AIDS, Sex and Culture: Global Politics and Survival in Southern Africa I. Susser. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. xxii + 277 pp., notes, bibliog., index. ISBN 978-1405155861. USD $87.50 (Hc.); ISBN 978-1405155878. USD $34.95 (Pb.) There have been an impressive number of com- pelling books by anthropologists immersed in research on HIV / AIDS in recent years. For a number of reasons, Susser’s penetrating analysis of one of the pandemic’s hardest hit zones is among the best. First, Susser, South African by birth, global by lived experience, effectively marries rigorous research with personal engagement. As she explains on p. 15: In my research on HIV / AIDS, I have seen myself as advocate and activist trying to work with people to better conditions. Ethnography and participant observation requires personal relations and the establishment of trust and attendant, ongoing human responsibilities. Under these conditions, it is practically impossible to study a place where people are becoming infected from a preventable disease without advocating for prevention resources …[and] joining the struggle for treatment. As poignantly relayed in the preface, Susser’s perspective on HIV / AIDS in Southern Africa was shaped equally by a childhood spent in a progressive home of anti-apartheid physician parents committed to the cause of social justice and by her training in the United States as a critical cultural and medical anthropologist. A product of having lived in but never quite fully a part of multiple social worlds, Susser’s vision is broad, her perception penetrating and her analytic skills sharp. Second, Susser’s historically and globally framed political economic perspective on women and AIDS, and her multisited event- based analytic strategy, facilitate analysis of the potent connections revealed by the pandemic among peoples, places, policies, and power. As she notes (p. 7), the theoretical approach that guides her mapping of the cultural politics of HIV / AIDS and the ideologies of gender that sustain everyday practice moves ‘from the local to the global and from the personal to the national’ and beyond. Third, the book, while never shying away from the painful realities of HIV / AIDS in Southern Africa, focuses on women’s avenues of hope, sources of resilience and mounting community activism. Central to Susser’s objec- tive is the development of a detailed account of the making of on-the-ground responses of women to the entwined effects of disease, gender discrimination and the neoliberal forces of global capitalism that promote deprivation and social suffering. Thus, she seeks to push beyond being a mere witness or chronicler of the burdens and anguish in the lives of the women she has studied in order to reveal ‘the possibilities for people to transform their situation’ (p. 16). Fourth, there is the inclusion of a moving portrayal in chapter 5 of the experiential world brought into being by HIV / AIDS. Its author is Sibongile Mkhize, an educated South African woman whose life has been deeply affected by the pandemic swirling around her. Mkhize’s voice adds emotional depth to Susser’s descrip- tive and analytic approach in the other eleven chapters of the book. Finally, the rich and complex text that Susser has produced cuts across a broad range of events (spread over two decades), places (espe- cially South Africa and Namibia, but elsewhere as well) and issues—from the role of imposed labour migration and apartheid in shaping the contours of AIDS in Southern Africa to the words and actions of women bead workers who make and sell small craft items to raise money for AIDS medicines, to the controversies of AIDS denial by Thabo Mbeki as president of South Africa, to the role of Europeans in the peddling of bogus AIDS treatments, and to the demand for female condoms and the rise of female health leadership in Namibia. In sum, this valuable and readily accessible book, appropriate for reading in various medi- cal and cultural anthropology courses or related courses in other disciplines, is, as Michael Bur- awoy has commented, ‘A must-read for anyone Book Reviews ª 2010 Australian Anthropological Society 395