Originally published in 1987, this book shows that there is still considerable continuity in the practices and ideas of marriage in Afican against a background of social and economic change. This book discusses the diverse marriage forms in Africa and explores the different systems some of which can be understood in terms of Levi-Strauss's distinciton between complex and semi-complex structures, while others throw up questions of filiation, child custoidanship and rights secured through bridewealth transactions.

First published in 1999, this book consists of in-depth family case studies from Africa, Asia and South America. The purpose of the book is to give a clear understanding of the physical and non-physical structures in bottom-up housing approaches. Physical structures include design aspects, materials, infrastructure and construction methods and stages. Non-physical structures include finance sources, participation and decision processes. All these elements present a challenging task for academics, research, policy makers and non-governmental organizations when intervening in bottom-up housing approaches. The book consists of four sections. Section I is an overview of conceptual issues and cross-national studies. Section II through IV are composed of case studies and fieldwork experiences from Africa, Asia (including the Middle East) and South America.

First published in 1998, this volume explores the connections between the rises in consumerism and the number of married women in paid work in light of the centrality of shopping and consumerism to the modern world. David R. Wells argues for women's incomplete gains from consumerism through an analysis of married women's employment, the structure of capitalism and the contradictory requirements of consumerism, the homemaker ideal and gender identity. Through this, Wells demonstrates how the gendered expectations of consumerism became motivating factors for women to join the workforce, resulting in higher standards of living and greater marital power.

This book grapples with the potential impacts of collective trauma in war-rape survivors' families. Drawing on inter-ethnic and inter-generational participatory action research on reconciliation processes in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, the author examines the risk that female survivors of war-related sexual crimes, now-mothers, will breed hatred and further division in the post-conflict context. Showing how the historical trauma of sexual abuse among survivors affects the ideas, perceptions, behavioural patterns and understandings of the ethnic and religious 'Other' or perpetrator, the book also considers the influence of such trauma on other attitudes rarely addressed in peacebuilding programmes, such as notions of naturalised gender-based violence, cultural scripts of sexuality and support for dangerous or violent aspects of the patriarchal social order. It thus seeks to sketch proposals for a curriculum of peacebuilding that takes account of the legacy of war rape in survivors' families and the impact of trauma transmission. As such, Trauma Transmission and Sexual Violence will appeal to scholars of politics, sociology and gender studies with interests in peace and reconciliation processes and war-related sexual violence.

Why did the medieval West condemn clerical marriage as an abomination while the Byzantine Church affirmed its sanctifying nature? This book brings together ecclesiastical, legal, social, and cultural history in order to examine how Byzantine and Western medieval ecclesiastics made sense of their different rules of clerical continence. Western ecclesiastics condemned clerical marriage for three key reasons: married clerics could alienate ecclesiastical property for the sake of their families; they could secure careers in the Church for their sons, restricting ecclesiastical positions and lands to specific families; and they could pollute the sacred by officiating after having had sex with their wives. A comparative study shows that these offending risk factors were absent in twelfth-century Byzantium: clerics below the episcopate did not have enough access to ecclesiastical resources to put the Church at financial risk; clerical dynasties were understood within a wider frame of valued friendship networks; and sex within clerical marriage was never called impure in canon law, as there was little drive to use pollution discourses to separate clergy and laity. These facts are symptomatic of a much wider difference between West and East, impinging on ideas about social order, moral authority, and reform.

After the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the country has experienced large-scale transformations owing to national and international migration, urbanization, the development of many national and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and economic dynamism. Globalization and economic liberalization have created opportunities to develop sustainable social policies by strengthening the national economy of the country. Major progress has been made in closing the gender gap, and the Constitution of Bangladesh provides equality of status and opportunity to all its citizens irrespective of sex. However, domestic violence perpetuated against women is a common phenomenon in Bangladesh. This book is a study about domestic violence against women in Bangladeshi society. It delineates, in particular, why and how some women become the victims of domestic violence in the changing socio-economic setting of Bangladesh. The author explores the multiple contexts in which domestic violence occurs by focusing on the everyday experience of women subjected to this violence. The book shows how changing socio-economic setting, urbanization and the growing demand for female labor influences the phenomenon and experience of domestic violence. It demonstrates that domestic violence is entangled in a complex web of institutionalized social relations that necessitates a structural and contextual understanding of the production of such violence in family, kinship and gender relations. Finally, it identifies factors that cause, perpetuate, and mitigate domestic violence or give strength to women to struggle and raise their voices or take shelter in the law against the perpetrators of domestic violence. A novel contribution to our understanding of how gender relationships are differently constituted and contested in the everyday lives of Bangladeshi women, both in natal and affinal families, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Sociology, Gender and Law and South Asian Studies.

