Soliciting Gifts and Negotiating Agency: The Spirit of Asking in Botswana

Abstract

This article explores the playful asking for things that occurs daily in Botswana, and connects it with the frequent solicitations one receives there to aid public and private projects. In these transactions people mutually construct themselves as independent actors: such constructions are not a priori to the interchanges. Requests and solicitations, organized around the possibility of denial, configure the actors as essentially of equal agentive positions. This particular subject position can be contrasted with those in other kinds of transactions in Botswana, which may configure hierarchy or interdependence. This approach is contrasted, in the article, with that of much conventional literature on exchange, which assumes the independence and equal agency of actors prior to their interaction. Introduction: 'Give me ten thebe please!' This formula, uttered as an insistent demand by children in urban Botswana, inevitably annoys Westerners to whom it is addressed. And indeed, these force- ful requests are inappropriate to local people as well, although not for the same reasons. Many Westerners in Botswana see the begging by local children as continuous with, and parallel to, the recipient status of Botswana in an interna- tional economy of development aid. The loans, gifts and projects that originate in the United States and Europe are an essential part of defining Botswana's Third-World status, just as the necessity for begging defines the children as impoverished. But this parallel between asking for things and poverty or de- pendency, although it is available for contemplation and suggestion, is not a necessary one for the people of Botswana: another interpretation is available. In Botswana, the act of asking for money or goods need not be embarrassing, and ought not be offensive, in many social situations. In fact, it can positively highlight the social dimensions of independence and self-determination of both the asker and the giver. In this article, I explore the ways in which agency is created for actors in social situations. I am most interested in the manner in which a kind of egali- tarian and autonomous position is established for people in the very context of, and not prior to, exchange interactions. But, as I will discuss, Botswana is not 'an egalitarian society'. Nor is it 'hierarchical'. In contrast to approaches which seek to characterize a society by one or the other term (cf Kent 1993), I found the situation in Botswana to be more complex. Hierarchy and egalitarianism,