Deconstructing the Portrayals of HIV/AIDS Among Campaign Planners Targeting Tribal Populations in Koraput, India: A Culture-Centered Interrogation

Abstract

This article deconstructs the portrayal of HIV/AIDS in the tribal dominated district of Koraput, India, among program planners, service delivery personnel, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), etc. who plan, implement, and evaluate HIV/AIDS interventions targeting tribal communities in the region. Drawing upon postcolonial and subaltern studies approaches, we critically examine the ideological assumptions that circulate in the dominant discursive spaces among campaign planners and implementers who target HIV/AIDS among the tribal population in Koraput, India. Based on our critical examination, we suggest guidelines for engaging with program planners and implementers through health communication pedagogy informed by the culture-centered approach.

Notes

¹We note here that even in our descriptive depictions of indigenous tribes, we draw upon a language of absences rooted in the discursive politics of the mainstream. The paradox of a postcolonial reading of indigenous political economy is situated amid the tensions between a critique of the languages of the mainstream that are typically utilized to silence the subaltern and the need to engage with mainstream articulations in order to create entry points for understanding the material marginalization of the subaltern sectors.

²Note that throughout our description of the tribal population, we draw upon the narratives and empirical data as articulated in the dominant discourses about tribal populations. Therefore, although we reflexively engage with these descriptions to offer a contextual base, we simultaneously deconstruct the fundamental descriptions drawn from these dominant knowledge structures. This reflexivity offers us an entry point for a postcolonial account that on one hand has to engage with the very structures of the mainstream to depict tribal communities, and has to simultaneously interrogate the neocolonial assumptions in these mainstream depictions of tribal populations. Therefore, throughout this section in depicting our context, we go back and forth between a mainstream account and a subaltern-studies reading of this account.

³Respondents with comprehensive knowledge of HIV/AIDS say that the use of a condom for every act of sexual intercourse and having just one uninfected faithful partner can reduce the chance of getting HIV/AIDS, say that a healthy-looking person can have HIV/AIDS, and reject the two most common perceptions, namely, that HIV/AIDS can be transmitted by mosquito bites and by sharing food.

⁴The postcolonial deconstructions through conversations with campaign planners in the mainstream offer the basis for a culture-centered dialogic project with tribal communities in Koraput that we have subsequently embarked on. Our postcolonial deconstruction presented here focuses on the conversations with campaign planners in order to initiate entry points for dialogues with tribal communities at the margins of contemporary development discourses in India.

⁵The names of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the respondents have been changed/concealed to ensure their privacy and security and minimize risk.

⁶Maha Shivratri or Shivaratri (Night of Shiva or “Great Night of Shiva”) is a festival celebrated every year on the 13th night/14th day of the 11th month in the Hindu calendar in India. Families all over India congregate at temples and pray to Lord Shiva and do meditation and yoga.

⁷National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) is a division of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare Government of India that provides leadership to HIV/AIDS control programs in India through 35 HIV/AIDS prevention and control societies.

⁸Chaita Parba is the most important tribal festival in Orissa, where the tribals pray to the Mother Earth before commencing agriculture. They wear new clothes, make sacrifices, drink, sing, dance, and celebrate.

⁹The “Scheduled Castes” is the legal and constitutional name collectively given to the groups that have traditionally occupied the lowest status in the Indian society and the Hindu religion. Also called the “untouchables,” they are a heterogeneous group and divided into many castes and subcastes conforming to an in-group hierarchy. Other terms used to identify this group of people are “Harijan” and “Dalits.”

¹⁰This project served as the basis for the development of a larger scale culture-centered project based on listening to the voices of tribal community members in eight blocks of Koraput. The CCA project will build on the understandings developed in this essay to engage program planners in dialogue with community members in the tribal areas of Koraput.