Romantic relationships, especially good ones, are desired of almost all humans. However, what makes such relationships good and nourishing? For the most part, it is the support and intimacy that exists within the couple, and their ability to experience life and face difficulties together. This book is divided into two sections, one focusing on the couple and their intimate relationship, and the other on how that relationship influences their offspring. Part one examines whether sacrificing in an intimate relationship is always beneficial and whether it help strengthen the marital/couple unit? Attachment theory has had a significant influence on how we view relationships in childhood as well as in adulthood. The book sheds light on the mechanisms that mediate attachment style and the quality of the intimate relationships, exploring the relationship between one's ability to express empathy and that person's ability to offer social support to his/her partner. The second part of the book explores what young adults think about marriage, influenced by their parental relationship; how parental relationships affect children's social experience in school; how parental approaches to children affect their sibling relationship; the parental role in childhood eating disturbances; and how the family climate affects children's loneliness. All in all, the book affords a thorough review not only of what marital/couple intimacy is and what can affect it, but how significant it is in affecting their children, in and out of the house. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Psychology.

This timely volume explores the impact of dramatic social change that has disrupted established patterns of family life and human development in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council. It addresses several major deficits in knowledge regarding family issues in the Gulf countries, bringing a critical perspective to the emerging challenges facing families in this region. Lansford, Ben Brik, and Badahdah examine the role of urbanization, educational progress, emigration, globalization, and changes in the status of women on social change, as well as tackling issues related to marriage, fertility and parenthood, and family well-being. This book explores how family relationships and social policies can promote physical health, psychological well-being, social relationships, safety, cognitive development, and economic security in the Gulf countries, placing a unique emphasis on contemporary families in this region. Families and Social Change in the Gulf Region is essential reading for scholars from psychology, sociology, education, law, and public policy. It will also be of interest to graduate students in these disciplines.

This book considers the ways that family relationships (parental, marital, sibling or other) mimic, and stand in for, political ones in the Early Modern period, and vice versa. Bringing together leading international scholars in literary-historical fields to produce scholarship informed by the perspective of contemporary politics, the volume examines the ways in which the family defines itself in transformative moments of potential crisis - birth and death, maturation, marriage - moments when the family is negotiating its position within and through broader cultural frameworks, and when, as a result, family 'politics' become most apparent.

This book discusses the personal and social lives of e-actors interacting within the socio-technical structures of the evolving broadband society by exploring the different ways in which individuals, social groups, institutions, operators, manufactures, policy makers, designers and other parties contribute to human communication and social interaction in contemporary media societies. The volume covers four theoretical and empirical areas of research: the conceptual perspectives of e-actors, the emergence of new forms of agency, subjectivity, and mediated interpersonal communication, the everyday life experiences of e-actors, and finally the shaping policies and regulations in the broadband society.

Strengths-based, solution-focused practice is one of the most exciting areas of contemporary child protection work. The demand for this protection practice has increased faster than the availability of training resources to help students and practitioners, until now. Strengths-Based Child Protection is the first textbook solely dedicated to furthering strengths-based practices in a child protection setting. Carolyn Oliver provides an original, accessible, and practical research-based model that focuses on the key to success in this field: the worker-client relationship. Oliver's long and varied front line experience in child welfare and research based on surveys and interviews with 225 child protection workers provides grounding in the realities of child protection work. Strengths-Based Child Protection contains a rich combination of case studies, reflective questions, and exercises that enable students and practitioners to conceptualize and master implementing strengths-based practices with children.

This book provides a fresh interdisciplinary analysis into the lives of migrant children and youth over the course of the twentieth century and up to the present day. Adopting biopolitics as a theoretical framework, the authors examine the complex interplay of structures, contexts and relations of power which influence the evolution of child migration across national borders. The volume also investigates children's experiences, views, priorities and expectations and their roles as active agents in their own migration. Using a great variety of methodologies (archival research, ethnographic observation, interviews) and sources (drawings, documents produced by governments and experts, films and press), the authors provide richly documented case studies which cover a wide geographical area within Europe, both West (Belgium, France, Germany) and East (Romania, Russia, Ukraine), South (Italy, Portugal, Turkey) and North (Sweden), enabling a deep understanding of the diversity of migrant childhoods in the European context.

