The "Failures of Culture": Christianity, Kinship, and Moral Discourses about Orphans during Botswana's AIDS Crisis

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 fundamental 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.