BackgroundThe number of reported pregnancies in women with diagnosed HIV in the UK increased from 80 in 1990 to over 1400 in 2010; the majority were among women born in sub-Saharan Africa. There is a paucity of research on how social adversity impacts upon pregnancy in HIV positive women in the UK; furthermore, little is known about important outcomes such as treatment uptake and return for follow-up after pregnancy. The aim of this study was to examine pregnancy in African women living with HIV in the UK.Methods and designThis was a two phase mixed methods study. The first phase involved analysis of data on approximately 12,000 pregnancies occurring between 2000 and 2010 reported to the UK’s National Study of HIV in Pregnancy and Childhood (NSHPC). The second phase was based in London and comprised: (i) semi-structured interviews with 23 pregnant African women living with HIV, 4 health care professionals and 2 voluntary sector workers; (ii) approximately 90 hours of ethnographic fieldwork in an HIV charity; and (iii) approximately 40 hours of ethnographic fieldwork in a Pentecostal church.DiscussionWe have developed an innovative methodology utilising epidemiological and anthropological methods to explore pregnancy in African women living with HIV in the UK. The data collected in this mixed methods study are currently being analysed and will facilitate the development of appropriate services for this group.

Contemporary definitions of trauma and their application remain controversial within anthropology. A survivor's awareness of a parallel, incompatible world of atrocity is understood to bypass language or conscious expression. Such a framework can be compared with ethnographic work on the silence of survivors. Experiences of inhumanity and extreme violence eventually find a discursive niche but nevertheless pose problems of translation. Through the lens of traditional anthropology another realm emerges—a world of vampires, zombies, and cannibals. “Crimes against humanity” can be added to the list, but overall translations seem oriented toward the maintenance of interpretative control, even in contexts of mass dehumanization. Anthropologists are well placed to pay attention to both the complex evidential systems of survivors and the construction of liberal voices. The image of trauma and its untranslatability, however, linger in the background of interventions and point to the vital but endangered bond between language and humanity.

A disregard for human traditions, the brutality of predation, sacrifice, and sexual desire are ingrained in languages across cultures. This paper concerns a key linguistic feature reflecting this predicament: utterances that encapsulate their opposite and effectuate a U-turn in meaning. This mode of communication stands out as a representation of the friction between incommensurable worlds-conceived together. An enemy's perspective or an unpalatable reality finds a host within language. I embark upon a multidisciplinary search for examples of such utterances and present an assemblage of five pertinent images. Each of these makes a distinct conceptual contribution. Vigilance and an awareness of other points of view underpin most of the utterances under study, which I propose to call "sharp communication" at the intersection of opposing perspectives.

This issue inaugurates the First Book Symposium as a feature in the pages of Social Analysis. Instead of including ourselves among the journals that devote a section to book reviews in their regular issues, as we have done for many years, we feel that a more focused approach is better suited to our goal of exploring the potentials of anthropological analysis. Adopting from other journals the format of the book symposium, in which a single book is subjected to sustained critical engagement by relevant scholars, we devote it in particular to discussion of books by first-time authors. Our aim is, on the one hand, to give a platform to scholars who are not already widely known and established and, on the other, to acquaint our readers with ideas and analytical approaches that are fresh.Knut Christian Myhre, Returning Life: Language, Life Force and History in Kilimanjaro (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018), 336 pp., illustrations, bibliography, index. eBook. eISBN 9781785336669.

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