This book about teenage girls in Tanzania is mainly based on eight empirical studies conducted by the Teenage Girls and Reproductive Health Study Group at the University of Dar es Salaam. Reproductive health is an expression widely used by people working with maternal and child health. It crosses the border between social sciences and medicine, and expands to social, cultural and economic issues. The study group is financed by the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries, SAREC. At present, the team is working with a second set of teenage studies on sexual and reproductive issues.

Presents an extended case study of the 20th-century AIDS epidemic and the cultural circumstances from which it emerged. The book brings together anthropology, demography and epidemiology to explain how the Chagga people of Tanzania in Africa experience AIDS.

Guide to Human Rights Sources

--A completely updated one-volume edition of the 4-volume International Encyclopedia of Sexuality--Includes nearly 60 countries and places--12 not previously covered--by more than 200 authorities--It is the only reference work of its kind in any language

This volume offers an empirical perspective on the so-called first generation of human rights. It explores the legitimization of these human rights by individual people, both because of their religion and because of their vision of what constitutes human dignity. The book addresses such issues as the foundation of human rights, the necessity of a broader conversation about human rights, aspects of freedom of religion, and the role of religion in Belarus, Britain, Chile, Germany, Italy, Nigeria, Norway and Tanzania. Taking an international comparative perspective, the volume answers the question as to what extent adolescents in different countries support civil human rights and what influences their attitudes towards these rights. As the diversity of the contributions in this volume shows, the relationship between religion and civil human rights is complex and multifaceted. Studying this complicated relationship calls for a variety of theoretical perspectives and rigorous empirical testing in different national contexts. This book’s empirical approach provides an important complementary perspective for legal, political and public debates.

How do modern women in developing countries experience sexuality and love? Drawing on a rich array of interview, ethnographic, and survey data from her native country of Kenya, Sanyu A. Mojola examines how young African women, who suffer disproportionate rates of HIV infection compared to young African men, navigate their relationships, schooling, employment, and finances in the context of economic inequality and a devastating HIV epidemic. Writing from a unique outsider-insider perspective, Mojola argues that the entanglement of love, money, and the transformation of girls into Òconsuming womenÓ lies at the heart of womenÕs coming-of-age and health crises. At once engaging and compassionate, this text is an incisive analysis of gender, sexuality, and health in Africa.

This volume explores how AIDS is understood, confronted and lived with through religious ideas and practices, and how these, in turn, are reinterpreted and changed by the experience of AIDS. Examining the social production, and productivity, of AIDS - linking bodily and spiritual experiences, and religious, medical, political and economic discourses - the papers counter simplified notions of causal effects of AIDS on religion (or vice versa). Instead, they display people’s resourcefulness in their struggle to move ahead in spite of adversity. This relativises the vision of doom widely associated with the African AIDS epidemic; and it allows to see AIDS, instead of a singular event, as the culmination of a century-long process of changing livelihoods, bodily well-being and spiritual imaginaries.