Kartini Day festivities in honor of the national heroine of Indonesia.

Karen A. Kroeger: Gender, Sexuality and AIDS Knowledge in Indonesia

"Neighborhood girls spread AIDS" (graffiti painted by construction workers). Three generations of Indonesian women.

My research interests include the social construction of public problems, medical anthropology and the relationship between global and local forms of knowledge. My dissertation project examined the social construction of AIDS and sexuality in Surabaya, E ast Java. I used participant observation and interviews to gather information on perceptions of men's and women's sexualities, ideas about AIDS risk and prevention, and explanatory models for HIV/AIDS. Fieldwork was conducted during a 17-month period in which I lived in an Indonesian household. I conducted formal interviews with nearly 200 women from three groups: housewives, female sex workers, and unmarried university students. I also gathered ethnog raphic data through daily interaction with health care workers, brothel managers, policy makers, and activists. My research was funded by IIE/Fulbright, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, National Science Foundation, and the Southeast Asia Council. Language training was supported by Foreign Language Area Scholarships. Since my return, I have been part of a team investigating the social aspects of a syphilis epidemic in St. Louis, and I have also conducted research in the Bosnian refugee community. In late 1998, I will return to Indonesia for two months in order to work with an international NGO on HIV/AIDS prevention programs aimed at urban street children in Jakarta.