Cati Coe

The Scattered Family: Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality

Todays unprecedented migration of people around the globe in search of work has had a widespread and troubling result: the separation of families. In The Scattered Family, Cati Coe offers a sophisticated examination of this phenomenon among Ghanaians living in Ghana and abroad. Challenging oversimplified concepts of globalization as a wholly unchecked force, she details the diverse and creative ways Ghanaian families have adapted long-standing familial practices to a contemporary, global setting. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, Coe uncovers a rich and dynamic set of familial concepts, habits, relationships, and expectations - what she calls repertories - that have developed over time, through previous encounters with global capitalism. Separated immigrant families, she demonstrates, use these repertoires to help themselves navigate immigration law, the lack of child care, and a host of other problems, as well as to help raise children and maintain relationships the best way they know how. Examining this complex interplay between the local and global, Coe ultimately argues for a rethinking of what family itself means.

Growing Up and Going Abroad: How Ghanaian Children Imagine Transnational Migration

Migration scholars should give attention to migration as seen through childrens eyes for at least two reasons. Firstly, childrens perspectives help us to understand whether or not children are being socialised into their communitys culture of migration, a culture which shapes migration patterns and flows. Secondly, given that some children migrate and some children are left behind by migrant parents or relatives, childrens imaginings of whether they as children ought to migrate affect where the responsibility and costs for their care will be located between family members, countries and states. In this paper I examine how children aged 8–22 in a town in southern Ghana imagine life abroad, conceptualise the timing of migration in their life-course, and articulate their goals in migrating. I use this rich material as a case study for exploring the wider issues.

Political belonging through elderly care: Temporalities, representations and mutuality

In this article, we examine the ways that elderly care generates political belonging. Our approach builds on studies which argue that nurture and care create kinship, but takes that argument further by suggesting that care generates membership in numerous social formations, across scales. We suggest that elderly care helps illuminate key aspects of political belonging, particularly the temporality of political membership, because elderly care entails mutuality and reciprocity over a long period of time. In addition, elderly care is an interactive process in which older persons, their caregivers, the state and other actors negotiate modes of political belonging that entail affect as well as rights. Furthermore, elderly care has been used to construct representations of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ families which are ideologically connected to particular political formations. These representations generate difference and ‘Othering’ of internal and external populations. Ultimately, we argue that a focus on elderly care collapses domains that are usually kept artificially separated, like kinship and the state, and private and public, in ways that are productive for social analysis as a whole.

Transnational migration and the commodification of eldercare in urban Ghana

ABSTRACT Over the past 20 years, organizations to provide commercial nursing services, mainly to the sick and debilitated elderly, have sprung up in Accra, Ghana. This article assesses the degree to which transnational migration has generated social changes in ageing at the level of everyday practices. It argues that a range of social actors differently involved in transnational migration has created and sustained a market for home nursing agencies in Ghana through diverse processes involving the imagination of care work abroad, complex negotiations between the elderly at home and their anxious children abroad, increased financial resources among the middle class and the evaluations of western eldercare services by return and current migrants. These dynamics illustrate the complexity of the role of transnational migration in generating social change and highlight the significance of the needs of local families and the role of the imagination in shaping social remittances from abroad.

The Divergence of Art from “African Culture”: From Achimota to the Educational Reforms of 1986 in Ghana's Art Education

