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The problem of HIV internationally has many wide ranging impacts on people, communities and countries' development. In the last decade antiretroviral (ARV) treatment has emerged as the major scientific-technical solution, albeit a costly one. Access to ARV treatment is of vital importance across Africa and around the world. Resources for HIV treatment, care and support are transferred globally on a massive scale. However, how such programmes operate ‘on the ground' in different contexts is still unclear. This research contributes to understanding the experience of the people who access such treatment programmes in different contexts. This research focuses on this gap, exploring how treatment programmes are experienced, how the availability of treatment impacts both on people's experience of being HIV+ and how the availability of treatment may also change perceptions of what it means to be HIV+, both individually and at a societal level. This research focuses on the lives and experiences, particularly the treatment experiences, of people living with HIV in peri-urban Gambia. Low prevalence countries such as The Gambia can provide a compelling example of the ways in which meanings and understandings of HIV are created. Here, entering a field of health pluralism and fluid knowledge creation around HIV-infection, came large scale actors providing a high-profile ARV treatment programme through clinic-based medicine, and an effective de-pluralisation of the medical field in relation to HIV, inviting scrutiny of how such knowledge relations and differences are experienced. Although not anticipated at the outset of the research, in parallel the Gambia has become the locus of a major, politically-backed, ‘alternative' AIDS treatment programme. This has thrown the personal and societal meanings of HIV into a new and sensitive context, compelling research attention into how knowledge, status and meanings around HIV are negotiated, and how people make choices amongst different treatment options.

This PhD examines horseracing in Britain. It is based upon fifteen months fieldwork in Newmarket, Suffolk, often referred to as the International Headquarters of Flat Racing. My research consisted of participant observation within the four main aspects of the racing industry; on a stud, at a training stable, at the Tattersalls sales and with professional gamblers and bookmakers on the racecourse. I also conducted interviews with racing officials and with individuals who considered themselves to be members of 'Newmarket families'. In addition, I examined the consumption of horseracing by gamblers. Betting on horseracing contradicts the ideology of pedigree whereby breeding will determine ability, and is therefore one of the sources of conflict between the suppliers and the consumers of racing. My intention was to examine the idea of pedigree as it is applied to the English thoroughbred. I have sought to specify the mechanism by which this idea can be applied to the human contingent of racing society, such that the hierarchy amongst animals naturalises the hierarchy amongst humans and vice versa. The thesis focuses particularly upon the ideas of relatedness held by members of racing society who consider themselves to be 'real Newmarket families'. Racing ability is envisaged as born and bred rather than taught, and racing credentials rest upon one's claims to kinship with successful individuals. Despite the apparent basis of this system in the sharing of blood, connections may also be created in its absence. It is argued that the ideology of pedigree contains a descriptive element, according to which relations of blood are mapped, and also a cultural imperative whereby ability must be explained on the basis of breeding. I suggest that it is this imperative which maintains the class based division of labour within racing. The naturalisation of class inequalities through the conventions of the racecourse, the jockey's apprenticeship, and the embodiment of taste (Bourdieu 1984) are all considered at length. I describe the ideology of pedigree as containing a theory of reproduction similar to that described by Delaney (1986), and ideas of relatedness which Bouquet has identified in the genealogical method (1993). These ideas are most completely worked out in relation to favoured animals, particularly racehorses. However, ideas of nature in Newmarket enable the application of pedigree to humans also. Nature in Newmarket is both a separate realm from humanity and also a realm encompassing humans. Racehorses can thus be made to stand, metaphorically, for persons, whilst in other contexts they may be conceptualised as 'man's noblest creation', such that humans are outside, and opposed to, nature. Both these conceptions of 'nature' are illustrated with relevant fieldwork examples. The final section of this thesis considers the impact of the new reproductive technologies upon thoroughbred breeding. These techniques are explicitly outlawed by the International Stud Book, and the debate surrounding their use in the future stresses ideas of the loss of control of blood. I argue that racing society in Britain is thus experiencing a literalising process (Strathern 1992b) whereby the class imperatives which inhere in the ideology of pedigree may be exposed.