| This dissertation reports on research on one of the most important forms of women's local institutions in contemporary Botswana known as burial societies. Not only does death unsettle relationships, but the funeral process demands massive mobilization of labor and resources, and also generates communal responses, encouraging individuals and social groups in various social settings to reinvest in social and institutional relations. A burial society is a relatively autonomous, historically distinct mutual aid local institution, which may be occupational or gender based, whose goal is to provide social relief and support (material and non-material) to a member or member's family/kin experiencing conditions of distress due to a death event. The research used an ethno-survey approach which systematically combined ethnographic methods and a cross-sectional survey of sixty-five groups in Gaborone and Ramotswa, Botswana. The burial society was the unit of analysis. The research findings indicate that burial societies are fundamental to our understanding of the contours and impact of social change on different social groups in contemporary Tswana society. They are women-centered local institutions whose priority is to systematically raise, manage, authorize and disburse financial and non-financial relief according to established criteria of entitlement to households in distress. Their emergency relief redefines gender and institutional relations in specific arenas of social practice at different levels of society. Family members, spouses and live-in partners invariably invest in women's participation in burial societies. In general, both men and women work collaboratively elsewhere outside the burial society. Men remain supportive and non-interfering. This option seems to be practical, strategic and viable. |
