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Full-Text Articles in Sociology of Culture
Christians’ Cut: Popular Religion And The Global Health Campaign For Medical Male Circumcision In Swaziland, Casey Golomski, Sonene Nyawo
Christians’ Cut: Popular Religion And The Global Health Campaign For Medical Male Circumcision In Swaziland, Casey Golomski, Sonene Nyawo
Anthropology
Swaziland faces one of the worst HIV epidemics in the world and is a site for the current global health campaign in sub-Saharan Africa to medically circumcise the majority of the male population. Given that Swaziland is also majority Christian, how does the most popular religion influence acceptance, rejection or understandings of medical male circumcision? This article considers interpretive differences by Christians across the Kingdom’s three ecumenical organisations, showing how a diverse group people singly glossed as ‘Christian’ in most public health acceptability studies critically rejected the procedure in unity, but not uniformly. Participants saw medical male circumcision’s promotion and …
Outliving Love: Marital Estrangement In An African Insurance Market, Casey Golomski
Outliving Love: Marital Estrangement In An African Insurance Market, Casey Golomski
Anthropology
Marital estrangement and formal divorce are vital conjunctures for married women’s kinship relations and life course, where a horizon of future possibilities are revalued and negotiated at the interstices of custom, law, and social and ritual obligations. In this article, after delineating the forms of customary and civil marriage and the possibilities for divorce or estrangement from each, I describe how some married women in Swaziland and South Africa mediate this complex social field for their children and families through pensions and continuing to pay for their partners’ insurance coverage. This was not solely out of avarice to reap future …