Jeanette Edwards

Surrogate Motherhood: Conception in the Heart.

* Introduction * Surrogate Mother Programs * Surrogate Mothers * Fathers and Adoptive Mothers * Surrogate Motherhood and American Kinship

Parenting skills: Views of Community Health and Social Service Providers about the Needs of their Clients

The concept of ‘parenting skills’ features large in professional, political and popular discourse on the role and responsibility of parents. This article explores what constitutes skills of parenting from the perspective of community health and social service providers, working with families deemed to be ‘in need’. It shows how the concept is drawn on to describe both the needs of women with whom they work and their own role in fulfilling some of those needs. It argues that ‘parenting skills’ are not only gendered, insofar as it is women as mothers who are more likely to be perceived as needing them, but that a lack of them might also be associated with marital status, age and place of residence. In looking at ‘parenting skills’ from the perspective of service providers in the context of their working lives, it is clear however that service providers, predominantly women, formulate a role for themselves in the face of poverty and poor housing which they feel powerless to change.

‘Make-up’: Personhood through the lens of biotechnology

Abstract This paper looks through the ethnographic lens of ‘new reproductive and genetic technologies’ (NRGT) at the idiom of ‘make-up’ in English understandings of personhood and relatedness. In the kinship thinking of interest here, persons are both ‘made’ and ‘made-up’. There are both unpredictable and inevitable elements in the way in which people ‘turn-out’ and their character or personality is meant to be idiosyncratic, lumpy and unique. The paper draws on the way in which residents of a town in the north of England explore possibilities presented by NRGT in ways that make explicit their understandings of personal identity, interpersonal relatedness and communal belonging. The paper attempts to integrate the quotidian and personal narratives of residents with broader social and economic changes occurring in their town. Make (n) (Of natural or manufactured thing) kind of structure or composition; build of body; mental or moral disposition Make-up (n) disguise of actor, cosmetics (etc.); persons character and temperament Make-up (v) concoct (story), settle (dispute); be reconciled

The anthropological fixation with reciprocity leaves no room for love. 2009 meeting of GDAT

Two spectres haunt the debate this year, the motion of which is ‘the anthropological fixation with reciprocity leaves no room for love’. The first is that oft-encountered bugbear ‘ethnocentrism’ – Jeanette Edwards asks: ‘Could it be that the search by some anthropologists for love, the determination to find love in the ethnographic record, is because they are also in love with the idea of love?’ In other words, are some anthropologists fixated on love because of its important place in the Euro-American tradition and in ideologies of the individual? A converse trend is the concern that forms or expressions of romantic love in various non-Western locales are influenced by (or even a product of) Westernization and globalization. Critique of Anthropology 31(3) 210–250 ! The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0308275X11409732 coa.sagepub.com

Donor siblings Participating in each other's conception

Comment on SAHLINS, Marshall. 2013. What kinship is—and is not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sociological Review: Introduction

This special issue of The Sociological Review addresses questions of community, continuity and change both in Britain and in the study of Britain. Such questions are timely. Recent years have seen widespread use of the term ‘community’ in political discourse in Britain and a renewed attention to it in the academy. This special issue is not only an expression and affirmation of that renewed attention but also an acknowledgement of a longer tradition of significant social research on community, change and continuity in Britain by anthropologists and sociologists. It is also more specifically an acknowledgement and celebration of the contribution and work of Ronnie Frankenberg, editor of The Sociological Review from 1969 to 1995. Contributors to this Festschrift have all pursued original, scholarly anthropological or sociological research in Britain. They were asked to write on the theme of community, continuity and change, drawing inspiration from the work of Ronnie Frankenberg. It is almost fifty years since the publication of Village on the Border (1957) and over forty years since the publication of Communities in Britain (1966) but the rich and varied nature of the articles produced here is testament to the continuing salience of his ideas today and to the diverse contemporary engagement with such questions. In this introduction, we first provide a brief summary of some of Ronnie’s insights on community in Britain, before turning to a discussion of the contemporary resurgence of interest in the kinds of questions he raised. In a year of a British General Election campaign in which questions of ‘British identity’ were brought to the fore, and in which debates about the putative loss of ‘community’ and of ‘respect’ have been high on the political agenda, there are, we suggest, particularly pressing reasons for sociologists and anthropologists to address such matters and to derive inspiration from the past in so doing. As we write, the concept of ‘community’ features daily and prominently in media reports and public discussion of the consequences and implications of bombs recently and tragically detonated or planted in London. Frequent and at times seemingly unreflexive references and appeals are being made to ‘the Muslim community’, for example. While a considered response to the contemporary use of such an idiom is beyond the scope of this volume, we

A Feel for Genealogy: ‘Family Treeing’ in the North of England

ABSTRACT Family history research is popular in England. As a social practice it straddles social class and is confined to neither the middle nor the working classes, but shows an enthusiastic and flourishing interest in the workings of social class and in micro-histories of the region. This article focuses on experts in family history research in a region of the north west of England where it is referred to colloquially as ‘family treeing’. Here family treeing is inflected by a post-industrial landscape and recent social and economic transformations with attendant threats to working-class life and dignity. Family treeing is about caring for the dead, but it is also, significantly, about caring for the living, and not only kin. It is an active practice of belonging both to people and places, and entails constant acts of reciprocity.

Sociological Review: Introduction: a Festschrift for Ronnie Frankenberg

This special issue of The Sociological Review addresses questions of community, continuity and change both in Britain and in the study of Britain. Such questions are timely. Recent years have seen widespread use of the term ‘community’ in political discourse in Britain and a renewed attention to it in the academy. This special issue is not only an expression and affirmation of that renewed attention but also an acknowledgement of a longer tradition of significant social research on community, change and continuity in Britain by anthropologists and sociologists. It is also more specifically an acknowledgement and celebration of the contribution and work of Ronnie Frankenberg, editor of The Sociological Review from 1969 to 1995. Contributors to this Festschrift have all pursued original, scholarly anthropological or sociological research in Britain. They were asked to write on the theme of community, continuity and change, drawing inspiration from the work of Ronnie Frankenberg. It is almost fifty years since the publication of Village on the Border (1957) and over forty years since the publication of Communities in Britain (1966) but the rich and varied nature of the articles produced here is testament to the continuing salience of his ideas today and to the diverse contemporary engagement with such questions. In this introduction, we first provide a brief summary of some of Ronnie’s insights on community in Britain, before turning to a discussion of the contemporary resurgence of interest in the kinds of questions he raised. In a year of a British General Election campaign in which questions of ‘British identity’ were brought to the fore, and in which debates about the putative loss of ‘community’ and of ‘respect’ have been high on the political agenda, there are, we suggest, particularly pressing reasons for sociologists and anthropologists to address such matters and to derive inspiration from the past in so doing. As we write, the concept of ‘community’ features daily and prominently in media reports and public discussion of the consequences and implications of bombs recently and tragically detonated or planted in London. Frequent and at times seemingly unreflexive references and appeals are being made to ‘the Muslim community’, for example. While a considered response to the contemporary use of such an idiom is beyond the scope of this volume, we

Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception.

A question of context beyond expectation - clinical practices and clinical concern explicit connections - ethnographic enquiry in north-west England negotiated limits - interviews in south-east England making representations - the parliamentary debate on the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act regulation, substitution and possibility