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Popular talk and silence about AIDS in Botswana have been shaped by survivors' efforts to manage the ways in which they remember relationships arising from procreation. The emotional force of death induces the immediately bereaved and wider communities of survivors to recollect who has shared blood with whom through sexual intercourse. Such acts of remembering may have decisive repercussions on relations of kinship, marriage and mutual support. For Batswana, ‘remembering’ is a form of acting as well as feeling, possessing a capacity to shape moral conduct for the long term. In the context of death, local debates about what and how to remember reflect contested endeavours to make relations based on blood persist beyond a person's passing. Focusing on a particular set of local perspectives on the morality of remembering, the article shows that members of an Apostolic church in Gaborone encourage one another to remember in a manner reflecting distinctive methods of maintaining relations of kinship and care.

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A common trope in recent Black popular literature compares pastors and pimps on the grounds that both collect money from their dependents. We frame this comparison in terms of regimes of value operating in U.S. inner cities, where the commercial economy and legal system commonly fail to affirm the personhood of the racialized poor. Drawing on fieldwork in Buffalo, New York, we show that in eliciting tithes and protection money, pastors and pimps combine care and exploitation in ways that assert the value of their own and others’ lives against heavy odds. We extend the concept of “human economy” developed by David Graeber to these transactions, arguing that pimps and pastors construe the money they gather in terms of its power to recognize the value of the lives of givers, askers, and receivers.

Drawing on an ethnographic description of hymns, prayers, and requests for material goods among Apostolic Christians in Botswana, this article considers how styles of asking bring aspects of the person to the attention of divine and human others. Apostolic believers regard personal well-being under circumstances of vulnerability as hinging in part on styles of prayer and asking, which entail forms of both self-assertion and engagement with the personhood of others. Experiences of vulnerability compel Apostolics' awareness of how partible aspects of their persons, including the voice, move among them so as ideally to build up well-being. Thus prayers to God as the ultimate source of well-being frame persons in aesthetic terms so that they may be well apprehended by divine and human others. In light of Mauss's theory of the gift, the article considers how verbal requests can foster well-being by conveying aspects of the person to divine and human hearers in ways that assert personal standing while sustaining moral consideration. An avenue is presented for comparative inquiry into the ways in which asking opens spaces of agency and obligation in religious and humanitarian discourses.