Dahl-Singing With Sad Faces

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Unpublished draft; please do not cite or circulate outside our class Students: Don’t worry if you have difficulty following the theoretical arguments in the introduction to this piece; focus instead on the story about aid Singing with “Sad Faces”: Orphaned Children and the Performance of Grief in a Botswana Village Bianca Dahl Brown University

“The way I see it, the biggest problem here in Botswana

is that they don’t let their children grieve.” –Ted,1 an American aid worker

In the context of the AIDS epidemic in Botswana – where one in three pregnant women

currently test positive for HIV – widespread anxieties about the future of the nation are manifested in an ever-growing preoccupation with how best to care for 130,000-plus orphaned children, the so-called secondary victims of the pandemic (UNAIDS 2010). The image of the AIDS orphan2 is emotively powerful both in Botswana and in the West, albeit for different reasons. For people in Botswana, the emergence of “AIDS orphans” as a meaningful category and a serious social problem portends the undermining of kinship relations and the moral economy that girds them in the wake of the epidemic. In Western media, orphans symbolize the greatest tragedy of HIV; they are the innocent victims, the lamentable side effects of the epidemic. Differences between local and foreign perceptions of orphans both converge and conflict in the space of humanitarian3 interventions designed to help. Orphans’ plight sparks a long-standing will to intervene, prompting aid from Europe and North America to pour toward child-centered non-governmental organizations (NGOs) across Africa. Even as Botswana’s foreign-funded NGOs ascribe to a humanitarian aim to do good on the basis of universal human rights, most attempt to raise Tswana orphans in what they perceive to be a culturally sensitive fashion, by offering day care services, health care, and material resources to children living with their extended families, rather than recruiting children into residential orphanages. However, foreign-run orphan day care NGOs embody and implement values, beliefs, and practices that at times openly contradict and undermine local customs. In so doing, these humanitarian-inflected interventions exacerbate patterns of social change already under way. At the heart of differences between Tswana and foreign interpretations of the orphan problem lies the question of how these children should cope with the loss of their parents – in Western parlance, how they should grieve. By focusing on grief, this chapter illustrates the distance between humanitarian aims and local realities as they unfold in the space of a program that pathologized (and sought to “heal”) the emotional wellbeing of orphans. Humanitarian aid is an industry in which emotion is an essential currency – from the “feel good” motivations of aidworkers and donors to the emotively complex reactions of aid recipients (who often feel both gratitude and resentment as objects of charity) – foreign-funded aid NGOs barter in affect just as much as they do in material resources. Attending to this dual emotional-and-material economy, I analyze the powerful – if perhaps unintended – means by which one humanitarian program contributed to the transformation not only of the ways that orphans express grief, but also of the very subjectivities of child participants, with profound social effects.

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My approach draws on a medical anthropological conception of subjectivity as the embodied selfhood or identity of a person, which is at once individual and fundamentally forged through sociopolitical forces. Yet emotion remains undertheorized within subjectivity theory (see also Luhrmann 2006), much as it is in the emerging anthropological literature on humanitarianism. When people’s subjectivities and senses of self begin to shift in the wake of aid programs seeking to alleviate the effects of Africa’s AIDS epidemic, I argue that emotion, sentiment, and affect – manifested in this case on the bodies of orphans – offers us key insights into the mechanisms of social and individual change.

As I will show below, when young people who are the object of aid interventions learn what foreign donors and program managers expect of them, they appropriate foreigners’ expressive repertoires and make them their own in agentive, albeit problematic, ways. Children’s transformations reflect aspects of social change – growing individualism, materialistic consumption, lack of discipline, and declining respect for elders – that are seen by Tswana people as part and parcel of the social crises associated with the era of AIDS. Yet the ways in which orphan care charities construct grief as a malady demanding treatment are also highly generative; such efforts illuminate philosophies about bodies, feelings, and personhood itself that are imported by – and remade through – aid programs.

It is no coincidence that the bodies I will explore through this three-part focus on humanitarianism, emotion, and subjectivity are the bodies of children. The stakes in social change during the AIDS epidemic are particularly acute when children become sites of intervention. The foreign aid industry commonly depicts young people as the innocent victims of the worst of human tragedies. Unable to fend for themselves, children in crises are commonly viewed by Westerners (and by Africans) as passive casualties, whose plight evokes pity from even the most stalwart opponents to foreign aid. By extension, through provision of care to children, humanitarian organizations present themselves as nonpolitical, non-divisive, and unequivocally good; children unite aid organizations and donors in sensations of empathic goodwill (Bornstein 2005; Malkki 2010; Moeller 2002). The presumption of children’s misery undergirds their construction as victims in charitable circles – without whom there can be no rescue mission. Donors further assume that aid for children is welcomed in the developing world as well; and certainly this is often the case (Cheney 2005). Yet humanitarian intervention is always laden with political agendas and effects. The political nature of aid produces interventions that recruit children into special categories of affliction, at times with problematic consequences. Humanitarian aid that renders children as passive and pure sufferers also masks certain realities on the ground, as children are a potentially divisive category and can be problematic – and agentive, and contested – targets of foreign intervention.

Ted, the American volunteer whose assertion about repressed grief prefaced this chapter, was one of many foreigners I heard voicing concerns about the childrearing practices of Tswana people during 38 months of ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted between 2003 and 2008 on Botswana’s “orphan problem.” Interpreted loosely, Ted’s remarks about children’s alleged inability to grieve have a ring of truth: in the emotional economy of Lentswê (the southeastern village where I carried out most of my fieldwork), villagers focus on “moving past” their grief so as to “give up” on the dead, a practice that leads to few overt expressions of sorrow by either adults or children. In contrast, at Bathusi Orphan Day Care Center, an NGO in Lentswê, the European director established a so-called music therapy program to “give voice” to sadness and “dedicate time” to mourning in order to “allow children to heal.” These two models stand for more complicated realities than simply giving up versus giving voice to sadness. As I will


discuss below, each mode of expressing emotion reflects different orientations between the self and the social world, which are themselves at stake in the negotiation of power by various groups attempting to raise orphaned children and to cope with the crippling effects of the HIV epidemic.

