Histories of Empire, Nation, and City: Four Interpretations of the Empire Exhibition, Johannesburg, 1936

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Child care in a globalizing world

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Different Kinds of Storytelling: Ethnographic Writing and Documentary Film-Making

This paper compares and contrasts ethnographic writing to ethnographic film-making as different ways of crafting a narrative. Films have the ability to reach larger audiences, including our own informants, and to make audiences feel connected to the central participants who seem to speak directly to them, but are less conducive to providing the broader context for those stories or showcasing stories that are less visually interesting. Film also seems more effective for making an intervention in policy or public opinion. Both modes of storytelling involve the selection of a few key incidents from a much larger set of footage or fieldnotes to tell a compelling story, shaped by emotion or theory, and the manipulation of the strongest elements available to construct that story. Documentary film-makers are more willing to discuss the construction of their product than ethnographic writers. Finally, the form of the final product, whether dissertation, monograph, or film, shapes the process of inquiry and discovery, affecting what is learnt and what is possible to tell. I came to documentary film-making as a result of my dissatisfactions with ethnographic writing, but I have realised that film does not replace writing; rather, they work in tandem, with different goals and possibilities. Based on my experiences of writing three monographs and making, in a less skilled fashion, two short documentaries on the same themes, this paper reflects on ethnographic storytelling through different media

Imagining Institutional Care, Practicing Domestic Care: Inscriptions around Aging in Southern Ghana

Elder care has become a significant national conversation in Ghana due to urban and international migration, lower birth rates, family nuclearization, and longer life spans. In the rural towns of Ghana’s Eastern Region, new elder care practices and discourses are emerging. These age-inscriptions signal the agency of older persons, which  is  often  neglected  and  overlooked.  Discursively,  older  adults  express  curiosity  about  Western  care facilities, a heterodox idea in relation to the orthodox position expressed by the Ghanaian government and NGOs which support kin care for older adults. Through this heterodox discourse, aged persons are able to critique the state and the church for not providing care and re-imagine a Western institution as fitting their locally constructed  needs. On the  other  hand, pragmatically, aged persons  and their children  are adapting existing  practices  of  adolescent  fosterage  to  help  provide  elder  care,  a  practice  which  is  not  discursively elaborated, and is therefore alterodox. Both age-inscriptions are less articulated than standardized discourses about the significance of adult children’s care, the orthodox position. This paper therefore illustrates how social change in norms occurs, through older people’s anxiety about their own aging, the use of their imagination, and their refashioning of existing care practices

Age-Inscriptions and Social Change

This special issue introduces the concept of age-inscription. It accounts for the ways that transitions, expectations and markers around age and life-course stages are modified in interplay with social change. This new concept is necessary, we argue, because age-inscriptions correspond to more indeterminate and transitional levels of changes in aging trajectories and life stages than the concept of norms. Inscriptions lie between rules, laws, and norms on the one hand, and individual feelings, emotions, and actions on the other. They are at least slightly shared between individuals, and, thus, somewhat more standardized than individual behavior, but not as standardized and shared as norms. This introduction lays out the reasons why ageinscriptions happen, as well as the primary ways by which they are formed and generated. We conclude by arguing that contemporary age-inscriptions are fashioned in relation to a longer life course encountered by a new generation, an increasing temporalization and institutionalization of the life course, and high levels of mobility and migration

Emerging Perspectives on Children in Migratory Circumstances: Selected Proceedings of the Working Group on Childhood and Migration June 2008 Conference

The pieces you see in this e-book provide rich data from the lives of migrant children and sometimes their families. Chantal Tetreault’s piece among transnational Algerian teen girls in Paris and Kendall King’s study in Ecuador are linguistic in focus, bringing up the ways that performance in language is part of the practice of immigrant experience (Tetreault) and highlighting how regard for globalization and attention to language are deeply intertwined for immigrant communities (King). Most of the pieces provide in depth points of view from child migrant perspectives—data that is often difficult to obtain and portray sensitively. Child-centered data is exceptionally valuable in helping us to grasp the micro-forces by which childhood is changing through migration and how children experience or activate agency under trying conditions. Laure Bjawi-Levine among Palestinians in Jordan, Lauren Heidbrink among Spanish speakers in immigration detention in the U.S., and Jill White among Mexican children in U.S. labor and schooling environments demonstrate ways in which children’s self-understanding is constrained by state and economy in ways that determine a marked life course. Kanwal Mand’s also deeply child-centered analysis shows us how migrant childhoods can be notably shaped and sometimes constrained largely by urban housing and schooling environments, in this case for Pakistani second-generation children in London. Cati Coe’s interviews with informants in Ghana, and Catríona Ní Laoire’s study on return Irish migrants examine strains across the generations that affect the emotional management of families and individuals to handle the spatial and temporal challenges of migration. And finally, Michelle Moran-Taylor provides a rich analysis of the gendered and socioeconomic strategies that families use to negotiate the challenge of child-rearing in the home area when families are geographically separated, drawing especially on data from Guatemala

