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****************************************************** * http://www.anthropologymatters.com * * A postgraduate project comprising online journal, * * online discussions, teaching and research resources * * and international contacts directory. * ****************************************************** Apologies for cross-posting. Please circulate widely. American Anthropological Association Meetings New Orleans, November 17th- 21st 2010 What’s new about ‘parenting’? Kinship, politics and identity Organizer: Dr. Charlotte Faircloth, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge Discussant: Professor Diane Hoffman, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia Over the last twenty years, ‘parenting’ has emerged as a concept in both the US and the UK, to characterise the activity that parents do in raising children. According to Hoffman, ‘parenting’ – the transformation of the verb ‘to parent’ into the gerund – is a relatively recent phenomenon that became prominent in the 1950s in jargon used by psychologists, sociologists and self-help practitioners, but that has subsequently spread into wider usage. ‘Parenting’ is not just a new word for child rearing, or the care activities associated with traditional kinship roles. Instead, it requires a specific skill-set: a certain level of expertise about children and their care, based on the latest research on child- development, and an affiliation to a certain way of raising a child, via any number of available methods (whether ‘Gina Ford,’ ‘Spock’ ‘Attachment’ or otherwise). It means ‘being both discursively positioned by and actively contributing to the networks of idea, value, practice and social relations that have come to define a particular form of the politics of parent-child relations within the domain of the contemporary family’ (Hoffman, AAA 2009). ‘Parenting’ is, of course, heavily gendered. Accordingly, in The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, Hays shows how it is mothers who are now encouraged to parent their children ‘intensively’ (Hays 1996). Writing on the basis of research with working mothers in the United States, she argues that ‘intensive motherhood’ is an emergent ideology that urges mothers to ‘spend a tremendous amount of time, energy and money in raising their children’ (1996:x). Hays suggests that this injunction remains culturally salient, despite an uneasy relationship with the logic of the work place, both because it props up the capitalist infrastructure and because mothering is perceived as ‘the last best defence against what many people see as the impoverishment of social ties, communal obligations and unremunerated commitments’ (1996: xiii). Certainly, on a wider political level, the family is increasingly located as the source of, and solution to, a whole host of social ills, from poor educational outcome to recidivism (in the UK, ‘parenting academies’ have recently become a flagship government initiative). These changes have, in turn, had a profound impact on the way adults experience parenthood (Douglas and Michaels 2004; Furedi 2002). Yet the ways in which parents’ experiences have been affected by an era of ‘intensive’ parenting – in short, the transformation of ‘parent’ from a noun to a verb – is not a topic, so far, that has been explored significantly within anthropology. This panel will explore some of the implications of this wider historical shift. How does ‘parenting’ intersect with anthropological perspectives on kinship? Is this just a ‘circulation’ of old ideas? What happens to kinship or care roles when they are employed as politicised ‘identities’? We hope that this panel will lead to an edited volume, appraising the place of parenting in contemporary anthropological work. Please email abstracts, of no more than 250 words, to [log in to unmask] by 15th March 2010 ************************************************************* * Anthropology-Matters Mailing List * * To join this list or to look at the archived previous * * messages visit: * * http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/Anthropology-Matters.HTML * * If you have ALREADY subscribed: to send a message to all * * those currently subscribed to the list,just send mail to: * * [log in to unmask] * * * * Enjoyed the mailing list? Why not join the new * * CONTACTS SECTION @ www.anthropologymatters.com * * an international directory of anthropology researchers * ***************************************************************