At the national school cultural competition held in Cape Coast in May 1999, the 10 regions of Ghana presented the finest examples of the art and crafts made by students in the region’s schools in the past year. As one of the judges noted, there was a “wide variety of exhibits on display,” from leatherwork, sculpture, and metalwork to lettering and design. The regional winner of the competition, the Central Region, demonstrated such variety in tie-and-dye cloth, hats, necklaces made of beads, a wood inlay picture of a drummer, paintings – of huts in a village, women carrying water, and a shiny red car – and signs such as “Avoid Cheating on Examinations” or “Ghanaians Send Your Girl Child to School.” Students have participated in school cultural competitions since the 1970s. Featuring performances of drum language, choral music, dance drama, and poetry recital, school cultural competitions are accompanied, particularly at the regional and national levels, by an arts and crafts exhibition like the one in Cape Coast. Yet in the eyes of participants and audience members, all the elements showcased at the school cultural competitions do not equally symbolize “traditional culture.” Instead, “‘culture’ quickly evoked in the mind drumming and dancing,” as Ms Patience Adow, then the Eastern Regional Minister, said in her speech opening the Eastern Regional biennial secondary-school cultural competition in March 1999. “Drumming and dancing,” rather than arts and crafts, set the terms of the debates about culture; it is what people argued through and against in my discussions with them about the meaning of national culture and its teaching in schools. Arts and crafts, in contrast, were considered “vocational skills,” as at the 1999 national cultural competition. How do some practices and activities get marked as “cultural” and others not (Dominguez, 1992; Whisnant, 1983)? This paper explores how art education dropped out of the category of “African culture” in Ghanaian education. This signification occurred despite an educational history in which art was associated with “African culture,” a history that explains its contemporary presence in cultural competitions. The educational reform of 1986 marked a culmination of the separation of arts and crafts from Ghanaian culture. Implementing ideas that had been circulating since the 1970s but which previous military governments did not have the resources to enact, the 1986 education reform made vocational skills a focus of the curriculum in juniorsecondary school (7th–9th years of schooling), which was recognized as the educational endpoint for most students in Ghana. What was taught in vocational skills combined what had been previously part of art education – woodworking, leatherworking, weaving, basketry, metalwork, drafting, and pottery – with home science. Each junior-secondary school chose a vocational skill as its specialty, a choice that mainly depended on the specialization and inclination of the subject teacher, who was trained in art or home science. The reform also introduced the subject of Cultural Studies, which focused on festivals and customs. Professor Esi Sutherland-Addy, a member

The Anthropology of Sibling Relations

Since the 1990s, after a gap following David Schneider’s critique (1984), there has been a remarkable revival of kinship in anthropology. The new kinship studies shifted interest to practices, processes, and meanings in contrast to a previous focus on jural rights and obligations, kin terms, and structures. Within this efflorescence of the literature, certain issues have dominated, while others have been largely overlooked. Exciting issues entailing moral and legal dilemmas or contesting biological notions of kinship dominate the research agenda. These include reproductive technologies (Rapp 1999, Franklin and Ragone 1998), international adoption and the constructions and surrogates of parenthood (Howell 2006, Leinaweaver 2008, Marre and Briggs 2009, Stryker 2010, Yngvesson 2010), and “new” legally recognised forms of alliance (Smith 2001, Weston 1991). Their common ground is to highlight how kinship is produced through social practices rather than determined by the physical act of birth.

Alma Gottlieb, The Afterlife Is Where We Come From: the culture of infancy in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (pb

with a mask personifying a bush spirit, who runs after children and women to whip them, which stresses the new adult status of the circumcised boys. During the circumcision (as well as when washing the knives), a rhombus is spun to produce the sound that is said to be the growl of a leopard. The circumcised boys are said to have ‘hit’ or ‘tied’ the leopard (they will later symbolically ‘kill the leopard’ and then eat it). After this, the boys stay for three days with the circumciser. During the night, some of them tour the village with adult men to mask their voice and sing licentious songs. They then stay in a hut in the bush until their wounds have healed. When they come back into the village, they are paired with girls, and each pair develops a joking relationship. Men and women then keep in separate spaces, and the women produce their own mask, caricaturing the mask of the men. The women bring the young girls to the river, where they undergo a simulacrum of circumcision during which their labia are pinched with crab claws. The ethnographic description is accompanied by an interesting discussion of the interplay between traditional rituals on one side, and Islam or Christianity on the other, arguing that today circumcision plays a crucial role in building the identity of the Dı̀ı̀. This short summary does not do justice to the unusual and remarkable wealth of ethnographic and linguistic detail provided by the author, who writes in a French academic tradition that gives unstinting importance to the utmost detail and produces very thick descriptions. Although it might appear unnecessarily detailed for readers unfamiliar with Adamawa, the ethnographic description of the most important ritual of the Dı̀ı̀ will provide anthropologists working in the region with an important basis for comparative studies.