Michelle Newcomb, Topic of Choice #4

Michelle Newcomb
Religious Studies – Primal Religions
Topic of Choice

Sickness as Evil

There is a history class I’m in this semester that covers the history of Africa. For the last few weeks we’ve been studying the aids epidemic thoroughly and the past few classes has been spent on what can be done worldwide to stop the spread of the virus. The most difficult part of the equation is the way in which the people view the disease – not as a disease at all, but as evil. We talked about sickness as evil forces brought on by poor behavior or wrong doings earlier in the semester and I found that I was applying much of our discussion to this history class.

As mentioned above, the biggest problem with the spread of the epidemic is the belief that AIDs is not a disease or a virus – but it’s the effect of some wrong doing and brought on by evil actions. Its really easy to see the conflict of modernity and primitivism, the AIDs is a modern virus (and to understand and prevent its transmission, you must first understand it in modern terms) but is effecting a primal world. The people are interpreting and understanding a modern disease as evil that was sent to them from the gods and are seeking ways in which to rectify the evil done. One of their solutions is to exterminate or oppress the women. Women are seen as subservient and weaker in this culture and are an easy scapegoat for their problems. Another solution is genocide of those of ‘inferior’ races or long time enemies – although this is not a stated reason for the warfare that goes on the continent at this time, its an interesting approach to understanding why the violence and murder has grown. In the history class we discussed how sickness and stress changes and morphs a society – how the chaos of such death and destruction can break into a society’s cosmos and wreak havoc. I think that this can also be applied to the epidemic in Africa as well, their cosmos is obviously disrupted and unless peace and stability can be established and the cosmos can be obtained again, the chaos will continue to reign.