Overview

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.

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9781009150224

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Reviews

'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

'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

Author Information

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.

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