Ethos最新文献

Collaborative work between anthropology and psychology on literacy and particularly on illiteracy helps to rethink general disciplinary backgrounds, concepts, and complex empirical phenomena in the field of (il)literacy. Since the formational period of the social sciences, the concept of literacy has been key to the self-understandings of anthropology and psychology. However, it was long neglected in empirical research. Nonetheless, implicit and explicit assumptions about the role, history, and distinctiveness of writing systems and their presence or absence in various societies were central to disciplinary understandings of societies, individuals, and humanity. To this day, literacy and especially its relational other—illiteracy—have not received the attention they deserve from either empirical or conceptual research. This article begins with their histories in anthropology and psychology and argues that illiteracy, in particular, has been neglected in their debates. It then offers a framework for literacizing and illiteracizing, conceptualizes both illiteracy and literacy as multiple and relational phenomena, and discusses methodologies and preliminary results from our collaborative research project on processes of literacizing and illiteracizing in urban literate environments in Benin and Bolivia. It concludes with a discussion of the potential of research on literacy and illiteracy as a model for transdisciplinary work, especially a more intensive collaboration between our disciplines.

How does a father come to be regarded as a “family man” in the Caribbean? By tracking the stories and strivings of various Dominican men who seek recognition as dedicated fathers, this essay unfolds complex answers to this seemingly simple question. Here, the lauded ascription of “family man” is revealed less as a signifier of fatherly commitment and care than as an idiom through which masculine “respectability” is performed or denied. The paper unknots the idea of the “family man” from several ethnographic vantage points: through the moral reorientation of a felon-turned-loving-father who strives for respectable recognition; observant participation with a men's group who advocate for “good fathering”; the biography of a retired police officer reflecting on parenting and being parented across shifting fatherhoods; and a youth advocate calling for more accessible masculine models. These ethnographic voices call for more expansive, historically grounded, and practice-oriented visions of the Caribbean father and “family man” while nuancing regional concepts of respectability and building on anthropological conversations about the making of moral personhood.

This article, based on ethnographic research in Senegal, explores parenting practices of expatriate international development workers who bring their families with them to overseas posts. These parents experience various ambivalences regarding class, privilege, and racial consciousness, and these are manifested in their concerns about the unintended lessons their children absorb from the dynamics that they observe. Children are ever-present spectators to the choices their parents are making, not only in terms of their parenting, but in their broader lifestyles as well. Often unwittingly, children represent a potential challenge to parents’ reproduction of themselves not just as good parents, but as good people.

According to the notion of “parental determinism,” parents are paradoxically imagined as both powerful actors and in need of expert guidance and supervision. Subsequent research in different world regions problematizes the links between parental competence, child development, and societal ills. However, the question of what “good parenting” actually consists of is highly contingent. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Ivorian parents and in a child welfare center, this paper examines competitive comparisons in baby shows, pregnancy consultations, and infant health reviews as performative parenting encounters in which parents, social welfare officers, and midwives interact as actors and audiences of “good parenting.” The paper analyzes contemporary parental determinism in Côte d'Ivoire as at once rooted in well-established local imaginaries of self and personhood and opening spaces for the development of aspirational parental selves. It looks at different ways in which parental determinism is enacted and talked about and how “doing good” as a parent and the well-being of children are grasped as entangled and mutually constitutive. The paper demonstrates that “beautiful babies” are a product of a shared understanding and co-practice. Making “beautiful babies” requires communal efforts to “be good” and “do good,” invoking the subjectivities of both parents and experts alongside their acts of parenting and counseling.

The article explores how the moralization of women mothers in contemporary Brazil reinforces structural inequalities. The analysis focuses on two forms of communication: reprimands and advice directed from experts toward mothers or circulated between mothers of young children in two different social contexts in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Based upon an ethnography carried out in a complex of favelas, the first case study examines how poor and racialized women are reprimanded by public daycare professionals. Based on participant observation in a WhatsApp group of middle-class parents, the second case study focuses on the advice distributed by parental experts that circulated among these parents in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through the comparison of reprimands and advice, we suggest that speech acts reveal how expert discourses perform modalities of moralization that not only shape motherhood experiences but also differentiate them according to attributes of class, race, and territory.

