Nomad RSI - Therapeutic diversity and the environment

Frédéric Bourdier (2004). Cayenne: Ibis rouge, 252p.
Language: French.

Migration in the Brazilian and French Amazon constitutes – through all the factors that characterize it such as poverty, economic and familial insecurity, social isolation and vulnerability – an indicator of risk for the spread of AIDS. The interactions between spatial mobility, the spread of the epidemic, access to health systems and recourse to treatment call for a broad reflection, one which brings together the analytical strengths of ethnography and geography. The two scales of analysis, corresponding to two methodological approaches, are applied. From these perspectives, the author demonstrates precisely how the epidemic in the Amazonian region – the confluence of Caribbean and Latin-American worlds – largely follows the migration patterns of recent decades between the Amapá people and the French Guyana. It is also linked to the attitude of the local governments who, after a certain amount of hesitation at the beginning of the 1980s, began to seriously engage with a fight against AIDS which was integrated, original and non-discriminatory (between social groups and at the level of gender relations).