To browse Academia. Shaped around the stories of one extended family, their friends, neighbours, and community, Pandemic Kinship provides an intimate portrait of everyday life in Botswana's time of AIDS. It challenges assumptions about a 'crisis of care' unfolding in the wake of the pandemic, showing that care - like other aspects of Tswana kinship - is routinely in crisis, and that the creative ways families navigate such crises make them kin.
In Setswana, conflict and crisis are glossed as dikgang, and negotiating dikgang is an ethical practice that generates and reorients kin relations over time. Governmental and non-governmental organisations often misread the creativity of crisis, intervening in ways that may prove more harmful than the problems they set out to solve. Moving between family discussions, community events, and the daily work of orphan care projects and social work offices, Pandemic Kinship provides provocative insights into how we manage change in pandemic times.
It argues that conjugal relationships are transformed into kin relation- ships 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 β and for both, recognition is key to self-making. 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 β 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.
Government agencies, local and transnational non-governmental organisations NGOs and donors alike prioritise assistance to families, whose breakdown is assumed to be both the primary cause and inevitable outcome of the epidemic. At the same time, intervening agencies themselves seem to be animated by discourses and practices of kinship. Tswana families, however, evade and disrupt these efforts, inverting their hierarchies and asserting different criteria for and distinctions between the political and the domestic.
