Rural Livelihoods and Gendered Resistance in Botswana: Patterns and Production in Women’s Basketry Co-operatives

As globalization has shifted the market in tourism—dependent Botswana, women who are responsible for the production of baskets have entered a new and expanded market economy where locally made baskets carry Tswana symbols and meanings into international contexts and construct and contest the idea of sustainability and gender ideology. These objects and cultural artifacts are both an insight into Tswana culture as well as a new means through which women produce, tell and re—tell narratives of cultural and global, financial success and resistance.

In this book, Rebecca Upton closely examines how women in a rural part of southern Africa give voice to contemporary issues of environment, health, economic disparity and the impact of migration on everyday lives. The ‘traditional’ Tswana patterns, tears of the giraffe and knees of the tortoise, have long been used by women to convey particular messages about ethnic group affiliation, meaningful cultural origin stories and cautionary morality tales. Today, these same patterns have come to take on additional meanings as a result of local interpretation of global impact on Tswana communities.

Emphasizing the role that African material culture plays in mediating between social worlds, this book will be of interested to those who research in the fields of African art and anthropology, economics, gender and sustainability.

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