Few books can claim to address a social problem involving billions of dollars withmillions of lives hanging in the balance, but Swidler andWatkins’s AFraught Embrace does just that. Dissecting the role of foreign altruists and local brokers in aid efforts to stem the HIV/AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa generally, and Malawi more specifically, this book makes a compelling sociological contribution to the study of foreign aid—a field of research more often reserved for economists and international development studies scholars. Swidler and Watkins turn a nearly 20-year research engagement on these issues inMalawi into a revealing ethnography of foreign aid to combat AIDS that introduces readers to the many actors, aims, and approaches involved in these efforts. They begin by introducing the context of theHIV/AIDS epidemic and development in Malawi. Next, they turn to the key players in both the global and local contexts: the altruists (institutional and individual) and brokers (cosmopolitan/national, district, and local/interstitial) who awkwardly negotiate myriad clashing “fantasies” to translate their competing aims and priorities into reality. It is in this clash that we find the titular “fraught embrace” in which altruists “long” for the right broker to connect themwith deservingprojectbeneficiaries in thevillageandbrokerswho “pine” foraltruists fromwhom they canderive livelihoods and enduring patronage. Though the romantic embrace metaphor might rub some readers the wrong way, Swidler andWatkins’s focus on the gaps in understanding between altruists and brokers is its richest contribution. The book then turns from the actors to the aims and approaches of AIDS altruism. Here, readers learn of the discordance among altruists and brokers over many issues on which they work (stigma, orphans, women’s empowerment, and harmful cultural practices), in approaches to address the epidemic (training, training, and more training!), and on how they measure what they have achieved (performance monitoring and evaluation). Chapters 7–10 weave a convincing narrative of how altruists and brokers never seem to mean or expect the same thing when discussing these aims and approaches. Even the Malawian brokers share widely divergent understandings of the aid industry and its role in fighting the epidemic, depending on which organizations they work for, whether they are urban elites or in the village, andwhere they are in the hierarchical “aid chain” Swidler andWatkins describe. Thesemanydisagreements andmisunderstandings leave theauthors “disheartened by theworkings of theAIDS enterprise” (p. 204). In response, they conclude by admonishing the aid industry (large and small) to try to better American Journal of Sociology

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令人担忧的拥抱：非洲艾滋病利他主义的浪漫与现实。作者：Ann Swidler 和 Susan Cotts Watkins。新泽西州普林斯顿：普林斯顿大学出版社，2017 年。Pp。十六+280。35.00 美元。

很少有书可以声称解决一个涉及数十亿美元、数百万生命悬而未决的社会问题，但斯威德勒和沃特金斯的 AFraught Embrace 做到了这一点。剖析了外国利他主义者和当地经纪人在阻止撒哈拉以南非洲地区艾滋病毒/艾滋病流行的援助工作中的作用，更具体地说，这本书对外国援助的研究做出了引人注目的社会学贡献——一个研究领域更多通常保留给经济学家和国际发展研究学者。Swidler 和 Watkins 将在马拉维对这些问题进行了近 20 年的研究转化为具有启发性的抗击艾滋病的外援民族志，向读者介绍了这些努力所涉及的许多行动者、目标和方法。他们首先介绍了马拉维艾滋病毒/艾滋病流行和发展的背景。接下来，他们求助于全球和本地环境中的关键参与者：利他主义者（机构和个人）和经纪人（国际/国家、地区和地方/间隙），他们笨拙地协商无数相互冲突的“幻想”以转化他们相互竞争的目标和优先事项变为现实。正是在这场冲突中，我们发现了名义上的“充满激情的拥抱”，在这种情况下，利他主义者“渴望”找到合适的经纪人，将他们与村庄中值得的项目受益者和经纪人联系起来，他们“松”了让他们从中获得生计和持久赞助的利他主义者。尽管浪漫的拥抱比喻可能会引起一些读者的误解，但斯威德勒和沃特金斯对利他主义者和经纪人之间理解差距的关注是其最大的贡献。然后，这本书从行为者转向艾滋病利他主义的目标和方法。在这里，读者了解到利他主义者和经纪人在他们工作的许多问题（污名、孤儿、妇女赋权和有害的文化习俗）、应对流行病的方法（培训、培训和更多培训！）上的不一致，以及关于他们如何衡量他们所取得的成就（绩效监控和评估）。第 7 章至第 10 章编织了一个令人信服的叙述，说明在讨论这些目标和方法时，利他主义者和经纪人似乎从不意味着或期望相同的事情。即使是马拉维经纪人，对援助行业及其在抗击疫情中的作用也有着广泛的不同理解，这取决于他们为哪些组织工作，无论他们是城市精英还是乡村，以及他们在分级“援助链”中的位置 Swidler 和 Watkins 描述。这些许多分歧和误解使作者“对艾滋病事业的运作感到沮丧”（第 204 页）。作为回应，他们最后告诫援助行业（大大小小的）努力改善美国社会学杂志