Book Description

"In An Epidemic of Uncertainty, Jenny Trinitapoli advances a new model for studying social life by emphasizing something that social scientists routinely omit from their theories, models, and measures--what people know they don't know. The book takes Malawi's ongoing AIDS epidemic as its entry point for understanding the stakes of uncertainty. After a four-decades-long battle, new infections are down and AIDS-related mortality has declined. But in the wake of pandemic AIDS, an epidemic of uncertainty persists; at any given point in time, half the population doesn't know their HIV status. The author argues that AIDS-related uncertainty is measurable, pervasive, and impervious to biomedical solutions. The consequences of uncertainty are pertinent to multiple domains of life including relationship stability, fertility, health, and well-being. Even as HIV is transformed from a progressive, fatal infection to a chronic and manageable condition, the accompanying epidemic of uncertainty remains central to understanding social life in this part of the world. This book is based on a ground-breaking longitudinal study that documents how the lives of young adults in Balaka, Malawi, unfold over a ten-year period. Trinitapoli also makes three general contributions: first, a demography of uncertainty and a set of theoretical and empirical tools for integrating what people know they don't know into social-scientific models of human behavior; second, a decade-long longitudinal study articulating what demographic approaches have to offer the social sciences; and third, an expansive attitude toward the empirical, which brings longitudinal survey data to life by incorporating accounts of uncertainty and its resolution through ethnography designed to capture population chatter and gossip in Balaka"--