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| Title: | The Widow in Blue: Blood and the Morality of Remembering in Botswana's Time of AIDS |
| Author: | Klaits, Frederick |
| Year: | 2005 |
| Periodical: | Africa: Journal of the International African Institute |
| Volume: | 75 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Pages: | 46-62 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Botswana |
| Subjects: | memory sexuality mourning AIDS Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Health and Nutrition Religion and Witchcraft Health, Nutrition, and Medicine Cultural Roles |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/3556716 |
| Abstract: | 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. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French. [Journal abstract] |
