IN GRASP OF A SECRET THAT WAS NOT MINE: SILENCES AND SECRETS AROUND LIVING WITH HIV/AIDS IN THE BRAZILIAN NORTHEAST
HIV/AIDS; Silence and secrets; Small town; Ethnography in health services; Illness experience.
In the face of social processes by stigma and discrimination in relation to HIV / AIDS, people who live with this condition for a long time, find themselves facing a lack of visibility process: they enter in a universe of silence and secrets as a way to protect themselves. This research is based on the assumption that, given the specificities of the social dynamic of countryside contexts, the place of origin / habitation, as a social marker of difference, shapes the way these people live with HIV, so they engage in a series of agencies with a view to the protection of identity in a context of a tendency to blur public and private aspects of life. Therefore, the aim of this study was to understand how the experience of living with HIV / AIDS is shaped, thought, lived and signified the experience to live with HIV / AIDS between silence and secrets in the country towns of northeast in Brazil. Ethnography is the theoretical methodological framework to understand the object of study. The data collection was carried out between April and September in 2019 in a specialized service located in the country towns in Rio Grande do Norte state. During the participant observations, productions of field diaries and semi-structured interviews were used to collect information from the interlocutors in the place of study. These data were interpreted based on the socio-anthropological literature on long-term suffering and illness, silence, secrecy and social markers of difference. Two chapters were produced from the analysis of this material. The first explores the ethnographic practice and the experience of otherness at the moment the researcher lived a field encounter that costs her the possession of a secret that was not her own and from there, she began to question the silences and secrets in the country towns contexts. The second chapter dialogues with the experience lived and narrated in the previous one, when the interlocutor, protagonist of the meeting, became the narrator of the issues that involved the management of silences and secrets about been HIV positive. From the discussion undertaken, it was possible to conclude that the vulnerability of serology secrecy in the countryside contexts pervaded the social dynamics of the city that brought up the possibility of discovering the secret, making PLWHA live in the silence of its body an unspeakable identity.