Child Fostering in West Africa

Erdmute Alber holds the chair of Social Anthropology at Bayreuth University. Her empirical and theoretical interests are in kinship, inter-generational relations, childhood and parenting, as well as in political anthropology. She has realized long term fieldwork in Latin America and West Africa.Jeannett Martin is a postdoctoral research fellow in Social Anthropology at Bayreuth University. She has done research on educational migration between southern Ghana and Germany and on child fostering and inter-ethnic relations in northern Benin. Catrien Notermans is an anthropologist and senior researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She has been doing long-term fieldwork in West Africa, Europe and Asia, concentrating on kinship, gender, and religion.

• CONTENTSList of figuresAcknowledgmentsList of contributorsChild fostering in West Africa: introductionErdmute Alber, Jeannett Martin and Catrien NotermansPART IPERSPECTIVES ON THEORIES1. A framework for the analysis of parent rolesEsther Goody2. Adoption, fosterage and marriage Suzanne Lallemand3. The transfer of belonging: theories on child fostering in West Africa reviewedErdmute AlberPART IINEGOTIATING STRUCTURE: PERSPECTIVES FROM ANTHROPOLOGY, HISTORY AND LAW4. Experiencing father’s kin and mother’s kin: kinship norms and practices from the perspective of foster children in northern BeninJeannett Martin5. Relating affiliation and descent: brothers’ daughters as co-wives among the Bulsa in northern GhanaBarbara Meier6. Children coming and going: fostering and lifetime mobility in East CameroonCatrien Notermans7. The promises of shared motherhood and the perils of detachment: a comparison of local and transnational child fostering in Cape VerdeHeike Drotbohm8. Disputes over transfers of belonging in the Gold Coast in the 1870s: fosterage or debt pawning?Cati Coe9. Child adoption and foster care in the context of legal pluralism: case studies from GhanaUlrike WanitzekIndex