Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the ways families manage narratives of illness and death in Botswana’s time of AIDS. It argues that the process of telling AIDS produces and negotiates crisis – and thereby reproduces kinship; and it questions how the retellings of NGOs and anthropologists affect this process.

Paper long abstract:

Botswana has sustained one of the world's worst AIDS epidemics - a long-standing public health crisis, 'orphan crisis', and 'crisis of care'. Catastrophic family breakdown is taken as both cause and effect of these crises. In this paper, I seek to reframe such 'crises' in terms of intersecting narratives and narrative strategies. By telling the story of one woman's HIV-infection, illness, and death from AIDS - told to me, in fragments and speculations, by several family members over several years - I trace patterns of sharing and silence, intimacy and distance, memory and forgetting, which shape the everyday, lived experience of family. I suggest that these tellings map intergenerational roles and relationships, and intersect critically with questions of care and personhood. They also produce, contain, and negotiate the crisis that AIDS represents for the family - and in doing so, reproduce the family itself. In this telling, I argue, family narratives have something unexpected to tell us about what crisis is, how it is lived, and what it creates.

The same story is told in sharply divergent terms, to different audiences and ends, by local orphan care NGOs. What are the implications of these retellings for family narratives, and the kinship dynamics they underpin? My telling of the story, too, is very different from the way it was told to me. I explore the consequences of the radical retellings that ethnographic writing requires, and compare both retellings to assess the suitability of ethnographic research and writing to the telling of crisis tales.