‘We are seeing things’: recognition, risk and reproducing kinship in Botswana's time of AIDS

Abstract

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.

Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense

“…The performative aspects of such instruction should give us pause, since there can be no doubt that, by the time she becomes a bride, a young Tswana woman will already have had ample opportunity to observe and understand the customary ways that women and men should behave towards each other. These may be silently conveyed and remain unarticulated as household members go about their everyday tasks (Bourdieu 1977), but are also reflected upon explicitly in the everyday negotiation of interpersonal conflict (Reece 2019).…”

“…Comaroff and Roberts 1981), molao on this reading emerges as a sort of 'ordinary ethics' (Lambek 2010) -a matter of everyday practice in ethical reflexivity and judgement, which permeates Botswana's parallel systems of customary and common law (Werbner 2014; see also Gluckman 1955). Molao is specifically oriented towards addressing disputes in ways that prioritise and protect opportunities for relational self-making (Alverson 1978;Reece 2019). But as we will see, it also emerges as a key means of making and navigating distinctions: by gender and generation, between legal forms, and between the domains of kinship and politics (McKinnon and Cannell 2013).…”

Morality in the middle: choosing cars or houses in Botswana

“…By 2017, the nowmarried sister parked her shiny new car in the family village compound; according to my storyteller, the uncles' wives were agog over the car and asked to be driven places in it. Insofar as both houses and cars are the sites of social action, they bring people together and are significant vehicles for the domestic tensions and disputes for which Botswana is so well known in anthropological literature (see Comaroff and Roberts 1981;Griffiths 1997;Reece 2019).…”

“…They are attentive, too, to the ways in which one's personhood is entangled with that of a wide array of other people, through various forms of mutuality and intersubjectivity, including shared practical activities and material exchanges, and also the effects of love, jealousy and anger (Durham 1995; 2002; Durham and Klaits 2002; Klaits 2010; Lambek and Solway 2001). The tension between personal achievement and social mutualization is both productive and a source of ongoing anxiety, because the two sides are heavily dependent on each other (see Reece 2019). The evidence of successful social interdependencies is physical well-being.…”

“…Many of the activities that characterize a house – sweeping and cleaning, bathing, doing laundry, cooking – are activities that pronounce one's caring for others and that promote their well-being. But households are also sites of personal tensions that can have dramatic effects: car accidents might be the (spiritually produced) outcome of jealousies and resentments in the household, or an angry wife might pour boiling water over her husband in his bath (see Lambek and Solway 2001; Durham 2005), or a relative who is pressed into doing too much labour might redefine herself as a servant (Reece 2019).…”