Issue 13

Kinship in the 21st Century

April 2012

~ Contents ~

Introduction: Kinship in these times

Ryan Anderson

The Other in Us: Anthropology, Genealogy, and Kinship in the 21st Century

Shannon Perry

Fictive Kinship and the Anthropologist's position

Diana Patterson

Motherhood and Internal Migration in Quintana Roo, Mexico

Veronica Miranda

Kinship: Real, Imagined, Past & Present

Ryan Anderson


Photo: Glass plate discovered in a second hand store in Kentucky, 2011.  By Ryan Anderson.

Motherhood and Internal Migration in Quintana Roo, Mexico

During my thesis research in the communities of Saban and Huay Max, located in the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico, I watched how children from three different familial units living on the same housing lot were constantly reorganized and re-circulated as adult family members came and went. For many rural communities in Quintana Roo, Mexico, child circulation is taking on a new meaning as many young women are joining men and now choosing to migrate out of the community in search of work in tourist and urban centers. The research for this essay grew out of my focus on how young migrant women negotiate the culturally prescribed role of motherhood versus the complex demands they face as economic providers. This essay explores how the dual pressures of economics and relocation are affecting Yucatec Maya mothers, fathers, and children.

Quintana Roo is a critical part of the tourism development boom that has taken place throughout Mexico since the early 1970s (see Clancy 2001; Castellanos 2010). While tourism development throughout the region generates both revenue and employment, there are also many serious negative social and environmental repercussions to this pervasive form of development (Sanchez-Gil et al 2004:588; Clancy 2001; Hiernaux 1999; Castellanos 2010). Tourism development in Quintana Roo has led to a dramatic increase of internal migration to the coastal regions, which has resulted in tremendous population concentrations that surround well-known destinations such as Cancun. In many of the households that I have encountered over the last several years, a vast majority had at least one member of the family who migrated out to tourists zones in search of work.

The social effects and impacts of tourism development are often deeply gendered (Casellas and Holcomb 2001). Although tourism may produce positive and/or negative consequences for women, Casellas and Holcomb point out that the employment women gain from tourism, among other benefits, can improve women’s economic and social positions within their respective communities (2001:162).

In Saban and Huay Max, most men and some women leave the community on a regular basis in search of wages and work—either weekly, monthly, or for longer periods of time—while their children stay behind. Ramon*, a middle aged father from Huay Max, explained what was driving the need for many men and women to leave the community:

There is no work here. We have to leave and find work in places like Playa [del Carmen] and Cancun in order to bring back money to pay for our children’s clothes and food.

Many other parents echoed Ramon’s sentiments that temporary out-migration was motivated by the need to fulfill parental and familial obligations.  This lack of economic opportunities is not an isolated issue; it is a problem faced by many families in the region.

Specifically, in rural Quintana Roo, children are being circulated because of the challenging situations that many women and their families face. In the past few decades it has traditionally been males who have been pushed to find work outside of the local community; but this trend has been drastically modified, as women are now starting to migrate out of their natal communities in search of a way to further supplement their family incomes. The main factor driving this out-migration is economic; however ecological changes to the environment have further affected rural communities’ economic needs. In response to these pressures, there are two primary factors that enable rural to urban migration for women in Quintana Roo: access to higher education and a thriving tourist economy.

Emily Walmsley argues that when rural regions become subsumed within wider global markets, “earlier practices of fostering and kinship are continually being shaped by new economic and social pressures” (2008:174). As Walmsley (2008) and Jessaca Leinaweaver (2007) demonstrate in their research, the practice of fostering or child circulation also serves as a survival strategy during times of economic crisis and reinforces kinship ties. In response, families are utilizing a highly dynamic and flexible family structure to facilitate child rearing. In rural Quintana Roo, children whose parents migrate out for work are moved around and primarily sent to live with close extended kin like older sisters, aunts, or grandparents. Although mothers and their husbands are the primary decision makers in determining the fate of the child, children also have a say as to where they choose to live. Sometimes it is the child’s desire to stay behind with family that influences the way in which they are circulated. Such occurrences are illustrative of not only the dynamic nature of the family unit, but also of the fluidity and flexibility of individual agency.

The majority of the residents of Saban and Huay Max are subsistence agriculturalists that rely on getting their main food staples from their milpa (agricultural plot). The families in the region have to constantly fight with environmental elements such as drought, floods, and hurricanes. In 2005, Hurricane Wilma (the strongest tropical cyclone on record in the Atlantic basin) had devastating effects throughout the peninsula in particular along the coast of Quintana Roo. Those effects were also felt close to home in both Saban and Huay Max with the complete loss of harvest due to floods and the salting of the fields caused by rainwater mixed with ocean water. During the summer of 2008 the communities once again completely lost their harvests due to drought. I was in these communities in early September when the rains came just two weeks too late. Nothing could be done; the crops dried out and the years’ work was lost.

