Farmer, Paul — AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (1992/2006) Source Information

Farmer, Paul — AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (1992/2006) Source Information Author: Paul Farmer Full Title: AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame Publisher: University of California Press (Berkeley / Los Angeles / London) Series: Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care, 33 Year: 1992; updated edition with new preface 2006 ISBN: 978-0-520-24839-7 Type: Secondary Source — medical anthropology, public health, structural violence Location in Vault: research/secondary-sources/ Status Text extracted: Yes Review pass: Audited and integrated (2026-03-31) Chapter notes: farmer aids and accusation ch notes Overview AIDS and Accusation is Farmer's first major book, emerging from his doctoral fieldwork in the village of Do Kay (a pseudonym for a community in the Central Plateau of Haiti) during the mid-to-late 1980s. Farmer arrived as both a physician and an anthropologist at the moment when AIDS first appeared in the village — he knew the first three people who died of the disease — and this proximity gives the book an ethnographic intimacy rare in public health writing. The book's central argument is that Haiti was not the origin of the AIDS epidemic but rather among its earliest and most catastrophically blamed victims, and that the mechanisms of that blame are not accidental but structural, rooted in centuries of racist representation and economic exploitation.