| Through analyzing the culture conflict surrounding HIV in South Africa, particularly the clash between Western discourses of medicine and South African cultural discourses of well being and authority, this dissertation details the tension between the democratic impulse of public culture, broadly conceived, and the particular public cultures that shape specific moments of public controversy. As such, this project adds to work by scholars of public culture by analyzing the important relationship between culture as an object of public debate and culture as context for such debate. In particular, this project seeks to identify a crucial tension underlying the democratic work of public culture: that the public requires particular cultural forms for its shape and structure; that the public circulation of those cultural forms generates differences in meaning, which then leads to conflict; and that the resulting conflict is constrained by prevailing cultural norms (inflected by both history and context) that inevitably favor a particular cultural perspective. Moreover, this dissertation argues that it is only in recognizing the cultural contingency of the public sphere, and thereby, the need to engage with the "partisan" nature of the cultural norms that mediate our cultural conflicts, that we can come to fully appreciate the difficult ethical work of intercultural dialogue. |