Who can concentrate on thoughts of Scripture or philosophy and be able to endure babies crying ... ? Will he put up with the constant muddle and squalor which small children bring into the home? The wealthy can do so ... but philosophers lead a very different life ... So, according to Peter Abelard, did his wife Heloise state in characteristically stark terms the antithetical demands of family and scholarship. Heloise was not alone in making this assumption. Sources from Jerome onward never cease to remind us that the life of the mind stands at odds with life in the family. For all that we have moved in the past two generations beyond kings and battles, fiefs and barons, motherhood has remained a blind spot for medieval historians. Whatever the reasons, the result is that the historiography of the medieval period is largely motherless. The aim of this book is to insist that this picture is intolerably one-dimensional, and to begin to change it. The volume is focussed on the paradox of motherhood in the European Middle Ages: to be a mother is at once to hold great power, and by the same token to be acutely vulnerable. The essays look to analyse the powers and the dangers of motherhood within the warp and weft of social history, beginning with the premise that religious discourse or practice served as a medium in which mothers (and others) could assess their situation, defend claims, and make accusations. Within this frame, three main themes emerge: survival, agency, and institutionalization. The volume spans the length and breadth of the Middle Ages, from late Roman North Africa through ninth-century Byzantium to late medieval Somerset, drawing in a range of types of historian, including textual scholars, literary critics, students of religion and economic historians. The unity of the volume arises from the very diversity of approaches within it, all addressed to the central topic.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The relationship between men and the domestic in eighteenth-century Britain has been obscured by two well-established historiographical narratives. The first charts changes in domestic patriarchy, founded on political patriarchalism in the early modern period and transformed during the eighteenth century by new types of family relationship rooted in contract theory. The second describes the emergence of a new kind of domestic interior during the long eighteenth century, a 'home' infused with a new culture of 'domesticity' primarily associated with women and femininity. The Little Republic shifts the terms of these debates, rescuing the engagement of men with the house from obscurity, and better equipping historians to understand masculinity, the domestic environment, and domestic patriarchy. Karen Harvey explores how men represented and legitimized their domestic activities. She considers the relationship between discourses of masculinity and domesticity, and whether there was a particularly manly attitude to the domestic. In doing so, Harvey suggests that 'home' is too narrow a concept for an understanding of eighteenth-century domestic experience. Instead, focusing on the 'house' foregrounds a different domestic culture, one in which men and masculinity were central. Reconstructing men's experiences of the domestic as shaped by their own and others' beliefs, assumptions and expectations, Harvey argues for the continuation of a model of domestic patriarchy and also that effective domestic patriarchs remained important to late-eighteenth-century political theory. It was a discourse of 'oeconomy' - the practice of managing the economic and moral resources of the household for the maintenance of good order - that shaped men's attitudes towards and experiences in the house. Oeconomy combined day-to-day and global management of people and resources; it was a meaningful way of defining masculinity and established the house a key component of a manly identity that operated across the divide of 'inside' and 'outside' the house. Significantly for histories of the home which so often narrate a process of privatization and feminization, oeconomy brought together the home and the world, primarily through men's domestic management.

Since the late nineteen sixties, transnational adoption has emerged as a global phenomenon. Due to a sharp decline in infants being made available for adoption locally, involuntarily childless couples in Western Europe and North America who wish to create a family, have to look to look to countries in the poor South and Eastern Europe. The purpose of this book is to locate transnational adoption within a broad context of contemporary Western life, especially values concerning family, children and meaningful relatedness, and to explore the many ambiguities and paradoxes that the practice entails. Based on empirical research from Norway, the author identifies three main themes for analysis: Firstly, by focusing on the perceived relationship between biology and sociality, she examines how notions of child, childhood and significant relatedness vary across time and space. She argues that through a process of kinning, persons are made into kin. In the case of adoption, kinning overcomes a dominant cultural emphasis placed upon biological connectedness. Secondly, it is a study of the rise of expert knowledge in the understanding of 'the best interest of the child', and how the part played by the 'psycho.technocrats' effects national and international policy and practice of transnational adoption. Thirdly, it shows how transnational adoption both depends upon and helps to foster the globalisation of Western rationality and morality. The book is an original contribution to the anthropological study of kinship and globalisation.

