Catrien Notermans

The emotional world of kinship: Children's experiences of fosterage in East Cameroon

This article focuses on childrens narrated experiences of fosterage in East Cameroon. It seeks to complement the predominantly adult approaches to fosterage with childrens views of the intimate, emotional and competitive aspects of kinship in everyday life. As kinship evolves in homes through sharing food and intimacy, children directly experience how kinship is created, disputed and defined and how lived kinship is inextricably linked with mobility, flexibility and power dynamics. It is argued that childrens multiple and changing experiences of fosterage depend on three interconnected factors: changing household compositions, power dynamics in the homes and the changes in womens life histories.

Child Fostering in West Africa

Child fostering in West Africa connects classical and new kinship theory and offers ethnographic studies on a mobile and creative kinship practice.

Surviving change by changing violently: ukuthwala in South Africa's Eastern Cape province

During the last decade a comeback of the apparently extinct marriage practice called ukuthwala has been noted and has found much attention in the South African media. It has been raised as a particular concern that, apparently, ukuthwala increasingly entails the abduction and rape of underage girls as a precursor to marriage. This article aims to illustrate why this alleged “cultural throwback” occurs as the result of national socio-cultural, legal and economic processes in South Africa. Operationalising the concepts of policulturalism and Afromodernity as suggested by Comaroff and Comaroff (2012), ethnographic fieldwork revealed that local communities are establishing new autonomous identities, set against the Constitutions ideal of human rights, through the revival and change of customary practices. These revived customs are then employed as survival strategies to combat new economic challenges and the HIV/ AIDS pandemic. Concurrently, these survival strategies influence the way in which ukuthwala is practiced, re-articulating an old tradition within modernity.

Researching religion: the iconographic elicitation method

This article aims at offering a contribution to context-related methods in anthropological fieldwork. The multidimensional realities of ethnographic fieldwork require much creativity in adapting research strategies to peculiar research contexts. This idea is illustrated with a description of a variant on the elicitation method as developed during research on Marian pilgrimage. Researchers studying religion come across specific problems such as peoples’ profound emotions and private suffering that may strongly inhibit communication with the researcher. The elicitation method as used in the project explicitly aimed at overcoming the problem of silence and outburst of tears among emotionally touched respondents, which seriously hampered initial interviews based on verbal stimuli. In contrast to this, emotional responses to the iconographic stimuli appeared to evoke stories revealing important religious meanings, whereas precisely this emotional dimension made it difficult for the people to express themselves when approached by the use of conventional interview techniques.

Caring and Connecting: Reworking Religion, Gender and Families in Post-Migration Life

This chapter deals with West and Central African women in Paris and their religious strategies to overcome the kin-related problems they face in their post-migration life. No longer living in close proximity to the extended family, they have to make continuous efforts to develop an alternative kin network. The women develop an intense programme of religious travel to Marian sites across Europe that offers them the opportunities to build new women-centred families around the central figure of Mother Mary. The chapter argues that their intensified religiosity results in a feminization of kinship based on spiritual ties that gives them support and respect as well as a feeling of home in a foreign environment. The study is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork between 2009 and 2012.

Restoring femininity through religious symbols after breast cancer. The case of the Polish Amazonki

Breast cancer operations have a great impact on women, not only on their bodies but also on their sense of self as women and mothers, and their sexuality. This paper analyses the ways in which a Polish breast cancer support group called Amazonki deals with this, and offers alternative models of femininity. In particular we will analyse the religious symbols and practices related to the Catholic Holy Mary and to the pilgrimage to Polands major religious shrine, that of the Black Madonna of Cze¸stochowa, and their meaning in terms of gender identity. It is argued that through these religious symbols and practices, as well as in the related discussion in their magazine, opposing and at times seemingly conflicting models of femininity are combined and reconciled, but also renegotiated with other social actors.

Homosexuality: Representing the Devil or a Spiritual Gift? Two Opposing Views in the Same Marian Devotion

This article analyzes opposing discourses on homosexuality forwarded by two different Catholic social actors. These are linked to the messages of the Lady of All Nations, a Marian apparition site in Amsterdam. These different actors are understood as competing moral communities (Hunt, 2009), especially about the issue of what constitute European values. Both discourses can be seen as examples of the minoritizing yet universalizing view on homosexuality (Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1990, p. 85). The devotion to the Lady of All Nations serves as a site for promoting competing discourses (Hermkens, Jansen, & Notermans, 2009).