Historical and Social Contexts of HIV-1 Emergence
Moderator: Janet Roitman (New School for Social Research)
Stephanie Rupp (Lehman College, City University of New York and the American Museum of Natural History) and Philippe Ambata (Historian)
“Social and Historical Contexts of HIV-1 Emergence in Southeastern Cameroon”
Analyses of genetic relationships between the human and simian immunodeficiency viruses provide compelling insight into the location and timing of the emergence of HIV, placing its origins among chimpanzees in the forests of southeastern Cameroon during the first half of the twentieth century. To achieve higher resolution on the factors that facilitated the emergence of HIV/AIDS, it is essential to consider social, political, and economic factors that would have lead to ecological and epidemiological opportunities for the immunodeficiency virus to anchor in human populations. By conducting collaborative ethnographic and historical fieldwork in southeastern Cameroon over the past twenty years, we have identified historical contexts and social factors that are likely to have contributed to the establishment of HIV-1M within humans, and to have facilitated its evolutionary adaptation to a state of transmissibility between people. We have identified three instrumental factors: European colonial demand for forest products, including rubber, ivory, meat, skins, and live animals; changes in labor markets and kin networks, coupled with the introduction of monetized currency; and the introduction of medical campaigns and technologies that perforated and connected human bodies in new ways. This paper examines each factor in detail, demonstrating the centrality of social factors in the historical emergence of HIV/AIDS.
