Battlegrounds of dependence

The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality, 2023

Focusing on key themes, this chapter highlights how kinship and relatedness constitute a vital lens for understanding gender. First, the everyday is the principal ground for examining relatedness. It illumines how gender shapes our lives and is, in turn, formed, maintained, and altered over time. The borders between gender and other aspects of life can be porous. Second, the seemingly merely domestic or intimate can be generative – a theme that builds on earlier feminist insights. Kinship has wider consequences, including for politics or economics. Finally, kinship is imbued with the potential for hierarchy and inequality, ambivalence, ruptures, and failure. Its generativity includes its less amiable aspects. Gendered inequities and enmities arise from these aspects. Breaks in the fabric of kinship, however, imply the possibility of repair, which may depend on gendered forms of labor. Threading through these themes is care, a key aspect of everyday life and relatedness alike. Care encompasses whole economies and traverses national borders. Care speaks, too, to the vulnerability that is at the heart of what it means to be human. It mirrors, and at times heightens, the difficulties inherent in kinship.

This article proposes a reflection on kinship starting from a recent debate between Marshall Sahlins and Warren Shapiro hosted by the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, between 2011 and 2012. The heated controversy about the " new kinship studies " , regarding sense, meaning, and ultimately the nature of human relatedness, finds the two anthropologists on divergent stances: on one hand kinship as mutuality of being, a locus for multiple ways to conceive and live relatedness, on the other kinship as biological and inescapable invariant of human relations. The article aims at highlighting how some key issues related to relations of power remain un-dertheorised in the " beyond constructivist " and " essentialist " views deployed in the Sahlins-Shapiro contention and underlines the ways that kinship issues engage with broad political stances. Finally, I introduce a reflection on gender as a possibly crucial, and yet eluded, dimension in the debate.

Online paper presentation Riga Univesity Lituania, 2023

What if our anthropological conceptions of transgenerational continuity in nation-states and extended (three/four generation) families contain an epistemological error of scale? To overcome this error, we critically follow Gregory Bateson’s ‘ecosystemic’ thinking and his abductive method (Bateson 1972; 1979; Bateson & Bateson 1987). We complement Bateson’s cybernetic solution by intertwining Nurit Bird-David’s, and Michael Herzfeld’s positions on kinship (webs of family ties), in small scale societies (indigenous peoples) and mass scale societies (nation-states), with insights from family therapy - clinical based – theories (Bird-David 2019a; 2019b; Herzfeld 1997; 2021; Nagy-Boszomenhy 1984; Van Bekkum 1999). For some decades now Bird-David tries to unravel in ethnography and anthropology a persistent comparative confusion in analysing kinship, families, animism from our nation-state bound ‘cosmology’ (1999; 2017; 2019). My paper starts with Bird-David’s claim that western dualisms like spirit-body and supernatural-natural are non-existent in Nayaka cosmology (1999, 71). This position overlaps Bateson’s, rather difficult, conception of mind which fits Bird-David’s ways of reasoning in ‘solving’ the dualisms. For people in small scale - indigenous – societies easily the mental and material worlds are complicated but they, individually and collectively, slip in and out these ‘separate worlds’ during ‘liminal states’ and ‘communitas’ (Turner 1969; Turner 2012???). The paper concludes with outlining ways out of the epistemological error by a) redressing family loyalties & state loyalties as ‘double binding’ (apparently incompatible) (Van Bekkum 1999) and b) that in co-creating ‘transitional – ritual - spaces’, dualisms of matter-mind; nture-nurture; individual-community, body-spirit, male-female, ancestors-unborns, temporarily dissolve (Turner 1979; Van Bekkum 2019). The arguments in this paper are grounded in and back up from two long term ‘fieldworking’ projects a) 10 years of clinical fieldworking, as an artisinal group therapist, with troubled/troubling drafted soldiers hospitalized in short term military psychiatry and followed up by b) 30 years of educational fieldworking with numerous professionals in (Dutch) youth care and mental health institutions (Van Bekkum et. al. 1996; The last 15 years these contexts were group learning processes during co-educating transcultural family - systemic - therapists and family social workers (Van Bekkum et. al 2010; Van Bekkum & Van der Heide 2010; Van Bekkum 2019; Tjin A Djie & Zwaan 2021).

