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This paper addresses the issue of the relative absence of anthropologists in the formulation of HIV/AIDS policy and research in Africa. Initially, taking an historical perspective, it looks at the development of the main policy-making forums in the USA before turning to the more recent establishment of UNAIDS and its dominant role in setting the agenda for Africa. The implications for anthropological research are then considered in order to shed light on the reluctance which can be discerned in the discipline to get involved in research on AIDS. Turning to specific case material, the paper then examines AIDS educational strategies in Botswana to provide an illustration of the potential insights anthropology can bring to explain the success or failure of such campaings. Stressing the importance of the cultural constructions of the disease, it shows how the western AIDS message is interpreted by local populations not as neutral scientific „fact“ but as an aspect of political and ideological domination. In turn, this discussion raises the issue of the coexistence of different belief systems, especially in the sphere of medicine, their interrelations and the social contexts in which response to western messages is antagonistic as opposed to complementary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of a military command for Africa (US AFRICOM) symbolizes the radical repositioning of the US military. Facilitated by the consensus in contemporary Western foreign policies - that there can be no development without security - over the last ten years the US military has expanded its activities into civilian domains including development and conflict prevention. As a reaction to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, recent US military doctrines on counterinsurgency and stability operations have singled out the need for more civilian and long-term activities as a precondition for success. AFRICOM has put most of these „military innovations" into practice. Due to the command's focus on development activities, on civil-military coordination and its proposed engagement in non-war situations, in military circles AFRICOM is seen as a role model for future military practices. This paper problematizes the military's expanding mandate and discusses its implications. It argues that the military's increasing engagement in issues of governance and development deeply blurs the normative boundary between the military and the civilian and exposes development as a technology of security. Furthermore, the military's repositioning follows the dominant securitization of so- called „fragile states" and classifies social spaces along Western strategic interests. As a consequence, targeted communities find it hard to separate development efforts aimed at countering poverty and those aimed at countering insurgency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the panel "Grenzmissverständnisse in der Globalgeschichtsschreibung (ca. 1500-1900)" at the Deutscher Historikertag (Annual Meeting of the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands [VDH, German Historians' Association]), from September 28 to October 1, 2010, in Berlin. Several papers on the concepts of borders and frontiers in European imperialism and colonialism in Asia, Africa, and Australia, from the perspective of global history, were presented.

After ending their migration to the Great Lakes Area, estimated around 1500, the Hima (= Tutsi) established a supremacy, based on their culture as livestock herders. Milk containers played an important role in their myths and rituals. Wooden Hima containers, carefully carved and of special shape, express the "ethnic superiority" in terms of remembering the Hima as having been "superior". In some societies like the Nyoro kingdom in Uganda, they expressed the social distinction between the Hima and the Hutu, the indigenous agriculturists. The containers were also "holy" objects. Several of them, collected between 1895 and 1902 by two Germans, Richard Kandt and Karl Paul Kollmann, are part of the African collection of the Ethnological Museum Berlin and some of them are described in the article. The container shapes also show the impact of the Hima supremacy within the region: they "migrated". Wooden containers act as cultural witnesses but also give an example of East African design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most theorists of development the peripheral states are weak by definition and their weakness is a significant factor in the syndrome of underdevelopment. Recently, especially the states of the African continent are keen as paradigmatically „weak or „failed" or „collapsed" or „decaying" states. Therefore, the paper uses African case material to discuss the thesis of the structural weakness of the peripheral state. The conclusion is that African states are weak only insofar as their „regulative power" is concerned; insofar as their power to guarantee the accumulation of riches in the ruling classes is concerned, in contrast, they are definitely strong states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]