After losing the harvest for the sixth year in a row and experiencing increasing food costs, the economic realities and hardships are undeniable and often seemingly insurmountable for many community members. As a result, many people are temporarily diversifying their modes of subsistence and choosing to migrate out in larger numbers than in past years to help supplement the costs of food, shelter, and clothing for their families. Many new migrants are now women. The majority of these women are in their late teens to late twenties. Those who are married usually have children; these children are often left behind with extended kin while the mothers migrate out in search of work. Because the majority of women who leave the community in search of work are of reproductive age, the well-being and social reproduction of children whose mothers migrate out is an issue of great importance.

As women negotiate their absence within their families they incorporate various strategies to help protect their children’s emotional and physical wellbeing. As much as mothers stated that they would like to be with their children, many expressed their feeling that the safety and well-being of their children is more important than their own personal desires, sense of identity, and fulfillment of traditional gender roles.

Maribel, a 30-year-old mother who has steadily migrated out for work over the last five years, told me during an interview how difficult it was for her to be away from her children. She explained that she had wanted them to stay and live with her (and her husband) in the city, but knew that they wanted to be back in the pueblo. She understood that her children were happier in the pueblo with all of their friends and family and knew that forcefully making them relocate would have devastating effects on them. However, in choosing to leave her children behind, Maribel felt a sense of loss. Due to her extended migration out of the community, Maribel’s youngest child would sometimes accidentally call her mother “aunt”, which Maribel said hurt her sense of motherhood and the value that she had in the lives of her children. In Maribel’s case, motherhood meant economically providing for her children rather than participating in their daily care.  

Liliana is the main economic provider in her household; she is one of the few women fortunate to have been able to make a living working in the community. Liliana has helped raise all three of her bother Jose’s children as well as the oldest son of her brother Mario. Liliana states that the main reason that the children don’t migrate out with their parents is because they are freer back in the pueblo than when they are in the city. She went on to say,

here in the pueblo they can run around and play with other children in the streets. They can stay out all day if they want to. Here they are not confined to a room or a small yard. In the cities it is not safe for children to walk or play around in the streets and that’s why they have to stay inside all day. The children don’t like it and that’s why they choose to stay in the pueblo.

The two youngest children that Liliana looks after are four and six, and they have openly expressed their desire to remain in the pueblo. To them the pueblo is their home, where they feel comfortable and safe surrounded by everything they know including their family and friends. They both had the opportunity to live in Chetumal, the capital city of Quintana Roo, with their parents but chose to return to the freedom of pueblo life were they were are able to play and wander around all day. Moving to urban cities, while sometimes exciting for children, can also be a lonely and shocking experience. For that reason, children often decide to stay in their natal community, where the comfort of routine, friends, familiar places, and family is readily available. 

Community ties are clearly important for children, just as they are for adults. Santiago, Liliana’s teenage nephew said that unlike his younger brother and two older sisters, he chose to stay behind because he didn’t want to leave all of his friends. Access to greater educational opportunities and resources were not significant factors influencing Santiago’s ultimate decision to stay in the community; for him the freedom he had in the pueblo, as well as his established relationships with friends and family, proved to be more important. I watched Santiago frequently move in and out of the house. He spent most of his time outside hanging out around the plaza, visiting the internet café, picking up a game of futbol, or visiting with various friends.

Stepping back and looking at how a rural community attempts to cope with increasing economic pressures through the migration of men, and now women, to tourist and urban centers demonstrates the powerful ways in which economic pressures can move bodies. It also highlights the creative and flexible ways in which families adapt to these pressures. In the case of rural Quintana Roo, the out-migration of women has further affected the lives of children, and reshaped socially acceptable norms about how children are positioned within larger family units. For families facing economic difficulties in Saban and Huay Max, the practice of child circulation enables women who migrate out for work to rely on kin relatives like their mothers, sisters, sister-in-laws, or older daughters to help raise their children and provide them with a better quality of life. This results in the establishment of closer kinship ties through the sharing of mothering. 

Here child circulation functions as a survival and betterment strategy as children are moved and transferred between households. Yet, as Maribel’s experiences demonstrate, female out-migration and the subsequent circulation of children can have difficult social costs for families in places like rural Yucatan.  This reality underscores the need to understand the implications of globalization beyond macro-economic perspectives. By analyzing how economic pressures affect the intimate relationships of family and motherhood, we gain a much deeper—and more complex—understanding of the local social meanings and impacts of wider political and economic processes.

Veronica Miranda

PhD Candidate

University of Kentucky

*All names used in this essay are pseudonyms.

References

Casellas, Antònia and Briavel Holcomb. 2001. Gender, Tourism, and Development in Latin America. In Women as Producers and Consumers of Tourism in Developing Regions. Apostolopoulos, Y., Sönmez, S. F., & Timothy, D. J., ed. Westport, Conn: Praeger.

Castellanos, M. Bianet. (2010). A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancun. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Clancy, Michael. 2001. Exporting Paradise. New York: Pergamon.

