"AIDS Alibis represents contemporary engaged anthropology at its best. Drawing upon intensive research in Belize and Chicago...each ethnographically focused chapter is powerful in its own right. Jointly they make for an innovative, deeply reasoned, and powerful critique of our own understandings-social, legal, medical, ethical-and help us move towards consequential reconsiderations." -Don Brenneis, Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz "This wise ... Read moreand affecting work reveals the limitations of current public health and criminal justice approaches to the AIDS pandemic. It also teaches us how to do fieldwork. The passionate rendering of 'stories that fall between the prescribed categories of analysis' tells us more about AIDS than any work I have yet encountered." -Shirley Lindenbaum, Anthropology, Graduate Center, City University of New York "[This book] unveils the political unconscious of AIDS and reveals AIDS as a 'master signifier' circulating and mutating throughout different discursive formations. Kane juxtaposes media sources, conversations, dialogues, oral tales, statistics and official accounts. This innovative ethnography not only captures the elusive cultural meanings of AIDS, it is a first-rate example of how anthropologists can study 'fluid' phenomena that have no well-defined boundaries, phenomena that flow effortlessly across national, ethnic, and linguistic barriers, and in the process, transform themselves and their hosts." -Stephen A. Tyler, Herb S. Autrey Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, Rice University "[This book] unveils the political unconscious of AIDS and reveals AIDS as a 'master signifier' circulating and mutating throughout different discursive formations. Kane juxtaposes media sources, conversations, dialogues, oral tales, statistics and official accounts. This innovative ethnography not only captures the elusive cultural meanings of AIDS, it is a first-rate example of how anthropologists can study 'fluid' phenomena that have no well-defined boundaries, phenomena that flow effortlessly across national, ethnic, and linguistic barriers, and in the process, transform themselves and their hosts." -Stephen A. Tyler, Herb S. Autrey Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics, Rice University "Stephanie Kane performs a timely and passionate ethnographic drama of misguided drug wars, risky bodily practices, panicky cultural logic, and the political unconscious of AIDS... a subtle, poetic and activist account of the ritual intersection between dangerous institutional forces and the everyday enactment of sex, labor, pleasure, and crime." -Stephen Pfohl, Sociology, Boston College Show Less