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Kin Relations (kin + relation)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Governmentality and the Family: Neoliberal Choices and Emergent Kin Relations in Southern Ethiopia

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2009
JAMES ELLISON
ABSTRACT, Rather than strictly local expressions of relatedness, kinship in southern Ethiopia has long been entangled with broad political and economic forces as people negotiate relations with each other, past generations, and the state. Accompanying government reforms in the 1990s, idioms of individualism and choice have circulated in transnational and national neoliberal discourses of development, rights, and economics. People in southern Ethiopia who use ideologies of ascribed social statuses to define local social hierarchies have employed these discourses in reshaping relatedness through an expansive trade association, which is referred to as a family and works through kinship principles of descent and generation. Drawing from recent scholarship on kinship and new reproductive technologies, I argue that, through mobile knowledges in neoliberal contexts, people choose this family and its lineage founder, transforming descent relations and land-based ideologies. These choices represent the workings of neoliberal governmentality in altering cultural relations of power and inequality. [Keywords:,kinship, neoliberalism, governmentality, hereditary status groups, Ethiopia] [source]

Milk Teeth and Jet Planes: Kin Relations in Families of Sri Lanka's Transnational Domestic Servants

CITY & SOCIETY, Issue 1 2008
MICHELE R. GAMBURD
Abstract This essay examines the confluence of local and global dynamics, exploring how transnational migration affects and is affected by gender roles, kinship relations, intergenerational obligations, and ideologies of parenthood. Journeying to the Middle East repeated on two-year labor contracts, many of Sri Lanka's migrant housemaids leave behind their husbands and children. Women's long-term absences reorganize and disrupt widely accepted gendered attributions of parenting roles, with fathers and female relatives taking over household tasks. Migrants say that economic difficulties prompt migration, and assess commitment to kin in financial terms. The government also benefits from remittances. Nevertheless, stakeholders (villagers, politicians, and the national media) worry about the social costs born by children. Drawing on interviews with the adult children of migrant mothers in four extended families in the Sri Lankan coastal village of Naeaegama, I examine the long-term effects of transnational labor migration on local households. The case studies do not support media claims that children suffer abuse and neglect in their mothers' absence, but do in part support survey information on reduced education, shifting marriage patterns, and paternal alcohol consumption. [source]

The Circulatory System: Blood Procurement, AIDS, and the Social Body in China

MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2006
Kathleen Erwin
The market for blood thrived in China for more than a decade, preying on rural villagers desperate for cash. Profit motives and unhygienic collection created an AIDS epidemic, where now up to 80 percent of adults in some villages are HIV infected. Today, illegal blood banks continue to operate in some areas. Moreover, better screening and blood testing do little to address the underlying cultural reluctance to give blood. This article examines what is at stake for blood donors in the circulation of blood through both the physical and the social bodies in China today. I argue that public health and social policy solutions require consideration of the symbolic meanings of blood and the body, kin relations, and gift exchange. China's HIV-contaminated blood procurement crisis demands a critical reexamination of the hidden processes embedded in a "circulatory system" that has inseparably bound the "gift of life" and a "commodity of death." [source]

Extra embryos: The ethics of cryopreservation in Ecuador and elsewhere

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 1 2007
ELIZABETH F. S. ROBERTS
Through ethnographic comparison with Ecuador, I localize North American and European ethical debates about embryos. In Ecuador, some in vitro fertilization (IVF) practitioners and patients do whatever they can to preserve the life of embryos through donation or cryopreservation. For this group, embryos are embroiled in debates about life, as they commonly are in North America. However, other Ecuadorians do not view embryos through debates about life. Instead, these IVF practitioners and patients let embryos die rather than freeze them, to regulate the legitimate bounds of kin relations. These contrasting models of life ethics and kin ethics illuminate ideologies of religion, kinship, and personhood in Ecuador. In addition, this comparison demonstrates that the location of embryos in a framework of kinship prevents their circulation and exchange, whereas the North American and European debates about the human life of embryos allow for their continued circulation in the globalized reproductive marketplace. [source]