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Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.
While the traffic in human organs stirs outrage and condemnation, donations of such material are perceived as highly ethical. In reality, the line between illicit trafficking and admirable donation is not so sharply drawn. Those entangled in the legal, social, and commercial dimensions of transplanting organs must reconcile motives, bureaucracy, and medical desperation. Matching Organs with Donors: Legality and Kinship in Transplants examines the tensions between law and practice in the world of organ transplants—and the inventive routes patients may take around the law while going through legal processes. In this sensitive ethnography, Marie-Andrée Jacob reveals the methods and mindsets of doctors, administrators, gray-sector workers, patients, donors, and sellers in Israel's living kidney transplant bureaus. Matching Organs with Donors describes how suitable matches are identified between donor and recipient using terms borrowed from definitions of kinship. Jacob presents a subtle portrait of the shifting relationships between organ donors/sellers, patients, their brokers, and hospital officials who often accept questionably obtained organs. Jacob's incisive look at the cultural landscapes of transplantation in Israel has wider implications. Matching Organs with Donors deepens our understanding of the law and management of informed consent, decision-making among hospital professionals, and the shadowy borders between altruism and commerce.
Bringing together emerging ethnographies on kinship in South Asia, this book explores the idea of kinship as ‘fiction’ in intimate relationships. Fictions and fictive kinship within anthropology are contested ideas. Increasingly, research suggests the idea of intimate relationships has to extend beyond the biological assumption of kinship relations. The idea of fiction is also not free from the biological imagination or the persistent dichotomy of nature-culture/nurture-nature. This edited volume resurrects the idea of fiction and fictive-ness to understand how intimate relationships may use these particular labels, translate into practices, or create an experiential understanding around relationships. The chapters in this book reengage the idea of fiction by exploring the ambiguity within household relationships, the process of making and engaging with a craft and skill, and the intricacies of making children through IVF and third-party involvement. They challenge societal norms of marriage and being married by reframing shared substances and the relationality they carry and by remembering deceased ties through acts of resurrection. Through vivid illustrations of life and living in South Asia, each chapter contributes to an understanding of how fiction and reality are mutually creating each other. This book will be beneficial to students, academics and scholars of anthropology, particularly those interested in kinship and the sociology of the family. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary South Asia.
Arguably all humans invent or accept forms of family beyond those that are close biological kin. These fictive forms of kinship may vary across diverse cultures and serve different purposes. This book explores a wide variety of such kinship-forming, from expedient daylong pseudo-marriages to notions of deities as everlasting parents for humankind and life on earth. These range from the purely abstract to the bricks and mortar of college fraternities and sororities. Family Beyond Family observes and examines the principles and purposes of such fabricated connections.
The XVth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies took place in Hamburg in July 2003. More than 400 scientists from over 25 countries participated. 130 contributions from the program were selected for this volume. They are mostly written in English and deal on the regions of Ethiopia and Eritrea and cover the span from the 4th Century to the present. The volume is divided into the following chapters: Anthropology (20 Articles), History (25), Arts (10), Literature and Philology (10), Religion (5), Languages and Linguistics (25), Law and Politics (10), Environmental, Economic and Educational Issues (10).
When a death is investigated by a coroner, what is the place of the family in that process? This accessibly written book draws together empirical, theoretical and historical perspectives to develop a rich, nuanced analysis of the contemporary inquest system in England and Wales. It investigates theories of kinship drawn from socio-legal research and analyses law, accountability and the legal process. Excerpts of conversations with coroners and officers offer real insights into how the role of family can be understood and who family is perceived to be, and how their participation fundamentally shapes the investigation into a death.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a small Chicago adoption agency specializing in transracial adoption, Contingent Kinship charts the entanglement of institutional structures and ideologies of family, race, and class to argue that adoption is powerfully implicated in the question of who can have a future in the twenty-first-century United States. With a unique focus on the role that social workers and other professionals play in mediating relationships between expectant mothers and prospective adopters, Kathryn A. Mariner develops the concept of “intimate speculation,” a complex assemblage of investment, observation, and anticipation that shapes the adoption process into an elaborate mechanism for creating, dissolving, and exchanging imagined futures. Shifting the emphasis from adoption’s outcome to its conditions of possibility, this insightful ethnography places the practice of domestic adoption within a temporal, economic, and affective framework in order to interrogate the social inequality and power dynamics that render adoption—and the families it produces—possible.
This collection, which includes an international roster of contributors from philosophy, history, literature, and science, is the first to ask what is "new" about the new materialism and place it in interdisciplinary perspective.
Living with the Law explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000-1250), relating medieval gossip, marital woes, and the voices of men and women of a world long gone. Probing the rich documents of the Cairo Geniza, a unique repository of discarded paper discovered in Cairo synagogue, the book recovers the life stories of Jewish women and men working through their marital problems at home, with their families, in the streets of old Cairo and in Jewish and Muslim courts. Despite a voluminous literature on Jewish law, the everyday practice of Jewish courts has only recently begun to be investigated systematically. The experiences of those at a legal, social, and cultural disadvantage allow us to go beyond the image propagated by legal institutions and offer a view "from below" of Jewish communal life and Jewish law as it was lived. Examining the interactions between gender and law in medieval Jewish communities under Islamic rule, Oded Zinger considers how women experienced Jewish courts and the pressure they were under to relinquish their monetary rights at court and at home. The tactics with which women countered this pressure, ranging from exploiting family ties to appealing to Muslim courts, expose the complex relationship between individual agency, gendered expectations, and communal authority. Zinger concludes that more than money, education, or lineage, it was the maintenance of a supportive network of social relations with men that protected women at different stages of their lives.