This article explores the ways in which families are reproduced in Botswana's time of AIDS. It argues that conjugal relationships are transformed into kin relationships through a gradual process of recognition in which they become visible, spoken about and known to ever wider spheres of kin. For women, this process is often catalysed by pregnancy; for men, by marriage negotiations – and for both, recognition is key to self-making. However, every shift in recognition is risky and tenuous, even reversible, and marked by dikgang – ‘issues’, conflicts or crises – the negotiation of which is crucial to its kin- and self-making capacity. Tswana kinship and personhood, in other words, are constituted in crisis, making them both highly fraught and highly resilient. In this context, HIV becomes one of many risks entailed in intimacy and kin-making – suggesting one explanation for persistently high rates of HIV infection in Botswana, and indicating an unexpected capacity in families to absorb crises such as the AIDS epidemic.

Social distancing has been the central public health strategy for tackling the coronavirus pandemic worldwide. But the ‘Stay Home, Stay Safe’ order in the United Kingdom and the consequent closure of nurseries and schools also created an unprecedented degree of proximity within households. Based on interviews with mothers of young children in Scotland, this article provides early insight into the ways that mothers manage the forced intimacies of family life under lockdown and the opportunities they create through the innovative management of space and time. The result is a more expansive understanding of the family in contemporary Scotland and a notion of intimacy characterised as much by the necessity of distance and distinction as by proximity and mutuality.

This article examines how families tell crisis, how non-governmental organisations tell it, and what a comparison offers for ethnographers of crisis. In Botswana's time of AIDS, families tell the stories of those they've lost in collaborative, fragmented, and mediated ways. Where words have risky intersubjective effects -especially among kin -family stories both produce and contain their danger, generating selves and relationships. Tales told by orphan care NGOs draw on different language ideologies, to different ends: they focus on the crisis of AIDS, its causes and effects, to generate solutions and legitimacy -potentially disrupting family tellings. I argue that ethnographies of crisis deploy a similar, EuroAmerican, narrative logic: they focus on crisis to generate change. But this approach may obscure the lived experience of crisis, and foreclose creative response. I propose specific ways that anthropologists might experiment with 'non-crisis narrations' (Roitman 2013) instead, taking family tales as inspiration.

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