‘She's just like my mother’: measuring motherhood in the context of the HIV epidemic in South Africa

Abstract

This paper emerges from an ethnographic study conducted in Kwazulu-Natal in 2010 that explored the practices of a humanitarian intervention providing psychosocial support for and strengthening of the bonds between orphans and children made vulnerable by HIV and their non-biological guardians. Examining the interface between the programme and its participants, this paper focuses on the social politics that emerged out of the organisation's bond strengthening vision. Providing a platform for the expression of a diversity of perspectives, I demonstrate the complex ways in which interventionist intention is reworked at ground level and how an essentially humanitarian goal was ‘twisted’ into a tool with which to ‘measure’ motherhood. This paper hopes to move both beyond the limitations of the polarised literature around the impact of the epidemic on African families, and by directly addressing the radical HIV-related reworking of motherhood, open up alternative avenues for the emergence of a ‘new’ and more nuanced anthropology of kinship in Africa.

Key words:

• HIV and AIDS
• development
• motherhood
• childcare
• knowledge
• stigma
• KwaZulu-Natal