'Belonging' is often overlooked in its relationship to society and social change, and yet it forms the bedrock of how we relate to the world around us. Through the work of Marx, Giddens and Goffman, this book covers the familiar terrain of identity theory, while going beyond it to other sites of identification and social change.

"Americans at Midlife" is an exploration of the middle years within the framework of trends in the larger society, including longer life expectancy and an aging population; changes in marriage, divorce, and family composition; increased participation of women in the labor force; and the growth of two-income families.Major interests at midlife center around work and careers, current and future economic well-being, and planning for retirement. Other major concerns involve relationships with younger and older generations: boomerang kids who leave home and return, and aging parents, often healthy and active now, who may need care in their later years.

The book begins with a discussion of how demographic and social changes affect midlife, followed by chapters on work and retirement planning or looking for the good years, the not-so-empty nest, and aging parents. A chapter on mid-life women considers the implications of combining work and caregiving and raises concerns about their economic well-being, given their longer life expectancy and often more limited resources. The book ends with a consideration of policy issues that may affect midlife in the future.

Sanctions for illegitimacy vary enormously across cultures and are linked to social structure. Some societies handle non-marital births in a relaxed way; others use restitutive sanctions; and others repressive sanctions. This study of 122 non-industrial societies shows that the regulation of illegitimacy is more varied than any particular theory suggests (and there are many, including Marxism, functionalism, sociobiology, and feminism). The work aims to test a variety of theoretical ideas about the possible factors involved in social regulation of illegitimacy -- social hierarchy, fraternal interest groups, female power, extended family structure, affection for children, and father involvement with infants -- and to examine combinations of these factors for predictive power. This study will be of interest to scholars and students in sociology, family studies, and cultural anthropology.

The need for a new method for assessment and imaging of families, couples, and individuals has emerged in response to changes in family forms during the twentieth century. In the twentieth century divorce, remarriage, out-of wedlock child bearing, and alternate life styles have replaced monogamy as predominant form of marriage and the family. The methods of representation and assessment on the other hand remain based on the nineteenth century eugenics models embedded in the modern day genograms. This book is based on the premise that changes in family structure require changes in methods of representation, assessment, research, and teaching. This book introduces such a method in the form of a model named the affinograph. The affinograph provides a method which allows a greater respect for individuals, especially if their relationships contradict the preconceived institutional notions of marriage and the family.

Improvement in visualizing families of various types and complexities can make affinographs an important new method that can bring together the theory, research, and application across varied disciplines that comprise family sciences.

This book proposes new perspectives on relational wellness and the contemporary family-combining a psychoanalytic overview with scientific research about the burgeoning popularity of divorce, the increase in "stepfamilies," and the use of social networks as well as other technologies. In this day and age, psychoanalysis has become increasingly interested in hyper-modern scenarios; for example, social networks and apps provide matching algorithms, which allow users to connect with people of similar interests. These networks have become one of the places where dissatisfied partners seek "more satisfactory situations." In the United Kingdom, cohabitation lasts for up to two years, on average, and 40% of marriages end in divorce. In the United States, the percentage rises: it has now reached 50%. Today the value of temporariness, in which everything is fragmented, is exalted. On the other hand, is it wrong to deny the natural ebb and flow of human feeling?

The study of childhood in academia has been dominated by a mono-cultural or WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) perspective. Within the field of anthropology, however, a contrasting and more varied view is emerging. While the phenomenon of children as workers is ephemeral in WEIRD society and in the literature on child development, there is ample cross-cultural and historical evidence of children making vital contributions to the family economy. Children's "labor" is of great interest to researchers, but widely treated as extra-cultural-an aberration that must be controlled. Work as a central component in children's lives, development, and identity goes unappreciated. Anthropological Perspectives on Children as Helpers, Workers, Artisans, and Laborers aims to rectify that omission by surveying and synthesizing a robust corpus of material, with particular emphasis on two prominent themes: the processes involved in learning to work and the interaction between ontogeny and children's roles as workers.

Unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases are on the increase among young people. This volume explores social and behavioural implications of adolescent sexuality and suggests ways in which to encourage sexual responsibility.

With contributions from psychologists, sociologists and family care experts, the volume examines such topics as gender, sexual behaviour, adolescent parenting, homosexuality and bisexuality.

This book contests the idea that lesbian and gay categories are disappearing, and that sexuality is becoming fluid, by showing how young people use them in a world in which heterosexuality is privileged. Exploring identity making, the book shows how old modernist stories of sexual being entwine with narratives of normality.

Seamon explores the historical, theological, and societal dynamics of religious intermarriage as a way to introduce scholars to the myriad of factors that have contributed and will continue to contribute to the complete transformation of religion and Christianity in the twenty-first century.

