Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception Jennifer Orme Once Upon a Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception. By Diane E. Goldstein . Logan: Utah State UP, 2004. 210 pp. In Once Upon a Virus, Diane Goldstein, professor of Folkloristics at Memorial University in St. John's Newfoundland, examines the intersections between HIV and AIDS narratives, medical and public health discourse, and actual behaviors related to HIV risk perception. Goldstein aims to show the ways in which these popular narratives work with and against official narratives about HIV, AIDS, and the risks of infection, as well as the roles that contemporary legends play in the success or failure of public health messages about risk behaviors and practices. The four narrative case studies in the middle chapters make up the heart of the text and deserve close attention. Each chapter takes a contemporary legend or group of legends as they appeared in Newfoundland at specific times and discusses them at length. Taken together, they reveal the interrelationships [End Page 327] among narrative, public discourse, social practice, and private behavior. These studies underscore the need to look at contemporary legends within their localized contexts and the ways in which narratives are taken up and modified by the people of a community so that they maintain relevance to that community. Goldstein's analysis in these chapters demonstrates the influence that legends have on the behavior of a specific population at a particular moment in history. The first two chapters, "Tag, You've Got AIDS" and "Bad People and Body Fluids," locate AIDS legends within the much older tradition of folk narratives about disease, infection, susceptibility, and blame. Goldstein provides substantial contextualization for Newfoundland as the site of the ethnographic data used throughout the text. She also lays the groundwork for the case studies in later chapters by establishing the history of AIDS in Newfoundland and introduces Conception Bay North as an area stigmatized by the statistics of high HIV infection recorded there in the early 1990s. Early in chapter 2 the features of contemporary legends and the major concerns of legend scholars are introduced and outlined briefly but succinctly. And the latter part of this chapter delineates the types of motifs of disease narratives that reappear in HIV and AIDS legends. "Making Sense" is the title and aim of chapter 3. Here Goldstein addresses the intersections among contemporary legends, public health services, the medical establishment, and the media. She argues convincingly for the importance of public health initiatives to acknowledge the ways in which disease narratives reflect concerns about the trustworthiness of the medical establishment. Further, narratives provide clues to understanding the causes of continued risky behavior even though most people seem to understand the messages public health is trying to project. Goldstein stresses the importance of taking popular narratives into account when designing health education projects. She concludes by identifying a significant hole in medical and public health studies and argues that they need to begin looking at shared social narratives rather than individual personal experience narratives alone. Chapter 4, "What Exactly Did They Do with That Monkey, Anyway?," is the first of the four case studies in the book and looks at HIV/AIDS origin narratives in medical, media, and popular traditions. The chapter is broken into sections based upon the three categories of AIDS origin narratives: "Animal Theories," "Isolated Case Theories," and the most revealing and interesting section, "Laboratory-Virus Theory." In this last section, Goldstein argues that conspiracy theories may demonstrate resistance to government, medical, and military organizations as well as work as "counter-blame" narratives for the communities that feel targeted by the other two origin categories. In the strongest chapter, "Welcome to the Innocent World of AIDS" (an earlier version of which was published in Contemporary Legend 2 [1992]: 23–40), Goldstein looks at two popular "Welcome to the World of AIDS" legends. [End Page 328] Her discussion of the second legend in particular and the reasons for its popularity in Newfoundland is brilliantly argued. This study clearly illustrates the efficacy and importance of understanding local social factors in determining not only how and why certain legend variants are told in specific...