Hiernaux, Daniel Nicolas. (1999). Cancún Bliss. In The Tourist City. Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein, eds. Pp. 124-142. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Leinaweaver, Jessaca B. (2007). On Moving Children: The Social Implications of Andean Child Circulation. In American Ethnologist, Vol. 34, No. 1. pp 163-180.

Sanchez-Gil, Patricia et al. (2004). Some socio-economic indicators in the Mexican states
of the Gulf of Mexico. In Ocean & Coastal Management, Vol. 47, pp. 581-596.

Walmsley, Emily. (2008). Raised by Another Mother: Informal Fostering and Kinship

Ambiguities in Northwestern Ecuador. In Journal of Latina American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 13, No.1, pp. 168-195.

Kinship: Real, Imagined, Past & Present

When I think about kinship studies in anthropology, I think of diagrams filled with little circles and triangles, and of course a lot of lines leading this way and that through a familial/historical maze.  That’s the image that comes to my mind.  I imagine a big chalkboard (or dry erase board) in front of a classroom and a complex network of family relationships all mapped out with some anthropologist explaining how the whole social mosaic fits together.  Kinship—to me—has a very classic and “old school anthropology” feel about it.

I’ll go ahead and be right up front about this: kinship is not my area of study.  That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate this aspect of anthropology.  I do.  In fact, I have always found the study of kin relations extremely interesting.  And as it turns out, I am not the only one.  When I was teaching intro to anthropology courses over the past two years, the kinship, marriage, and family lectures turned out to be some of the most fun and engaging (especially when students got into discussions and debates about things like arranged marriages or in vitro fertilization).  When I first started teaching, however, for some reason I assumed that students would have zero interest in all of that stuff.  After all, there is something about kinship studies that harkens back to the anthropology of yesterday.  Kinship charts?  Isn’t that something that anthropologists used to do in the black-and-white, sepia-toned days of the late 19^th century?  Right? 

I knew that it was something that I found intriguing, but I just assumed it was too old-fashioned for young college students.  And I was totally wrong about that.  I was completely surprised to find out just how popular kinship issues were with students. Over the past several years, the more I have met and talked with colleagues and professors who are doing kinship studies these days, the more I realize just how off base I was about the relevance and appeal of the entire subject.  Kinship studies aren’t just some holdover from anthropology’s past that draw interest from a limited few—and the anthropologists who specialize in this area of research are out there doing some pretty exciting and inspiring work.

All you have to do to realize that “kinship matters” is pay close attention to the political debates and social conflicts that engulf discussions about families, reproduction, adoption, and marriage.  When it comes to all of the ideals, social conventions, beliefs, and norms that people have in relation to sex and family, it’s seriously a battleground out there.  The current US election cycle (including much of the rhetoric of candidates like Rick Santorum) proves quite clearly that the socio-political importance of kinship is anything but passé.  So there you have it: in the 21^st century, kinship matters…just check out the work of researchers such as MarciaInhorn if you still have any doubts.

Now that we have established the point that kinship is not only interesting, but also a critical component of 21^st century anthropology, I am going to move this little essay down the road and discuss one aspect of kinship that I find particularly intriguing: online genealogy.

That’s right: I am talking about all of the people who spend years and years of their lives searching out distant family relationships on sites like Ancestry.com and Rootsweb.  I mean, what on earth are all those people doing?  What are they looking for?  Why are they so obsessed with finding some little document that may or may not really show the Civil War enlistment of some random, long-dead person they never met?

Full disclosure: I am, or have been at one time during my life, one of those people who have dabbled with these sorts of genealogical quests.  I can’t claim to be some genealogical or archival expert, and I have a lot to learn when it comes to this type of research, but to me the whole process is endlessly alluring. 

Let me give you a little background: On one side of my family I can trace my ancestry back to a group of German Lutherans who landed in North America in 1717.  My family is connected to the Yagers who, along with several other families, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the early 18^th century and subsequently found themselves indentured by one Governor Spotswood in Virginia for seven years.  My family genealogy threads its way back to one of the passengers who made that voyage: Adam Yager.  Ever since I was about 10 years old I have had a copy of a typed document that details some of these histories, along with some stories about members of later generations (all the way up to recent 20^th century family connections in Los Angeles, California).  And that’s not the end of it: there is a site in Virginia called “Germanna” where some of those early German relatives of mine settled and lived.  I have a copy of an archaeological report about this site, and someday I will hopefully get the chance to visit in person some day.  But think about what’s going on here: isn’t this a lot of energy, thought, and time devoted to what are (at best) imagined family relations (I will, after all, never break bread with the late Adam Yager)?

This search for connections with people long gone reminds me of Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion about the functions of kinship, and the differences between what he called “theoretical” and “practical” kin relations.  Bourdieu points out that the kinship charts and diagrams of genealogists and anthropologists merely reproduce “the official representation of social structures” (1977:34), rather than actual relationships as they exist in daily practice.  Representational kinship, Bourdieu argues, is “nothing other than the group’s self-representation and the almost theatrical presentation it gives of itself when acting in accordance with that self-image” (1977:35). 

