2019
DOI: 10.1017/s0001972018000694
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‘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 m… Show more

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Cited by 9 publications
(11 citation statements)
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References 29 publications
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“…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).…”
Section: Hierarchies Of Marriagementioning
confidence: 99%
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“…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).…”
Section: Hierarchies Of Marriagementioning
confidence: 99%
“…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).…”
Section: Conjugal Transformationsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…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).…”
Section: People and Their Carsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…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.…”
Section: Upper Middle-income Materialismmentioning
confidence: 99%
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