Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Author’s interview with Malau Alita Seati. 2. In approaching the history of disability from this perspective I am indebted to Margaret Lock’s model of “local biology” and Caroline Bledsoe’s work on bodily “contingency .” Lock, Encounters with Aging; Bledsoe, Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa. 3. Setswana, like all Bantu languages, utilizes a system of pre¤xes to classify nouns. Thus, Botswana is the country (or the collective noun of all Tswana), Motswana is a single Tswana person, Batswana more than one person, Setswana the language and the ways and customs of the Batswana, and Tswana the root. “Tswana” is often used in place of “Setswana ” or “Batswana.” In addition, the reader will sometimes encounter the pre¤x “Ga,” which indicates that the word is a location: for example, “Gakwena” for the place of the Bakwena. Throughout the bookI use the term “community”in both geographic and identitybased ways. The meanings should be apparent from the context. 4. I consider dis¤gurement (or “aesthetic impairments”) to be a form of impairment because it can impair one’s self-presentation. The impairment is driven by others and speaks to the nature of our physical bodies as sites and vehicles of social interaction. The term “aesthetic impairments”is from Weiss, Conditional Love; see also Dreger on “unusual anatomies ” in One of Us. 5. Scheper-Hughes and Lock, “The Mindful Body”; Jean Comaroff, Body of Power. 6. Livingston, “Recon¤guring Old Age”; Livingston, “Maintaining Local Dependencies.” 7. Karp, “Persons, Notions of,” 392. See also Jackson and Karp, eds., Personhood and Agency; Riseman, “The Person and the Life-Cycle in African Social Life and Thought”; John L. and Jean Comaroff, “On Personhood: An Anthropological Perspective from Africa.” 8. See Cassell, “The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine.” 9. See Comaroff and Roberts, Rules and Processes; see also Kuper, Kalahari Village Politics. 10. Durham, “Soliciting Gifts and Negotiating Agency”; Durham, “Civil Lives: Leadership and Accomplishment in Botswana.” See also the discussion by the Comaroffs, who make the distinction between “individuality”and “individualism,”in Comaroff and Comaroff , “On Personhood.” 11. See also Durham, “Empowering Youth: Making Youth Citizens in Botswana”; and Livingston, “Maintaining Local Dependencies.” 12. Fred Klaits calls these “housed relationships” in “Care and Kinship in an Apostolic Church during Botswana’s Time of AIDS.” 13. Cf. Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity. 14. Thomas, The Politics of the Womb, 18–19. 15. Lamb, White Saris and Sweet Mangoes. 16. Rapp, “Extra Chromosomes and Blue Tulips.” See also Dreger, One of Us; Frank, Venus on Wheels. 17. Baynton, “Disability and the Justi¤cation of Inequality in American History”; Kudlick , “Disability History.” 18. I am grateful to Simi Linton for helping me think/phrase this in such clear terms. 19. Activists and their supporters in Botswana, including myself, often use the term batho ba ba nang le bogole (persons with disabilities), but digole was the term used by most people in the late 1990s. I translate “digole” as “disabled persons,” but in certain contexts (for example, in some of the proverbs I will refer to in this book) I use “cripples” as the more accurate or appropriate translation. 20. Contemporary experiences of debility often trigger memories and conversations about various aspects of the past. Cole, Forget Colonialism? 21. See the discussion in Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam. 22. I am borrowing this term and the framework of therapy as a diachronic and heterodox process from Janzen, The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire. 23. Kleinmann, The Illness Narratives. 24. Rapp and Ginsburg, “Enabling Disability.” 25. See Davis, Enforcing Normalcy; Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies; Linton, Claiming Disability; Longmore and Umansky, eds., The New Disability History; Davis, ed., The Disability Studies Reader. For an overview, see Kudlick, “Disability History.” 26. This Euro-American emphasis is an effect of the current trends in scholarship. Most disability studies scholars appear open to and enthusiastic about broadening their ¤eld geographically and culturally. Cf. Kudlick, “Disability History.” Although four-¤fths of the world’s disabled persons live in developing countries, there is a relative dearth of humanities and social science scholarship exploring disability in non-western contexts. Important exceptions include Silla, People Are Not the Same; Kohrman, “Motorcycles for the Disabled”; Kohrman, “Why Am I Not Disabled?”; Ingstad and Whyte, eds., Disability and Culture; Holzer, Vreede, and Weigt, eds., Disability in Different Cultures; Das and Addlakha, “Disability and Domestic Citizenship.” 27. Rapp and Ginsburg, “Enabling Disability”; see also Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, 9. 28. I have...