Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana

Abstract

Debility and the Moral Imagination Botswana. By Julie Livingston. African Systems of Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp.xii, 310; 13 illustrations. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. Debility and the Moral Imagination Botswana, Julie Livingston's first book, offers a compelling history of the strains and redemptive qualities of familial care, of the changing ways which people envision a set of possible futures worthy of their labors the present. Livingston centers care and a moral vision a history of bodily experience framed by the eclipse of African therapeutics by biomedicine, migrant labor, gendered conflict, and intergenerational tensions. The interstices and intersections of these familiar frames are wholly novel. Debility and the Moral Imagination meets the challenge of producing textured, deep, regional histories of the person and community and draws from them the hardest new questions for the moral imagination work on. The book should become a mainstay of graduate seminars on historiography and method. It could be used with great profit courses on medical anthropology, modern African history, the comparative study of health and healing systems, of the body, and courses on colonial and postcolonial studies. An elegantly argued introduction sets out Livingston's theoretical grounding and the scope of her historical interest. From embodied personhood moral imagination, the central focus on debility, disability, work, and able-bodiedness takes shape as shifting territories of experience that intersect with larger, well-known political, social, and economic processes twentieth-century Southern Africa. Debility forces into view fundamental social, moral, and biological dynamics are grounded experience as people struggle marshal care and rework meanings and lives within and around bodies that are somehow impaired or different (p. 234). But moral imagination holds Livingston's attention throughout the book: Because the sets of relationships that make up a moral order are continually renegotiated conversation with broader historical transformation, moral imagination and moral expression provide both an index of cultural response historical and a force which helps dictate how and where sickness and disability are defined and the ways of coping with them (pp. 21-22). Debility and the Moral Imagination opens up these pithy connections a first chapter that examines how family, especially women and the sources and fates of money, lie at the center of the shifting experience, management, and power struggles that debility brings. Livingston applies her fine historical sensibility drawing out how unexpected practices and ideas become related issues of health and physical ity. The convergence and interpretation of these historical circumstances occupy her analysis of a southern African twentieth century that has not been opened up quite this way by any other of its historians. The story begins early the twentieth century, as chiefship and Tsvvana therapeutics (bongaka) moved against mission medicine ways that tended support their former roles public health. Livingston unearths the ways which therapeutic systems maintained and reproduced a stratified social system. But she also shows how medicine (and politics, for that matter) contain tensions between the egalitarian and the hierarchical (p. 85). The ideal life course went off track by discord-violation of or ambiguity the application of moral guidelines. Whether bungled or ruined, lives bore burdens often realized through historical change and expressed acts of sorcery and ancestral anger (p. 98). Chiefs, as well as able-bodied doctors, men, and women directed efforts to make the spatial, cosmological, and social aspects of life mirror one another. They did this by trying unify all those mirrors in a greater moral ethos (p. …

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