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190 seven Did You Bathe This Morning? Baths and Morality in Botswana Deborah Durham ‘‘Did you bathe this morning?’’ The two Herero1 girls laughed, taking a break from their morning household work to lean over the compound fence and chat. Their arms and legs were coated with dust and the residues of sweat and oils smudged their faces: they may have bathed earlier themselves, but it didn’t show at mid-morning. I suspected the teenage girls were being impudent , ‘‘playing with me,’’ as children in the urban village of Mahalapye sometimes did. They were also perhaps curious about me as an American. Americans and Europeans were reputed, in villages in Botswana, to be surprisingly indifferent to bathing and cleaning. I had heard stories of Peace Corps volunteers who had been observed doing laundry by swishing clothes around a tub with a stick (instead of diligently scrubbing them section by section through multiple washes and rinses). I had been asked about the slovenly dress of European development workers and tourists—unironed clothes, lack of seemly underclothing, and dress appropriate to housework or play worn in offices and downtown. And people had repeatedly let me know that whereas they themselves , Africans, bathed twice a day, many whites seemed to bathe much less often—sometimes not even daily. Did You Bathe This Morning? 191 At the time the girls’ question seemed mostly amusing for inverting the common Western stereotype that Africans are incorrigibly dirty—contextually dirty from dusty villages or tropical environments burgeoning with microflora and mud, and inherently dirty by virtue of race or moral temperament. I didn’t write the encounter into my fieldnotes. And yet the question remains vivid in my memory, as too does the experience of bathing. As I fell into the routines of the village, including the ritual of daily baths, bathed in the company of others on trips or in the high-energy preparations before a funeral, watched baths being prepared in city and village, and listened to stories of the bathed and unbathed, I came to see baths as intricately woven into the social ethos of civic and domestic life. Who bathes, who doesn’t, when baths are taken and how are bound up with expectations of civic personhood and the political context of liberal democracy in Botswana. Baths are also at the center of domestic moral economies. As the labor involved in preparing a bath enters into negotiations of loving care and anxious spousal tensions, baths inscribe domestic asymmetries into the larger civic moralities of who has, and who has not, bathed. The sympathetic interdependencies and labor inequalities within households are the background against which baths are seen to be independent acts of selfdevelopment by individuals in the public domain. Household and gender inequalities, and conceptualizations of bodily condition as intersubjective, are the contested material that reveals the hidden inequalities in civic ideologies of individual responsibility, liberalist egalitarianism, and the possibilities for self-improvement through hard work. Hidden and revealed, baths are one lens through which social marginalization and civic inequalities make sense to participants and so are perpetuated and accepted. In asking me whether I had bathed, the girls were probing to see what kind of person I was. Bathing and Dirt When the young girls asked me whether I’d bathed, or when a man commented that old people don’t bathe often, they were not distinguishing between categories of people who are dirty or clean. They were talking about bathing, not dirt; about those who undertake to make themselves clean or else do not do so. While people do talk about themselves or others as washably dirty (in Herero, o nandova, s/he is dirty), and while there is a sense that some bodies are inherently more prone to become dirty, baths are not simply about dirt. Although school textbooks preached hygiene, such that bathing was part of a constant battle against dirt and germs, the village baths seemed less about the need to keep dirt always at bay than about a moral and civic personhood, about making oneself into a kind of person through the act and consequences of bathing. The young women who teased me, like people of all ages that I knew in the village,2 plunged without hesitation into dirt and dirty activities. They scrubbed pots blackened by fires, emptied chamber pots into stinking decrepit latrines at the corner of compounds, kneaded manure and dirt into [18.221.41.214] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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