In contrast, practical kinship groups exist only through continuous maintenance (social ties, rituals, marriages, family events, communication, and so on).  Bourdieu makes the case for seeing kinship as something that people actively create and “with which they do something” (1977:35), rather than as a static, idealized, structured map of social relations.  In short, he urges us not to confuse the map of society with the actual practical, daily, and very real workings of society itself (he extends this argument when he talks about “The Synoptic Illusion” later on in this text; see page 97).  Bourdieu writes:

The logical relationships constructed by the anthropologist are opposed to “practical” relationships—practical because continuously practiced, kept up, cultivated—in the same way as the geometrical space of a map, an imaginary representation of all theoretically possible roads and routes, is opposed to the network of beaten tracks, of paths made ever more practicable by constant use.  The genealogical tree constructed by the anthropologist, a spatial diagram that can be taken in at a glance, uno intuiti, and scanned indifferently from any point in any direction, causes the complete network of kinship relations over several generations to exist only as theoretical objects exist, that is, tota simul, as a totality present in simultaneity.  Official relationships which do not receive continuous maintenance tend to become what they are for the genealogist: theoretical relationships, like abandoned roads on an old map (1977:37-38).

Essentially, that’s what I am doing with my search for the Yagers and other distant kin connections: looking for abandoned roads on old (theoretical) family maps.  These aren’t practical, living, real kin connections that I seek…but idealistic abstractions based upon a whole compilation of documents, bits of data, and family stories about “where we came from.”  Now, why would anyone do this?  What’s the purpose of chasing down these kinds of historical abstractions?  Why would I (let alone the thousands of other genealogically-inspired folks), feel the need to locate the familial equivalent of a dusty old road that nobody has been down for generations?

I haven’t exactly gone full bore into this historical and genealogical research, but I do check in and see what I can find out from time to time.  It’s a project that I pick up every now and again, between everything that I have going on in graduate school.  I am drawn to all of this because it combines personal histories with my studies in both anthropology and archaeology.  Someday I want to explore this further..I’m curious to see where it all leads.  What’s also  interesting about this is that many other people are doing the same thing—thousands in fact—and the online communities at places like Rootsweb can be quite collaborative and helpful.  People often make connections, assist other researchers, and spend a good amount of time providing tips and possible family details to fellow part-time genealogists.  Online genealogy forums provide a whole range of tools and social networks that people utilize in their own searches for those old, lost dead ends and alleys in their family histories.

Like any kind of historical and archival research, genealogical studies can be pretty tedious.  Things are difficult enough with fairly well-documented historical sources, but they get even more dicey once you reach the online genealogy world.  Mostly because there are so many people who participate in these informal research communities.  One of the issues that I see with many of the family trees posted online, for example, is that there are often a lot of discrepancies the deeper the roots go.  This is to be expected, and makes for slow work for anyone who really wants to find out the difference between plausible connections and demonstrable kinship connections (although I think there is always a measure of uncertainly in some cases).  That’s why I have a lot of respect for the legions of trained, experienced archivists and genealogists out there who do this kind of research and have the talent to work through these difficulties.

The expert genealogists are really amazing to talk to, and it’s always impressive to see how a really knowledgeable person weaves their way through histories.  I had the chance to visit the National Archives about a year ago, and was incredibly impressed with one of the staff archivists.  But the experts are one thing…what really catches my interest are the thousands, if not millions of non-professionals out there who spend enormous amounts of time tracking down their kinship histories.  I am truly intrigued by the legions of amateurs who brave the mountains of information, rumors, documents, and family trees in search of a connection to the past.  What is really striking in anthropological sense, actually, is how many people make connections in the present while searching for connections to real or imagined pasts.  Using online forums and tools, many people start to form new communities (and even establish new kinship connections) while sifting through their prospective histories.

I’ve had people email me asking questions about particular individuals, and I have emailed others asking for information and help as well.  People post discussions asking about specific individuals or more information about particular surnames or geographic areas.  In the discussion forums of sites like Rootsweb, this sort of thing is really common.  It’s a social network that is predicated on finding distant relations and histories…and in the meantime people end up creating new ties and bonds (which sometimes result in yearly events like family reunions).  This is a fascinating use of technology and social media.  In these days of disconnected social ties and networks (family often live quite separated throughout the country in places like the US), sites like Rootsweb are locations where people create and participate in new, digitally-mediated kin relations.

Earlier I asked why people undertake these personal genealogical quests.  What are they looking for—what are they hoping to find after sifting through those old abandoned genealogical roads?  One thing seems possible: the creation of new communities and relationships during their online genealogical quests might be as meaningful as finding a documented familial connection with a long deceased individual that arrived in the Americas in the late 1600s. So the whole process may be just as much about building, maintaining—and extending—kinship relations in the present through the camaraderie of shared pasts.  And that’s how it goes: when it comes to kinship, whether we’re talking about the classic, complex diagrams of the early 20^th century or the new ways in which people participate in social relationships, there’s often a lot more to it than you might think upon first glance.  When you look closely, some of those old, abandoned roads that people seem to obsess about are actually surrounded with incredibly meaningful little paths and connections that are continually created and recreated in the dynamic present.

