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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007 African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Show panel list
Care for the Dying, Care by the Dying: Redemption from Death in a Botswana Spirit Church
Panel |
15. Reconfiguring the Religion-HIV/AIDS connection: challenges and opportunities
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Paper ID | 356 |
Author(s) |
Klaits, Frederick
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Paper |
No paper submitted
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Abstract | Christian movements worldwide commonly provide believers with hopes of redemption from death, yet the forms these hopes take hinge on particular views of what people need to be redeemed from in contexts of death, dying, and bereavement. In the context of Botswana’s HIV/AIDS pandemic, churches of the spirit have adopted prominent roles in responding to lived dilemmas involving how sentiments and relationships of love may be sustained between the dying and their caregivers, as well as among the bereaved. This paper accounts for the emphasis which members of such churches place on redemption from resentment and jealousy, rather than on redemption from sinful acts of promiscuity, in terms of historical circumstances which have focused local attention in Botswana on the qualities of women’s nursing and other domestic labor. Framing these concerns in terms of the social biography of a particular church of the spirit located in Gaborone, the paper outlines the moral premises of local Christian discourses framed so as to discourage the stigmatization of AIDS sufferers in Botswana. More broadly, it suggests a framework for conceptualizing how, in the process of articulating possibilities of redemption from death, Christian movements have provided believers with diverse terms for understanding the historicity of the self in relation to others and to God.
Susan Harding’s work with evangelical Protestant movements in the U.S. shows that believers confront potential converts with images of death as intrinsically purposeless, causing them to consider how confession of sin and reconciliation to God may give meaning to their own lives and deaths. By contrast, the efforts which members of churches of the spirit in Botswana devote to prayer, healing, and consolation in the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic have been more largely geared toward reconciling survivors to one another than toward reminding them of each other’s sinfulness or providing them with a sense of God’s purposes in causing death. In Botswana as elsewhere, the severe illnesses associated with AIDS have placed extraordinary burdens on the resources of sick people and their caregivers, causing them to experience acute anxiety, sadness, frustration, and anger toward others. In this context, church members’ understandings of how to die with faith in God draw upon popular preoccupations with two sets of issues: 1) how the words spoken by a dying person and his or her caregivers may have long-term consequences for the well-being of others; and 2) how decisions to nurse the ill in particular houses and compounds turn on questions of who has been willing to look after particular persons’ well-being. Suggestions that a fatal illness has been contracted through sins of promiscuity are liable to call into question a woman’s willingness to care properly for her family, so that church members tend to discourage talk about sinfulness in sexual behavior in favor of speech intended to remind the dying, their caregivers, and survivors of their love for one another.
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