The Chinese family as instituted fantasy: or,rescuing kinship imaginaries from the ‘symbolic’

This article revisits well‐travelled ethnographic portrayals of traditional Chinese family dynamics to draw attention to desire as a product of family life and to how crucial elements of family organization and ideology can be understood, in turn, as effects of desire – that is, as instituted fantasies. Although my case in point is the Chinese family, the analysis addresses the category ‘family’ cross‐culturally. In any of its variations, the ‘family’ exists at two synergistically implicated levels: first, it comprises an important part of the reality into which individuals are socialized; second, it embodies in instituted form individuals' attempts to realize – to bring into being – social arrangements as they would like them to be. In the Chinese case, at least two ironies are embedded in this synergy. First, women are primary producers and reproducers of the family in the ‘real world’, despite the fact that patriliny as ‘instituted fantasy’ downplays or veils their agency. Second, the normative subordination of the son to a patriarchal father, expressed and mediated through institutions including ancestor worship and valorization of filial piety, veils a valorizing of the son as agent or protagonist of filial action. Although ultimately unrealizable, patrilineal and familial fantasies animate Chinese family life and are thus an important constituent of Chinese realities. To these ends the analysis re‐purposes ‘the symbolic’ and ‘imaginaries’, categories widely employed in contemporary gender studies and social theory, arguing that understanding kinship enjoins incorporating desire's role both in defining institutions and in motivating their creators.     

Ethnic background,social class or status? Developments in school attainment of the children of immigrants in The Netherlands

In the field of education and children of immigrants we are confronted with a peculiar clash of opinions. Some believe that the differences in school attainment between indigenous children and children of immigrant families can be explained in terms of social class. Others seek the differences in terms of status groups. Empirical research was carried out in one of the bigger cities of The Netherlands, which attempted to further this theoretical debate. The results indicate that the influence of an immigrant background on school attainment is largely mediated by both social class and status. Ethnicity, however, also has a specific effect on education, independent of social class and status. It is argued that the characteristic of ethnicity is a sociological kind of motivation. The educational motivation of immigrant families can have a ‘positive’ effect in the sense that ‘black’ schools perform reasonably well, and a ‘negative’ effect in the sense that immigrant children at schools with a high level of aspiration perform less well than their indigenous Dutch schoolmates.     

Children's labour in ethnic family businesses: The case of Chinese take‐away businesses in Britain

Reliance upon unpaid and committed family labour is said to make many ethnic businesses competitive. However, most analysts' references to this labour have not taken into account the nature of family members' and, in particular, children's work roles or the ways in which their labour is elicited and maintained. Here, the nature of children's labour participation in ethnic businesses is investigated in the case of families running Chinese take‐away businesses in Britain. This article focuses on how children in these families understand their often double‐edged experiences of ‘helping out’, as part of a ‘family work contract’, and on the ways in which families negotiate children's labour over time. Given these families' experiences of migration and ethnic minority status, I argue that Chinese children's work in take‐away businesses must be examined in relation to the intersections of family obligations and relationships, livelihood strategies and pressures, and issues of cultural identity.     

Social mobility of ethnic minority students in Laos

Idealistically speaking, schools are engines for upward social mobility. Education for ethnic minorities in Laos was set up to achieve nationalist, political, economic and sociocultural goals of ‘equity’ and ‘equality’. It was hoped that education would shift ethnic minorities from a lifestyle based on superstitious beliefs to a modern one, so that they could participate and enjoy ‘equality’ through educational equity. The purpose of this paper is to provide a case study of how equality as a promise in education has impacted on students’ upward mobility, particularly the political discourse of the ‘big man’. This paper explores social mobility provided by national education for ethnic minorities through boarding schooling. It finds that such education has yet to reposition ethnic minorities into the ethnic Lao sociocultural hierarchy. As a result, regardless of their educational success, students are still ranked as ‘ethnic minorities’ and as being ‘poor’ in the eyes of urban students, middle class and rich students, and the ethnic Lao elite.     