I undertake this analysis by examining the meaning and effects of singing and dancing in the context of death, comparing Tswana funeral practices with Bathusi Orphan Day Care Centre’s music therapy intervention. Song and dance are laden with emotional content (Faudree 2006), and are key features in mourning rituals in Lentswê. In the midst of rapid social change in Botswana, the stakes in managing grief are incredibly high. By exploring the role of singing and dancing in the management of negative sentiments in these two contexts, this chapter centers on emotional expression in order to illustrate one way that humanitarian institutions manage and reshape the most fundamental core of Tswana subjectivity: namely, the culturally- and historically-mediated relationship between individuals, their kin, and their communities.

For while this argument is about emotion, it is also about foreign aid and the work it executes on people’s bodies and ultimately on their subjectivities. Much current anthropology of aid interventions follows in the path of James Ferguson’s seminal work on international development in Lesotho (1994). Ferguson deliberately chose not to concentrate primarily on the deleterious effects of development institutions at a micro or village level, but instead focused foremost on the apparatus of development itself – its practices, discourses, and ideologies. Among Ferguson’s insights was a discussion of how development organizations describe the problems of inequality, poverty, and unemployment in terms that present them as susceptible to the kinds of technical solutions that development institutions can provide (e.g., building roads, health centers, or even orphan care institutions). Yet, as he cogently demonstrated, the technical solutions provided by the World Bank did nothing to alleviate what were, at their heart, political and structural problems. Ferguson’s work and its legacy forged a methodology for unveiling the structural reasons why foreign aid fails to achieve its explicit aims. Emerging work on humanitarianism within anthropology echoes and extends this focus through exploring the mismatch between donor (or state) aims and desires of recipients (Feldman 2007; Ticktin 2006), while continuing to foreground aid institutions and their ideologies (Redfield 2005). My concern here lies in a somewhat different direction, as I focus more centrally on the mechanisms of social change at the intimate level of individuals and communities. Where critical development studies do trace the effects of large-scale forces on everyday sociality, the literature often tends to presume a ready toolkit of subaltern modes of resistance to foreign aid (following Scott 1987). Questions about emotional dispositions, embodied practices, and their interaction with foreign assistance – or of the authenticity of resistance or acquiescence – remain relatively understudied. This is partly because the study of emotion is usually undertaken from a psychological anthropological approach, which tends to focus on interpersonal interaction or phenomenological dimensions of emotional experience – often to the exclusion of more macro-level economic and social-structural factors. In what follows I instead analyze how humanitarian aid can create incentives for new modes of self-expression, bringing together the politics of intervention with an analysis of how subjectivity can be reformulated in the bodies of individuals who have been recruited into the category of victims. I aim to establish why emotional expression is a crucial point of access into the politics of subjectivity and social change during the HIV epidemic. Bringing Together Subjectivity and Emotion

In efforts to push past the interior/exterior divide that is commonly presumed to occur at the level of the body’s surface, many anthropologists who take seriously “the body” as an


analytic category have called for attention to affect or emotion (following Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). Emotion, of course, is not simply manifested on people’s bodies and faces, it is also experienced within. To borrow from Janelle Taylor’s conceptualization of medical technologies, emotion too is an apparatus that “surfaces the body interior.” Emotional expressions both provide a surface or cover over the inner dimension of experience as they are imperfect representations of feelings, while also bringing that interiority to the surface so that it can be publicly read and interpreted (Taylor 2005). Humanitarian aid engenders an economy or marketplace of emotional possibilities that operates on bodies in ways that unsettle and remake inner subjectivity. The intersection of subjectivity and emotion becomes the means through which social change occurs.

I draw here explicitly on Biehl and colleagues’ definition of subjectivity, as an index of “the dynamic and unsolved tension between the bodily, self, and social/political processes” (2007:15). Put somewhat more instrumentally for my present purposes, bodily action (singing and dancing) in ritually inscribed, socially mediated activities (Lentswê funerals and Bathusi’s music therapy) – which are themselves shaped by political and social conditions (the AIDS epidemic, humanitarian response to it) – produces a moral and emotive orientation of individuals’ selves (their desires and feelings) toward the world around them. Biehl et al.’s conception of subjectivity emphasizes its embodied, political, and processual nature as it is made and unmade through social interaction; and yet in articulating their theoretical position, scholars often strangely seem to ignore the role of emotion in creating subjectivity, except when it appears in the form of suffering (Kleinman et al. 1997).

Anthropologists have long written against a Cartesian mind/body dualism that viewed emotions as somehow distinct from cognition, or as the “natural” in opposition to the “cultural” (Abu-Lughod 1986; Lutz and White 1986). If, in this tradition, we follow Michelle Rosaldo and view emotions as “thoughts embodied” (1984: 138), it makes sense to look at the expression of emotion as an – albeit limited and incomplete – window onto some of the orientations toward the world that underlie culturally mediated subjectivities. Following Lutz, “emotional meaning is then … an emergent product of social life” (1998: 5), rather than a purely individualized mode of experience. As Comaroff and Comaroff (2001) and Durham and Klaits (2002) demonstrate in their respective analyses of Tswana funerals, the performance of emotion for Tswana people has long been integrally (though not necessarily obviously) linked to concepts of the self and the social, in which individuals strive to manage their sentiments in keeping with cultural norms.

The conventional view of emotion in the West – one held by aid workers in Botswana – is that a person first feels something and then expresses it. A correct “read” of a person’s expression should therefore enable one to make judgments about what the person was experiencing – to access their subjectivity. Ethnographic and cross-cultural research has challenged this view, demonstrating how cultural norms surrounding what emotions are appropriate to express can lead to emotional expressions that do not map neatly onto the person’s experience or feelings, problematizing the analytically challenging relationship between “interior” emotion and “external” expression of it (R. Rosaldo [1989]1993; Lutz 1998). A corollary of this Western understanding of feeling and expression is what is commonly called the hydraulic model of emotion, rooted in an emphasis on talk therapy. This is based on the belief that negative emotions must be expressed in order to be resolved; emotions that fester inside the body are believed to impair the self and prevent “healing” from taking place. The hydraulic perspective is at the heart of many Euro-American therapies, which encourage people to articulate their feelings (on the psychoanalyst’s couch; in a personal journal) in order to bring


closure to the sentiment lying within, waiting to burst forth and be resolved through its release, and this perspective continues to motivate statements like Ted’s opening quote.