Religious revelation, secrecy and the limits of visual representation

This article seeks to contribute to a more adequate understanding of the adoption of modern audiovisual mass media by contemporary religious groups. It does so by examining Pentecostal-charismatic churches as well as the Christian mass culture instigated by its popularity, and so-called traditional religion in Ghana, which develop markedly different attitudes towards audiovisual mass media and assume different positions in the public sphere. Taking into account the complicated entanglement of traditional religion and Pentecostalism, approaching both religions from a perspective of mediation which regards media as intrinsic to religion, and seeking to avoid the pitfall of overestimating the power of modern mass media to determine the world, this article seeks to move beyond an unproductive recurrence to oppositions such as tradition and modernity, or religion and technology. It is argued that instead of taking as a point of departure more or less set ideas about the nexus of vision and modernity, the adoption of new mass media by religious groups needs to be analyzed by a detailed ethnographic investigation of how these new media transform existing practices of religious mediation. Special emphasis is placed on the tension between the possibilities of gaining public presence through new media, and the difficulty in authorizing these media, and the experiences they induce, as authentic. Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications

Women in (Dis)placement: The Field of Studies on Migrations, Social Remittances, Care and Gender in Chile

This article presents current perspectives on the gender approach to the study of migration in Chile between 1990 and 2018, contextualizing it in light of international debates in the social sciences. We will discuss how the feminization and the growth of Latin American migrations have given rise to a prolific field of research, as exemplified by studies conducted in central and northern Chile. We will show how the concepts of social remittances and caregiving permeate the Chilean debate on migrant women. We conclude with reflections on topics and perspectives to be incorporated into the Chilean research agenda on gender and migration.Se presenta un estado del arte sobre el enfoque de género en los estudios de la migración en Chile entre 1990 y 2018, contextualizándolo a la luz de debates internacionales de las ciencias sociales. Abordaremos cómo la feminización y el incremento de las migraciones latinoamericanas inauguran un prolijo campo de investigaciones, articulado a través de estudios desarrollados en el centro y en el norte de Chile. Señalaremos cómo los conceptos de remesas sociales y cuidados permean el debate chileno sobre las mujeres migrantes. Finalizamos con reflexiones sobre temas y perspectivas a ser incorporados en la agenda chilena de investigaciones sobre género y migración.The authors would like to thank the Chilean National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) for funding the study that led to this article through Fondecyt Regular Project number 1160683: “Ser Mujer Mayor en Santiago. Organización social de los cuidados, feminización del envejecimiento y desigualdades acumuladas” (“Being an older woman in Santiago. Social organization of care, feminization of ageing and accumulated inequalities”), led by Herminia Gonzálvez Torralbo and Fondecyt Regular Project number 1190056: “The Boundaries of Gender Violence: Migrant Women’s Experiences in South American Border Territories” led by Menara Lube Guizardi

How Debt Became Care: Child Pawning and Its Transformations in Akuapem, the Gold Coast, 1874-1929

Studies of slavery in Africa have noted the persistence of those relations in different forms, such as through pawning, allowing social changes in power, status, and wealth to be weathered more gradually. As pawning itself became less frequent, did other kinds of relationships take its place? Some scholars have argued that pawning was folded into marriage and fatherhood, others that there are continuities with fosterage and domestic servant arrangements today. This paper examines the question of pawning’s transformations in Akuapem, a region in southeastern Ghana involved in forms of commercial agriculture that were heavily dependent on slave labour and the capital raised by pawning. Ultimately, it argues that debt became key to fatherhood and fosterage relations between children and adults, changing from a short-term exchange to more lifelong reciprocal relations of care.Peer reviewe

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

Migration scholars should pay attention to migration as seen through children’s eyes for at least two reasons. For one, children’s perspectives help us understand whether children are being socialized into their community’s 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, children’s imaginings of whether they as children ought to migrate affects where the responsibility and costs for their care will be located, between family members, countries, and states. This paper examines how children aged 10-18 in a town in southern Ghana imagine life abroad, conceptualize the timing of migration in their lifecourse, and articulate their goals in migrating as a case study for exploring these larger issues.Peer reviewe