United States

Assuming that kinship obligations and expectations are in constant processes of change, the question arises what happens if these changes do not affect relatives at the same pace. This is the case in the Republic of Benin, West Africa, where processes of urbanization are leading to a growing heterogeneity of life styles, normativities and economic capacities within kin groups. As a result, people who see one another other as closely related through kinship are developing different normativities concerning children´s belonging as well as educational visions.


My paper analyzes these diverging normativities through the lens of child fostering and institutionalized, morally laden modes of exchange between kin. I argue that conflicts around children are in fact negotiating kinship obligations and possibilities of retreating from them by relating to other normativities such as children´s rights or schooling obligations. At the same time, these conflicts are creating new normativities that relate urban and rural households to one another, under the conditions of rising inequality of wealth and life chances.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

Diverging Kin-Scripts within the Extended Kin-Group: Conflicts over Children&#39;s Belonging in Benin

africa

immigration and diasporas

kinship and families

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Diverging Kin-Scripts within the Extended Kin-Group: Conflicts over Children's Belonging in Benin

technical paper

Global populations are changing. Widespread demographic shifts have resulted in social transformations that impact families, individuals and communities. One particular area of concern is population aging, which has created ongoing challenges regarding the care of elderly people. In Ghana, as elsewhere, a global aging population has created a gap between elderly people’s expectations of care and the ability for family members to provide that care. Increasingly, narratives around elder care by both older and younger Ghanaians claim that near the end of life, family members often neglect their social obligations to extended kin, yet once a person is near death or has died, family members meet their kin obligations in highly visible ways. One such way is through the public display of funeral posters, which line the streets of main roads throughout Ghana. Their purpose is twofold: to announce the burial and funeral arrangements of their loved one, and, more importantly, to signal that their kinship obligations are being met, often in an attempt to repair kin relations that have been strained or severed. In this paper, I examine a series of funeral posters and contrast the moralizing messages and symbols that put forth an image of continuity and care with the narratives of Ghanaians who feel that family members are prioritizing more public displays of care after death, rather than attending to the more private kin obligations that occur while a person is still living.

Family Loves the Dead: Care after life in Sunyani, Ghana

“En France, les parents sont différents, ma famille là-bas c'est à l’infini! Je ne sais pas même c'est qui est qui.” This contrast between expansive Bamiléké families in Cameroon and the boundary-drawing practices of the Cameroonian diaspora in Europe remind us that recent transnational migration combined with the cultivation of cosmopolitan middle-class selves has led many Bamiléké to reconfigure ideas and practices of relatedness. The shifting boundaries of relatedness are particularly relevant with regard to kinship obligations surrounding the care of children.   Drawing on fieldwork in Cameroon, Germany, and France, this paper poses two broad questions regarding kinship, migration, and social class. First, how do middle-class Bamiléké migrants to Europe and their relatives in Cameroon manage “kin-scription,” or “the practice of assigning kin-work to family members” (Stack and Burton 1993, 157)? Second, how might the changing nature of kin-work•in this case, new ideas about what it means to raise a child properly•affect these processes of kin-scription?    Concretely, what accounts for the curiously sharp reduction in child fostering among middle-class Bamiléké migrants and return migrants? This contribution explores just one among many interacting explanations for the contraction of child fostering•changing ideas about hardship with regard to middle-class Bamiléké migrants’ child rearing strategies. In preferring cultivation over toughening for their own children, and deflecting potential conflict with kin, these cosmopolitan Bamiléké withdraw from previously common practices of child fostering.

Hardship, Care, and the Contraction of Child Fostering Practices: Shifting Boundaries of Relatedness in Cameroonian Transnational Families

Many Ghanaians celebrate their reliance on family in providing elder care, contrasting kin care with the discarding of older adults in institutional facilities that they envision in Western countries. Elder care becomes a way to organize cultural difference and invert global hierarchies, such that “African tradition” has a positive valence. Kin care for older adults in the late twentieth century in Ghana was particularly dependent on the labor of daughters, in part because the obligations of an extended group of kin had narrowed to the biological sons and daughters. Migrant daughters were expected to return to the hometown to care for older kin (and grandchildren) and be supported by the remittances of their male siblings and migrant children. Migrant daughters today are increasingly unhappy with this expectation and are finding a substitute by hiring a paid caregiver in the hometown or moving their mothers in to live with them, and hiring a caregiver to help. In the process, they take on the role of their brothers by caring for their parents through providing the financial support for their wellbeing, rather than providing personal care directly. In these new kinship arrangements, paid caregiving is accommodated to the ideal of kin care: both aging parents and adult children see hiring a care worker as a way of fulfilling adult children’s kinship obligations rather than an outright reversal. It reveals the ways kin relations are commodified. The reinterpretation of kinship as commodity exchanges also allows adult children to more easily disavow those obligations.

