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Cross-cultural Approaches to Adoption
This edited collection looks at diverse examples of child-rearing and adoption practices from across the globe, revealing some of the assumptions that lie beneath western childcare policy.
Things:
The relation between religion and things has long been conceived in antagonistic terms, privileging spirit above matter, belief above ritual and objects, meaning above form and 'inward' contemplation above 'outward' action. This book addresses these issues.
Past and Present: Perspectives on Gender and Love
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2015. How do humans conceive of, enact, embody, perform, control, commodify, proscribe and portray love and gender? How are our bodies, our identities, our beliefs, our representations of ourselves affected by love and gender – or perceptions of love and gender? What don’t we know? What don’t we talk about? Why? Have answers to all these questions changed over time? Across cultures? These and many other questions lie at the heart of this volume on the changing natures and intertwining of gender and love. Its contents encompass concepts of love within and of the self, in families and between specific family members, in sexual and intimate relationships, in spiritual practice, in communities, and seen through many different lenses and from a range of disciplines and approaches. Readers may be left with more questions than answers: we certainly hope so.
Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond
Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond provides a new look at the old anthropological concern with materiality and connectivity. It understands materiality not as defined property of some-thing, nor does it take connectivity as merely a relation between discrete entities. Somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it sees materiality and connectivity as two interrelated modes in which an entity is, or more precisely – is becoming, in the world. The question, thus, is how these two modes of becoming relate and fold into each other. Throughout the four-year research process that led to this book, the authors approached this question not just from a theo...
Enjoying Religion
“Enjoying religion” seems to be a contradiction because religion is generally perceived as a serious or even suppressive phenomenon. This volume is the first to study the increase of enjoying religion systematically by presenting eleven new case studies, occurring on four continents. The volume concludes that in our late modern secular societies the enjoyment of religion or of its loose elements is growing. In particular when scholars concentrate on “lived religion” of ordinary people, the cheerful experiences appear to prevail. Many people use pleasant (elements of) religion to add meaning to their lives, to find spiritual fulfillment or a way to salvation, and to experience belonging to a larger unity. At the same time, diverse cultural dynamics of late modern society such as popular culture, commercialization, re-enchantment, and feminization influence this trend of enjoying religion. In spite of secularization, playing with religion appears to be attractive.
Making Families Through Adoption
This volume examines adoption as a way of understanding the practices and ideology of kinship and family more generally. Adoption allows a window onto discussions of what constitute family or kin, the role of biological connectedness, oversight of parenting practices by the state, and the role of race, gender, sexuality, and socio-economic class in the building of families. The book focuses primarily on adoption practices in the US but will also use examples of adoption and fostering across cultures to put those American adoption practices into a comparative context. While reviewing practices of and issues surrounding adoption, the authors highlight the ways these practices and discussions allow us greater insight into overall practices of kinship and family.
Child Fostering in West Africa
Child fostering is an age-old and also modern phenomenon whose importance stretches much further than the boundaries of so-called ‘traditional’ African societies. As a mobile and creative kinship practice, child fostering is of growing importance in the global world as it goes along with other forms of mobility such as migration and transnationalism. The book aims to revitalize the study of fostering by situating the issue in more recent theoretical approaches to kinship. It also examines what functionalist and structuralist theory may still contribute to the understanding of child fostering. Historical and recent child fostering practices in several West African countries are discussed from the angles of Anthropology, History and Law.
Transfers of Belonging
In Transfers of Belonging, Erdmute Alber traces the history of child fostering in northern Benin from the pre-colonial past to the present by pointing out the embeddedness of child foster practices and norms in a wider political process of change. Child fostering was, for a long time, not just one way of raising children, but seen as the appropriate way of doing so. This changed profoundly with the arrival of European ideas about birth parents being the ‘right’ parents, but also with the introduction of schooling and the differentiation of life chances. Besides providing deep historical and ethnographical insights, Transfers of Belonging offers a new theoretical frame for conceptualizing parenting.
Creative Research Methods
Creative research methods can help to answer complex contemporary questions which are hard to answer using conventional methods alone. Creative methods can also be more ethical, helping researchers to address social injustice. This bestselling book, now in its second edition, is the first to identify and examine the five areas of creative research methods: • arts-based research • embodied research • research using technology • multi-modal research • transformative research frameworks. Written in an accessible, practical and jargon-free style, with reflective questions, boxed text and a companion website to guide student learning, it offers numerous examples of creative methods in practice from around the world. This new edition includes a wealth of new material, with five extra chapters and over 200 new references. Spanning the gulf between academia and practice, this useful book will inform and inspire researchers by showing readers why, when, and how to use creative methods in their research. Creative Research Methods has been cited over 500 times.
The Oxford Handbook of Mary
The Oxford Handbook of Mary offers an interdisciplinary guide to Marian Studies, including chapters on textual, literary, and media analysis; theology; Church history; art history; studies on devotion in a variety of forms; cultural history; folk tradition; gender analysis; apparitions and apocalypticism. Featuring contributions from a distinguished group of international scholars, the Handbook looks at both Eastern and Western perspectives and attempts to correct imbalance in previous books on Mary towards the West. The volume also considers Mary in Islam and pilgrimages shared by Christian, Muslim, and Jewish adherents. While Mary can be a source of theological disagreement, this authorita...
