Gendering culture: towards a plural perspective on Kwena women's rights

Abstract

This chapter adopts a gendered perspective on rights and culture which highlights how women and men negotiate their procreative relationships and the claims that arise from this in daily life in Botswana. Based on research carried out in the village of Molepolole between 1982 and 1989, it is a local-level ethnographic study focused on the concrete and specific ways in which gender frames the relations of power up on which negotiations concerning family relationships among Bakwena are founded, through social actors' perspectives and experiences. It thus is aligned with the shift from conceptions of ‘culture’ as representing a static, homogenous, coherent unity to a view of culture as practice, embedded in local contexts and in the multiple realities of everyday life (Bourdieu 1977; Sahlins 1976; Strathern 1980). This framework, which conceives of culture as an ongoing process, allows us to acknowledge heterogeneity in the social and legal practices shaping people's worlds and their relationship with rights (see Merry, in this volume). We may then bring together for consideration culture, rights and law in ways that undermine simple dichotomies between rights and culture. Law, culture and rights: an ethnographic perspective By taking account of the specificities of people's lives, my analysis reinforces the perspective on the relationship between culture, rights and law, that reorients the debate on human rights away from universalist/relativist polarizations.