Such concepts are inimical to how Tswana subjectivity is intrinsically bound up in the maintenance of emotional harmony in the social world. As in many societies, emotions in Botswana are seen not as simply residing inside the individual feeling them. In particular, negative emotions – like the sadness, anger, and jealousy that are often evoked by deaths – are widely believed to possess the power to do serious harm to others, even if the person feeling them has no desire or intent to actually cause injury (Durham 2002). In the Tswana worldview, feelings out of control can gain force and agency of their own accord. As such, emotions must be carefully managed, lest they cause unintended harm (Durham and Klaits 2002). In short, negative emotions must be transformed into positive ones, or risk permanent fissures in the social fabric.

In marked contrast to the Western hydraulic model of emotion, Tswana villagers tend to avoid the overt expression of sadness or other intense negative feelings. Healing, for Tswana people, comes about by conquering sadness and then creating – and expressing – more positive, socially cohesive emotions. Of course, this description is something of an ideal type: Tswana people do also express grief, anger, or sadness in ways that are obvious or familiar to Westerners. However, these expressions tend to be more rare and often concealed, contained to an audience of close family members or friends. Read in this light, Ted’s comments above might be seen as missing the point. It is not simply that Tswana people do not allow their children to grieve. Rather, orphans’ subjectivities are formed within a context in which value is placed on concealing sadness and transforming it into more positive affect – an environment where grief remains a private concern that is not to be publicly or dramatically performed. Public displays of negative emotions, for Tswana people, come at the risk of social disharmony.

In examining the moral, political, and social economies surrounding a cluster of emotions (sadness/grief/mourning/loss) as these sentiments are managed in the multiple contexts of village life, my approach in the ethnographic examples below is less concerned with the nuances of emotional experience itself, instead focusing on the politics at stake in its expression. I use the terms “grief,” “sadness,” and “mourning” to encompass a constellation of negative emotions evoked through loss. For this discussion, I do not aim to pinpoint or translate the precise experience of such feelings. Instead, I focus on how the negative emotions encompassed in the idea of “grief” are managed, expressed and controlled through song and dance in particular contexts – and what this can tell us about the transformation of subjectivities and social change.

Song and Dance, Grief and Mourning in Lentswê

When I first came to Botswana in 2003, I arrived to a village where multiple funerals occurred every weekend, where the effect of AIDS could be visually mapped onto the local graveyard. Graves covered with green shade netting that had been formed into tents to cast shade – a new burial fashion that came about in the early 1990s concurrent with the surge of HIV – were already more numerous than the untented graves of the preceding 100-plus years. My expectation had been to encounter and recognize widespread grief. Given the prevalence of HIV (estimated then at 38 percent of the adult population) and high death rates, I assumed that expressions of despair would abound.

However, instead of encountering recognizable expressions of sadness everywhere, I saw a great deal of what looked like happiness; these sentiments seemed to be expressed most often in the singing and dancing that are ubiquitous in the spaces of everyday life. People in Lentswê often spontaneously launch into dancing characterized by rhythmic pumping of the fists and


swinging of the knees and feet, a shuffling, easy movement of the body. Similarly, villagers of all ages often break into song while working or socializing. Emotional displays I would have associated with grief or mourning were largely missing. In response to my direct questioning about the relative absence of open displays of sad affect, villagers repeatedly stated that it is inappropriate to dwell on sadness. Yet the realities of widespread death were undeniably evident.

In Lentswê, a village of about 5000 people, approximately 9 percent of the total village population consists of orphaned children, most of whose parents are said to have died of AIDS-related illnesses. Even during the years of the highest death rates in the early 2000s, Lentswê’s inhabitants maintained high attendance rates at funerals. Funerals are important spaces for sustaining social cohesion, wherein the community convenes to serve as a buffer for feelings of loss generated by death – especially the premature death of young adults that is so characteristic of AIDS (Klaits 2010).

Most people in Lentswê identify as Christian,4 and funerals generally follow the same basic structure regardless of denomination. There are two distinct parts to each funeral in Lentswê, the vigil and the burial, both of which are commonly referred to by the same word (phitlo) in Setswana. In the week leading up to the interment of the body, a daily vigil is held every afternoon at the home of the bereaved. These vigils are usually fairly lively and informal social affairs, with gossip and tea as the main elements, punctuated by hymn singing. During the burial on Saturday, prayers and sermons are orated, and every few minutes someone cuts into the talk by initiating a song in call-and-response style. The singing builds up into a loud chorus, accompanied by movements ranging from gentle swaying to more intense dancing, characterized by stomping and clapping, which grows more energetic as the ceremony goes on. Atmospheres at interments tend to be somber initially, but as the singing gains momentum, most people become animated and the mood generally turns light-hearted, even joyous. At the first interment I attended, I was struck above all by the happy expressions on people’s faces as they sang.

Admittedly, happy countenances do not mean that funerals are harmonious events. Tswana funerals can be contentious proceedings, where kin, church members, friends, and lovers all negotiate competing claims on the dead person – such as who knew them best, who stands to inherit their property, who took the best care of the deceased, and who will take custody of their children (Durham and Klaits 2002; Klaits 2010). Klaits describes bereavement for Tswana as a “frighten[ing]” and “dangerous” status (2005: 46, 48). Allegations of witchcraft and malicious intent circulate freely around the village after a death, reinforced by gossip about who fails to attend a funeral. Negative sentiments like jealousy or anger are often credited as being the underlying cause of death, or are articulated as potential motivators for a person to engage in witchcraft or sorcery against an object of resentment (Livingston 2008). The positive sentiments expressed during singing at funerals are a way of building cohesion within the community, and repairing the damage to social relations that death so often causes.

