Deborah Durham

Associate Professor of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology and Sociology
Sweet Briar College

Articles | Unpublished Work | Books in Progress | Research in Botswana

I have done research since the 1980s in Botswana, in southern Africa. Currently I am researching youth in Botswana, and exploring the ways in which youth have been conceptualized and studied in anthropology as a whole. My first research project, upon which I continue to work, asked how people realize a cultural identity in the context of strong liberal democracy and the cultural dominance of a different ethnic group. I lived with Herero people, who had fled German South West Africa (now Namibia) in 1904, to explore how they sustained a sense of being Herero at the same time that they embraced Botswana citizenship and considered themselves full members of the nation. I stayed with Herero in the "urban village" of Mahalapye, located in the more densely settled eastern part of Botswana along the main north-south rail line and roadway. I describe my research more thoroughly below.

But more briefly, in articles and chapters I've published, I've written on:

Herero dress in Botswana and what it means to them, in "Predicaments of Dress: Polyvalency and the Ironies of a Cultural Identity," American Ethnologist 26, 2 (1999):389-411. In the article, I explain how dress bears a variety of meanings, and that it may mean contradictory things even to a person wearing that dress. Some of these contradictions are lodged in the various ways in which meaning becomes bound up with the dress: through the physicality of the dress, through national political issues, through perspectives on history and global relations.

Funerals, sentiments, and the public sphere, in "Love and Jealousy in the Space of Death," Ethnos 67, 2 (2002):155-180, and also in a piece I jointly wrote with Fred Klaits, an anthropologist who had worked with a Tswana church in the capital city, "Funerals and the Public Space of Mutuality in Botswana," Journal of Southern African Studies 28, 4 (2002):773-791. In the first I analyze funerals as a site where very basic premises of how people are oriented towards one another are foregrounded: sentiments such as love, jealousy, and selfish desire (these sentiments have their own significance in Botswana). In the second, Fred Klaits and I contrast the notion of a public sphere as a space of rational discourse (a concept debated in European history) with a public space in which sentimental connections are key in developing community and political society. To the right are three women dressed up (and in Herero dress, which these women did not wear every day) for a funeral.

The bureaucratic imagination and how it may be borrowed to articulate forms of identity foreign to the original bureaucratic ones - in this case how passes or passports, intended to locate people in bounded areas as individuals much like other individuals there, can be reinvented to articulate an ever-expanding form of transnational relatedness that delocalizes people but also promotes highly individualized autobiographies. The picture at left shows a passport and insignia used by Otjiserandu, a Herero commemorative and burial society.This chapter will appear soon as "Passports and Persons: The Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges in Southern Africa" in Clifton Crais, ed., The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination (Heinemann).

I have also written chapters on citizenship and minority identity in the postcolonial situation, and on how a broader idea of "civil society" than that used by political scientists helps us recognize the strength of political life in Botswana, in "Uncertain Citizens: The New Intercalary Subject in Postcolonial Botswana," in Richard Werbner, ed., Postcolonial Subjectivities in Africa (Zed Books, 2002),

and in "Civil Lives: Leadership and Accomplishment in Botswana," in John and Jean Comaroff, eds., Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa (University of Chicago Press, 1999). The photos at the right show the headman of Herero Ward in Mahalapye listening to a resident's problems, and the Herero Chief in his office in the main Mahalapye chief's court, which is staffed by two or more subordinate "tribal authorities."

I've written on how what seems like begging - or asking for things - in Botswana, may be part of different kinds of interaction. Sometimes, asking for things signals that the asker considers herself an independent equal of the person she addresses, and not an unequal (poorer, dependent) person. Recognizing that requests start from different kinds of relations between people - and that requests may be attempting to define those relations - is important for anthropological ideas about reciprocity (or exchange). The article is called "Soliciting Gifts and Negotiating Agency: The Spirit of Asking in Botswana," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute n.s. 1 (1995):111-128. The picture to the left shows a gathering celebrating the opening of a new store, at which people were asked to give money to the store owners.

I have been writing recently on youth as a social category and form of experience. I put together a double issue of Anthropological Quarterly on the theme of "Youth and the Social Imagination in Africa" for which I wrote an "Introduction" (AQ, vol. 73, nos. 3&4). I have several manuscripts in various stages, on youth in Botswana: "Just Playing: Choirs, Bureaucracy, and the Work of Youth in Botswana," which is in a collection edited by Alcinda Honwana and Filip de Boeck titled Children and Youth as Emerging Categories in Postcolonial Africa, "Mysterious Disappearance: Youth as a Social Deictic in Botswana," which I am revising for submission to a journal, and "Making Youth Citizens," which I presented at the AAA meetings in 2001, and which is destined for a book I am editing with Jennifer Cole titled Global Ages: Age in the Context of Globalization. At the right are members of the Herero Youth Association in one of their choir uniforms.

I've also written an entry on "Botswana" for the encyclopedia Countries and their Cultures, edited by Melvin Ember and Carol R. Ember (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2001), and a chapter titled "The Lady in the Logo: Tribal Dress and Western Culture" in Dress and Ethnicity, edited by Joanne B. Eicher (Berg Publishers, 1995).

