Abstract:
In the HIV/AIDS literature, the tendency has been to avoid the agentive concept in favour
of an emphasis on structure and subjectivity. Based on research with an HIV/AIDS
project in Pretoria, South Africa, this article posits that examining how agency is locally
conceptualized forms one route via which the notion may be plausibly inserted into the
study of the pandemic. I evoke the figure of the ‘ideal agent’: the imagined AIDS sufferer
against whose model actions those of actual AIDS sufferers are measured. Three stages
emerge, the first characterized by victimhood, the second by moral transformation, and
the third by the choice to ‘go home to one’s relatives’. In view of patients’ impending
deaths, local knowledge regarding proper burial and ancestorship, and the limited
resources of the project, the ideal agent suggests how AIDS sufferers’ agency is
circumscribed and helps to clarify the volatility of the moral rebirth experience.