As further evidence of this emphasis on positive social cohesion, tears are rarely shed by anyone at any point in a funeral process. In general, to break into tears is considered by most Tswana people to be not only childish or weak, but also dangerous, as tears can open a person up to powerful negative emotions like jealousy or excessive grief (Livingston 2005). While tears are only one means of displaying grief or sadness, even less dramatic physical expressions of mourning are commonly transformed through song and dance during the funeral.

As Evans-Pritchard famously reminded us, death is not only a natural fact but also a social fact (1937). In Botswana (as in varying degrees everywhere), the social fact of a death explicitly hinges on the loss of a person, and the necessity of patching, replacing, reordering


social relations to continue the functioning of everyday life. For a bereaved person to dwell too long on his or her grief or to display it overtly is viewed as threatening to the continued harmony between selves and the social world (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). As many Lentswê residents told me, loss cannot be dwelled upon, as it risks socially paralyzing the bereaved by freezing them in orientation toward the past, toward a time when the dead were still living (see also Klaits 2005; Werbner 1998). In both public and private spaces, the ways people grieve are molded by their understandings of the social and spiritual worlds, understandings that are embedded in deep histories as much as in the current crisis of HIV and AIDS. Tswana people’s collective participation in funeral rituals is a means of ensuring that the bereaved manage their loss and reintegrate into society. People who become depressed or disengage with kin and friends are viewed as socially dead, and are sometimes even spoken of in the past tense, as though they have ceased to exist by virtue of their withdrawal (Comaroff and Comaroff 2001). The expressions of joy, laughter, and positive affect that I observed during singing at funerals are a vital aspect of the transformative work of ritual.

Given the Tswana discomfort with negative sentiments and the acute potential for grief to cause the bereaved to obsess about the death of a loved one, this joyous song-and-dance display makes a great deal of sense in the local context. Rather than dwelling on negative emotions, Tswana people animate their bodies and voices to actively and physically produce joy to help them “give up” on the dead and move forward (Klaits 2010). It is in this context that American and European aid workers at Bathusi Orphan Day Care Center began to enact their own understandings of grief and mourning, to quite different effect.

Singing with “Sad Faces”

Bathusi was founded in 2002 by a European man and his Tswana wife as a purportedly culturally sensitive solution to Botswana’s so-called orphan problem. Children in Lentswê between the ages of 3 and 18 who had lost at least one parent could attend the project after school ended around noon. The organization fed children lunch and supper, gave them material necessities, tutored them on their homework, and offered a variety of recreational activities through a small Tswana staff and a continuous cycle of foreign volunteers. In the evenings, the children returned to the homes of extended family members, in so doing remaining “connected to their culture,” as Bathusi’s promotional material claimed. The project was quickly supported by grants from embassies and philanthropic organizations, which permitted it to grow rapidly.

In the first year and a half of Bathusi’s operation, the seeds of what would become the music therapy program were sown, in the form of group singing sessions. Initially, however, musical performances at Bathusi were not concerned with grief, but rather with self-esteem-building and entertainment. Piet, the European man who ran the center, had been an amateur musician and retained a fondness for songwriting. Having lived in Botswana for ten years, he had a sense of Tswana children’s love of song and dance. In 2003, Piet wrote several songs that the orphans could perform to audiences at functions (usually held by foreign or foreign-funded NGOs) in exchange for donations. These performances quickly captured local media attention as an entertaining way of raising support and awareness. The early songs were noticeably different from traditional Tswana vocal performance; they featured jazzy pop-like tunes, lively electric piano accompaniment, and messages of self-empowerment – quite a departure from the complex harmonies that characterize Tswana a capella singing, which consists mostly of hymns and folk songs about agriculture. Piet’s songs were almost all in English, a language the children spoke in varying degrees. “I’m Special,” “The Abstinence Song,” and “Superstar” were three high-energy


songs about empowerment, with messages of self-esteem building that were more or less denotationally comprehensible to the children. The latter featured the unequivocal chorus: “I want you to know just exactly who I am; I want you to know I am a superstar!”

These pop-style songs were popular and appealing to members of the organization. The Tswana staff and children alike thought they were funny (if perhaps a little absurd) and took pleasure in integrating song lyrics in sassy and humorous ways into the everyday discourse at Bathusi. The songs were also popular with the foreign-dominated audiences5 in Botswana’s capital city to whom Bathusi’s children performed. These audiences perceived the songs as “adorable” or “inspirational,” as I heard enthusiastic expatriates gush after each performance. Though the upbeat tunes were ostensibly intended to instill self-esteem in the orphans, it was clear by Piet’s focus on perfecting the performance styles that self-esteem building was secondary in importance to the fact that the concerts were a fundraising success.

With the increasing popularity of Bathusi’s shows, several of the foreign volunteers suggested that Piet compose songs of a more serious nature. On several occasions, I heard Piet muse that donors wanted to know about the problems orphans faced. Like Ted, Piet worried that the children in Lentswê did not seem to express grief after their parents’ deaths. After repeated conversations with several medical professionals about the emotional, psychological, and medical implications of repressed grief (including a contingent of American nurses that spent a day at the center in 2003, a psychiatrist who was an email correspondent with Piet, and several foreign doctors volunteering at local hospitals), Piet decided to fuse the music program with a different kind of therapy project. As he later told local and foreign media, he appropriated a common form of expression in Botswana – song and dance – as a “culturally sensitive” platform for helping children cope with their suppressed sense of grief. Piet’s claim sparked a great deal of public interest in his music program, which was already something of a pet project for embassies and NGOs. Bathusi thus used songs about grief as a means to fulfill the (mostly Western) donors’ preconceived ideas about children’s emotional needs – while also thereby advancing Piet’s economic aims. Playing into sponsors’ stereotypes and upon their empathic pity, Piet’s brainchild was a brilliant means to encourage financial support for the center.

