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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.
Most children in Africa start working from a very early age, helping the family or earning wages. Should this work be abolished, tolerated, or encouraged? Such questions are the subject of much debate. International and national organizations, employers, parents, and children often have diverse opinions and put pressure in different directions. The contributions in this book offer intensive fieldwork and careful analysis of children's activities, considering childhood and family, work and play, work in rural and urban contexts, paths to learning, work and school, and children's rights. (Series: Reports on African Studies / Beitrage zur Afrikaforschung - Vol. 52)
This book is a comprehensive study of some ways of treating the subject that demonstrate new and unusual perspectives, and provides a different approach to the popularly-held views of mothers-in-law; and that further address these works as popular culture; and as texts in their own right from within the framework of literary theory; and as works that demonstrate the ability to reach and connect with, and satisfy, both the general reader, the student, and the scholar, from all levels and walks of life.
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.
From the 1720s to the 1940s, parents in the kingdom and later colony of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) developed and sustained the common practice of girl fostering, or "entrusting." Transferring their daughters at a young age into foster homes, Dahomeans created complex relationships of mutual obligation, kinship, and caregiving that also exploited girls' labor for the economic benefit of the women who acted as their social mothers. Drawing upon oral tradition, historic images, and collective memories, Jessica Reuther pieces together the fragmentary glimpses of girls' lives contained in colonial archives within the framework of traditional understandings about entrustment. Placing thes...
What happens to a community when the majority of young people leave their homes to pursue an education? From a Trickle to a Torrent documents the demographic and social consequences of educational migration from Nubri, a Tibetan enclave in the highlands of Nepal. The authors explore parents’ motivations for sending their children to distant schools and monasteries, social connections that shape migration pathways, young people’s estrangement from village life, and dilemmas that arise when educated individuals are unable or unwilling to return and reside in their native villages. Drawing on numerous decades of research, this study documents a transitional period when the future of a Himalayan society teeters on the brink of irreversible change.
As Africa's population ages, the inadequacy of kin care becomes more visible. In Ghana, older people and their allies are developing fragile initiatives and programs beyond the norm of kin care. Changes in Care examines aging in Ghana as a way of understanding the unevenness of social change more widely.
This volume examines religiosity on university campuses in Sub-Saharan Africa. Focusing on both individuals and organized groups, the contributions open a window onto how religion becomes a factor, affects social interactions, is experienced and mobilized by various actors. It brings together case studies from various disciplinary backgrounds (anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies, literature) and theoretical orientations to illustrate the significance of religiosity in recent developments on university campuses. It pays a particular attention to religion-informed activism and contributes a fresh analysis of processes that are shaping both the experience of being student and the university campus as a moral space. Last but not least, it sheds light onto the ways in which the campus becomes a site of a reformulation of both religiosity and sociality.
International Migrations have become a central topic in the Humanities in the last years. Understanding migration requires a closer look at the migratory phenomena and the continuities within the societies involved in the migration process. This volume intends to overcome simplistic views on migration and the shortcomings of a push and pull-factor analysis. Instead, the perspective of the migrants themselves orients the approach of "cultures of migration". In this view, migration becomes a complex issue, and motives and acceptance of migration appear to be a matter of negotiations, in the migrants' societies of origin and in the host societies as well. The present volume brings together a number of essays exploring the cultures of migration in various contexts. It is organised in three sections, dealing with "Migrations as Encounters", "Migration as Challenge", and "Transcontinental Migrants". Ten contributions, each based on original fieldwork in various parts of Africa, examine the validity of the concept of "cultures of migration", as explained in the introduction.
This edited volume provides an anthropological study of family businesses and business families. In previous research on family firms and business families, the comparative cross-cultural approach of anthropology has so far received little attention. As a result, family firms and business families are too often analyzed without considering cultural and kinship differences adequately. Similarly, although the topics of kinship and the economy are central to anthropological analysis, research on family firms and business families has been a marginal topic only that lacks in-depth discussions within anthropology. This volume breaks the mold by offering new empirical and theoretical insights into...