This article provides a perspective on rural Malawi during the unsettled times following the recognition by village residents that AIDS is a profound danger. The primary data are observational field journals in which local ethnographers wrote their recollections of conversations about AIDS that...

The authors examine the global diffusion of international population policy, which they consider a cultural item. The process of cultural diffusion is often seen as spontaneous: items of Western culture are in demand because they are universally attractive. Yet cultural flows may also be...

This paper compares three interpretations of women and the transmission of HIV in rural Malawi. One is disseminated world-wide by institutions with a global reach such as the World Health Organization in Geneva and United States Agency for International Development (USAID); the second is...