In 2003, Piet wrote a song called “Sometimes,” a message for the children to sing about their parents watching over them from heaven. This tune was something of a deliberate tearjerker, with a slow tempo and melancholy lyrics:

Sometimes when I feel lonely, I just close my eyes; It makes me feel and it makes me see how much I love you … I can feel your arms, I can feel your eyes; I can feel your warmth like a paradise – inside of me

The mostly expatriate audiences responded to the song with tearful applause and an outpouring of donations. Post fact, Piet developed a founding myth for “Sometimes” that he repeated to donors and the press, claiming that he and the children co-wrote the song as a tribute to their lost parents. He maintained that the song-writing session was the first time any of the children of Bathusi broke down and cried over the deaths of their mothers and fathers. This account held great appeal to donors, even if it differed from the reality of that session, wherein most of the children were busy playing while Piet scribbled down lyrics – and certainly not a tear was shed. Yet Piet’s founding myth about the writing of “Sometimes” soon became as important as the song itself, as it provided the basis for the transformation of Bathusi’s music program into an innovative “music therapy” program. Piet described the program in ways that donors seemed implicitly to understand: there was supposed to be something therapeutic in being able to express


sadness to an audience; and, music therapy also claimed to create private environments during song-writing sessions for children to give voice to their sentiments. The program openly drew on the hydraulic model of emotions described above, assuming that orphans were repressing sadness and needed a safe outlet to express grief in order to be healed. Whether or not Piet understood Tswana emotions, he definitely understood donor emotions, realizing the appeal of the program to the Americans and Europeans who supported the center.

The transformation from music program to music therapy was neither immediate nor seamless, however. In 2003 when Bathusi orphans first started performing “Sometimes,” they sang this sad dirge about their dead parents watching them from heaven in much the same way as they sang Tswana hymns – with grins on their faces and energetic, ebullient dancing. Well inculcated into the enthusiastic musical style of their village, orphans performed “Sometimes” in ways that evoked funeral singing, using song and dance as a means of producing joy.

This performance style looked rather incongruous to the foreign aid workers at Bathusi. The music was slow, written in a minor key, with a tragic subject matter, and yet the children were performing the song in exactly the same way that they sang “I’m Special.” They were bright-eyed, animated, smiling and happy, wriggling their bodies in lively movements, not at all fitting the donors’ expectaions for how children who had watched their parents die would try to express their heartache about their loss. Piet was not satisfied. One practice session in August 2003, he stopped the song midway through and said, “No, this is all wrong. This is a sad song. You need to perform it with sad faces. Can we practice doing sad faces?”

He then asked one young child to face the group. Piet took her face in his hands and, using his fingers, he re-molded it into a “sad” expression for all to examine, turning down he mouth and pulling at the corners of her eyes. The children all giggled, but quickly realized he was serious; soon all were practicing singing with sad faces, with only periodic explosions of mirth. Piet quite literally molded the “appropriate” emotional expression directly onto the children’s bodies, and encouraged them to perform it. Not long after, Piet and another volunteer spent an afternoon teaching the children how to hold their bodies more mournfully while they sang. It wasn’t enough to master sad faces and sad bodies, though – the children had to intuit which songs required happy faces and which needed a more serious expression, a lesson that they came to appreciate in time through repeated feedback from Piet, foreign volunteers, and their foreign-dominated audiences.

Up until that point, the music program had been democratic; that is, all children participated. After they learned to sing with sad faces, though, Piet began to weed out the children who did not perform as well. While all the children continued to practice the songs together at Bathusi, the real maestros were rewarded for writing the “correct” kinds of emotions onto their bodies. Those skillful children were chosen to attend trips to the capital city for performances, with meals at restaurants and other forms of special attention. From the orphans’ perspective, incentive to perform to Piet’s specifications was greatly increased as soon as the performances became a privilege awarded on the basis of merit. This merit was not conferred upon the best vocalists – almost all the children could carry the tunes well – but rather to the best performers, the most expressive children. Piet’s meritocracy was reinforced by the reactions of audiences; foreigners watching Bathusi children perform sad songs often made no effort to hide the tears running down their faces. Initially, this was disconcerting and confusing for the children – who sometimes asked me or the Tswana staff of the center why the audiences were crying – but as they became more accustomed to this response, they began to play into it as much as possible by exaggerating their “sad faces” and restraining their normally exuberant dancing


during more somber songs. One 15-year-old boy observed to me wryly that Piet was always in a particularly good mood if the audience cried.

At one level, Piet’s music therapy program was simply an appropriation of an existing meaningful cultural practice (song and dance), as per his stated intent. Children and youth have many opportunities to perform dramas, songs, and dances at a variety of venues in Tswana village and city life, like in many parts of Africa (Argenti 2007; Durham 2007; Klaits 2010). Musical performances by orphans are not unprecedented in this region; a well-known, mostly foreign-funded orphanage near Gaborone runs a celebrated children’s marimba band, which can be hired to perform at any venue for a donation toward the orphanage.

At another level, however, Bathusi’s program represented a departure from these other musical and artistic expressions for youth. The idea of music therapy implies a transformation of subjectivity through song, a process of healing that can be witnessed in public even as it is also (presumably) experienced privately. Such transformation – visibly proclaimed by the writing of “grief” onto orphans’ bodies – held immense emotive appeal for expatriate audiences. The success and fame of Bathusi’s music program was undeniably linked to the emotional responses it produced in the audiences – responses which were amplified by the orphans’ own expressions of sad (and happy) affect. It is a more general truth that the justification for humanitarian action relies on the spectacle of misery (Fassin and Vasquez 2005). But in this case, the choreographed nature of the spectacle is especially obvious. Grief was molded onto the children’s bodies, spectacularizing them, and in the process transforming Bathusi’s singing orphans into recognizable, pitiable (albeit laudably brave) victims. Regardless of whether Piet truly believed his program was therapeutic for orphans or simply a great performance for donors, both his therapeutic concept and the program at Bathusi had far-reaching consequences.

