Choose the location you want to see specific content and pricing for:

Pandemic Kinship

Pandemic Kinship

Pandemic Kinship

Families, Intervention, and Social Change in Botswana's Time of AIDS
Koreen M. Reece , Universität Bayreuth, Germany
June 2022
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Adobe eBook Reader
9781009169950
$99.99
USD
Adobe eBook Reader
USD
Hardback

    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.

    • Offers an intimate account of the everyday lived experience of an extended family in Botswana's time of AIDS
    • Challenges the widespread assumption that AIDS has destroyed families, by showing how crises can create and recalibrate kin relations
    • Available as Open Access on Cambridge Core, this book will interest students and scholars of anthropology, African studies, social work, development, and the histories of pandemics and pandemic response

    Reviews & endorsements

    ‘Drawing on years of intimate involvement with a family in southeastern Botswana, Koreen Reece provides a compelling portrait of how well-intended humanitarian interventions fail to engage with local imperatives to work out conflicts among kin. This is a signal contribution to the literature on kinship and humanitarianism in southern Africa.’ Frederick Klaits, University at Buffalo

    ‘This is a beautifully written, intimate portrait of family life in the time of pandemics. With a perspective that draws on years of both ethnographic and NGO work, Koreen Reece provides an innovative analysis of Tswana kinship that demonstrates how its oft-cited ambiguity productively drives life forward.’ Jacqueline Solway, Trent University

    'In Pandemic Kinship, Reece places crisis and conflict at the center of our understanding of processes that create kinship, thereby brilliantly unsettling decades of anthropological theory on the subject. Through stunningly insightful narratives of family conflicts, she elucidates the cultural values and tensions that shape Tswana projects of kin- and self-making and demonstrates powerfully how, in the time of AIDS, these were consistently misconstrued and disrupted by the otherwise well-meaning interventions of NGOs.' Susan McKinnon, University of Virginia

    ‘Illustrating the kinds of insights that can be gleaned only from long, painstaking, meticulous participant observations, Reece provides an intimate portrait of kin and community building during the crisis of the southern African AIDS pandemic … The story is compelling, and the writing is clear and passionate, though aimed at specialized readers … Highly recommended.’ A. S. MacKinnon, Choice

    See more reviews

    Product details

    June 2022
    Adobe eBook Reader
    9781009169950
    0 pages
    This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction
    • Part I. 'Where are you from? Where are you going?': The Geographies of Kinship:
    • 1. Going up and down
    • 2. 'Ke a Aga': lorato, building
    • 3. Geographies of intervention
    • Part II. 'Who is taking care of your things?': Care, Conflict, and the Economies of Kinship:
    • 4. Children of one womb
    • 5. Taking what belongs to you
    • 6. Supplementary care
    • Part III. 'We are seeing things': Recognition, Risk, and reproducing Kinship:
    • 7. Recognising pregnancy
    • 8. Recognising marriage
    • 9. Managing recognition in a time of AIDS
    • Part IV. 'They were far family': Child circulation and the limits of Kinship:
    • 10. Far family
    • 11. Living outside
    • 12. Children in need of care
    • Part V. 'We show people we are together': Making selves, Families, Villages, and Nations:
    • 13. The village in the home: A party
    • 14. 'Lifting up culture': A homecoming
    • 15. A global family.
      Author
    • Koreen M. Reece

      Koreen M. Reece is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth. She has over fifteen years' experience working in Botswana, first as an advisor to NGO and government responses to the AIDS epidemic, and later as an anthropologist.

    Thank You

    You will receive email communication regarding the availability of this product