Imagined futures: why business studies dominate the higher education choices of second-generation Turks in the Netherlands

Relying on in-depth interviews with higher education students and young graduates the study investigates the factors underpinning the participation patterns of second-generation Turks in the Dutch higher education system. The paper highlights how ethnic minority students accommodate the constraints faced by the Dutch educational system by rationalizing economics at professional colleges as a suitable alternative to studying medicine at university, an alternative that will meet both their aspirations for a more successful and secure life than their parents’ while maintaining the traditional family ties in line with the work-life balance offered by a ‘nine-to-five job’.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Beyond V40.31</Emphasis>: Narrative Phenomenology of Wandering in Autism and Dementia

Research on autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and on Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and other types of dementia describes a behaviour called ‘wandering’, a term that denotes movement through space lacking intention or exact destination, as when a person is disoriented or not self-aware. In the U.S., ‘wandering’ in both ASD and AD has been examined mostly from a management and prevention perspective. It prioritizes safety while primarily overlooking personal experiences of those who ‘wander’ and their families, thus limiting the range of potentially effective strategies to address this issue. Communicative challenges faced by many people diagnosed with ASD and AD further obscure the experiential, existential aspects of ‘wandering’. This article reflects an increasing concern of social science scholars interested in whether and how the conceptual and practical strategies to address ‘wandering’ are informed by the situated experiences of people with cognitive and developmental disabilities and their families. We examine ‘wandering’ at the intersections of personal experience, family life, clinical practice, public health policy, and legislation, as a conceptually rich site where notions of personhood, subjectivity, intentionality, and quality of life powerfully and consequentially converge to impact the lives of many people with ASD and AD, and their families. We draw upon critical autism studies describing how attributions of personhood, subjectivity, intentionality, rational agency, and moral autonomy of people with ASD have been contingent upon the norms and conventions governing movement of the human body through space (Hilton, Afr Am Rev 50(2):221–235, 2017). When this movement is deemed aberrant, the person may be construed as irrational, a danger to self because of a lack of self-awareness, and a danger to others because of a lack of empathy. These attributions put the person at risk of being excluded from the considerations and, more importantly, the obligations of the ‘moral community’ to ensure that he or she has a ‘good human life’ (Barnbaum, The Ethics of Autism: Among Them but not of Them. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2008; Silvers and Francis, Metaphilosophy 40(3/4):475–498, 2009). Using ethnographic, narrative phenomenological (Mattingly, The Paradox of Hope: Journeys through a Clinical Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), and medical humanities (Charon, JAMA 286:1897–1902, 2001; Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) approaches, we examine multiple perspectives on ‘wandering’ in ASD and AD across narrative discourse genres, institutional contexts, and media of representation. We argue for an extension of the prevention and management view to focus not only on safety but also on what phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1962) called “having a world” (p. 146). The analysis is intended to inform clinical practice, policy and public health efforts to enhance understanding of first and second person perspectives on ‘wandering’ in order to improve the participation and quality of life of people with ASD and AD who ‘wander’, and their families.     

‘Rules that apply in times of crisis’: time,agency, and norm‐remaking during Nepal's People's War

This article explores how people in the former Maoist heartland of Nepal adopted previously transgressive norms and practices during the decade of the People's War (1996‐2006). By examining the rise in practices of beef‐eating and inter‐caste commensality, this article suggests that the temporal dimension of wartime ‘when different rules apply’ was crucial in making people accept new ideas and break established norms on a scale atypical for the ‘normal’ times of peace. Analysing the agency of Maoist activists, who self‐consciously tried to implement a project of radical social transformation, and those people who were caught in the midst of the Maoist transformative endeavour, this article argues that the contours of the ‘new society’ emerged not only due to revolutionaries’ intentional actions but also because of the ‘exceptional’ nature of wartime, which forced people to radically re‐create their daily lives. By transgressing social norms, ‘ordinary’ people did not deliberately undermine the normative order, but rather responded to the constraints of wartime, when people's agency and ethical choices were mostly driven by the need to secure the survival of their families and ensure the continuity of life itself.     

“Not helping out”: classed strategies of the (non) contribution of children in immigrant family businesses

This article analyses the role of immigrant entrepreneurs’ class positions in understanding the participation of children in business activities. Immigrant entrepreneurship scholarship has highlighted how the participation of children depends on relations of reciprocity as well as on the lack of opportunities in paid employment. I argue that the (non) contribution of children has to do with the social mobility strategies that migrant families put in place. Drawing on the narratives of fifty-five Latin American entrepreneurs and family members in Spain, I explain (i) the role of the small firm in trajectories of social mobility, (ii) how class positions explain the (non) participation of children, and (iii) the mechanisms by which downward mobility is cushioned through practices of distinction for middle-class entrepreneurs. The article contributes to nuance our understanding of the role of family ties in migrant firms by integrating the impact of class on the lives of migrants’ children.     

Founders,ancestors, and enemies: memory,family, time,and space in the Pernambuco sertão

This article concerns the use of narrative and genealogical frameworks among sertanejos, the inhabitants of the hinterlands (sertão) of Pernambuco in the Northeast of Brazil, in the process of grouping and differentiating families. It explores how accounts produced by different people are linked by shared memories of past conflicts – such as cangaço and questões de família (lit. ‘family issues’). Through conceived and lived relationships among relatives and the correlated concepts of ‘blood’ and ‘race’ current in this social formation, I look to identify the different meanings attributed to time and space, inscribed in the collective memory, and implicated in the moving configurations of ‘family’ in a cognatic universe.     

The Social Life of Death on Delhi's Streets: Unclaimed Souls,Pollutive Bodies,Dead Kin and the Kinless Dead

ABSTRACT

How does the status of ‘street children’ in life inflect the narrative representation of their deaths? Street-dwelling children's interactions with death in North India reveal much about how their identities are produced in public domains. In this paper, I examine several instances of ‘homeless child’ death to illuminate the place of such subjects in society and urban space, and to interrogate the degree to which they can be rendered ‘recognizable’ or ‘grievable’, in Butler's (2010) terminology. In particular, I explore the presence or absence of kin in the ways that child death is narrated. I also explore the related question of how living ‘vagabond (aawara) children’ situate their status in narratives of death and loss. I conclude with discussions of how children negotiate their orientations towards death through ghost narratives, and of the space-, economy- and age-bound assignment of pollutive tasks once reserved for low castes to street-dwelling children.     

Mines and Monsters: A Dialogue on Development in Western Province,Papua New Guinea

This article analyses an internal debate between Gogodala villagers, Western Province, Papua New Guinea, in which they explore the concept of development through a dialogue that revolves around ela gi or ‘way of life’. The analysis focuses on two developmental projects: the Ok Tedi gold and copper mine, which affects eight Gogodala villages on the lower Fly River, and a test oil drill carried out among northern Gogodala villages in 1995. I propose that it is through ela gi, a lifestyle that encompasses an evangelical Christianity as well as the actions of the first ancestors and is based on a bodily experience of the environment, that community development is envisaged and debated. Whilst the oil drill in the north is discussed in terms of approval, villagers on the Fly River to the south are increasingly concerned about changes to their lifestyle and landscape. They explore this ambivalence through a discussion of the movements and moods of ancestrally‐derived ‘monsters’ or ugu lopala, creatures who patrol the waterways of both north and south villages. At the same time, Gogodala from both communities are articulating what the transition from ‘living on sago’ to a lifestyle based on money might mean. This dialogue foregrounds an ongoing debate about the roles that the environment, village practices, the ancestral past and Christianity play in the constitution of the Gogodala way of life, and how these factors may initiate a certain kind of development.     

Settler indigeneity and the eradication of the non‐native: self‐determination and biosecurity in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas)

This article analyses how settlers of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) construct themselves as ‘natives’ through environmental management. Taking a multispecies ethnographic and historical approach to studying the Falkland Islanders’ self‐determination claim, I explore a series of ecological practices that demonstrate how some nonhumans become institutionalized into systems of racial and colonial classification whereas others appear natural. I show how agroindustrial and technoscientific value systems categorize human and nonhuman cohabitants according to degrees of political, economic, and ecological status through particular periods in the Falklands: from the eradication of ‘native pests’ (1833‐1982) to defence against ‘alien invaders’ (1982‐present). Towards a conclusion, I analyse how Islanders have begun to uproot their own ecological imperial past through removal of British‐introduced ‘invasive’ species and native habitat restoration. The article argues that attention to how settlers colonize with natives contributes significantly to a critical multispecies anthropology with broader implications for debates on ethnogenesis and indigeneity.     

Anthropology in conversation with an Islamic tradition: Emmanuel Levinas and the practice of critique

As an alternative to approaching Islam as an object for anthropological analysis, this article develops the idea of an anthropologist participating in conversations going on within an Islamic tradition. The idea of a conversation is developed through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his ideal of knowing as an ethical relation with an infinite other. Levinas opposes a sterile and oppressive relation of ‘totality’, where the knowing self encompasses the other within concepts and thought that originate in the self, with a critical and creative relation of ‘infinity’, in which the alterity of the other is maintained and invites conversation that brings the self into question. In the article, recent disciplinary discussions of how anthropology should engage with alterity, which have been framed in terms of ontology and post‐secular anthropology, are examined in the light of Levinas's ideal of knowing as ethical and critical practice.     

Relocating the future: biographical objects,aspiration, and repair in urban Taipei

How might urban relocation unfold as a time of social reproduction? Taking the case of Zhongxin Village in Taipei, a military settlement that was relocated in 2016, I show in this article that while mainland Chinese veterans experienced the move with reluctance, their Taiwanese wives readily stepped up to bridge family histories. Offering new ethnography on ‘family repair’ and the arranging of ancestral altars, I suggest that loss is often not the only force at play when moving home. The Taiwanese wives of Zhongxin Village recount family stories that are elicited through their engagement with ‘biographical objects’. They transmit family lore through daily acts of care even as they project aspirations for the futures of their descendants onto the furnishing of new flats. This marriage of materiality, aspiration, repair, and affect shows that relocation can encourage the social reproduction of the family and, for some, a move from remembrance to aspiration.     

“A Massive Long Way”: Interconnecting Histories, a “Special Child,” ADHD, and Everyday Family Life

Focusing on one family from a study of dual-earner middle-class families carried out in Los Angeles, California, this article draws on interview and video-recorded data of everyday interactions to explore illness and healing as embedded in the microcultural context of the Morris family. For this family, an important aspect of what is at stake for them in their daily lives is best understood by focusing on 9-year-old Mark, who has been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In this article, we grapple with the complexity of conveying some sense of how Mark’s condition is experienced and relationally enacted in everyday contexts. Through illuminating connections between lives as lived and lives as told, we explore the narrative structuring of healing in relation to Mark’s local moral world with the family at its center. We examine how his parents understand the moral consequences of the child’s past for his present and future, and work to encourage others to give due weight to his troubled beginnings before this child joined the Morris family. At the same time, we see how the Morris parents act to structure Mark’s moral experience and orient to a desired future in which Mark’s “success” includes an appreciation of how he is accountable to others for his actions. Through our analyses, we also seek to contribute to discussions on what is at stake in everyday life contexts for children with ADHD and their families, through illuminating aspects of the cultural, moral and relational terrain that U.S. families navigate in contending with a child’s diagnosis of ADHD. Further, given that ADHD is often construed as a “disorder of volition,” we seek to advance anthropological theorizing about the will in situations where volitional control over behavior is seen to be disordered.     

The ‘successful’ return: Caribbean narratives of migration,family, and gender

Research on female migrant caregivers has tended to focus upon the emotional and social problems they encounter working abroad, given women's traditional role as caregivers for their own families. This article analyses how Caribbean women who have returned after a period abroad as domestic workers inscribe their migration experiences within the gendered narrative of the good relative who migrates to help the family left behind and therefore deserves social recognition in the community of origin. It argues that this narrative allows the women to both affirm and reinterpret local family and gender roles within the context of migration. This analysis points to the close connection between narrative structures, accounts of migration experiences, and self‐presentations and suggests that narratives about family and gender roles not only reflect people's lives, but are also a malleable resource that can be (re)shaped to validate a variety of life‐courses.     

Shared secrecy: teasing,attachment, and children's emotional management in rural southern Mongolia

In recent decades, anthropologists have scrutinized psychologists’ claim that humans process information about others by imputing mental states. The debate remains open whether cross-cultural variability in how people conceive of minds and inner states reflects differences in their folk theories only, or whether it engenders deep-grained psychological differences. In this article, I look at the very onset of children's apprenticeship in emotional management to examine its cognitive consequences. In the context of rural Mongolia in the late 2000s, questions about homesickness prompted by adults raised children's awareness of the existence of a private self and by the very same process discouraged verbalization or public display of personal feelings. I start by presenting interactions where children were routinely teased about homesickness, and invited to deny that they missed their family. I contextualize this teasing routine within local conceptions about emotional control and linguistic ideology to unveil how it introduced children to the performative power of words while also making them face moral dilemmas. The irreconcilable tension between behaving according to expectations of self-control and experiencing separation induced children's discovery of the possibility of disconnecting intimate feelings from public self-presentation, thus transforming the experience of separation into an experience of secret connection. I speculate that the secrecy that hallows homesickness contributed to making it all the more poignant. The way adults constantly checked on whether children were missing their home prompted children to actually identify some emotional state or aspect of their experience as ‘missing home’. It gave a name to a personal experience which thus became social and guaranteed that it became a shared feeling, albeit a secret one.     

Spectres of Seppo: the afterlives of Finland's nuclear waste experts

This article examines how Finland's nuclear waste repository safety assessment experts summoned memories of Seppo: a deceased colleague whose ‘spectre’ was said to still ‘haunt’ their workplace. First, it tracks how Seppo appeared in predecessor parables: cautionary tales told about his death, which conveyed value judgements about how experts ought to act, engage, and aspire. Second, it explores how Seppo's long-time ‘right-hand man’ Gustav still felt haunted by his colleague's affective intensities, scientific vision, and sharp tongue. This led Gustav to prod his workmates to reconsider how they modelled Finland's ecosystems many millennia into the future. Studying this ethnographically revealed how traces of Seppo's past life infused living experts with emotions, opened them to alternative futures, and spurred them to rethink their professional values. This article concludes by introducing expert afterlives as a temporal, epistemic, and affective nexus that can shape how technocratic projects are organized and how expert knowledge is made.     

Disenfranchised grief and social inequality: bereaved African Canadians and oppositional narratives about the violent deaths of friends and family members

This article discusses how disenfranchised grief, that is grief that has been invalidated in some manner, is experienced by African Canadians who have lost friends and family to gun-related violence. It is based on research findings suggesting that the violent deaths of young black men are partly rooted in racial stratification and perceived criminality. These factors have implications for how the deceased person is grieved. Covictims, the bereaved families and friends of deceased people, are impacted by the treatment they receive as a result of their social location as raced bodies. Police scrutiny of co-victims and the media representation of the victims as ‘known to police’ are just two of the ways in which grief is invalidated. The analysis points to the complexities of coming to terms with the death of loved ones in a liberal racial state where a group's precarious status signifies social meanings in life and death.     

HIV,Embodied Secrets,and Intimate Labour in Northern Nigeria

ABSTRACT

This article explores how HIV-positive women manage secrets through the use of their bodies. Women conspicuously enhance their beauty in an attempt to defend themselves against the violence of social exclusion. Moreover, they do so in order to forge safe, loving, and prosperous relationships with their boyfriends, husbands, and families. My goal is to understand how intimacy, as a material, affective, psychological, and embodied state, characterises these women's corporeal and sartorial acts. Further, I question how these embodied practices become imbricated in exchange relations with family members, health workers, and the larger community. To describe these routinised toils and triumphs as women seek to care for themselves and others, I employ the term ‘intimate labour’. I demonstrate how women gain access to social and economic resources by attending to and capitalising on the sensual and bodily desires and needs of others.