Abstract:

In the midst of the devastation caused by the AIDS epidemic in Botswana - where one in four adults are HIV-positive - transnational humanitarian organizations launched a rapid proliferation of supposedly "culturally sensitive" orphan care institutions over the past ten years. These projects provide children with material resources, educational support, and recreational opportunities, in an effort to offset the burdens faced by kin who continue to house orphans - the traditional method of caregiving. However, humanitarian interventions have also wrought significant, albeit unintended, social repercussions. Through a focus on orphans as a pivotal population around which the effects of recent social changes become visible, this dissertation lays bare some of the most profound outcomes of the AIDS crisis. It demonstrates how foreigners' efforts to provide care for neglected orphans have begun, perhaps ironically, to create new inequalities in village life, and to upend the very cultural values that the organizations initially set out to rescue.

Based on 38 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation provides an extended perspective on the unfolding of social change in Lentsw?, a southeastern village that was home to an institution I call Bathusi. I ask how Bathusi's efforts to empower orphans fuelled the contradictory anxieties and aspirations that villagers felt with regard to foreign interventions. Bringing perspectives from the anthropology of humanitarianism into dialogue with kinship studies, this dissertation traces the impact of foreign aid from macro-level ideological and political effects down to social and emotional changes wrought at the level of individuals' subjectivities. By drawing on insights from the anthropology of childhood, I argue that orphans and the debates about their upbringing came not only to reflect social changes long underway, but also to contribute to them. Indeed, this dissertation illustrates how orphans became a contentious topic because of the actions of the children themselves, whose appropriations of values from both their families and foreign aid workers positioned them as agents of social change. Rather than being "left behind" in the wake of HIV/AIDS, as people across Botswana frequently suggest, this dissertation demonstrates how orphans in fact came to be positioned at the forefront of social change.