My mother was a prostitute. My grandmother and great-grandmother were prostitutes. Maybe I should have given the family business a chance... BBC RADIO 4 PICK OF THE WEEK, Katie Puckrik 'Eliska's story is an extraordinary and powerful read. It's the ultimate book about survival and an against-all-odds fight to make it in life. Highly recommend.' Clover Stroud 'A scintillating, devastating memoir, and a fiercely witty and unabashed tribute to the toughness of the human spirit.' Damian Le Bas __________________________________________________ To westerners, being Gypsy means being wild, romantic and free. To Eliska Tanzer, it means being rented out to dance for older men. It means living without running water. It means not being allowed a job or an education. It means being stuffed into a bare room with all your aunts and cousins, fighting over the thin, stained blanket the way you fight over the last piece of half-mouldy bread. It means joining the family prostitution ring when you're still a child. But Eliska was given a way out. Slung out of Hoe School and shipped to England in a washing machine box, she thought she had made it. But her dream soon turned into a nightmare. A moving and timely memoir from a powerful new voice in literature.

As Michael Harrington's "New American Poverty" alerted readers to that problem, so the present collection makes readers aware of the various conditions of single parenting. . . . The institutional barriers of courts, housing, and workplace to the economic well-being of the female single parent are explicitly and directly examined. Solid recommendations for institutionalizing change on the state and federal levels are made. The interdisciplinary expertise of the authors covers the fields of law, social work, urban planning, housing, economics, and public policy, all with solid academic preparation. Charts are clear and concise, and the laguage is direct and concrete. "Choice"

The single-parent family phenomenon is primarily about households headed by single mothers with minor children. Some perceive this growing family form as a threat to the values of the traditional nuclear family and often stereotype the mothers and their children as problems all too often dependent on public assistance. Others cite an uncaring society that ignores the needs of its more vulnerable members. Stereotypes of single women as parents, however, often significantly misrepresent the reality. Indeed, the very ignoring of the great range of differences that characterize contemporary single mothers has itself led to a large and harmful body of myths that perpetuate and intensify the single parent's problems.

This sensitive, substantive book provides a needed examination of the realities of single parenthood for women. It makes a major contribution toward thoughtful formulation of policies for improving the economic and social well-being of single parents and their children. Scholars and practitioners in the fields of law, social work, urban planning, housing, economics, and public policy address and respond to the many problems, challenges, and barriers that single mothers confront in the courts, in labor markets, and in housing.

Exploring Twins presents an analysis of twinship considered as a specifically social phenomenon. Drawing upon a wide range of interdisciplinary, historical and cross-cultural data, Dr Stewart argues that in both traditional and modern societies, twinship represents a recurrent anomaly which calls into question the assumptions around which different types of society are organized. Part One identifies and analyses the fascinating range of cultural and disciplinary approaches to the interpretation of twinship, while Part Two considers the possibilities for a distinctively social analysis of twinship.

Bonding Eros with virtue is neither unrealistic nor naive, contends Mike Martin. On the contrary, it's practical, even pragmatic. Virtues serve to focus, structure, and even define erotic love. In particular, caring, respect, faithfulness, honesty, fairness, wisdom, and gratitude are central to successful, long-term relationships.

"In Love's Virtues," Martin takes a look at why moral values enhance and solidify erotic and marital relationships. In the process, he challenges the widespread cynicism about marriage while remaining sensitive to the innumerable problems confronting couples. His approach to marital love is both traditional and modern. Traditional, by seeking to understand the moral significance of relationships based on long-term and lifelong commitments to love. Modern, by proceeding within a pluralist framework that affirms many kinds of erotic love, depending on the ideals partners embrace and their interpretations (within limits) of love's virtues.

Marriages, as Martin understands them, are moral relationships that involve sexual desires (at some time during the relationship) and are based on long-term commitment, whether or not those commitments are formally sanctioned by legal or religious authorities. In this sense, marriages are not restricted by the law, religious tenets, or the partners' sexual orientation.

Drawing on literature, psychology, and philosophy--from Plato and Shakespeare to Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bellah, and Carol Gilligan; from Tolstoy and D.H. Lawrence to Erich Fromm, Erica Jong, and Alice Walker--Martin reminds us that virtuous erotic love is a way to morally value another person. Understanding love as a virtue-structured way to appreciate others, he illustrates, is itself a step toward renewing marital faith.

