Infected Kin: Orphan Care and AIDS in Lesotho by Ellen Block and Will McGrath (review)

A anxiety of anthropologists of southern Africa has long been how to give voice to those who have been rendered voiceless; in this case, Lesotho’s long history of structural violence shaped by South Africa’s historical exploitation of this small landlocked country. Infected Kin: Orphan Care and AIDS in Lesotho by anthropologist Ellen Block and her husband, literary nonfiction writer Will McGrath, is a recent addition to the Medical Anthropology: Health, Inequality, and Social Justice series edited by Lenore Manderson. Infected Kin is a book about exercising agency in the face of adversity in Lesotho, where one-quarter of adults are infected with AIDS and where devastation has swept across communities, felt at every level of kinship. In the context of scholarship on the AIDS pandemic, which is targeted largely at the abstract level of global and public health, or a single disease vertically, Block and McGrath’s Infected Kin is an important book. It is even more so when we consider that COVID-19 has directed health care resources and funding elsewhere. While scholars have largely focused on the ways in which culture and sociality influence HIV/AIDS, their approach has been largely limited to examining its interventions. Block argues: