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The price of antiretroviral (ARV) medicines in Uganda has fallen dramatically in recent years and more people are under treatment. By mid-2003 it was estimated that 10 000 people were taking ARVs. Drawing on participant observation, qualitative interviews, work with key informants and document reviews, we seek to map out the channels through which ARVs are being made available to people and to describe and assess the social implications of the present system of distribution. Four channels of access to ARV medicines were common in mid-2003: (i) Medicines were provided free in structured research and treatment programmes funded by donors, but only to those who lived in a defined catchment area and met inclusion criteria. (ii) Gazetted treatment centres provided drugs on a fee-for-service basis; these urban-based institutions account for the largest number of drugs dispensed. (iii) Private practitioners, mainly based in Kampala, provided discrete treatment for those who could afford it. (iv) Finally, medicines were 'facilitated' along informal networks, supplying friends and relatives on a less regular basis, sometimes for free, sometimes for cash. However, access to ARVs remains highly uneven. We argue that cheaper drugs make possible different kinds of access, different qualities of care, and a growing awareness of inequity. Because the price of drugs has fallen drastically, middle-class families now have the possibility of buying them. But this requires tough prioritising and many cannot follow the regimen regularly. Health workers must consider whether patients will be able to purchase the drugs or not. In a kind of popular social pharmacy, people assess who can and should and does get access to ARVs. Further research should examine the whole range of ARV access channels in different countries and the associated patterns of social differentiation and exclusions.

This article brings two analytic perspectives to bear on temporal aspects of relations to children's children. The first, which we call processual time, is the long-term, ‘experience-distant’, view of household developmental cycles over a historical period. Beginning with this approach, we describe the arrangements of family and marriage that provide the framework for people's relations to the children of their sons and of their daughters in Bunyole County, eastern Uganda. Household survey material collected over thirty years in one village shows an increase in the number of grandchildren being cared for, as expected in an era when parents are dying of AIDS. However, it also qualifies the hegemonic historical narrative of AIDS by showing that other factors have been and still are at work in influencing the patterns of caring for grandchildren. The second analytical perspective is that of the intersubjective time of shared biographies and common experience. The emphasis here is on the ‘experience-near’ qualities and practice of relatedness as they are lived and talked about in the lifeworlds of social actors. They are evident in the dyadic relations between grandparents and grandchildren and also in the ways that these relations are embedded in other connections to children and in-laws. When grandparents take on the care of a daughter's children, they are mindful of the past, present and future of her relation to her husband and his family. The concept of ‘intersubjective time’ points to the intertwining of the lives of three generations and provides a rich complement to the more abstract concern with developmental cycles and historical processes.

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In this article I explore links between fieldwork experience and different conceptions of time as they are encountered in what I term 'episodic fieldwork'. I use 'episodic' to emphasize the importance of absence and return for fieldwork relationships and the ethnographies that are founded on these relationships. I draw on Simmel's concept of sociability to explore the significance of the recurring updates that are so much a part of long-term and thus episodic fieldwork. Updating suggests participation, positionality, and transformation-as well as play and familiarity. The presumption of familiarity, which is at the heart of sociability, becomes a tool for exploring time and new social experiences and the ways in which chronology is interwoven with shifting social positions.