Astrid Bochow

Christian Creations of New Spaces of Sexuality, Reproduction, and Relationships in Africa: Exploring Faith and Religious Heterotopia

Abstract In many African societies today Christian churches, Pentecostals in particular, are an important source of information on sexuality, relationships, the body, and health, motivated in part by the HIV/AIDS pandemic but also related to globally circulating ideas and images that make people rethink gender relations and identities through the lens of ‘romantic love’. Contextualizing the contemporary situation in the history of Christian movements in Africa, and by applying Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, this introduction and the subsequent papers show that Christian doctrines and practices are creating social spaces of altering relational ethics, identities and gender roles that appeal especially to upwardly mobile women.

Let's talk about sex: reflections on conversations about love and sexuality in Kumasi and Endwa, Ghana

This paper recounts and reflects on conversations about love and sexuality conducted with young people in Kumasi and Endwa, Ghana. It examines the settings of these conversations – in a kinship-based household, secondary schools and Pentecostal churches – and explores young peoples reticence to talk about such matters in the light of intergenerational respect. Analysing young peoples strategies of silence and provocative speech, the paper shows that, paradoxically, schools and churches provide institutionalised spaces for young peoples subversive outspokenness that contrasts with the ethical codex of decency as the expression of hierarchical relations.

Marriages and Mobility in Akan Societies: Disconnections and Connections over Time and Space

At the Central Market in Kumasi in Ghana I befriended two women, Auntie Emi and Sister Afia, both in their mid-thirties and living apart from their husbands who were in the United States. Auntie’s husband had left her soon after they got married and the birth of their now ten-year-old son. In the first two years, he sent money but then stopped doing so and she had heard nothing for five years. The two women expressed their longing for a new husband and a second child but were faced with the situation that, as married women, they could not go out in the evening for a beer without becoming the target of gossip.

Saving and serving the nation: HIV politics and the emergence of new professional classes in Botswana

This chapter discusses the fight against HIV/AIDS in Botswana as an ongoing state-driven process of social differentiation that has led to the consolidation of a new class of technocrats. With reference to the literature on humanitarian interventions, Bochow shows how international agencies forge new, sometimes informal, job economies that offer novel opportunities to educated professionals. The rise of HIV/AIDS activism among educated female professionals shows that the success of the country’s government in pooling foreign and domestic resources to fight the disease has been important to social differentiation. Stigmatization of HIV-positive individuals complicated the emergent structures and identities of middle classness in Botswana—they found their status associated with neediness and backwardness, and experienced various forms of social exclusion. This has inspired forms of ‘helping’ that build on existing social differences between the ‘fortunate’ and ‘unfortunate’, corresponding to a ‘sociology of pity’ that reshapes the class identity of those who help (Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Participation in the counter-HIV struggle thus contributes to a class-like status beyond one’s actual class position.

Introduction: new ethical fields and the implicitness/explicitness of ethics in Africa

Throughout history, people on the African continent have experienced momentous transformations of their lifeworlds andways of living, some of them irruptive, uncompromising and cataclysmic, others of a more subtle and negotiable nature. What remains to be dealt with in more detail by anthropologists are the manifold ways in which these transformations are reflected in, and have a bearing on, people’s ethical demeanours, commitments and debates. Given the complexity and variability of these processes, it is not possible or even desirable to give a conclusive answer to this question. Instead, taking account of historical and sociocultural specificities, this special issue features in-depth case studies of ethics as ideals in practice from several countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Botswana, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania). In doing so, the contributions combine a presentation of ethnographic findings with a discussion of a new conceptual approach for a practice-oriented anthropological study of ‘ordinary ethics’ (Lambek 2010). In this introduction,we argue for a ratherfluid notion of ethics that entails people’s convictions, value judgements and sentiments on how to live a morally good and/or just life.We suggest that themaking and unmaking of ethicalfields takes placewithin the context of state politics, the influence of international organizations and the emergence of new publics and localNGOs that provide people with new ideas aboutwhat is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.We show that these ethicalfields emerge indialectical processes between what we call the ‘implication’ and ‘explication’ of ethics. In what follows, we first briefly reflect on previous anthropological work on ethics in Africa. We then delineate the parameters of our conceptual approach, before finally commenting on how the articles in this special issue broaden our understanding of everyday struggles in contemporary Africa to achieve or to maintain a certain ethical composure, to win relevant others over to committing themselves to particular ethical principles, or to position oneself in relation to the (un)ethical claims of others.