“Basically, you have NGOs and foreign governments deciding who lives and who dies.”


way for me to understand the big picture of what was going on—what I couldn’t under- stand just by being a clinician or a community organizer,” he says. In the 1990s, Nguyen returned to Africa


Bearing Witness


When you read medical anthropologist Dr. Vinh-Kim Nguyen’s credentials, it’s hard to believe that he didn’t plan to become a researcher. He’s worked throughout French- speaking West Africa as a community organ- izer, physician, consultant and activist. He’s been a consultant for the International HIV/ AIDS Alliance. He’s an HIV specialist at Clinique Medical L’Actuel in Montreal and the recipient of the Research Council of Canada’s 2007 SSHRC Aurora Prize. And yet, he says, “I never really set out to be a researcher. It just kind of happened.”


Nguyen, however, has always been inter- ested in development. At 18, in 1981, he went overseas to Mali as a Canada World Youth participant. After returning to Montréal to complete his undergraduate degree, he encountered medical anthropology for the first time in a course taught by Margaret Lock. She encouraged him to think about the social implications of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Today, the University of Montréal Associate Professor’s research examines the dynamics of HIV epidemics and their broader social and political consequences. “Research became a


WITH THE RELEASE OF HIS BOOK THE REPUBLIC OF THERAPY, DR. VINH-KIM NGUYEN SHEDS LIGHT ON AN ERA OF TREATMENT AND ACTIVISM IN WEST AFRICA.


to work with HIV groups in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. There, he mobilized and organized the groups to help acquire the technical support and funding they needed to implement programs. But it wasn’t until the late 1990s that Nguyen realized he was experi- encing a unique period in medical history. Although effective antiretroviral therapies were becoming available in Canada, they were not being used in Africa due to cost and logistical challenges. This, Nguyen writes, was “insidi- ous logic that [valued] lives differently.” Nguyen was no longer just a doctor or community organizer—he became a treat- ment activist. And documenting what he witnessed was pivotal to that role. “I had the idea that I wanted to convert it in some way to something tangible.” That something was his second book, The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS (his first book, An Anthropology of Biomedicine, was co-authored by his once undergraduate instructor, Margaret Lock). The book, which was released in October 2010, is about the changes Nguyen witnessed working in Africa over a period of 10 years, specifically the perception and use of treat- ment. “In the space of six months all these people who said we couldn’t do treatment in Africa were suddenly saying, ‘We have to do treatment,” Nguyen explains. “And then to see treatment happen—which is what we all want- ed and what we fought for, and to see how it was pitting people against each other and the fight to get access to resources—was really sobering.”


Nguyen’s research has wider implica-


tions beyond just AIDS, though. “Basically you have NGOs and foreign governments picking diseases and deciding who lives and who dies,” he says. Nguyen hopes that his work, research and book will cause people and organizations to consider how to best design and implement programs, as well as to question what their work is accomplish- ing. “It’s all very well intentioned,” he says, “but there’s a fundamental blindness to the inequalities of money and power.”


Thinking Positive verge: 5


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16