Winner of the 2014 Richard Kalish Innovative Publication Award presented by the Gerontological Society of America Young working mothers are not the only ones who are struggling to balance family life and careers. Many middle-aged American women face this dilemma as they provide routine childcare for their grandchildren while pursuing careers and trying to make ends meet. Employment among middle-aged women is at an all-time high. In the same way that women who reduce employment hours when raising their young children experience reductions in salary, savings, and public and private pensions, the mothers of those same women, as grandmothers, are rearranging hours to take care of their grandchildren, experiencing additional loss of salary and reduced old age pension accumulation. Madonna Harrington Meyer's Grandmothers at Work, based primarily on 48 in-depth interviews conducted in 2009-2012 with grandmothers who juggle working and minding their grandchildren, explores the strategies of, and impacts on, working grandmothers. While all of the grandmothers in Harrington Meyer's book are pleased to spend time with their grandchildren, many are readjusting work schedules, using vacation and sick leave time, gutting retirement accounts, and postponing retirement to care for grandchildren. Some simply want to do this; others do it in part because they have more security and flexibility on the job than their daughters do at their relatively new jobs. Many are sequential grandmothers, caring for one grandchild after the other as they are born, in very intensive forms of grandmothering. Some also report that they are putting off retirement out of economic necessity, in part due to the amount of financial help they are providing their grandchildren. Finally, some are also caring for their frail older parents or ailing spouses just as intensively. Most expect to continue feeling the pinch of paid and unpaid work for many years before their retirement. Grandmothers at Work provides a unique perspective on a phenomenon faced by millions of women in America today.

The sites, spaces and subjects of reproduction are distinctly geographical. Reproductive geographies span different scales - body, home, local, national, global - and movements across space. This book expands our understanding of the socio-cultural and spatial aspects of fertility, pregnancy and birth. The chapters directly address global perspectives, the future of reproductive politics and state-focused approaches to the politicisation of fertility, pregnancy and birth. The book provides up-to-date explorations on the changing landscapes of reproduction, including the expansion of reproductive technologies, such as surrogacy and intrauterine insemination. Contributions in this book focus on phenomenologically-inspired accounts of women's lived experience of pregnancy and birth, the biopolitics of birth and citizenship, the material histories of reproductive tissues as "scientific objects" and engagements with public health and development policy. This is an essential resource for upper-level undergraduates and graduates studying topics such as Sociology, Geographies of Gender, Women's Studies and Anthropology of Health and Medicine.

Multigenerational living - where more than one generation of related adults cohabit in the same dwelling - is recognized as a common arrangement amongst many Asian, Middle Eastern and Southern European cultures, but this arrangement is becoming increasingly familiar in many Western societies. Much Western research on multigenerational households has highlighted young adults' delayed first home leaving, the result of difficult economic prospects and the prolonged adolescence of generation Y. This book shows that the causes and results of this phenomenon are more complex. The book sheds fresh light on a range of structural and social drivers that have led multigenerational families to cohabit and the ways in which families negotiate the dynamic interactions amongst these drivers in their everyday lives. It critically examines factors such as demographics, the environment, culture and family considerations of identity, health, care and well-being, revealing how such factors reflect (and are reflected by) a retracting welfare state and changing understandings of families in an increasingly mobile world. Based on a series of qualitative and quantitative research projects conducted in Australia, the book provides an interdisciplinary examination of intergenerational cohabitation that explores a variety of concerns and experiences. It will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in housing, demographics and the sociology of the family.

Adopting a conversation analytic approach informed by ethnomethodology, this book examines the process of socialization as it takes place within everyday parent-child interactions. Based on a large audio-visual corpus featuring footage of families filmed extensively in their homes, the author focuses on the initiation of interactive assessment sequences on the part of young children with their parents and the manner in which, by means of embodied resources, such as talk, gaze, and gesture, they acquire communicative skills and a sense of themselves as effective social actors. With attention to the responses of parents and their understanding of their children's participation in exchanges, and the implications of these for children's communication this book sheds new light on the ways in which parents and children achieve shared understanding, how they deal with matters of 'alignment' or 'disalignment' and issues related to their respective membership categories. As a rigorous and detailed study of children's early socialization as well as the structural and embodied organization of communicative sequences, Socialization: Parent-Child Interaction in Everyday Life will appeal to scholars of sociology and child development with interests in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, early years socialization and the sociology of family life.

