The August AIDS Forum hosted by the CSA will be addressed by Dr Isak Niehaus. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bushbuckridge, Dr Niehaus argues that the association of AIDS with sexual promiscuity has not been the major source of its stigma. Instead, he suggests that denial, silence, fear and fatalism have stemmed from the construction of persons living with AIDS as “dead before dying”, and from their symbolic location in the anomalous domain betwixt-and-between life and death. In this process the notion that AIDS is a fatal terminal illness carries as much symbolic weight as the popular association of persons with AIDS with lepers and zombies.
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