Funerals and the Public Space of Sentiment in Botswana

Abstract

In Botswana, funerals are key to the exercise of civil conduct. Funerals constitute distinctive public spaces that focus local attention on how particular persons' sentiments influence the well-being of others. By managing the social impact of sentiments of sorrow, love, jealousy, anger and resignation, all those who attend funerals ideally maintain a footing of civility, preventing recognised differences from causing permanent disruptions in social relations. In the context of death, people shape forms of community and difference - along lines of ethnicity, class, religion, gender and kinship - through the mutuality of their emotions. Funerals thus give rise to a public space and a civil discourse based on sentiment, as distinct from the bureaucratic and rationalising practices of official nationalism. This article is based on the authors' respective fieldwork in a Herero minority community in Mahalapye, and with an Apostolic church in Gaborone.