Beyond the Blame Paradigm: Rethinking Witchcraft Gossip and Stigma around HIV-Positive Children in Southeastern Botswana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In 2007, the families of several HIV-positive children in a southeastern Botswana village complained that they were suffering increased stigma in the wake of national successes at preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Alluding to the government's apparent eradication of ‘natural’ pathways of infection to infants, many villagers began alleging that the existing population of sick children must therefore have contracted the virus through unnatural means, such as witchcraft. This article probes the relationship between the notion of stigma and neighbours’ gossip about witchcraft. According to ethnographic evidence across Africa, invoking witchcraft has been a common means for HIV-positive people to lessen the stigma of infection, deflecting blame for sickness away from their (potentially immoral) behaviour and on to malevolent agents. In contrast, the case studies in this article instead entail gossip about witchcraft that was consistently refuted by families of sick children, who felt this aetiology contributed to their child's marginalisation. The article contends that neighbours’ gossip was not simply concerned with jealousy or deflection of blame – the predominant foci of ethnography on the occult. Instead, these cases direct analytical attention toward people's ambivalent sentiments and anxieties about care that are also expressed through speculation about witches, in which villagers strive to morally orient themselves toward children whose sickness is more profoundly disturbing than that of adults.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".