Beyond the male-migrant: South Africa's long history of health geography and the contemporary AIDS pandemic

This article begins by noting the contribution that past South African writings on health can make to the field of health geography—especially writings on male migration and syphilis from the 1940s that conceptualized space as relational. However, the second part of the article notes that the rapid rise of AIDS in the post-apartheid period influenced the problematic projecting forward of the male-migrancy model. Ethnographic and secondary data show how AIDS is embedded in under-researched social and spatial structures after apartheid. In tracing these processes the article combines anthropology, geography, and political economy to chart an interdisciplinary analysis of the uneven geographies of health.