Originally published in 1991. Covering courtship, disclosure, diversity, and public implications, the essays here discuss topics such as erotic magic, nakedness, physicians' attitudes about sex, boy-love, saints and sex, and the politics of sodomy, as they were manifested in medieval Europe and the Middle East.

Following networks of mothers in London and Paris, the author profiles the narratives of women who breastfeed their children to full term, typically a period of several years, as part of an 'attachment parenting' philosophy. These mothers talk about their decision to continue breastfeeding as 'the natural thing to do': 'evolutionarily appropriate', 'scientifically best' and 'what feels right in their hearts'. Through a theoretical focus on knowledge claims and accountability, the author frames these accounts within a wider context of 'intensive parenting', arguing that parenting practices - infant feeding in particular - have become a highly moralized affair for mothers, practices which they feel are a critical aspect of their 'identity work'. The book investigates why, how and with what implications some of these mothers describe themselves as 'militant lactivists' and reflects on wider parenting culture in the UK and France. Discussing gender, feminism and activism, this study contributes to kinship and family studies by exploring how relatedness is enacted in conjunction to constructions of the self.

This book sheds light on the invisible early post-arrival period of female family migrants, traditionally considered to be low skilled or professionally quiescent. With attention to the experiences of Chinese and Taiwanese women married to German men, it examines the ways in which the private sphere-marked by intermarriage couple dynamics and native-foreigner relations-constitutes the main locus of women's socialization in the host country, as interactions with their intimate partners in the family realm shape both their self-conceptions and their employment intentions. Based on interviews with migrant women and their spouses, the author outlines the subject positions that characterize female migrants' attitudes to external constructs and entering the labor market, showing that female family migrants frequently take on family migrant and wife roles that permeate intimate relationships and impede employment intentions, but also often strive to realign with their pre-departure independent selves and thus regain agency. A study of gender dynamics and labor market entry among newly arrived female migrants, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in gender, migration, and work.

Originally published in 1958, this book discusses how marriage and Fulbe family life, the economy and the whole organization of society is centred on cattle; how the welfare of the herd and its increase, the balance betweent he size of the herd and the size of the family are major preoccupations in the life of a Fulani herd-owner.

Every year migrants across the globe send more than $500 billion to relatives in their home countries, and this circulation of money has important personal, cultural, and emotional implications for the immigrants and their family members alike. "Insufficient Funds" tells the story of how low-wage Vietnamese immigrants in the United States and their poor, non-migrant family members give, receive, and spend money.
Drawing on interviews and fieldwork with more than one hundred members of transnational families, Hung Cam Thai examines how and why immigrants, who largely earn low wages as hairdressers, cleaners, and other "invisible" workers, send home a substantial portion of their earnings, as well as spend lavishly on relatives during return trips. Extending beyond mere altruism, this spending is motivated by complex social obligations and the desire to gain self-worth despite their limited economic opportunities in the United States. At the same time, such remittances raise expectations for standards of living, producing a cascade effect that monetizes family relationships. "Insufficient Funds" powerfully illuminates these and other contradictions associated with money and its new meanings in an increasingly transnational world.

Every year migrants across the globe send more than $500 billion to relatives in their home countries, and this circulation of money has important personal, cultural, and emotional implications for the immigrants and their family members alike. "Insufficient Funds" tells the story of how low-wage Vietnamese immigrants in the United States and their poor, non-migrant family members give, receive, and spend money.
Drawing on interviews and fieldwork with more than one hundred members of transnational families, Hung Cam Thai examines how and why immigrants, who largely earn low wages as hairdressers, cleaners, and other "invisible" workers, send home a substantial portion of their earnings, as well as spend lavishly on relatives during return trips. Extending beyond mere altruism, this spending is motivated by complex social obligations and the desire to gain self-worth despite their limited economic opportunities in the United States. At the same time, such remittances raise expectations for standards of living, producing a cascade effect that monetizes family relationships. "Insufficient Funds" powerfully illuminates these and other contradictions associated with money and its new meanings in an increasingly transnational world.