So there you have it.  Why not take your own online sojourn in search of long-gone ancestors and distant kin relations.  Just don’t forget to take note of the fellow travelers who happen to be traversing the same old roads.

Ryan Anderson

References

Bourdieu, Pierre.  1977.  Outline of a Theory of Practice.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Introduction: Kinship in these times

Discarded backpack and photographs, Anza-Borrego desert, 2006.

Closeup of photographs from above, 2006.

I took these two photographs during the summer of 2006.  Back then I was working on a large Cultural Resource Management archaeological project in the deserts east of San Diego, California.  On this particular day it was brutally hot and we were doing some survey work just a few miles from the US-Mexico border.  It's a corridor where thousands of people risk their lives to cross those harsh deserts in search of economic stability for themselves and their families back home (in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, etc).  Take a close look at the two images above.  When I walked up, there was this backpack sitting out in the middle of nowhere.  There were no other people around beside the crew I was working with.  No signs of what happened.  Just these personal items strewn on the desert pavement. 

The discarded backpack is suggestive enough, but the plastic sleeved photographs laying alongside are particularly disheartening.  What happened here?  The fact that the photos were not yet faded by the desert sun and heat means whatever took place here had not happened long before.  It was a faily recent event.  Someone crossed that massive border, shouldering this small backpack with these images of children as reminders of family back home.  Why were these things left behind?  Were they simply forgotten?  Did the person suddenly have to run?  Were they apprehended by officials whose job it is to protect the political line in the sand known as the United States border?

It was six years ago that I took these photographs, while I was out looking for evidence of human occupation from much earlier time periods.  These two images still have a sad, haunting feel about them...mostly because of the implications of the abandoned images of loved ones.  Someone took a terrible risk because of limited socio-economic options, and all they had to remind them of the most important things in life--like family--were a few two dimensional photographic approximations of kin relations back home.  For people who find themselves trapped in the grist mill of the global economy, family and kinship ties are often what motivate people to take incredible risks...and also what they hold on to when they are far from home.  And whenever I look at these images I always wonder what happened, and if the person who once wore this backpack ever found a way back to the faces depicted in those photographs.

This issue is about kinship in the 21st century, a theme that has been around in anthropology from the start.  It's a classic component of anthropology, true, but also something that is every bit as relevant today as it was 100 years ago--especially considering the current global economy, debates over cultural norms, and the politics of reproduction and sex.  This month we have essays by Shannon Perry, Diana Patterson, Veronica Miranda, and yours truly.  Thanks for having a look, and feel free to post your comments and thoughts.

R.A.

Fictive Kinship and the Anthropologist’s Position

I went to Amman, Jordan in 2008 mentally prepared to deal with the large, gregarious extended family whom I imagined would host me. As an only child from a small, quiet family, I was steeling myself for the stereotypical Middle Eastern family who, I was certain, would not give me a moment’s privacy. They would be loud, with many children running circles around my beginner’s Arabic; I’d probably have to share a room with the hellions. I dreaded the sure-to-be constant stream of inquisitive relatives. As a demonstration of their culture’s famed hospitality, they would make me eat. A lot. Imagine the astonishment on my face when a solemn, middle-aged Jordanian couple with no children, picked me up in their luxury vehicle and escorted me to my own room: painted a gaudy pink, with my own bed, my own desk, and my own copy of the Qur’an translated into English. I glanced at my host mother, who smiled slightly. And then, doubling my astonishment, my Jordanian “parents” politely excused themselves as if they were hotel staff and shut the door, leaving me standing in the middle of “my” room. I remember vividly the disappointment mixed with relief that I was not going to experience the “traditional” Jordanian household.

I was to experience many more of these reversals during my fieldwork in Jordan in 2008 and 2009, reversals which I use in this ethnographic essay to contemplate the implications of globalizing field sites, particularly the practices of fictive kinship and the anthropologist’s position. As local sites become more globally connected, through media, tourism, and other development processes, locals become increasingly aware of the world of the researcher, increasingly able to imagine that world and to project it onto their local one. Arjun Appadurai (1996) has described the resulting disjunctures as “ethnoscapes,” shifting landscapes in which more people in more places exercise social imagination. Mobility not only characterizes modernity but becomes, for many people the desired feature of modernity.