Interrogating what constitutes “good parenting” captures and reflects multiple debates within and across different societies, milieus, and power constellations. In this Special Issue, Contested Parenting. Experts, Audiences, Selves, we bring together seven articles and a commentary that tackle how people move through the labyrinth of diverse knowledge formations and when they reproduce themselves as “good” via their own considerations of parenting models. This introduction advocates for understanding parenting as the encounter between at least three groups of actors: first, the parents themselves, who work with their own parenting imaginations while also addressing the expectations and role ascriptions of “ideal types” of personhood; second, the experts—professional or self-ascribed—who represent a central authority on how to observe, comment, and, if necessary, intervene; and finally, audiences, including not only (other) parents and experts but also in-laws, neighbors, and any onlooking member of an imagined community that apparently observes and judges whether parenting is done in the right, the good, and the appropriate ways. This three-fold perspective sees this introduction concentrate on classed, gendered, and racialized parenting imaginaries by exploring the subjectification of parents in and through the idea and the practice of raising—or not raising—children.

In stringing together the fine-grained ethnographic studies that comprise this special issue of Ethos, “Contested Parenting. Experts, Audiences, Selves,” our commentary is designed to go beyond the micro-setting of daily routines to the emotional entanglements of family relationships within wider economic and political networks. Calling on the notion of affective economies, we examine how, in the present-day “parenting culture,” racial and class inequalities mediate not only expert intervention and policy objectives, but the moral and emotional foundations of parental selves. Comparing widely diverse settings—from New York mothers of the cosmopolitan elite to working-class dads in the Caribbean, from African-based ex-pats engaged in the international aid industry to Vietnamese immigrants in Berlin, it becomes clear that, as we descend the socioeconomic ladder, parental anxieties are retooled and compounded by the accusatory gaze of surrounding audiences. Failing to see today's parenting culture as a contextually-circumscribed ideal, government policies tend to isolate its component parts in universal principles of good practice, propagating a myopic moralism that exacerbates feelings of frustration, humiliation, and burn-out among families and professionals caught in the cross fire of historically-shaped structures of inequality and discrimination.

In this paper, we explore the unintended consequences of parenting support and child protection services for families who have migrated from Vietnam to Berlin, Germany. We identify such negative consequences on three levels: The relationship between practitioners and parents was, contrary to good intentions, often characterized by tensions and distrust, which may undermine effective collaboration. Another potentially detrimental effect of parenting support is that parents may experience an intensification of parenting, increased stress, and insecurity concerning their competencies. Finally, parenting support may amplify intergenerational conflicts as children witness and potentially adopt the devaluation of their parents as incompetent agents. We argue that research and practice need to systematically attend to unintended consequences to avoid harm and develop more helpful approaches. In a plural society, we suggest, parenting support must be guided by the well-established insight that parenting varies for good reasons across groups, socioeconomic conditions, and individual families.

This article examines how life coaching, as practiced by Latinx and Latin American coaches in the United States, yielded new audiences and forms of sociability and provided conceptions of parenting as a contested practice, as defined in this special issue, for women who did not have children (either by circumstance or choice). These life coaching practices measured personal transformation in terms of how effectively individuals changed the inner linings of the self, manifested a desired outcome, or cultivated social and fictive kinship networks. Using a case study ethnographic model, the article follows the life of a middle-aged Puerto Rican woman and two life coaches with whom she worked. Considering the Latin American origins of life coaching, I introduce the main interlocutors in this ethnographic project: life coaches Gloria Rodriguez and Ester Fried and Camila Zamora, a childfree middle-aged upper-middle-class Puerto Rican woman who sought life coaching. Moreover, I identify tenets across life coaching modalities while tracing Camila's path from seeking a romantic relationship to expanding social capital and access to valuable upper-class, cosmopolitan child-centered spaces. Thus, Latinx and Latin American life coaching contested parenting by undermining an individualistic parent-child bonding while privileging the cosmopolitan practices, lifestyles, and social capital that upper-classed urban parenting yielded among adults, whether they had children or not.

Parenting is socially constructed via interpersonal encounters, experiences, and narratives circulated among parenting interlocutors who act simultaneously as experts in and audiences for parenting practices. This contribution addresses the changing and contested nature of parenting expertise in Cameroonian Berlin, exploring how kin, friends, and pedagogical, social service, and medical personnel construct contrasting views of what “good” parenting is and whose expertise counts. Immigrant mothers who arrived in the early 2000s developed expertise and then became community-based experts, advising subsequent immigrants on how to manage officials who hold power to define good parenting in the German context, to praise or insult migrant mothers, and even to remove custody rights. The content and sources of parenting advice, its modes of transmission, and its audiences have changed over the past quarter-century in response to the increasing size and heterogeneity of the Cameroonian diasporic community, and new technologies for communicating advice. Immigrant mothers’ parenting advice remains focused on biomedical care, emotional regulation, and academic readiness, aimed at producing middle-class selves and achieving dignity and respect in an environment that so often denigrates Black women “foreigners” and their German-born children. Women who develop a reputation for mothering expertise undergo self-realization, crucial in Cameroonian immigrants’ search for dignity.