Kinship as Commodity: Migrant Daughters and Paid Caregivers in Elder Care in Southern Ghana

The 2011 Arab Spring destabilized national borders across the Middle East and North Africa, amplifying the dangers of migratory trajectories practiced by under-class Tunisian youth. Structurally locked out of national labor markets, young people took advantage of the security breach to attempt the Mediterranean passage to Europe; others migrated by the thousands to join the jihad in Syria, Libya, and Iraq. Back home in Tunisia, the figure of these missing youth became central to the politics of families left behind. Families foregrounded the inviolability of kinship in an appeal to the state to locate their missing kin, confirm their safety, and return them home. In this context, mothers’ gendered performances on behalf of missing sons are viewed as particularly efficacious.    This paper considers the pressures that kin-based activism places on mothers of missing Tunisian sons. Disappearance confronts families with an ambiguous loss: neither able to confirm a missing son’s well-being, nor properly mourn his death. Such mothers describe kin-bonds with their sons in terms resembling Sahlins’s “mutuality of being,” explaining how the sensorium shared between mother and son offers proof that the latter is still alive. While this helps mothers to navigate the uncertainty of ambiguous loss, it also risks making them the sole custodian of personhood for the absent son. This paper examines modes of emotional exhaustion among Tunisian activist mothers, revealing how the skilled performance of a boundless motherhood leads to depletion in the face of prolonged absence.

Poignant Attachments: Mothering the Missing in Tunisia

Is kinship moving in reverse? Are material and emotional expectations increasing beyond possible fulfillment, and then boomerang back like a snapped rubberband, leaving kinship obligations diminished or unfulfilled? Frustrations and not giving the expected are a central part of kinship. Many “classic” studies address kinship and conflict, including succession disputes and witchcraft as key expressions of the so-called dark sides of kinship (Geschiere). Examples abound regarding secrets and challenges to kinship as an unambiguously positive “mutuality of being” (Sahlins). What do these kinship troubles look like today? Current social contexts may be turning disappointed expectations into new patterns and norms. This double session examines cases in which highly valued kinship obligations get “rolled back,” and explores the varied contexts in which these transformations occur. We consider how models from classic ethnographies of kinship conflict can be applied, adapted, or challenged vis-à-vis current situations. We highlight migration, class differentiation, and the impossibilities engendered by both economic challenges and climate change. The panelists in our paired session address a set of guiding questions: What are the circumstances in which people retreat from normative kinship obligations? From which obligations do they retreat? What reasoning do they give (if at all) for their retreats? What are the consequences for changing notions or organization of kinship and social life? Are conditions changing such that we see something new regarding “kinship in reverse?” Do actors classify contemporary diversions from traditional norms as “bad” kinship, or are they changing the norms themselves? Do the challenges of transnational lives reverberate to transform kinship in multiple locales? Through these guiding questions, the panelists address broad questions as well as deeply contextualized ethnographic particulars. For example, papers investigate how various institutional contexts•including hospitals, courts, welfare offices, and immigration regimes•affect the types of responsibility kin feel for one another. We explore the unintended consequences of kinship actions, such as when efforts to evade one type of kinship betrayal produce another. Panelists uncover tension between kinship affect in the private sphere and its expression in public arenas. Our papers map onto axes of social differentiation such as gender, class, and urban vs. rural settings. Our contributions explore conflicts regarding kinship obligations among a range of actors, including children, parents, siblings, and spouses. In this first of two paired sessions, these conflicts involve sex, love, and marriage; violence and courts; hospitals and healers. They revolve around care of spouses, children and the sick. They address responsibility, affect, and the quality of care. They ask ethnographic questions about who counts as kin, and who retreats from kinship relationships. In this session, our cases address a variety of sub-Saharan African countries (Cameroon, Cape Verde, Madagascar, Mali, Namibia, and Senegal) and their diasporic destinations (France, and the United States).

Kinship Obligations in Reverse I: Relationship Dramas


In a 1991 article, the prominent Cameroonian psychiatrist Mathias Makang Ma Mbog argued that "the African family is increasingly becoming a site of doubt and worry. Modern medical culture increasingly teaches society that if, in a couple, the brother is mad or the mother is psychotic, the children will inevitably inherit some parental defects... the family culture is thus becoming pathologized by medical discourse. Previously, there was reassurance in knowing that madness came from the sorcerer. Now, the sorcerer hides in genes" (26). Drawing on 24 months of dissertation fieldwork, this paper examines how psychiatric treatment and psychoeducation intervene in relationships between hospitalized patients and familial caregivers (gardes malades
) at Cameroon's flagship public psychiatric clinic. Playing with Nikolas Rose' (1990, 2017) notion of "responsibilization," I contend that the explanatory framework of neuropsychiatry both "de-responsibilizes" patients and families from communal accusations of sorcery -- of having caused their own distress through immoral behavior -- and "re-responsibilizes" patients through the prescription of what the hospital calls "mentally hygienic behavior," and families, through the language of pathologized inheritance, including notions of "genetic defect." Which forms of care and obligation are foreclosed by this moral work of the clinic, which are made possible, and to whose benefit? How do clinical rearrangements of responsibility shape the contours of life after hospitalization -- of the very idea of what it means to be well, and who can be well? 

