This deeply insightful ethnography explores the healing power of caring and intimacy in a small, closely bonded Apostolic congregation during Botswana’s HIV/AIDS pandemic. Death in a Church of Life paints a vivid picture of how members of the Baitshepi Church make strenuous efforts to sustain loving relationships amid widespread illness and death. Over the course of long-term fieldwork, Frederick Klaits discovered Baitshepi’s distinctly maternal ethos and the “spiritual” kinship embodied in the church’s nurturing fellowship practice. Klaits shows that for Baitshepi members, Christian faith is a form of moral passion that counters practices of divination and witchcraft with redemptive hymn singing, prayer, and the use of therapeutic substances. An online audio annex makes available examples of the church members’ preaching and song.

About the Author

Frederick Klaits, a cultural anthropologist, teaches in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University.

Reviews

“This book is a valuable contribution to the study of HIV/AIDS. . . I would highly recommend it to anyone.”
— Easa

“This [book] will provoke new, creative, and sustainable ways of designing and implementing AIDS prevention and treatment policies.”
— Journal Royal Anthro Inst

“The [book] is rich and detailed, both meticulous and expansive.”
— Somatosphere

“This book should be required reading for all Africanists, for scholars of religion, of the emotions, and for medical anthropologists seeking to understand AIDS or the meanings and practices of care.”
— American Ethnologist

“Written in a clear and engaging style. . . . [This book] enlarges our understanding of how people nurture loving relationships in the context of AIDS.”
— African Stds Review

"Klaits' work is not only a major contribution to the anthropology of religion and the social scientific literature on AIDS, but also a significant intervention into debates on how Africanists should approach their understandings of sociality and relatedness."—Matthew Engelke, author of A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church

"The reader gets the sense of being a welcome party to a close conversation. Klaits sustains a direct, clear, humane, and jargon-free voice, and we come away with a radically challenged understanding of what it means in an African church to be 'born anew'."—Richard Werbner, author of Tears of the Dead: The Social Biography of an African Family

Media

Correction: A passage on page 5 of the text mistranslates a Setswana proverb as “Jealousy is cooked together with the voice; when the voice emerges, jealousy remains.” This proverb, “lefufa le apetswe le lentswe, lentswe la butswa ga sala lefufa,” should be translated as “Jealousy is cooked together with a stone; when the stone has ripened jealousy remains,” meaning that jealousy is even more resistant than a stone to alteration. The author regrets having mistaken the mid-low-toned final vowel in lentswe (stone) for the high-toned final vowel in lentswe (voice) in this instance.