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Papers by Bianca Dahl
Botswana has the world's highest rate of orphans, primarily as a result of HIV and AIDS. National... more Botswana has the world's highest rate of orphans, primarily as a result of HIV and AIDS. National response policies include a range of material resources given to relatives caring for parentless children. The insertion of financial incentive into kinship obligations has transformed younger orphans into valuable assets, leading some relatives (at least allegedly) to compete for the " right " to house them, and causing moral ambivalence among the public. Yet as orphans reach legal adulthood, the cessation of social services and poor opportunities for wage labour alter relations with relatives in unexpected ways. In this article, I explore how the ranks of meaningful kin appear to both swell and shrink around youth ageing out of their " orphan " status. Based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Botswana between 2003 and 2013, these case studies expose significant labour expended among families in policing categories of personhood like greedy relatives, needy orphans, and economically stagnant youth. I show how kinship relations become affectively populated through moral discourses – and how these discourses in turn provide pathways for new forms of claims-making, even for the supplanting of " verifiable " kin by less " traditionally " legitimate forms of relatedness – ultimately reshaping the very practice of kinship in rural Botswana.
As the specter of HIV looms in the background, Botswana's industry of orphan-focused aid interven... more As the specter of HIV looms in the background, Botswana's industry of orphan-focused aid interventions reflects deep-seated anxieties about girls' bodies, health, sexuality, and morality. As foreign NGO staff lament "patriarchal" norms that supposedly leave orphaned girls culturally and economically ill-equipped to refuse advances from older men, these organizations seek new ways to liberate orphans from underage sexual relationships. I trace how one NGO attempted to render sugar daddies unnecessary by directly giving girls the gifts a boyfriend would provide, drawing on human rights and empowerment discourses. However, many orphans began to appropriate these NGO resources in order to attract even wealthier boyfriends, aggressively pursuing age-unequal relationships using the very tools the NGO provided to fight them. While tales of failed intervention are commonly represented in development studies as evidence of either "culture clash" between foreign aid and local customs, or as the "unintended consequences" of aid, this article argues that such explanations fail to address the competing and coalescing moralities that motivated the girls' behavior. By recognizing their actions as efforts to manipulate multiple moral codes that are at play during the HIV epidemic, I suggest that we may reach a better grasp of the inner lives of aid's targets and gain fresh perspectives on the intimate sociopolitical effects of intervention.
Cultural Anthropology, Nov 2014
The iconography of the African AIDS orphan, captured in National Geographic–style images of half-... more The iconography of the African AIDS orphan, captured in National Geographic–style images of half-starved toddlers with distended bellies, inspires humanitarian aid for the continent. In Botswana, stereotypes underlying both foreign-funded and governmental programs for orphaned children—which imply that orphans are underfed and underloved—initially resonated with Tswana people’s anxieties that neglect by overburdened kin results in parentless children going hungry. However, during the past decade international feeding projects began to evolve into elaborate day-care complexes in which village orphans gained exclusive access to swimming pools, DVDs, trendy clothing, and daily meat rations. This article traces the shifting moral semiotics of orphans’ fat and skinny bodies, explaining why new discourses protesting the overfattening of orphans arose in a southeastern village. Metaphors of fat and feeding have become a scale on which the excesses of humanitarian aid and the perceived shortcomings of local kinship practices are weighed. A new kind of “politics of the belly” calls into question relations of patronage around metaphors of fleshiness and dependence on foreign support. In the process, contestations over children’s skinny and fat bodies lead to reconfigurations of the idea of orphanhood.
