“Slow marriage,” “fast <i>bogadi</i> ”: change and continuity in marriage in Botswana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Classic work on Tswana marriage emphasises that it is a process of becoming, involving a series of rituals and prestations characterised by a long period of socially productive ambiguity in which the status of the union, the spouses, their children and their broader families remain uncertain. Marriage was a “total social phenomenon” entailing the intermingling of the economic, social and political spheres and continual gift circulation, thereby fostering dense social networks. In the twenty-first century, relatively few people marry, marriage is largely a middle class phenomenon, and people marry in civil ceremonies such that marriage is virtually instantaneous. Associated rituals occur over one or two days and bridewealth [bogadi] is usually given at the time of marriage. This article examines what such a time contraction in the rituals and prestations means and what it might suggest about marriage, the person and kinship. I propose two ideal types to capture this evolving process, “slow marriage” to depict marriages in the past and “fast bogadi’ to characterize contemporary marriages in which the rituals and gifts exchanged between marrying families occur over a brief time period. I draw on the concept of “possessive individualism” to help understand changing notions of personhood.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".