"The Sorcerer Hides in Genes": Responsibility and Kinship in the Psychiatric Clinic

Moving between different cultural contexts, transnational migrants render sharply visible a broader truth: that kinship is often changing and conflicted, and that cultural ideals and practices often don’t line up. When Malagasy women marry French men and migrate to France, they do so motivated by long-standing imperatives in which women gain their power and authority in the world by marrying away with their husbands, even as they also retain their ties to their natal families and ancestors.  They find themselves in a context where their legal status as migrant wives makes them dependent on, and vulnerable to, the men they marry, at least until they gain citizenship. At the same time,  state rhetoric claims to protect women and numerous subsidies exist to support single women, in particular. Drawing on fieldwork in France that began in 2010 and has continued intermittently into the present, this paper examines how Malagasy women who come as brides both appropriate and incorporate French bureaucratic norms around gender in their efforts both to gain resources and  establish themselves in France.  Focusing on a particular family drama in which a Malagasy woman’s French husband abused family members who she subsequently brought to live with them and who were nominally under her care, I show how these norms often become a weapon through which women renegotiate their relations with one another. 

Love, marriage, and assault: A Kinship Drama Among Malagasy Marriage Migrants in France

Drawing on two research projects conducted in Ile-de-France between 2007-2018, I examine how state policies, the public health system, and social services•especially the intervention of social workers in intimate lives of immigrant families•underlie conflicts between spouses and their respective kin, potentially leading to abandonment, divorce, or imprisonment. Male labor migrants from the Senegal River Valley region in West Africa constituted an important sector of the French workforce after World War II. In 1976, documented foreigners became eligible to request reunification with their spouse and children, to experience a “normal” family life in France. Yet an influx of women and children between 1980 and the present generated marital conflict related to the perceived failure of wives and husbands to fulfil kinship obligations. From the perspective of men interviewed for this study, France favors the rights of women, denying men’s rights as household heads. Men contended that women should ask permission before leaving the house, choose friends acceptable to their husband, and defer to the husband’s notions of appropriate childrearing and childbearing. They alleged that their wives falsely report them for abusive acts in order to obtain housing and financial support from the state and deny husbands the right to follow the Qur’an and “correct” their wives and children’s misbehavior. In contrast, women described the restrictive expectations of their husbands, lack of financial support, burdensome obligations to in-laws, and unwelcome efforts to recreate the idealized Muslim wife of rural West Africa. Transnational communications with kin in West Africa shape these marital tensions.

Marriage in Conflict: Contested Notions of Spousal Obligations among West African Immigrants in France


Until the end of apartheid in 1990, class mobility was severely restricted for most Namibians. Only very few families had the possibility to hold elite positions in the so-called ‘homelands’. In post-apartheid Namibia, new educational and occupational opportunities have stimulated the growth of a black middle class, leading to more class heterogeneity within kin groups. Depending on one’s class position, kin relations might be experienced as supportive resources or never-ending burdens. During weddings, these class tensions become especially visible. Based on long-term fieldwork in rural and urban Namibia since 2003, I analyze the influence of class on two weddings. Bride and groom of the first wedding had moved up the social ladder, living comfortable urban middle class lives, while most of their rural kin remained impoverished. Nevertheless, the couple expected that kin would support the facilitation of their wedding in the rural hometown. Instead, kin withdrew from the wedding, emphasizing differences and ‘growing apart’. In contrast, kin supported the rural wedding of the second couple. Like the first couple, bride and groom belonged to the urban middle class. Contrary to the first couple, however, their rural kin groups had already been part of the pre-independence elite. Not class mobility and an increase in class heterogeneity but class similarity and continuity framed the couple’s interaction with their kin. This indicates that in class homogeneous families, especially long-term elite families, kinship strengthens class reproduction. In emergent multi-class families, however, kinship is more conflict-laden, possibly even hindering class consolidation.

More or Less Similar: Class-Based Continuities and Ruptures of Kin Relations in Namibian Marriages

Classic work on migration by scholars across several disciplines typically assumed male migrants.  More recent writing explores how the experiences of female migrants often diverge dramatically from those of their male counterparts.  The case of Cabo Verde speaks strikingly to this new focus because of the notably high rate of women’s out-migration. Women flee Cape Verde not only from poverty but also from abuse•especially, betrayals of the expectations of kinship, including support (whether financial or emotional) by husbands.  Ironically, these women’s escapes abroad may end up traumatizing those nearest and dearest to them, especially their children.  In effect, women’s efforts to evade one kind of kinship betrayal may produce another.  In other cases, women may send their children abroad to provide them with better financial and professional opportunities, but the experience of migrating while quite young may produce its own traumas for the children, including sexual abuse.  At the same time, personal resiliency, along with social networks and privileges of class, may partly mitigate such sources of suffering--whether for those who were left behind, those who were sent abroad unwillingly, or those doing the abandoning.  In this talk, I explore a selection of riveting cases of Cabo Verdean women who have migrated to the U.S. and Europe from a variety of subject positions and have experienced versions of the above scenarios.  In their life stories, the complex and sometimes competing bonds and values of divergent kinship relations stand out as sources of both motivation and deception. 

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