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The Heat of the Hearth
Janet Carsten offers a vivid and original investigation of nature and kinship in Malaysia, based on her own experience of life as a fister daughter in a family on the island of Langkawi. Kinship relations are crucial to personal and social identity, and in Malaya culture identity is mutableand fluid: it is given at birth through ties of procreation, but is also aquired throughout life by living together and sharing food. The author shows that the heat of the hearth is not only necessary for the cooking and sharing of food, but central to domestic life, including childbirth andreproduction. Kinship is a process not a state; people become kin largely through the everyday actions of women in and between the households. The incorporation and assimilation of newcomers--`making kinship'--is central to the social reproduction of village communities; domestic life is thuscentral to the political process.Janet Carsten gives the reader a fascinating `anthropology of everyday life', including a compelling view of gender relations; she urges reassessment of recent anthropological work on gender, and a new approach to the study of kinship.
Constructing Transnational and Transracial Identity
Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are home to more than 90,000 transnational adoptees of Scandinavian parents raised in a predominantly white environment. This ethnography provides a unique perspective on how these transracial adoptees conceptualize and construct their sense of identity along the intersection of ethnicity, family, and national lines.
Imperial Investments
This book examines the legacy of a British child migration scheme that relocated British children to Southern Rhodesia between 1946 and 1962, with the aim of populating the colony with “fresh white stock”. The selected children were resettled at Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College, a boarding school established in a disused RAF airbase outside the town of Bulawayo. This social engineering project sought to “rescue” children from what were predicted as undesirable futures in Britain and offer them a “better life” with prospects of social advancement. Yet, beyond individual salvation, the scheme emigrated the children with the intention that they would help sustain the racially se...
After Kinship
This innovative book takes a look at the anthropology of kinship and the comparative study of relatedness. Kinship has historically been central to the discipline of anthropology but what sort of future does it have? What is the impact of recent studies of reproductive technologies, of gender, and of the social construction of science in the West? What significance does public anxiety about the family, or new family forms in the West have for anthropology's analytic strategies? The study of kinship has rested on a distinction between the 'biological' and the 'social'. But recent technological developments have made this distinction no longer self-evident. What does this imply about the comparison of kinship institutions cross-culturally? Janet Carsten gives an approachable view of the past, present, and future of kinship in anthropology, which will be of interest not just to anthropologists but to social scientists generally.
Being a Parent in the Field
How does being a parent in the field influence a researcher's positionality and the production of ethnographic knowledge? Based on regionally and thematically diverse cases, this collection explores methodological, theoretical, and ethical dimensions of accompanied fieldwork. The authors show how multiple familial relations and the presence of their children, partners, or other family members impact the immersion into the field and the construction of its boundaries. Female and male authors from various career stages exemplify different research conditions, financial constraints, and family-career challenges which are decisive for academic success.
About the House
The domestic unit is inseparable from its homestead, and the 'house', at once a physical place and a social unit, is often also a unit of production and consumption, a cult group, and even a political faction. Inspired by Lévi-Strauss's suggestion that the multi-functional noble houses of medieval Europe were simply the best-known examples of a widespread social institution, the contributors to this collection analyse 'house' systems in Southeast Asia and South America, exploring the interrelationships between buildings, people, and ideas. They reveal some of the ways in which houses can stand for social groups and serve as images of process and order.
Marriage and the Moral Imagination
This fresh and engaging book opens up new terrain in the exploration of marriage and kinship. While anthropologists and sociologists have often interpreted marriage, and kinship more broadly, in conservative terms, Carsten highlights their transformative possibilities. The book argues that marriage is a close encounter with difference on the most intimate scale, carrying the seeds of social transformation alongside the trappings of conformity. Grounded in rich ethnography and the author's many decades of familiarity with Malaysia, it asks a central question: what does marriage do, and how? Exploring the implications of the everyday imaginative labour of marriage for kinship relations and wider politics, this work offers an important and highly original contribution to anthropology, family and kinship studies, sociology and Southeast Asian studies.
Difficult Attachments
Anthropologists have long considered kinship as the basis for social solidarity. Indeed, the idea that kinship is grounded in positive sociality has found its way into most anthropological accounts and has served as an orienting framework directing decades of scholarly research. But what about when it is not? What about instances when kinship is anything but ‘warm and fuzzy’ but is characterized, instead, by neglect, violence, negative affect, or a lack of nurturance and care? In the three interlinked sections of this volume, the view that kinship is about “solidarity” and “care” is challenged by exploring how kin relations are not only about connection and inclusion but also about disconnection, exclusion, neglect, and violence. Kinship relationships that feel “positive” and “good” take a great deal of perseverance and work; there is nothing “natural” about kinship ties as being based on positive sociality. In these chapters, the contributors take seriously the contingency of kinship relations (the moments when kinship breaks down or is a source of suffering) and how this prompts scholars to develop new theoretical and methodological perspectives.
Cultures of Relatedness
Our understanding of what makes a person a relative has been transformed by radical changes in marriage arrangements and gender relations, and by new reproductive technologies. We can no longer take it for granted that our most fundamental social relationships are grounded in 'biology' or 'nature'. These developments have prompted anthropologists to take a fresh look at idioms of relatedness in other societies, and to review the ways in which relationships are symbolised and interpreted in our own society. Defamiliarizing some classic cases, challenging the established analytic categories of anthropology, the contributors to this innovative book focus on the boundary between the 'biological' and the 'social', and bring into question the received wisdom at the heart of the study of kinship.
Transplanting Care
The sudden call, the race to the hospital, the high-stakes operation—the drama of transplant surgery is well known. But what happens before and after the surgery? In Transplanting Care, Laura L. Heinemann examines the daily lives of midwestern organ transplant patients and those who care for them, from pretransplant preparations through to the long posttransplant recovery. Heinemann points out that as efforts to control healthcare costs gain urgency—and as new surgical techniques, drug therapies, and home medical equipment advance—most of the transplant process now takes place at home, among kin. Indeed, the transplant system effectively depends on unpaid care labor, typically provided...
