From March 2003 to February 2006, I lived in Okhahlamba, a portion of the uThukela District in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. I had come to this mountainous region abutting the northern Drakensberg (Dragon's Mountain) to record the experiences of people living in a context of HIV and AIDS among African communities in the Ngwane and Zizi chieftaincies, and adjoining African freehold settlements. I hoped that whatever I came to write would reflect the concerns of rural people and would pay close attention to local ways in which the illness, through time, was folded into everyday life, as well as how people used language to reflect upon its devastating presence. My aim was to provide an ethnographic record of a particular period in which suffering from the illness was acute, and where, prior to readily available antiretroviral treatment, death was inevitable. In particular, I wished to trace repertoires of care outside of the formal institutional domains of hospitals and clinics, in order to show what people in limited circumstances brought to bear on the illness when there was little assistance forthcoming from the state. As it happens, the book spans a period in which antiretrovirals were initially unavailable, and moves on to a time when treatment became accessible in various ways. It therefore begins with the presence of overwhelming death and mourning, after which hope gradually became manifest in the recovery of a number of people through antiretroviral therapies and ‘the return’ of bodies they could recognize as their own – bodies that had recovered from a state of emaciation.

Notwithstanding the ‘crisis of representation’ that has unsettled anthropology over the last 25 years by overturning the discipline's former claims to objective ‘truth’ (see Clifford 1988, Clifford & Marcus 1986), I uphold the value of ethnographic study both as a research methodology and as an art of writing. In so far as ethnographic research implies protracted interaction with people over time, where an attempt is made to reflect a range of local views and practices pertaining to interlocutors ‘in the field’, it provides important records of and insights into the unfolding textures of everyday life (Fabian 1983). These are textures that include the presence of the anthropologist, a presence that has its effects.