Tests for life chances: CD4 miracles and obstacles in Uganda

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between technologies, socialities and inequities based on case material from a recent study about the first generation of people living with ART – Antiretroviral Therapy – in Uganda. The authors discuss how the diagnostic technologies of HIV tests, ‘CD4 counts’, and weight measuring produce results and numbers that are appropriated by people living with HIV to reflect upon their lives, bodies and relationships and hence influence their socialities and subjectivities. It is argued that because treatment programmes and especially their associated technologies vary greatly in Uganda, the programmes themselves introduce inequity in the already unequal landscape of HIV patients. In debates about biomedical technology and about HIV/AIDS it has been suggested that new kinds of socialities emerge, which have been conceptualised as ‘therapeutic citizenship’ and ‘bio-sociality’. In the study on which the present article is based, clientship, friendship and kinship are kinds of sociality that play a much larger part in informants’ lives than do ‘therapeutic citizenship’ and ‘bio-sociality’. The authors attribute these findings, not only to the Ugandan setting, but to the method of doing extended case studies, which were not institution and programme based, but family and home based.