It is not uncommon to find locals esteeming the anthropologist-as-world-traveler, as cosmopolitan and modern. I found my interactions with Jordanians and with migrant workers characterized by this same esteem. In Jordan I saw my position of desirable mobility reflected in the thousands of migrant workers, women from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, who had come to Jordan to work as live-in household “maids,” cleaning, cooking, and taking care of the children and elderly of their Jordanian employers. At the time I conducted my fieldwork, the Jordanian Ministry of Labour estimated 70,000 maids were working legally, with many thousands more working illegally, most by violating the terms of their labor contracts. Since the 1980s, Jordan and other Middle Eastern states have adopted a labor recruitment system called the kafala, or sponsorship system (from kafeel, sponsor). In this system, labor recruitment agencies match female laborers to an employer-family which “sponsors” the women’s employment. The sponsor becomes the sole legal employer during the contract, usually a two year term in which the female laborer must live in the same household with the employer-family. Consequently many Jordanian employer-families, motivated by economic concerns or by cultural concerns, restricted their maid’s movement. In the most extreme cases, employers confined the maid to the house, confiscated her passport, withheld her pay, prevented her from communicating with other maids, and sometimes verbally or physically abused her. More moderate employers allowed maids more freedom of movement, even giving them a weekly day-off in Amman to do as they pleased.

Although I have since lived with three host families, in Jordan and later in Tunisia, I still feel more akin to these female migrant workers than to my fictive families. We were women doing our best to negotiate our mobility in cultures critical of feminine mobility. We lived with families who grafted us into their kin group but left us puzzling over the nuanced and often contested web of family obligations. Both maids and myself, alone and abroad, were presumed by locals to be vulnerable and in need of kin protection, yet that protection involved a daily series of negotiations. And so I found my position as anthropologist not unlike the maids’ position as contract workers imagined as family members.

Although cultural pressures to protect feminine honor-mobility motivated some employers’ behavior, few Jordanians spoke of it. Instead Jordanian informants framed the maid phenomenon within variants of an international human rights discourse circulating in Jordan at the time. While I could write of the experiences of migrant workers, particularly how they negotiated mobility and even subverted human rights discourse to their own ends, I’m more interested here to consider how globalizing discourses like human rights affect fictive kinship practices as well as my position as a researcher. To evaluate the human rights discourse, I interviewed a Jordanian Ministry of Labour employee, labor recruitment agents, human rights activists, and Jordanian employers of maids. In doing so, I experienced the uncanny reversal of having informants presume to know what I as a Western woman thought and then recycling discourses in their interviews with me. For example, one afternoon I visited a Jordanian garment factory representative and his wife in their home. I’ll call them “Anjad” and “Deema.” Not only had they employed two maids, but they also had assisted extended family members in hiring and managing their purportedly unruly maids. Additionally, Anjad and Deema had hosted a series of foreign exchange students, and thus considered themselves to be more open-minded and experienced than the average Jordanian family.

Anjad described how a Swiss foreign exchange student had criticized the family for failing to invite the maid to join them in watching television. Incredulous, Anjad explained he “had his own family,” maintaining that the maid was only a contract worker. Sympathizing with the Swiss student, I agreed that it would be ok for the maid to watch television with the family. Anjad turned on me by questioning my own position: “Now talk about where you’re coming from, Alabama. There are still houses that employ servants, that employ maids. In the South, it still exists, but not in the same form that we have here.” I was shocked. Anjad continued his diatribe by asking if I had seen the film Babel, which he then used to frame his discussion of migrant work in the United States, where he had attained a university degree. He offered the same romanticized modernization narrative my other Jordanian informants told: Jordan is modernizing, families are becoming more nuclear, women increasingly work outside the household, and thus maids are needed in the household. But “human rights” were a political tool, he said, a Western imposition.

I couldn’t have felt more of a Western imposition than I did one evening when I found myself interviewing a women’s rights activist, “Noura,” in an all-male coffee-shop, per her request. As she sat opposite me, heavily made up and wearing tight leather pants, she smoked her argeelah with an impressive degree of nonchalance considering every man in the café was staring at us. I described my discussion with Anjad. She replied by emphasizing the importance of understanding cultural differences, criticizing Jordanian employers like Anjad for their lack of empathy. At least a dozen times during our three-hour conversation, Noura said of the maids, “They are human after all.” Noura was also an employee of the Domestic Workers Division of the Jordanian Ministry of Labour, and she had ambitious ideas for regulating labor, including a household inspection team:

But then again, it’s very difficult if you want to send an inspector inside the home. What if there is a man? This is connected to the culture in Jordan, which is very important. Maybe one male inspector and one female inspector can do the job…How else can we know what is inside the homes? What is inside the homes? Men.

Noura complained that men, as guardians of the households, likely would prevent inspection teams from examining working conditions because such an inspection is tantamount to criticism of kinship practices. “Some employees are a little bit tough, even with their daughters, not only with their domestic workers,” Noura explained.