Interntional Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 2023

In this paper, we examine the European devaluation of maternal and female domestic labor after the Industrial Revolution as a defensive byproduct of collective male annihilation anxiety due to the replacement of male manual labor by machines. We argue that an abject attitude towards women was codified in law, economic policy and social norms that still exist today, contributing to an ongoing, unconscious, structural degradation of female caregiving. We also suggest this stance towards female labor was exported to post-colonial nations through the global adoption of the gross domestic product statistic, which excludes domestic and maternal labor from national accounting measurements. We draw on Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, research from the fields of economics and policy analysis-and the burgeoning subfield of narrative economics-to suggest a reparative path forward for both men and women.

Social Problems, 1989

This paper explores how twenty dual-earner couples with school-aged children talk about sharing child care and housework. In about half of the families, fathers are described as performing many tasks traditionally performed by mothers, but remaining in a helper role. In the other families, fathers are described as assuming equal responsibility for domestic chores. With reference to the parents' accounts of the planning, allocation, and performance of household labor, I investigate the social conditions and interactional processes that facilitate equal sharing. I describe how the routine practice of sharing child care and an ongoing marital conversation socialize the parents and help them to construct an image of the father as a competent care giver. Drawing on West and Zimmerman's (1987) formulation of "doing gender, "I suggest that household labor provides the opportunity for expressing, confirming and sometimes transforming the meaning of gender. Motherhood is often perceived as the quintessence of womanhood. The everyday tasks of mothering are taken to be "natural" expressions of femininity, and the routine care of home and children are seen to provide opportunities for women to express and reaffirm their gendered relation to men and to the world. The traditional tasks of fatherhood, in contrast, are limited to begetting, protecting, and providing for children. While fathers typically derive a gendered sense of self from these activities, their masculinity is even more dependent on not doing the things that mothers do. What happens, then, when fathers share with mothers those tasks that we define as expressing the true nature of womanhood? This paper describes how a sample of twenty dual-earner couples talk about sharing housework and child care. Since marriage is one of the least scripted (Goffman 1959) or most undefined (Blumer 1962) interaction situations, the marital conversation (Berger and Kellner 1964) is particularly important to a couple's shared sense of reality. I investigate these parents' construction of gender by examining their talk about negotiations over who does what around the house; how these divisions of labor influence their perceptions of self and other; how they conceive of gender-appropriate behavior; and how they handle inconsistencies between their own views and those of the people around them. Drawing on the parents' accounts of the planning, allocation, and performance of child care and housework, I illustrate how gender is produced through everyday practices and how adults are socialized by routine activity. Gender as an Accomplishment West and Zimmerman (1987:126) suggest that gender is a routine, methodical, and recurring accomplishment. "Doing gender" involves a complex of socially guided perceptual, interactional, and micropolitical activities that cast particular pursuits as expressions of masculine and feminine "natures." Rather than viewing gender as a property of individuals, West and Zimmerman conceive of it as an emergent feature of social situations that results from and * Funds for this research were provided by the University of California and by the Business and Professional Women's Foundation, Washington D.C. I thank Candace West and the anonymous reviewers of Social Problems for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

2011

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2023

The contentious issue of the division of labour in relation to household chores has been the focal point of a plethora of academic critique by feminist scholars since the onset of second wave feminism in the 1970's. Whilst strong motifs point to inequalities based on biological essentialism, reproduced and reinforced by popular culture and the media, the underlying values integral in perpetuating this phenomenon and their wider implications have at times lacked scrutiny. It will be the purpose of this paper to expand upon the chosen article to critically examine inequalities in paid and unpaid work and the forces, both latent and manifest, that facilitate the power based dichotomy of gendered behaviour as an entrenched status quo.