The music therapy model went on to gain much broader reach than simply to the orphans at Bathusi. It was quickly adopted by other NGOs as a “culturally sensitive” means of giving orphaned children opportunities to grieve. With the help of several volunteers from overseas, Piet developed a manual for using music to allow African orphans to cope with their sorrow. Through funding from one aid organization, he presented his manual at southern African conventions on orphan care in South Africa, Swaziland, and Lesotho. Bathusi received several large grants to train other organizations about its successful model. The aid industry is, again, fundamentally inscribed with a dual emotional-and-material economy, wherein success in generating resources is bound up in success in generating emotional resonance with donors.

Over the following three years, the music therapy model was adopted by scores of orphan care projects across southern Africa. Bathusi was touted by a major international charity as a “best practice” organization in 2006. Music therapy received international attention, with images of joyous orphans and sorrowful orphans alike emblazoned across supporters’ websites and appearing in media including the US News and World Report, MSNBC, the UK Guardian, the Washington Times, and a handful of scholarly and popular nonfiction books. NBC’s Today Show featured the orphans in several segments on American national television, and anchor Ann Curry organized and hosted a huge fundraiser gala for the project at the United Nations in 2006.

In a nine-minute promotional video for Bathusi that was produced in 2004 by a professional public relations company in Gaborone, Piet spoke about the therapy model. His comments merit quoting at some length:

The music is basically expression, expression of who you are. From the first days of Bathusi it became a tool to allow the children to do what they cannot do in our society


[Botswana], which is to tell who they are, how they feel, what they think. So the next step was then, ok, if you like singing, if you like dancing, if you like music, then it has to be your music, it has to be your words. ... I was looking for some kind of a form to allow the children to express their grievings [sic] in life, something that we don’t do in our [Tswana] society, especially when you’re a child. To be allowed to cry, to be allowed to say what you feel now that your mother has died. …We have found a way to allow the orphaned children to regain their self-esteem, to become part of society again, and one day to go out there full of confidence and be part of the wider society.

In this interview, Piet insisted that music allowed children to externalize their essential, pure, unmediated, non-cultural interiorities: “expression of who you are.” Piet’s claim to authority about “our society” derived from his recent receipt of Botswana citizenship; he frequently spoke of Tswana culture as his own. More generally, his assertions were compelling to Western audiences for two reasons: first, for his (stereotypical) description of Tswana society as restraining children from coping with their losses, which legitimated Bathusi’s rescue mission. And second, he compellingly suggested that music therapy provided the setting for orphans to express their own voices without mediation. Both the problem and the solution resonated with Western humanitarian impulses to redress the effects of presumably repressive African cultures. Piet’s assertion that orphans used singing to express their own ideas was in many ways ironic, as the children rarely took an active role in creating the music. Even when Piet did include them in his songwriting sessions, their role was limited to that of veto – of rejecting or endorsing a turn of phrase he had crafted. The subjectivities that Piet claimed were expressed by orphans during music therapy were overdetermined by his own lyrics, his preferred forms of emotional expression.6 Most of the children simply accepted their responsibility to perform, and I did not witness them resisting overtly; rather, they recognized music therapy as a means through which to curry favor with the foreign aid workers. While Piet was the dominant influence in the music therapy program, his approach was reinforced by the many foreign volunteers at Bathusi, who themselves frequently broke down into tears when they first heard the children sing sad songs.

Still, it is important to note that emotional displays were so tied up in the material economy of power at Bathusi that incentive to “express one’s grievings” was motivated by desire for attention and for access to the special rewards that “expressive” children received. The orphans who best mastered the performance found themselves becoming recipients of lavish gifts – from cell phones to the latest fashions. In short, children were rewarded on multiple registers for externalizing particular forms of emotionality. Without the backing of material gains, the motivation to participate in music therapy might never have existed. Piet’s relative power over orphans’ kin and the wider village community in encouraging expressions of grief was thus firmly grounded in the material advantages that the organization wielded.

Orphans’ Appropriations of Emotional Expression

Thus far, I have presented two models of expression of grief through song, broadly conceived: the Tswana paradigm, in which song and dance transform negative experiences into positive emotions; and the NGO’s music therapy paradigm, in which song and dance create a space where orphaned children must show grief. The tensions between these models came to light most clearly when the orphans themselves began to appropriate from these two emotional paradigms, creating behaviors and crafting subjectivities that became increasingly disturbing for Tswana adults and even, at times, to foreign aid workers. What made the issue of grieving such a contentious flashpoint in Lentswê was the actions of orphaned children, their at-times-confused


appropriations from both models of grieving, and the local stakes in the subjectivities that orphans’ behaviors represented. The performance or manifestation of emotion on the surface of children’s bodies became – for Tswana villagers and the children’s kin – a problematic index of the changes in social relations and social reproduction that had been brought about by AIDS as a demographic crisis and then exacerbated by aid as a humanitarian response.

My first example of children’s negotiations between these paradigms involves a teenage girl. Grace was one of the orphans who became especially skilled at presenting sad emotions, even outside the context of music therapy. At 16, Grace developed a habit of speaking in somber tones with foreign volunteers and with one of Bathusi’s white expatriate trustees about the death of her mother. She was one of very few orphans at that time who spoke freely and emotively about her dead parent, even though the attention and compassion this behavior elicited from volunteers might logically have made it more common more quickly among her peers.

Over the course of two years, Grace became closely attached to a series of foreign women affiliated with Bathusi. Some of the foreigners who got to know Grace particularly well commented to me that she could be manipulative, that she made allusion to her grief at the loss of her mother in order to elicit sympathy and material support. Other volunteers unquestioningly indulged the girl. Grace seemed to have mastered a certain kind of performance that aimed at securing gains for herself (both material and emotional), and it occasionally appeared calculating to the foreigners she latched onto. However, while many of Bathusi’s children were experts as code-switching – behaving like average, unobtrusive Tswana children when in their homes, but performing the more Western kinds of emotionality at Bathusi – Grace rapidly lost that ability and seemed to become almost the quintessential embodiment of Bathusi’s emotional style.

