Time, Space and Death in Familiar Places: New York's Lower East Side in a Time of HIV/AIDS

Abstract

My aim in this article is to develop a pragmatic method to explore and understand the lived immediacy of HIV/AIDS by considering how subjectivity, experience, and memory emerge as part of people's practical activity and engagement with their surroundings. For William James, pragmatism finds its origins in the Greek word *πρᾶγμα* and its reference to action, practice, and movement. This highlights how our ongoing interaction with, and consciousness of, the world is in a constant process of differentiation: an ever-changing stream that constitutes our experience and being from moment to moment. In response, the article details an attempt to develop a pragmatic and performative ethnographic context for understanding the emergent senses of self and subjective realms of emotion and memory that arise through people’s ongoing practical activities and engagements with their familiar material surroundings.