Crying for Our Elders

Over the past twenty years, international NGOs and charities have devoted immense attention to the millions of African children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic. In Crying for Our Elders, anthropologist Kristen Cheney shows that this humanitarian focus on orphanhood often elides the social and political circumstances that present the greatest adversity to vulnerable children. Cheney uses close ethnographic work, including collaborative research with young adults in Uganda, to explore the unique experience of AIDS orphanhood through the eyes of children, caregivers, development practitioners, and policymakers. She highlights the underappreciated role of children as agents and argues that the construction of the orphan category in Africa and the discourse of vulnerability that it engenders neglect local strategies for coping with death and illness. By detailing children s attempts to gain access to various support networks crucial to survival, especially by negotiating local and global children s rights discourses, the book documents the inventive ways children act as agents in their own uplift and try, against all odds, to survive in the era of widespread AIDS orphanhood."