Ending AIDS: An “Epidemic of ARVs”

Drawing on ethnographic material collected over almost two decades in the South African lowveld district of Bushbuckridge, this chapter discusses the social and cultural implications of global discourses of the “end of AIDS”. I argue that in Bushbuckridge, antiretroviral therapy (ART) heralded the transformation of the epidemic into an “epidemic of ARVs” and that this consequently threatened to invisibilize social suffering in the past and the present and exposed the disjunctures between local experiences and global narratives of HIV.