Legibility and health management: ethnographic notes on the municipal committee on mortality for AIDS of Porto Alegre

Abstract

We discuss how the first AIDS Mortality Committee created at Brazil works based on the theoretical framework provided by Scott’s concept of legibility. Based on ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews, from fieldwork carried out in 2014-2015, we analyze both the process of governance and of policy creation within this newly create institutional space. The Committee members, through collaborative relations and sometimes disagreements, use different tools to map and document those processes that resulted in a premature and avoidable AIDS death in Porto Alegre (RS). The Committee formulates recommendations and suggestions based on those patients’ itineraries who have become legible – despite being patients who are at State margins. Those recommendations center on how the health services could improve, but fall short of discussing direct and immediate actions that could change those social conditions that have put these subjects who have died at the margins.