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Title: | Marriage, Kinship and Childcare in the Aftermath AIDS: Rethinking Orphanhood in the South African Lowveld |
Authors: | Niehaus, I |
Keywords: | Marriage;Kinship;Childcare;Orphans;Social grants;HIV/AIDS;Bushbuckridge;South Africa |
Issue Date: | 2016 |
Citation: | Anthropology Southern Africa, 33 (1): pp. 1 - 22, (2016) |
Abstract: | In this article I consider the significance of marriage from the vantage point of children’s affiliation to domestic units during the era of South Africa’s AIDS pandemic. Drawing on multi-temporal fieldwork in Impalahoek, a village in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the South African Lowveld, I suggest that AIDS-related diseases and deaths have led to the further erosion of marriage, and to the greater absence of fathers in the lives of children. However, these changes have not precipitated a crisis in childcare. A survey of 22 households shows that orphaned children are generally cared for by related adults, such as matrikin and older female siblings. These arrangements are a product of a long history of improvisations, necessitated by experiences of oscillating labour migration. Moreover, they are facilitated by a diffusion of parental obligations, which is a central tenet of Northern Sotho and Shangaan models of kinship. I argue that in an economy of high unemployment and dependence upon state instituted social security systems, marriage does not appear to be decisive to children’s welfare. |
Description: | This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Anthropology Southern Africa on 2112/2016, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23323256.2016.1243449 |
URI: | http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/13553 |
ISSN: | 2332-3256 |
Appears in Collections: | Dept of Social and Political Sciences Research Papers |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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FullText.pdf | This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Anthropology Southern Africa on 2112/2016, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/23323256.2016.1243449 | 132.22 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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