The self as capital in the narrative economy: how biographical testimonies move activism in the Global South Marian Burchardt Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, G€ ottingen, Germany Abstract This article analyses and theorises the practice of biographical storytelling of HIV- positive AIDS activists in South Africa. Combining research in illness narratives, studies of emotions in social activism and analysis of global health institutions in Africa, I explore how biographical self-narrations are deployed to facilitate access to resources and knowledge and thus acquire material and symbolic value. I illustrate my argument through the analysis of the case of an AIDS activist who became a professional biographical storyteller. Based on the analysis which I claim to represent wider dynamics in human-rights-based health activism in the Global South, I propose the concept of narrative economies by which I mean the set of exchange relationships within which biographical self-narrations circulate and produce social value for individuals and organisations. Keywords: illness narratives, human rights, HIV/AIDS, Africa, economy, biographical research Introduction In September 2010, I returned to Cape Town where I had conducted field research on civil society responses to HIV/AIDS in 2006. Immediately after my arrival, I called Palesa 1 ,a young HIV-positive AIDS activist and one of my closest research partners back then, with whom I had kept contact over the years 2 . On the phone, while expecting to arrange for a meet- ing in Langa, the township where she lived, she asked me: ‘Why don’t we meet in town and have a drink together?’ I was astonished since in 2006 Palesa was very poor and would have been and felt ‘out of place’ in the city’s fancy entertainment environments. When we met in 2010 she had her hair beautifully braided, wore fashionable clothes and jewellery. What had happened in the meantime of four and a half years? In this article, I explore the practice of autobiographical storytelling as a fundamental way of linking HIV-positive people, activism and institutions and demonstrate how this practice has shaped Palesa’s biographical trajectory. Autobiographical storytelling and narrations of the self have long been recognised as modes of making sense of disparate events in time (Char- maz 1999, Frank 1995, Ochs and Kapp 2009). Rarely, however, have sociologists looked at how the life stories recounted are linked to the social values accruing from narrations of the self in different institutional arenas. How and why do biographical testimonies circulate through the landscapes of HIV/AIDS activism and programmes in Africa the way they do? © 2015 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Sociology of Health & Illness Vol. xx No. xx 2015 ISSN 0141-9889, pp. 1–18 doi: 10.1111/1467-9566.12381