Women in Botswana

Abstract

My critique of research on women in Botswana was undertaken as a constructive comment on current concepts and interpretations. 1 This brief response to Kerven's rejoinder is offered in the same spirit. 2 I will focus on those points that perhaps will promote rather than deter constructive dialogue. I believe the opposition drawn between research and social or applied research is counter-productive. Research questions are influenced by practical and political constraints whether one is working within a government or a university. They are also influenced by prevailing ideas, theories, models and preconceptions within any discipline as well as those within any ministry. But the point then is that one assumes a totally unconstrained choice of research topic or mode but that one's thinking and practice need be determined by pre-existing categories. Far from advocating a quixotic gallop in pursuit of purer truth3 I was attempting a more modest (though less romantic!) pursuit of analytical categories that would prove more productive than some now in common use. Of course this attempt builds on the work that has been produced with precisely these current ideas. My suggestions for rethinking were based only on my own fieldwork but also on the accumulating literature in Botswana. Any impression that I wish not to recognize other researchers' contributions4 is quite wrong: only the critique but my own thinking and other writing are profoundly affected by the quantity and quality of research carried out in Botswana. Any omissions I made were due to the article's brevity, to the need to make only a few but pungent points, and to my own hobby horses and blind spots and were thus far less sinister than Kerven suggests. I disagree too with the implication that policy-related research produced in Botswana for nonacademic purposes and audiences is thereby excluded from the kinds of critical review associated with academic purposes and audiences. This is a two-way street. As I pointed out, some researchers in Botswana have taken up the concept matrifocal households developed by various academics concerned with processes of social change in other parts of the world. Doubtless the evidence from Botswana will be drawn into the current debate on the analytical and empirical significance of matrifocality which, in turn, will feed back into the theories and methods used and adopted by policymakers. It is precisely these exchanges and the separation between academics and policy analysts that are interesting. Now to the misrepresentations in my critique. First, the issue of Botswana and Lesotho. We are all concerned both to do justice to the variation in experience of l P. Peters, 'Gender, Developmental Cycles and Historical Process: A Critique of Recent Research on Women in Botswana', Journal of Southern African Studies 10, 1 (1983), pp. 100-122. 2 C. Kerven, 'Academics, Practitioners and All Kinds of Women in Development: A reply to Peters', Journal of Southern African Studies 10, 2 (1984), pp. 259-268 (hereafter cited as Kerven). I Kerven, p. 263. 4 ibid., p. 264.