Available Formats
Fragmented Worlds, Coherent Lives: The Politics of Difference in Botswana
By (Author) Pnina Motzafi-Haller
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Praeger Publishers Inc
30th July 2002
United States
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
Indigenous peoples
Social research and statistics
306.0899683
Paperback
232
Width 156mm, Height 235mm
369g
In the context of fieldwork among the Tswapong people of Botswana, the author delivers a critical reflexive discussion that explores the tension between data recorded at a particular historical moment and the interpretive frames offered to make sense of such data. When the author first went to Botswana in the early 1980s to study the impact a major land reform had on rural life in this impoverished African country, social theory and ethnographic practice seemed solid and convincing. A decade later, and again in 1999, she returned to Bostwana and to the Tswapong people whose lives she had shared, and she encountered not only a rapidly shifting social reality, but she also began to ask questions that stemmed from and were shaped by theoretical frames quite different from those she had employed in her earlier work. At the center of the narrative that runs through this study is a critical reflexive discussion that explores the tension between data recorded at a particular historical moment and the interpretive frames offered to make sense of such data.
This highly readable thnography explores the variety of ways in which lives of the por and marginal in Africa are fragmented.-African Affairs
"This highly readable thnography explores the variety of ways in which lives of the por and marginal in Africa are fragmented."-African Affairs
PNINA MOTZAFI-HALLER is Senior Research Fellow at the Blaustein Institute for Desert Research and Lecturer in Anthropology in the Department of Behavioral Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel.