How do people envision social reproduction when regular modes of generational succession and continuity are disrupted in the context of HIV/AIDS? How and where can scholars identify local ideas for restoring intergenerational practices of obligation and dependency that produce mutuality rather than conflict across age groups? Expanding from studies of HIV/AIDS and religion in Africa, this article pushes for an analytic engagement with ritual as a space and mode of action to both situate local concerns about and practices for restoring dynamics of social reproduction. Finally, chapter 6 shows how as Pentecostal-charismatic Christian discourses criticized customary and newer bereavement and commemorative practices for the benefit of both the living and the dead. Chapter 5 shows how funerals became more critical events to regenerate and redistribute life force through food preparation and consumption, as well as in purification and burial placement of bodies. While promising financial providence, insurance consumption mapped onto logics of social immorality ('witchcraft) and reworked kinship and caregiving practices across generations. Pastors' and general religious discourse with elders' projects for youth subjection.Ĭhapter 4 shows how peoples' preparations for future deaths were also commercialized in a new life insurance market. In chapter 3, emergent Christian Pentecostal-charismatic religious practices became popular means for social and bodily healing and forecasting peoples' futures. Global health and development organizations responding to the epidemic introduced newer models that complicated and supplemented elders' projects to reverse this generational inversion. Elders in households and communities reemphasized customary models of personhood and life course involving gendered respectful subjection of youth and generational age-set organization. Chapter 2 shows how elders understood youths' earlier deaths to be from HIV/AIDS and moral violability. The kingship's nationalist cultural ceremonies meant to combat the disease were increasingly commercialized for tourism and seen as ineffective in general disease prevention. Chapter 1 shows HIV/AIDS to be a condition of regional and global economic marginalization. The study presents the following findings. Restoration was framed as journeying toward a more moral life, good death, and better future. In response to these conditions many Swazis elaborated indigenous notions of 'work' and 'ritual' and applied these to their everyday lives and life cycle rites like funerals as means to restore personhood and intergenerational relationships. This study (revised and published as Funeral Culture by Indiana University Press) documents an emergent funeral culture in the African nation-state of Swaziland (today eSwatini) amid the enduring HIV/AIDS epidemic that impacted notions of personhood and intergenerational relations.ĭata derives from 16 months of ethnographic research with households, churches, and public and private organizations in Swaziland and South Africa, along with archival and document research (2008-2011).ĭemographic age patterns of mortality reflected local crises of social reproduction and generational succession where youth increasingly predeceased their elders.