A good friend of mine was married to Grace’s maternal uncle. Once, over a cup of tea, Grace’s aunt relayed to me an event that occurred during a recent funerary vigil of a distant relative. In the midst of the Tswana songs and prayers, Grace started sobbing and howling inappropriately and ran out of the house. Grace apparently later explained her behavior to her relatives by saying she had been overcome because the funeral was associated in her mind with memories of her own mother’s death. Grace’s aunt said to me: “I wanted to beat her into behaving correctly. I have never seen a girl of 18 put on such a performance, and for whose benefit? She was just showing off.” Grace’s outburst during a funeral, like her over-performance of grief with foreign volunteers, was seen as inauthentic and/or inappropriate by members of her Tswana family and – perhaps ironically – even by Western aid workers. Her kin and friends alike came to reflect on Bathusi’s foreign-backed initiatives and the ambivalence people felt about the changes accompanying the institution’s aid.

My second example of the amalgamation of Tswana and Western emotional styles concerns one 11-year-old girl I call Dikeledi. The night before I left Botswana at the end of my first research trip in 2003, the children and staff of Bathusi held a farewell party, attended by families of orphans as well as numerous other villagers. Piet did not attend, and children and adults alike sang Tswana hymns and danced freely, practices that Piet normally discouraged by satirizing and imitating the Tswana dance style, which he saw as repetitive and overly simplistic. In the midst of the whirling chaos of dancing bodies, Dikeledi came up to me. Initially, she was laughing and seemed to be lifting her arms happily in time with the music, but when she saw me she stopped dancing and stretched out her hands, announcing in a surprised tone, “Look, Bianca, I’m crying.” Sure enough, her face was streaked with tears, oddly offset by her broad smile. Her comment was almost beseeching; she seemed at once to be proud of her tears, yet also confused by them. A few moments later, Dikeledi disappeared back into the throng of young villagers who


were chanting, stomping, and singing tsamaya ka pula (“go with rain,” a Tswana song wishing good luck to travelers). I had given my digital camera to another child that evening, with the instruction that he should take photographs of whatever was most interesting to him; at the end of the evening when the boy reviewed his photos on the playback mode, he called my attention to one picture only: his striking photograph of Dikeledi dancing and laughing, her face streaked with tears. (See Appendix I.)

Dikeledi’s tears, her huge smile, and her participation in the emotionally charged singing and dancing that night were all entangled in the various means of expressing grief, loss, and sadness that she encountered in her world. Singing Tswana songs caused her to begin weeping, even as she laughed joyously – a collision of music therapy with funeral dancing. Whether her reaction to her own tears was surprise, or whether it was pride at having achieved the ultimate Western expression of sadness, the emotional registers for Tswana adults and those for foreign adults began to coalesce in Dikeledi’s own means of experiencing loss. Like Grace, she failed to code-switch, instead spontaneously performing music-therapy-style sadness in the midst of a mostly Tswana village audience. Her confusion was evident in her tone of voice, as though asking for me to explain the mysterious appearance of tears on her face, even as her smile belay her appropriately Tswana conversion of sad emotions into joyous ones. At the time, I didn’t have an answer for Dikeledi’s implicit question about why she was crying, but on reflection perhaps the response might have a lot to suggest about the power of song and dance in shaping emotions, and about the influence of foreign adults’ tears on her own ways of expressing loss or sorrow.

Conclusion

In some ways, music therapy can be read as a secular reincarnation of Pascal’s famous wager. As such, “kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe” has been transformed into: “dance sorrowfully, sing with sad faces, and you will be healed.” However, just as anthropologists agree that belief is something more than just ritual, so also feeling is surely more than mere expression. In the examples above, both Grace and Dikeledi took up elements of the expressive registers of various adults in their lives. When confronted with loss in their lives – a family funeral for Grace, a friend’s farewell party for Dikeledi – these girls drew on ways of performing grief that they had learned and been rewarded for in music therapy. They expressed sadness in the company of family and friends who were together contributing to the production of joyful feelings. In each case, the children amalgamated Tswana and Western modes of expression. These girls were not simply converts; they were creating something new.

To return to the earlier discussion of emotion as a mechanism to account for shifting subjectivities and social change brought about by humanitarian intervention during the AIDS epidemic, my description of Piet’s scripting of negative emotions onto children’s bodies and faces in many ways begs the question of authenticity. When children learned to express negative emotions through song, did this practice actually come to map onto their internal experience? Does the ritual of music therapy reflect or shape the children’s phenomenological experience of emotions? What was being altered through the emotional work promoted by Bathusi and appropriated by its child participants – did music therapy really contribute to changing subjectivities at both an individual and a social-structural level, or was it just a performance? While acknowledging that I cannot fully access children’s feelings, I nonetheless point to Dikeledi and Grace as examples of incipient changes in the process of their unfolding. As indicated above, in the Lentswê social world, the expression of negative feelings is a weighty matter, one that has force of its own. Thus, I do not ask whether Grace and Dikeledi were


“actually feeling” grief; whether their tears were some sort of authentic expression of an interior state, or whether they were artificial performances. Indeed, one might argue that the Tswana value on expressing joy during times of great sadness is itself inauthentic. Instead, their actions are important – and contentious – by virtue of their expression in the public space of Lentswê.

I see children’s emotional performances as an indication of what Arthur Kleinman and Erin Fitz-Henry briefly noted in their discussion of subjectivity: “our affect is always both internal and external to us – located as much within the contours of our bodies as within the shifting parameters of our sociopolitical worlds” (2007:64). Subjectivity – as the embodied collision of social and political context with interior experience – is shot through with emotion in ways that exceed either “authentic” interiority or “calculating” manipulation of social conditions for instrumental ends. My point therefore is to sidestep questions of authenticity that privilege interior essentialism, as this formulation is a red herring for an anthropology concerned with subjectivity and social structural conditions. What matters is that tears are at once an emotional, bodily, and political act in the context of humanitarian intervention, an unruly (and perhaps inadvertent) resistance to normative Tswana efforts to move beyond grief and reintegrate the social world in the wake of loss. In different ways, Grace and Dikeledi each took the Tswana use of song to produce joy and fused it with the Bathusi use of song to release feelings of sadness. In so doing, they crafted subjectivities at the interface of their bodies, their emotions, and the socio-political context – subjectivities that articulated the primacy of their own immediate feelings above the expressions considered appropriate in their village. Their sad faces and sad bodies had become the site of intervention and social transformation.

