Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ‘crisis of care’ provoked by Botswana’s AIDS epidemic. It argues that crisis is in fact constitutive of kinship, and that families are uniquely well-placed to absorb the effects of AIDS; but that government and NGO intervention in families disrupts this adaptive capacity.

Paper long abstract:

Botswana struggles with one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics, frequently cast as a 'crisis of care', an 'orphan crisis', an economic crisis, and even a threat to national survival. Catastrophic family breakdown is taken as both cause and effect of these crises. In response, government and non-governmental organisations have prioritised substantial interventionist programming in families; yet rates of infection remain unchanged, and programmes are beset by frustration and failure.

This paper argues that conflict, crisis and its irresolution are in fact constitutive dynamics of kinship for the Tswana. It shows that the crises generated by AIDS map closely on to these ordinary crises of kinship - suggesting that families are especially well-equipped to cope with the problems posed by the epidemic. Finally, it argues that agencies seeking to alleviate the effects of AIDS often assume very different attitudes towards the dynamics of conflict in kinship, thereby creating new crises of their own - and threatening to refigure kinship practice in a much more enduring, problematic way than the epidemic itself.