Honorable Mention for the 2014 MLA Alan Bray Memorial Award Finalist for the 2013 LAMBDA LGBT Studies Book Award In nineteenth-century America-before the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and heterosexuality-what were the parameters of sex? Did people characterize their sexuality as a set of bodily practices, a form of identification, or a mode of relation? Was it even something an individual could be said to possess? What could be counted as sexuality? Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America provides a rich new conceptual language to describe the movements of sex in the period before it solidified into the sexuality we know, or think we know. Taking up authors whose places in the American history of sexuality range from the canonical to the improbable-from Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and James to Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Mormon founder Joseph Smith-Peter Coviello delineates the varied forms sex could take in the lead-up to its captivation by the codings of "modern" sexuality. While telling the story of nineteenth-century American sexuality, he considers what might have been lostin the ascension of these new taxonomies of sex: all the extravagant, untimely ways of imagining the domain of sex that, under the modern regime of sexuality, have sunken into muteness or illegibility. Taking queer theorizations of temporality in challenging new directions, Tomorrow's Parties assembles an archive of broken-off, uncreated futures-futures that would not come to be. Through them, Coviello fundamentally reorients our readings of erotic being and erotic possibility in the literature of nineteenth-century America.

The founding volume of the European Family Therapy Association book series presents new ideas confirming the crucial importance of systemic family therapy for family practice. Spanning paradigms, models, concepts, applications, and implications for families as they develop, experts in the field demonstrate the translatability of session insights into real-world contexts, bolstering therapeutic gains outside the treatment setting. Chapters emphasize the potential for systemic family therapy as integrative across theories, healing disciplines, modes of treatment, while contributors' personal perspectives provide unique takes on the therapist's role. Together, these papers promote best practices not only for therapy, but also research and training as professionals delve deeper into understanding the complexity and diversity of families and family systems. Origins and Originality in Family Therapy and Systemic Practice offers practitioners and other professionals particularly interested in family therapy practice timely, ethical tools for enhancing their work.

This book explores the significance of food practices for childhood identities, from early babyhood to middle childhood and teenage years. It examines how children and families negotiate food and eating practices; what influence the media has on these; the role institutions play; and how far class and ethnicity shape the food that children eat.

"This is a much-needed sociological review of stepfamily life, examining the particular issues and challenges which people in stepfamilies face. Combining published studies and original fieldwork, it focuses on the internal dynamics of stepfamily households as well as the relationships sustained with those outside the household"--Provided by publisher.

In this volume, a distinguished set of international scholars examine the nature of collaboration between life partners in the sciences, with particular attention to the ways in which personal and professional dynamics can foster or inhibit scientific practice. Breaking from traditional gender analyses which focus on divisions of labor and the assignment of credit, the studies scrutinize collaboration as a variable process between partners living in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were married and divorced, heterosexual and homosexual, aristocratic and working-class and politically right and left. The contributors analyze cases shaped by their particular geographical locations, ranging from retreat settings like the English countryside and Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to university laboratories and urban centers in Berlin, Stockholm, Geneva and London. The volume demonstrates how the terms and meanings of collaboration, variably shaped by disciplinary imperatives, cultural mores, and the agency of the collaborators themselves, illuminate critical intellectual and institutional developments in the modern sciences.

This book examines how gay place-making challenged the juggernaut of neoliberal urbanization in the Malate district of Manila. In this ethnography, Collins explores the creation of place, characterized by neighborhood renewal, gay community and entrepreneurialism, and informal gay sexual labor. Malate teaches us that the power of sexual community to sustain a transgressive, inclusive, gay neighborhood is circumscribed and fleeting, and that urban livability, justice, and freedom must be pursued through organized grassroots political projects if the magic of Malate is to be revived for all its residents.

This timely book examines parental rights to 'welfare state support' and parental responsibilities for child welfare in relation to recent social policy agendas pursued by the UK's Labour government, in the context of: child well-being research, state welfare analysis, sociological research about parental perspectives, and the multiple contexts of parenting and childhood. It calls for notions of parental rights and responsibilities which are more responsive to the diversity of parental perspectives and parenting contexts. The book examines the complex and changing relationship between the state and families. It presents new research and evidence on the perspectives of families, policy makers, and practitioners, offering a clear conceptual framework and analytical strategy to examine the four concepts central to family policy and everyday family lives.

After a decade of Thatcherism, rising illegitimacy and the moral panic over child sexual abuse, the family is more of a political issue than ever. But is it 'the family' that is in crisis, or family ideology? In this revised edition of an important and controversial book, Diana Gittins adds to a broad range of historical, anthropological and feminist evidence, a new chapter on child sexual abuse.

This book explores how masculinities and fatherhood are transmitted across family generations of white British, Irish and Polish fathers. Providing unique insights into men's lives, migration, employment, father-son relationships and intergenerational transmission, it offers a rich methodological story of how intergenerational research is done.

How do we choose a partner to initiate a relationship with, and what makes us stay in a given relationship over time? These questions are most often pursued by scholars with an emphasis on the internal thoughts, feelings, and motivations of individual decision-makers. Conversely, this volume highlights the importance of considering external influences on individual decision-making in close relationships. Featuring contributions from internationally renowned scholars, the volume is divided into two interrelated sections. The first section considers global and societal influences on romantic relationships and the second section focuses on social network and communicative influences on romantic relationships. Taken together, this collection helps us to better understand how external factors influence the internal machinations of those involved in intimate relationships.