An early paper by Deborah Durham and James Fernandez discusses how metonymic imagery (the use of a part to refer to a whole, for example) is particularly apt and powerful in political relationships of inequality. This paper, "Tropical Dominions: The Figurative Struggle over Domains of Belonging and Apartness in Africa" is in Beyond Metaphor, edited by James Fernandez (Stanford University Press, 1991).

I have other papers in the works. One, titled "Did You Bathe This Morning? Baths, Dirt and Morality in Botswana," looks at how bathing figures complexly into domestic economies and gender relations, and also into ideas about appropriate citizenship and what kind of person you are in Botswana. Women largely are expected to prepare men's baths, as they are expected to do many of the household activities that underwrite people's entry into the broader political and economic world. But in that world, frequent bathing is seen as an important commitment to on-going self-making and self-improvement. Another paper is part of the book project on Global Ages that I describe below. In it (it is called "Making Youth Citizens: Empowerment and Disempowerment in Botswana", I talk about how government and non-government youth development schemes draw upon the idea of "empowering" youth as related to concepts of citizenship and that state in Botswana today. I also discuss how these empowerment schemes are met with older ideas of youth and power, on the one hand, and how they are taken up in contested forms on the other, as young people seek to locate a new social space for youth in a rapidly changing society. And in "From Hot Singers to Deep Song: Songs, Choirs and Community for Herero of Botswana", which is a paper written for the African Studies Association annual meeting in 2002, I explore how the circulation of singers and songs in choral groups in Botswana builds overlapping communities, which are sometimes at odds with one another but often drawn together.

Books in Progress

I now have three books-in-progress. Hopefully all three will be finished soon!

One is titled "Village of Devilthorns, Village of Lights" and describes the ways in which Herero people of Mahalapye negotiate spaces for their cultural identity, at the same time that they embrace the national identity of citizens of Botswana, where that citizenship is shaped by the dominant Tswana cultural history and by strongly promoted concepts that originated in Europe, including liberalism. I describe the material of the book below, in the section on my research in Botswana. The picture at the left captures, to me, some of the contrasts of the book: the two women are sisters, and one is wearing "traditional Herero dress" while the other is in a "Tswana style" outfit.

The book's title is made up of two terms that have been used to refer to Mahalapye by Herero and others, terms which highlight some of the conflicts that Herero feel. "Village of Devilthorns" is borrowed from one of the many praise-names Herero have for Mahalapye. Many Herero across southern Africa make praise-names for their villages and settlements. In Mahalapye, there was a revival of references to them in the mid-1990s. One of the lead praises was to call Mahalapye "etundu rozohongwe". An etundu is an abandoned settlement, usually the complex of houses around a cattlepost. Ozohongwe are the small spiny seeds called "devilthorns" in English; the plants rapidly take over abandoned settlements, and the seeds are painful to step on and were a contant painful annoyance to my husband and myself in our house and poorly-swept yard. The other half of the title comes from the term "kwa diponeng" - a colloquial reference to Mahalapye popular across Botswana in the late 1970s through the 1980s (after which it fell out of use in favor of "Mafia"). Kwa diponeng means, in the Tswana language, "at the place of lights" and refers to the train station that promoted the small villages growth, and the development of the government subdistrict offices, both of which were electrified and signalled the development of a modern town at the heart of the more traditional village. This electric town center, now filled with shops and banks and other businesses, lies on the main north-south road and is a popular stopping place for food and drink for travellers going places. Until a major improvement project to the downtown that took place in 1999, Mahalapye presented itself to these travellers as rather a dirty, unattractive place, but well lit and with shops.

My Research on Herero

Botswana has had a stable multiparty democratic government since its independence in 1966, and is notable for its rapidly growing economy. The growing economy, and the large diamond mines, whose profits have supported schools, health care, and development initiatives, are one reason for the country's stability. But many people continue to think that Botswana's stability and success with democracy are based on a homogeneous Tswana population. In fact the country is composed of people of a wide variety of ethnic and cultural backgrounds, and Tswana may not even be a majority. Nonetheless the perception that Botswana is predominantly Tswana is supported by the dominance of various features of Tswana history and practices, in particular the special recognition given to Tswana chiefs in a House of Chiefs and the use of Setswana (the Tswana language; the word also refers to Tswana culture/practices) as the national language.

Minority groups in Botswana had protested this situation since the 1970s, and in 1999 one group had lodged a lawsuit against the country's constitution for its nondemocratic practices. Herero in Mahalapye were very ambivalent about these developments; while some embraced the idea that Herero could gain formal recognition in Botswana, others were uncomfortable with the idea. My research examines this ambivalence.

To be continued....
In the future, you will see descriptions of my book-in-progress, Village of Devilthorns/Village Lights, and other works-in-progress; acknowledgments to various institutions that have supported my research; and links to courses I teach, and to interesting webpages on Botswana.