At the heart of May Chazan's new ethnography is a fascinating puzzle about the kinds of political possibility emerging from the HIV crisis in Southern Africa. Her book recounts the first few years of the ‘Grandmothers to Grandmothers Campaign’, an effort catalysed by the Stephen Lewis Foundation (SLF) in Canada that connected largely white, middle-class grandmothers in Canada with gogos (isiZulu for grandmothers) in Southern Africa in a campaign to mobilize a response to the epidemic. These gogos bore the brunt of the HIV care burden in places such as KwaZulu Natal, the setting of the South African portion of Chazan's ethnography and a province where HIV prevalence can top 40 per cent. Her book tracks the development of the campaign in the mid-2000s both in Canada, where much of the organizing and most of the funding was situated, and in South Africa, where local NGO volunteers, healthcare workers, middle-class ‘champions’ and local groups of grandmothers all worked to respond to intersecting crises of HIV, poverty, inequality and violence. The grandmothers’ campaign enjoyed rapid success, despite the global financial crisis and the recent shift away from the historically high levels of global HIV funding.
Chazan's book describes how the campaign brought significant change not only for South African grandmothers and their families and communities but also for the Canadian grandmothers, who developed new forms of solidarity, engagement and identification. This is an ethnography of a global HIV campaign but it focuses on how it was interpreted and experienced by different sets of actors across a wide range of contexts. It makes a complex and compelling argument about how global connections can have unpredictable effects, effects that are not reducible to conventional narratives about oppressive North–South relationships. These are shaped not only by the various contexts, relationships and local structures at play, but also by the agency and creativity of those involved in this effort. One of Chazan's central arguments is that this campaign emerged, developed, matured and had considerable impact despite the fact that its chief protagonists, the Canadian and South African grandmothers, held divergent, sometimes radically different, understandings of each other, of the campaign, and of the social and political relationships formed in the process.
Chazan shows in fascinating detail how these (mis)understandings of each other developed, were managed, and were ultimately transformed. Throughout, she highlights the critical role of the many interlocutors between the grandmothers, including the SLF, the South African NGO that received SLF funding and coordinated the gogos’ involvement, and the locally based healthcare workers and volunteers who provided direct support to these women. These interlocutors served as critical points of intersection, activation, translation and transformation across multiple relationships and contexts during the campaign.
Chazan develops a number of central theoretical arguments throughout the book. First, and most compelling, is her argument that these kinds of North–South initiatives, highly visible during the worst of the HIV crisis, do not always play out according to clear and fixed sets of rules. Rather, they are determined by the combination of specific individuals’ and organizations’ relationships, events, structures, processes and acts of agency that make up these initiatives. While Chazan acknowledges that existing norms and power dynamics are often powerful constraints, she also shows how these same norms and relationships must be reinforced daily, and, in the process, can be challenged and reconfigured. She also uses, sometimes with less clarity, Anna Tsing's notions of ‘friction’ and ‘zones of awkward engagement’ to describe the differences in perception and expectation across the campaign. While differences were clearly evident within the campaign, the ‘frictions’ that these differences might have produced were not always readily apparent. Much of her account seems, in fact, to be about the fairly ‘un-awkward’ transformations of ideas across these global connections.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the fascinating puzzle mentioned at the beginning of this review: the fact that, while the Canadian grandmothers felt a strong sense of connection to the gogos in South Africa, almost none of the South African grandmothers perceived themselves to be part of the ‘grandmothers’ campaign’ – or, for that matter, any other global campaign or set of relationships beyond their community. When asked what bigger movement or initiative their groups were part of, they said: ‘Our group is just us.’ Chazan's account, then, is of a global campaign to build solidarity between far-flung grandmothers who share a common concern, but in which those on one side of the relationship have no significant awareness of or connection to those on the other.
The book culminates in a thought-provoking final chapter on the ‘politics of possibility’ and, in particular, on the possibility of global forms of solidarity that do not depend on shared ideals, intentions, or even politics. This was the most intriguing and most frustrating part of the book. On the one hand, how can one meaningfully speak of global solidarity and of a global politics – at least in a progressive and anti-colonial vein – without a shared political vision, coordinated effort, or even a sense of connectedness between those acting in solidarity with each other? On the other hand, Chazan provides a convincing portrait of how new, unpredictable and in many cases positive changes were made possible through this campaign, ones that resisted both the triumphalism of development narratives and the pessimism of anti-development narratives. Chazan's ethnography will provide those interested in both the global and the local meanings and effects of these North–South dynamics with plenty to think about.
