These books, part of Berghahn’s “Epistemologies of Healing” series, offer empirically rich and theoretically innovative ethnographic accounts of social life in Africa in the era of AIDS. Quite different in their orientations—Geissler and Prince provide a detailed monograph focused on one small community in western Kenya, while the Dilger and Luig edited volume surveys many settings through fourteen contributed essays—both books speak to the deep and complex interconnections between AIDS and wider arenas of social life. Particularly compelling is the way each volume analyzes the relationship between AIDS and broader processes of societal change with which the epidemic is associated. As depicted in these books, the causes and consequences of AIDS (as they are explained anthropologically, but even more significantly as they are experienced emotionally and socially by people in Africa) epitomize many contemporary problems and anxieties. Yet these books also emphasize that lifestyles linked with AIDS are symbolic of numerous opportunities and aspirations associated with modern life. Readers of these volumes will learn of the conflicts, contradictions, and ambivalences spurred by the epidemic, but also of countless examples of hope, resilience, and care-giving, even in the face of tremendous hardship and daunting challenges.

In addition to their broad examination of the intertwining of Africans’ experiences of AIDS and associated social changes, a theme that connects these two books is their extended and sophisticated treatment of morality as an integral aspect not only of the AIDS epidemic, but also of every dimension of the social responses it has produced. While the relevant scholarly literature is replete with evidence that interpretations of AIDS are tied to widespread stigma, these volumes push well beyond recognizing the moral underpinnings of stigma. Instead, they reveal the social-relational nature of morality as it is produced, interpreted, contested, reproduced, and sometimes transformed in relationships along lines of gender and generation, inflected by exchange and inequality, but also by duty and desire. A great merit of these books, and one of their most important contributions, is that rather than discussing morality in the abstract, they examine the ways in which morality is empirically and theoretically tied to sociality, as illustrated through rich and compelling ethnography.

A second shared contribution of these books is their attention to death, mourning, and the social consequences of AIDS mortality. The third of three sections in Morality, Hope and Grief includes five essays that examine issues such as the consequences of AIDS for funeral practices, care-giving for the dying, the social position of widows, the plight of orphans, and the ways that religious mourning and remembrance of the dead are tied to (re)negotiations about the structure and meaning of kinship ties. In The Land Is Dying, Geissler and Prince (who also have a chapter in the edited volume), provide graphic and moving accounts of families coping with death and dying. Rather than shying away from the details of death, they provide intimate portrayals of the physical and emotional tasks of caring for the sick, washing dead bodies, and navigating the conflicts among kin that death inevitably brings to the surface, while also presenting examples of human courage and compassion in the face of immense suffering. Together, these volumes provide some of the most compelling accounts of the social and emotional dimensions of HIV-related sickness and death produced in the burgeoning anthropological literature on AIDS in Africa.

Interestingly, each book approaches the epidemic as an object of study quite differently. The Dilger and Luig edited volume privileges AIDS as its point of departure, and the chapters are united by their attempts to situate the epidemic in its cultural contexts, while at the same time arguing that social responses to the disease offer a revealing window onto wider processes of continuity and change. In addition to the aforementioned section on grief and death, the volume also includes a section on hope, healing, and care, and one on how various aspects of morality are at stake in the epidemic. Like any edited volume, there is some unevenness in the quality of the chapters, but the level of sophistication, the depth of the ethnographic evidence, and the overall coherence of the chapters are impressive.

By contrast, Geissler and Prince assert that their book is not primarily about AIDS, but rather about the production and reproduction of social relations through time, particularly as these relations are constituted (and contested) through everyday practices that they gloss as “touch.” While AIDS, or what Geissler and Prince’s Luo interlocutors call “the death of today,” is a prominent topic, the book situates AIDS in western Kenya against a much larger backdrop of social change and engages with the domains of religion and culture, kinship and households, child rearing and socialization, economy and subsistence, sexuality and gender, and sickness and death. All of these subjects are illustrated with vivid longitudinal ethnographic examples that could only come from researchers with the long experience that Geissler and Prince have in this community in western Kenya.

The book’s boldest theoretical innovation is its conceptualization of sociality through the aforementioned idiom of touch, arguing that all the dimensions of social life that are addressed can be theoretically analyzed in this way. While this innovation and the way that it enables Geissler and Prince to organize their material produces a much-appreciated concreteness in the account, I am not entirely convinced that conceiving of each domain of social relations as an arena of touch adds significantly to what we learn from this informative monograph. Further, while one of the book’s great merits is the depth and nuance of the ethnography, it is so detailed (and long) that I have a hard time imagining that even the most dedicated undergraduates would have the time to read it all. It is a book from which scholars will benefit greatly, but few others will, I fear. This may be an indictment of the wider readership that Africanist scholars may not be reaching, but it is a reality to which, some might argue, scholars ought to adapt. Some sacrificing of detail and length would have permitted the authors to attract a wider audience without necessarily sacrificing too much of their compelling material.