In 2007, the families of several HIV-positive children in a southeastern Botswana village complai... more In 2007, the families of several HIV-positive children in a southeastern Botswana village complained that they were suffering increased stigma in the wake of national successes at preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Alluding to the government’s apparent eradication of ‘natural’ pathways of infection to infants, many villagers began alleging that the existing population of sick children must therefore have contracted the virus through unnatural means, such as witchcraft. This article probes the relationship between the notion of stigma and neighbours’ gossip about witchcraft. According to ethnographic evidence across Africa, invoking witchcraft has been a common means for HIV-positive people to lessen the stigma of infection, deflecting blame for sickness away from their (potentially immoral) behaviour and on to malevolent agents. In contrast, the case studies in this article instead entail gossip about witchcraft that was consistently refuted by families of sick children, who felt this aetiology contributed to their child’s marginalisation. The article contends that neighbours’ gossip was not simply concerned with jealousy or deflection of blame – the predominant foci of ethnography on the occult. Instead, these cases direct analytical attention toward people’s ambivalent sentiments and anxieties about care that are also expressed through speculation about witches, in which villagers strive to morally orient themselves toward children whose sickness is more profoundly disturbing than that of adults.
The “Failures of Culture”: Christianity, Kinship, and Moral Discourses about Orphans during Botswana’s AIDS Crisis, 2009
In the midst of Botswana’s HIV epidemic, moral discourses about the provision of care for the nat... more In the midst of Botswana’s HIV epidemic, moral discourses about the provision of care for the nation’s 100,000-plus orphaned children encapsulate Tswana people’s most fun- damental anxieties about the effects of AIDS. This article examines a shifting relationship between popular narratives about the supposed shortcomings of Tswana “culture” and widely proliferating assertions that Christian love can provide a more successful moral paradigm for the care of orphans. As Tswana people increasingly draw on a Christian framework to imagine alternative approaches to caring for needy children, they are responding to profound dislocations in the material and demographic foundations of their society. By tracing these moral claims and their transformation over time, this paper illuminates the changing context of social reproduction during Botswana’s AIDS crisis.
Teaching Documents by Bianca Dahl
Three times this semester (at least once by the end of week 6) you should write a concise critica... more Three times this semester (at least once by the end of week 6) you should write a concise critical response to at least one of the week's assigned readings. These response papers should be 3 pages, double-spaced, 1-inch margins, Times New Roman, 12-point font. This response is due at the beginning of discussion section in the same week that the relevant reading was assigned.
Botswana has the world's highest rate of orphans, primarily as a result of HIV and AIDS. National... more Botswana has the world's highest rate of orphans, primarily as a result of HIV and AIDS. National response policies include a range of material resources given to relatives caring for parentless children. The insertion of financial incentive into kinship obligations has transformed younger orphans into valuable assets, leading some relatives (at least allegedly) to compete for the " right " to house them, and causing moral ambivalence among the public. Yet as orphans reach legal adulthood, the cessation of social services and poor opportunities for wage labour alter relations with relatives in unexpected ways. In this article, I explore how the ranks of meaningful kin appear to both swell and shrink around youth ageing out of their " orphan " status. Based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Botswana between 2003 and 2013, these case studies expose significant labour expended among families in policing categories of personhood like greedy relatives, needy orphans, and economically stagnant youth. I show how kinship relations become affectively populated through moral discourses – and how these discourses in turn provide pathways for new forms of claims-making, even for the supplanting of " verifiable " kin by less " traditionally " legitimate forms of relatedness – ultimately reshaping the very practice of kinship in rural Botswana.
As the specter of HIV looms in the background, Botswana's industry of orphan-focused aid interven... more As the specter of HIV looms in the background, Botswana's industry of orphan-focused aid interventions reflects deep-seated anxieties about girls' bodies, health, sexuality, and morality. As foreign NGO staff lament "patriarchal" norms that supposedly leave orphaned girls culturally and economically ill-equipped to refuse advances from older men, these organizations seek new ways to liberate orphans from underage sexual relationships. I trace how one NGO attempted to render sugar daddies unnecessary by directly giving girls the gifts a boyfriend would provide, drawing on human rights and empowerment discourses. However, many orphans began to appropriate these NGO resources in order to attract even wealthier boyfriends, aggressively pursuing age-unequal relationships using the very tools the NGO provided to fight them. While tales of failed intervention are commonly represented in development studies as evidence of either "culture clash" between foreign aid and local customs, or as the "unintended consequences" of aid, this article argues that such explanations fail to address the competing and coalescing moralities that motivated the girls' behavior. By recognizing their actions as efforts to manipulate multiple moral codes that are at play during the HIV epidemic, I suggest that we may reach a better grasp of the inner lives of aid's targets and gain fresh perspectives on the intimate sociopolitical effects of intervention.