These shifts were reinforced through Bathusi’s structures of material and emotional rewards for orphans who learned to perform grief. Yet the ways children sampled from the two registers created a new, third mode of subjectivity – one that appeared to be “individualized” and “empowered” in a way valued by children’s rights advocates, but which was also problematically self-promoting and perpetually marked with the troubling status of Victim. The actions of Grace, Dikeledi, and their Bathusi peers had significant consequences in village life. Like what happened with Grace, orphans increasingly came to be regarded by villagers (and some aid workers) as emotionally manipulative and inappropriate. As Bathusi’s children received more extravagant material possessions and increasingly manifested grief inappropriately, villagers began to refer to orphans with the insult, ba ratha dilo – “they like things,” the implication being they like things instead of people. By performing inappropriate emotions in exchange for resources, Bathusi’s orphans were viewed (to an extent, by both foreign aidworkers and their fellow villagers) as forsaking proper sociality, as selling out and opting out of social relations.

The expression of grief through song becomes of stand-in for larger concerns raised by humanitarian-inflected interventions like Bathusi. Performing grief in the Western register had real repercussions for many of Bathusi’s orphans, jeopardizing their integration in their community. Lentswê villagers frequently claim that orphans have become wild and difficult to control, a perception that emerged in the same period as the music therapy program and the organization’s efforts to empower children to claim their rights to self-expression and their entitlement to material resources. In some fashion, Lentswê’s orphans exchanged one kind of stigma for another. Rather than being the children that Lentswê villagers feared were unwanted, the victims left behind by AIDS, orphans became the children who did not know how to behave properly, who simultaneously brought resources into their extended families from NGOs and at the same time undermined the core of what kinship is about – the reciprocal caregiving between oneself and one’s family and friends, which forms the essence of Tswana sociality. This example


is made all the more ironic by the multiple ways in which the foreign aid workers at Bathusi attempted to be culturally sensitive, appropriating elements of Tswana society while undermining their original meaning and purpose.

At stake here is the figure of the humanitarian victim, in this case the orphan-child whose presumed grief is definitive of her very existence. Bathusi required this premise to appear “true” in order to justify the NGO’s existence. The more the donors and aid workers entered into internal dialogue with their own empathic emotions stirred up through images of grieving orphans, the more they drew on idealized configurations of both orphans and grief from their own cultural repertoires. The adaptation of a quasi-medical, quasi-psychological model for treating children’s grief justifies, legitimates, and indeed encourages intervention into children’s bodies, and produces the sensations of goodwill that motivate aidworkers. Rather than empowering orphans to speak about their experience, music therapy placed words in the children’s mouths, injected the treatment into their bodies and faces, and created a system of rewards for continued performance. Refracted in the sad faces of orphans is the reminder that subjects are simultaneously interior and exterior, situational, made and remade and unmade through introspection and interaction. Emotion – as a motivator for aid, a potential form of pathology, and a site for intervention – is central to this process. It is indeed the apparatus through which changing subjectivities are projected onto bodies and refracted into individual children’s actions and their broader social context. It is indeed the very stuff that motivates aidworkers in the first place.

While Grace’s and Dikeledi’s tears may be small matters in the grander scheme of tensions between foreign aidworkers and Lentswê villagers over the provision of care for orphans, they nonetheless help articulate why children’s participation in orphan care NGOs is a microcosm for the multifaceted and often unplanned role that humanitarian interventions play in changing modes of social reproduction and shifting subjectivities – even when they are designed to alleviate the suffering and uncertainties of a real crisis. By medicalizing grief through a therapeutic model, Bathusi created the very illnesses it aimed to heal.

Notes 1. All names of people, organizations, and places are pseudonyms, except references to public figures and organizations whose actions are detailed in the public record. 2. The term “AIDS orphan” is a commonly circulated phrase in humanitarian circles. While many of Bathusi’s children were not orphaned by the AIDS epidemic, I draw on this phrase to reflect the presuppositions inherent in humanitarian constructions.

3. I use the term “humanitarian” to indicate charitable aid and philanthropic intervention (that is, not loans or structural development) that aim to redress the deleterious effects on humans of crises and other social tragedies – be they epidemics, wars, environmental catastrophes, or otherwise.

4. The different denominations of Christianity in Lentswê are representative of the variety found across Botswana. According to the chief, most Christians in Lentswê are Zionist (ZCC), Catholic, or Lutheran. Across Botswana, roughly half of churchgoers attend the so-called “churches of the spirit” and half attend former mission congregations, the “churches of the law.” While there are differences in hymns and dancing at funerals of different denominations (and there are further variations in other parts of the country), I am painting a sufficiently generic portrait of the ritual to encompass most local instantiations.


5. Most of the performances were for multi-national development groups holding business meetings, or for community events. The bulk of the people attending these events were usually expatriates living in Botswana and highly educated, “Westernized” Tswana elites. 6. The influence on children’s singing that Piet and the foreign volunteers wielded was made particularly clear in one incident. In 2004, the fifteen or so “best” performers recorded a CD of Bathusi’s songs at a professional recording studio in the capital city; these CDs were sold at a sharp profit to project supporters in Botswana and overseas. Piet only ever wrote one song in Setswana, Nthusang – an upbeat tune whose simplistic lyrics begged “elders” to “help us” achieve aspirations for children’s futures. When the group first performed Nthusang to the Tswana recording engineer managing their set, he burst into laughter, telling the children in disbelief that they were singing the Setswana lyrics with heavy English accents – that they sounded like “little Americans.” The children had so fully appropriated the voices of foreign aid workers that they lost authenticity in their own language. References Abu-Lughod, Lila

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Appendix I: Dikeledi’s tears

Documents

Dahl-Singing With Sad Faces