Herein lies the disjuncture. My Jordanian host family employed two contract workers: an Indonesian maid and an American student, me. Whereas the maid was confined to the house, I was given my own room, my own key, and all the freedom to come and go or stay in my room with the door shut. I never observed my host family mistreating the maid, yet I pondered over the gulf between her position and mine. Human rights discourse situated maids within a human family and dignity narrative. Employers claimed maids were part of the family, although whether these affirmations laid claim primarily to labor or to belonging was unclear. Maids developed supportive networks in Jordan, treating one another as fictive kin while supporting their biological kin at great distance and cost with remittances. And I, the cultural anthropologist, was adopted into a host family which anticipated my American expectations and conceptions of family belonging and privacy. The people we meet as anthropologists in the increasingly globalized field are increasingly aware of the possibilities of modernity, of the potential expressions of kinship obligations, of the multiple, complex ways that people make appeals to family membership. Discourse that originates elsewhere, like human rights discourse, comes back to us in the field, often in unexpected reiterations. How can we begin to disentangle these discourses and be more attuned to the interpretations and expectations of modernity in our field sites? What are the implications for anthropologists and their increasingly globalizing field sites, where our own frameworks are reiterated and positions as knowers are challenged?


Diana Patterson is a first-year PhD student of cultural anthropology at the University of Kentucky. She has explored intersections of migration, honor, and kinship in Jordan. For her Master’s thesis at the University of Chicago, she studied state regulation of homeschooling in the United States, and for her dissertation research at the University of Kentucky, she plans to continue examining the state and education in the context of Iraqi Kurdistan.

Reference

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. In Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

The Other in Us: Anthropology, Genealogy and Kinship in the 21st Century

Anthropology and Genealogy’s Long Romance

From prime-time celebrity TV shows, like BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?, to subscription-based Internet records archives, like Ancestry.com, to y-chromosome DNA testing, modern genealogy means big business. Growing numbers of professional genealogists, local historians, and lay family researchers participate in professional certification programs, conferences, local society chapters, national associations, and online webinars. Here, I consider anthropology’s past intersections with genealogy and suggest new disciplinary ways for using this old method to understand contemporary cultural experiences and emerging social structures.

The oral traditions of cultures throughout the world collected and preserved kinship data and family lineages long before such social concerns featured prominently in ancient texts, like the Bible and the Erya, a third century B.C.E. Chinese encyclopedia featuring a chapter on kinship and marriage. Even now, much of what many of us know about our family histories comes to us via oral transmission. Up until recently, genealogical preoccupations in Western societies existed mainly among royalty and a landed elite concerned with inheritances of titles, land, and other properties. In the late nineteenth century scholars in the emerging field of cultural anthropology became interested in using systematized genealogical collection to scientifically study kinship patterns (especially seemingly taboo practices, like incest and cross-cousin marriage) among non-European, indigenous peoples. Lewis Henry Morgan created kinship surveys to document the Seneca of upstate New York and other Native American cultures, while British anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers relied heavily on genealogical data to study indigenous peoples in the colonial Pacific (deRoche 2007). First published in 1910, Rivers’ (1998), “The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry,” provided a succinct guide for generations of anthropologists interested in using genealogy to study traditional social organization and kinship through the 1960s.

Around this time, anthropology shifted from the collection and preservation of cultures supposedly untouched, but endangered by Western influences to a focus on understanding modernity's effects on traditional cultural patterns at home and abroad. As societies moved from agricultural to industrial to postindustrial economic models, kinship seemed to play less of a role in securing personal well-being, structuring social relations, and understanding emerging cultural patterns. Especially in more urban locales, private corporations and government agencies increasingly stepped in to provide social services, like education, work, and health care, to an increasingly mobile population less attached to family or geographical place (deRoche 2007). Some projects, like the Junaluska Heritage Association's work to uncover the history of Junaluska, a traditionally African American community in Boone, North Carolina, continue to find genealogy a useful research method. Many contemporary urban anthropologists and virtual ethnographers, however, employ newer methods to study more fluid, interest-based social relationships and debate over whether to classify such emergent structures as “networks,” “subcultures,” “neo-tribes,” or “scenes” (Hodkinson & Deicke 2007).

Some modern anthropologists have noted genealogy's popular explosion since World War II and, particularly, after the 1977 publication and television adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots, based on the author's research of his own African American family's history. Based on her study of genealogy hobbyists in eastern England, Fennella Cannell (2005) dismissed misconceptions that genealogy represented a self-centered preoccupation or that most participants were motivated by a search for lost roots. Instead, she argued for genealogy's modern popularity in the postindustrial West as one expression of a repressed need to care for the dead, participate in healing cultural remembrance, and redefine contemporary ideas about kinship and connection to others. As genealogical research becomes more popular, modern anthropologists ought to take advantage of this phenomenon to determine what new and useful research and teaching possibilities family history research might now hold.

Autoethnographic Anecdote

My own road to connecting genealogy and anthropology began when I discovered and decided to use the autoethnographic method in my Master’s thesis research. Born of 1970s feminist scholarship, autoethnography took root in anthropology as the discipline experienced a reflexive turn, acknowledging the non-existence of the disembodied, objective researcher. This radical, interdisciplinary method fuses autobiographic and ethnographic writing, using personal experience as a springboard for investigating larger social patterns and exploring ourselves as historically situated, culturally constructed persons (Berger & Ellis 2007). I used autoethnography to investigate how my personal experience as a performer in a local experimental music scene intersected with contemporary Appalachian representations and regional identifications.

