Love and Jealousy in the Space of Death

Abstract

This article examines funerals in a Herero community in Botswana as a discourse on the fundamental sentiments that orient people to one another and that connect them through effecting mutuality. I argue that the Herero community, in the face of ongoing dispersal, is more concerned with sustaining sociality than with reconstituting particular forms or relationships. At deaths, Herero highlight basic social orientations through sentimental assertions of love, and desire, in the context of evidence of hostility and jealousy. Because these assertions are made, and sentiments motivated and acted, they also provide the medium through which changes in social forms take place.