Urban Culture between Tradition and Globalization in Francistown, Botswana

Description: The assumption of this project is that in the course of the last two centuries the Southern African subcontinent has increasingly come to constitute one vast cultural region, due to the convergence of a multitude of social, political, economic and cultural processes. Against this background, this research focuses on the political and symbolic culture in one centrally situated medium-sized town (Francistown, northeastern Botswana). This will hopefully yield insights with more general applicability to the subcontinent. The town is viewed as a sociostructural locus in which interaction occurs between tradition (which is anchored in the countryside and in specific ethnic groups) and the modern state. This process is being studied from a number of complementary perspectives: family and kinship; urban housing as an individual strategy and as an object of governmental action; systems of social control, both informal and diffuse (at the level of the urban residential area, the family, the church) and formal (adjudication by legal institutions created by the government); ethnic patterns of interaction and mobilization; voluntary association, especially those in the religious, professional and political domain; the impact of the state at the local level; economic, kinship and ritual dimensions of urban-rural relations. Along these lines, specific contemporary urban patterns become discernible in interaction, organization, representations and values. To study these patterns in greater detail, the research has increasingly concentrated over the years on the vast therapeutic domain (which locally, in addition to cosmopolitan medicine and pragmatic herbalism, also comprises most Christian and traditional religious expressions). Organizational, symbolic and existential dimensions of urban processes in general are reflected there. Recently, the use of Internet by Francistonians has emerged as another line of research. The research employs the following methods: participant observation; in-depth interviews; a comprehensive survey; perusal and wherever possible quantitative analysis of current governmental files; archival research. Access a book on virtuality, globalisation and the transformation of Africa, in which Francistown urban culture features prominently.

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