Because I enjoyed and learned so much utilizing this method, I started seeking ways to help my students locate personal experiences within broader historical-cultural contexts. As I resurrected a personal project to research my own ancestors, I began to realize the potential for using family history research as a bridge between the personal and the cultural. An informal first-week survey of first-year college students in the genealogy seminar I am currently teaching confirmed my suspicion that a tremendous amount of interest exists for pursuing this type of research. Most students enrolled because of a personal desire to explore their own family histories and share these discoveries with their peers. I, myself, am excited to share what I’ve learned about my own heritage and what I find illuminating about this particular type of research.

One story I love to tell concerns my great-great-great grandparents, Clement I. Camp and Marie Louise Thelesie Varion. They were both born in New Orleans, Louisiana around 1820 and married there in 1847. My grandmother remembers their daughter, her own grandmother, Charlotte. Nevertheless, she and her sister were shocked when Camp family researchers informed them, via email, that these ancestors were documented as free people of color on their marriage record and several of their children's birth certificates.

Charlotte Camp Knight holding grandson,
New Orleans, Louisiana, circa 1928

“Does it make you feel any different?” my grandmother had asked me as she struggled to digest this new information.

The research process forced her to see herself in a new light, while helping my teenage self begin developing a reflexive awareness about the cultural and historical contexts that shaped our life experiences and marked us as belonging to different generations. Coming of age in the South during the years preceding the civil rights movement, my grandmother, who is, also, half Italian, developed an acute awareness of the relationship between ethnicity and oppression. Her Italian relatives had Anglicized their surname in the early 1900s. Meanwhile, most of the Camps, like many colored families in the South, seized the opportunity to “pass” as white by this time. When I replied that I felt no differently, I realized how much this attitude was informed by having grown up in the 1990s when more multicultural celebration and visibility existed in American public education and popular culture. I also realized that while my identification with my Filipina mother's heritage made me comfortable claiming a mixed ethnic identity, my American grandmother neither acknowledged this mixed heritage nor understood the desire to claim such an identity.

My recent research of these Camp ancestors has led far beyond a skeletal outline of their lives into an investigation of the historical and cultural backdrop of their time and place. By choosing to delve further, I learned about the still too unexplored antebellum history of free people of color in New Orleans. Many of these individuals arrived in the port city via Cuba and Saint-Domingue (which became Haiti in 1804) after the slave rebellions of the late 1700s and early 1800s. This created a dynamic, multi-ethnic cultural tapestry that included a large, prosperous class of educated and property-owning free people of color, unlike anything found in America during this time (Louisiana Black Heritage Symposium 1979; Kein 2000). Census records and some basic searching revealed Clement, himself, to be a skilled mason who worked to redesign the facade of the city's historic Catholic St. Louis Cathedral, in the early 1850s.

Conclusion

After years of reflection and research, I would now answer my grandmother’s question in the affirmative. Yes, in light of all I have uncovered, I do feel differently about myself. I feel even prouder to claim a multi-ethnic heritage, which is the true history and contemporary reality of the United States of America. I feel even more motivated to use genealogy as one tool for exploring the lives of women, ethnically diverse people of color, the poor, LGBT communities, and other oppressed peoples—those “others” that mainstream historical and cultural discourses still too often deemphasize or ignore altogether.

In conclusion, quality genealogy research possesses tremendous potential for anthropologists seeking more reflexive understandings of the historical and cultural contexts that shape our lives. Often, personal or family stories complicate cultural stereotypes and encourage the reexamination of historical grand narratives and taken-for-granted “truths.” Finally, family history research brings one face-to-face with stories and experiences that simultaneously do and do not belong to us. The genealogical lens asks that we confront the other in us while helping us recognize and build new types of kinship connections with those we perceive as historical and/or contemporary others.

Shannon Perry

References

Berger, Leigh, and Carolyn Ellis. 2007. Composing autoethnographic stories. In Doing cultural anthropology. Michael V. Angrosino, ed. Pp. 161-176. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.

Cannell, Fenella. 2011. English ancestors: The moral possibilities of popular genealogy. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17: 462-480.

deRoche, Constance P. 2007. Exploring genealogy. In Doing cultural anthropology. Michael V. Angrosino, ed. Pp. 19-32. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc.

Hodkinson, Paul, and Wolfgang Deicke, eds. 2007. Youth cultures: Scenes, subcultures and tribes. Routledge Advances in Sociology, 26. New York: Routledge.

Kein, Sybil, ed. 2000. Creole: The history and legacy of Louisiana’s free people of color. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Louisiana Black Heritage Symposium, with Robert R. Macdonald, John R. Kemp, Edward F. Haas, and Louisiana State Museum. 1979. Louisiana’s black heritage. New Orleans: Louisiana State Museum.

Rivers, W.H.R. 1998. Kinship and social organization. London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press.