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The influx of African migrants into Europe in recent years has raised important issues about changing labor economies, new technologies of border control, and the effects of armed conflict. But attention to such broad questions often obscures a fundamental fact of migration: its effects on ordinary life. Affective Circuits brings together essays by an international group of well-known anthropologists to place the migrant family front and center. Moving between Africa and Europe, the book explores the many ways migrants sustain and rework family ties and intimate relationships at home and abroad. It demonstrates how their quotidian efforts—on such a mass scale—contribute to a broader process of social regeneration. The contributors point to the intersecting streams of goods, people, ideas, and money as they circulate between African migrants and their kin who remain back home. They also show the complex ways that emotions become entangled in these exchanges. Examining how these circuits operate in domains of social life ranging from child fosterage to binational marriages, from coming-of-age to healing and religious rituals, the book also registers the tremendous impact of state officials, laws, and policies on migrant experience. Together these essays paint an especially vivid portrait of new forms of kinship at a time of both intense mobility and ever-tightening borders.

This chapter examines the way AIDS orphanhood has influenced child circulation and kin construction in Uganda. While many studies have documented the effects of AIDS on orphans and vulnerable children’s circulation in Africa, few studies have critically examined the effects of AIDS on constructions of kinship, and particularly its symbolic repertoire amidst its everyday significance as a bodily substance. While ‘blood’ in the African context has gained notoriety in the age of HIV/AIDS as a substance that carries pathogens such as HIV, it has also gained significance as a substance that immutably binds children orphaned by those pathogens to their extended kin, on whom they rely for care. This chapter therefore traces the sometimes-contradictory social, economic, and emotional effects of children’s circulation within and across family networks, highlighting orphaned children’s concerns with identity and intra-family mobility. Doing so demonstrates how orphan care in the age of HIV/AIDS is consequently transforming both fosterage practices and kin obligation, jeopardizing children’s well-being and their ability to identify with the ‘blood ties’ that still form powerful tropes of relatedness for orphaned children.

This book represents a Copernican change to our understanding of alternative care in Japan and answers the question of Japan’s continued use of institutional care over foster care. – Tsuzaki Tetsuo In contemporary Japan, 85 per cent of children in alternative care remain housed in large welfare institutions, as opposed to family-based foster care. This publication examines how Japan has been isolated from the global discourse on alternative care, urging a shift in social work and alternative care policies. As the first ethnographic account from inside child guidance centres, it makes a key contribution towards understanding the closed world of Japan’s social services, including the decision-making processes by which a child is removed from the family and placed into care. In addition, regional variation in policy implementation for alternative care is outlined, with reference to detailed case studies and a discussion around organisational cultures of the child guidance centres. Where foster care is constructed as anything other than professional, it is often seen as a threat to the child’s family-bond with their natal parent and therefore not used. Child Guidance Centres in Japan destabilises this construction of the family-bond as singular and discrete, highlighting new practices in alternative care. Child Guidance Centres in Japan: Alternative Care, Social Work, and the Family will be a vital resource for students, scholars of social work and Japanese studies, as well as practitioners and lobbyists involved in alternative care.

Luo orphaned children derive their conceptualization of home from historical ideologies of patrilineal kinship and the local discourses of belonging situated within properly constituted marriage. Contrary to older literature that presents home as a domestic spatial arrangement, orphans understand home as a relational pathway that safeguards growth. We show that orphans use their notion of home to express feelings of vulnerability and apply their agency against adult-initiated fosterage practices. The article contributes to an enhanced understanding of Luo sociality and promotes a dynamic anthropology of relationships and child anthropology by unpacking the facets of childhood vulnerability. Our analysis points to analytic themes of contradictions and paradox in Luo kinship values in relation to child support and ambivalence in how children's agency is exercised in fosterage arrangements.

Humans are obligate cooperative breeders, relying heavily on support from kin to raise children. To date, most studies of cooperative breeding have focused on help that supplements rather than replaces parental care. Here we propose that fosterage can act as a form of dispersed cooperative breeding, one that enhances women's fitness by allowing them to disinvest in some children and reallocate effort to others. We test this hypothesis through a series of predictions about the costs and benefits of fosterage for mothers, foster parents, and foster children using data from the Himba, a group of Namibian agro-pastoralists. We show that fostering out children enhances mothers' fitness, and we provide evidence for a causal link from fosterage to enhanced fitness by showing that fosterage of early-born children is associated with greater maternal reproductive success. Foster parents minimize the costs of fosterage by skewing their care toward their postreproductive years, and by mainly fostering close kin. However, the system is associated with some detrimental effects on foster children, who are more likely to be stunted and underweight than their non-fostered counterparts.

Wet-nursing and fosterage were widely used in early modern Ireland. Despite the difficulties of reconstructing practices surrounding the nourishment and care of infants and young children, the limited surviving sources provide some evidence for the practical arrangements involved, the role of these practices in extending families and creating long-lasting ties of ‘fictive kinship’, the emotional and economic connections they forged and deeply held concerns that they might inspire and extend political disloyalty and disaffection. While fosterage is mostly associated with Gaelic communities, by the sixteenth century, a distinct brand of fosterage was significant to Old English families as well. New English and Protestant families also increasingly participated in networks referred to as fosterage, and references in the 1641 depositions testify to the degree to which these practices linked settlers and natives and the horror inspired by their abandonment.

Humans are obligate cooperative breeders, relying heavily on support from kin to raise children. To date, most studies of cooperative breeding have focused on help that supplements rather than replaces parental care. Here we propose that fosterage can act as a form of dispersed cooperative breeding, one that enhances women’s fitness by allowing them to disinvest in some children and reallocate effort to others. We test this hypothesis through a series of predictions about the costs and benefits of fosterage for mothers, foster parents, and foster children using data from the Himba, a group of Namibian agro-pastoralists. We show that fostering out children enhances mothers’ fitness, and we provide evidence for a causal link from fosterage to enhanced fitness by showing that fosterage of early-born children is associated with greater maternal reproductive success. Foster parents minimize the costs of fosterage by skewing their care toward their postreproductive years, and by mainly fostering close kin. However, the system is associated with some detrimental effects on foster children, who are more likely to be stunted and underweight than their non-fostered counterparts.

In this article, I draw from ethnographic research in Ayacucho, Peru, to describe how rural-to-urban migrants move children between houses as part of a common survival and betterment strategy in the context of social and economic inequality. Such \"child circulations\" produce and strengthen kinship and are an important part of local family-making efforts. My investigation of child circulation grounds a critical assessment of Peru's globalized adoption system, which implicitly denaturalizes the parenting of poor, indigenous Peruvians.

In this article, I examine the relationship of charitable help that, through the persons and the work of caregivers, connects some donors to the young persons who grow up in home-based childcare institutions in contemporary Malaysia. The prism of my analysis is the small charity functions that take place within the homes that I have studied, which allow donors and receivers to elaborate, perfect and enact moral ideas of themselves and of their place in society. Because they stage the main characters of charity, the functions also give an insight into how, since an early age, children actively explore the dominant and largely ethnicized model of virtue and merit they are summoned to embody, thus making sense of their shared condition of “charity children”. This self-care work, I argue, inspired by Erica Bornstein’s study on Indian charity, is made possible by the “pure gift” core that characterizes donors and caretakers, as it frees the aided children from the necessity to “buy” their care back, which is otherwise requested in traditional child fostering.