Cultural Anthropology, Nov 2014
The iconography of the African AIDS orphan, captured in National Geographic–style images of half-... more The iconography of the African AIDS orphan, captured in National Geographic–style images of half-starved toddlers with distended bellies, inspires humanitarian aid for the continent. In Botswana, stereotypes underlying both foreign-funded and governmental programs for orphaned children—which imply that orphans are underfed and underloved—initially resonated with Tswana people’s anxieties that neglect by overburdened kin results in parentless children going hungry. However, during the past decade international feeding projects began to evolve into elaborate day-care complexes in which village orphans gained exclusive access to swimming pools, DVDs, trendy clothing, and daily meat rations. This article traces the shifting moral semiotics of orphans’ fat and skinny bodies, explaining why new discourses protesting the overfattening of orphans arose in a southeastern village. Metaphors of fat and feeding have become a scale on which the excesses of humanitarian aid and the perceived shortcomings of local kinship practices are weighed. A new kind of “politics of the belly” calls into question relations of patronage around metaphors of fleshiness and dependence on foreign support. In the process, contestations over children’s skinny and fat bodies lead to reconfigurations of the idea of orphanhood.
In 2007, the families of several HIV-positive children in a southeastern Botswana village complai... more In 2007, the families of several HIV-positive children in a southeastern Botswana village complained that they were suffering increased stigma in the wake of national successes at preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Alluding to the government’s apparent eradication of ‘natural’ pathways of infection to infants, many villagers began alleging that the existing population of sick children must therefore have contracted the virus through unnatural means, such as witchcraft. This article probes the relationship between the notion of stigma and neighbours’ gossip about witchcraft. According to ethnographic evidence across Africa, invoking witchcraft has been a common means for HIV-positive people to lessen the stigma of infection, deflecting blame for sickness away from their (potentially immoral) behaviour and on to malevolent agents. In contrast, the case studies in this article instead entail gossip about witchcraft that was consistently refuted by families of sick children, who felt this aetiology contributed to their child’s marginalisation. The article contends that neighbours’ gossip was not simply concerned with jealousy or deflection of blame – the predominant foci of ethnography on the occult. Instead, these cases direct analytical attention toward people’s ambivalent sentiments and anxieties about care that are also expressed through speculation about witches, in which villagers strive to morally orient themselves toward children whose sickness is more profoundly disturbing than that of adults.
The “Failures of Culture”: Christianity, Kinship, and Moral Discourses about Orphans during Botswana’s AIDS Crisis, 2009
In the midst of Botswana’s HIV epidemic, moral discourses about the provision of care for the nat... more In the midst of Botswana’s HIV epidemic, moral discourses about the provision of care for the nation’s 100,000-plus orphaned children encapsulate Tswana people’s most fun- damental anxieties about the effects of AIDS. This article examines a shifting relationship between popular narratives about the supposed shortcomings of Tswana “culture” and widely proliferating assertions that Christian love can provide a more successful moral paradigm for the care of orphans. As Tswana people increasingly draw on a Christian framework to imagine alternative approaches to caring for needy children, they are responding to profound dislocations in the material and demographic foundations of their society. By tracing these moral claims and their transformation over time, this paper illuminates the changing context of social reproduction during Botswana’s AIDS crisis.
Three times this semester (at least once by the end of week 6) you should write a concise critica... more Three times this semester (at least once by the end of week 6) you should write a concise critical response to at least one of the week's assigned readings. These response papers should be 3 pages, double-spaced, 1-inch margins, Times New Roman, 12-point font. This response is due at the beginning of discussion section in the same week that the relevant reading was assigned.