Book review: Transfers of Belonging: Child Fostering in West Africa in the 20th Century

Abstract

A central feature of anthropology is to question what is assumed to be natural. This is especially true for the anthropological study of kinship. Notions of motherhood and fatherhood are deeply engrained into our personal experiences. They feel “natural.” Erdmute Alber questions any naturalistic assumption with the very first sentence of her fascinating and very timely book on parenthood and fosterage in Benin: “Nothing is seemingly more natural than the idea that children belong to their birth parents who are caring for them” (1). In a sophisticated way, Erdmute Alber shows that children do not always and not everywhere belong to their birth mother or their birth father. Among the Baatombu in northern Benin, the belonging of a child can be transferred to someone else. While adoption and fosterage have been described for different regions of the world, what makes the cases described in Alber’s monograph outstanding is the normality of this transfer of belonging. For the Baatombu, child fostering and not growing up with one’s birth parents is “the normal way of parenting and not an exception or an anomaly” (4). Nevertheless, due to various forms of social change and “modernisation,” especially the spread of Western types of education and European ideas of parenthood, practices of child fostering are undergoing substantial changes. In exemplary detail, Alber scrutinises these historical trajectories and relates them to the contemporary practices. The book is divided into four parts. In the first part, the introduction, Alber lays out her conceptualisation of the study, describes her field site, and discusses her fieldwork. The book spans a remarkable long period of more than a quarter of a century of research. Since 1992, Alber has researched the Borgu region of northern Benin, conducting field work in both villages and cities. The honesty with which she describes her long-term fieldwork is unusual, touching, and very convincing. Photographs of herself, her two daughters, and the new kin Alber made while living in Benin are complemented with reflexive discussions of how of her children have influenced her fieldwork. Methodological, Alber’s book is ethnography at its best. Alber combines the intimacy of numerous life stories she has observed and listened to over the years with archive data, participant observation, and questionnaires. Beyond globalisation, Alber’s monograph shows the importance of long-term ethnographic fieldwork in one field site. Africa Spectrum 1–2 a The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0002039719886324 journals.sagepub.com/home/afr