytic and materialist focus [18] where we will challenge that conceptualisation of HIV risk in resource-poor settings inherent in risk group positioning emphasises individual actions, but argue for a political economy of the virus. Our article is underpinned by empirical data: data on Kiribati’s economy and social structure; sex workers’ accounts of the negotiation of HIV risk in Kiribati’s mainport town; and second-generation HIV surveillance data of i-Kiribati seafarers It attempts to show how people’s HIV risk inheres in global political-economic forces—forces that operate independently of the people whose experiences and HIV status are the grounds for those data [19] [20]. We want to describe local experiences of social phenomenon, and to conceptualise the global processes of development and dependency that lie behind these phenomena
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