Nowhere is the failure of anthropologists to engage with the real world of suffering and with what remains of the humanistic values at the core of the Enlightenment more evident than in their absence from debate and action around the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The questions of the AIDS epidemic are all anthropological questions, or at least questions with which anthropologists should engage. As anthropologists we are all now well aware of the limitations of our narrative. Anthropology should become less internally obsessed, less concerned with philosophical therapy, more outwardly active and engaged: in short, it is time to reconnect with the discipline’s roots in the Enlightenment.
