Exceptional Suffering? Enumeration and Vernacular Accounting in the HIV-Positive Experience

Drawing on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Freetown, Sierra Leone, I highlight the recursive relationship between Sierra Leone as an exemplary setting and HIV as an exceptional disease. Through this relationship, I examine how HIV-positive individuals rely on both enumerative knowledge (seroprevalence rates) and vernacular accounting (NGO narratives of vulnerability) to communicate the uniqueness of their experience as HIV sufferers and to demarcate the boundaries of their status. Various observers' enumerative and vernacular accounts of Sierra Leone's decade-long civil conflict, coupled with global health accounts of HIV as exceptional, reveal the calculus of power through which global health projects operate. The contradictions between the exemplary and the exceptional-and the accompanying tension between quantitative and qualitative facts-are mutually constituted in performances and claims made by HIV-positive individuals themselves.