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.
The second part of the book summarises the different theoretical approaches to child fostering. Child fostering has been an important topic for British and French traditions of kinship studies. Alber positions herself within what is now called “the new kinship” studies. Child fostering for Alber is foremost a social practices of imaging, creating, and maintaining belonging. Consequently, “the very moment in which a transfer of belonging takes place is of special importance” (53). Thus, Alber takes a very close look at the transfers of belonging of a child in the third part of the book. A breathtakingly large number of aspects relating to parenthood and child fostering in rural Borgu are being presented and discussed. The compelling narratives, life stories, and photographs make this part of the book an especially rewarding read. A passage I felt was particularly moving is Alber’s description of how mothers detach themselves through avoidance from their newborns after giving birth (62–73). If a child is being fostered, the connection to his or her birth parents is often not revealed to the child. Any interaction between the fostered child and his or her birth parents is permeated with shame and should be avoided.
While the third part of the book provides a description of child fostering and all its related aspects, the final and fourth part follows the changes in child fostering throughout the twentieth century. Alber carefully weaves together historical records and oral histories. This enables her to trace how the lived realities of child fostering have been reconfigured from precolonial time through French colonialism up the Marxist–Leninist revolutionary period and post-independence. Through a complex comparison of three rural and semi-rural sites, Alber can show how the influence of the colonial and later postcolonial state and its institutions, especially schools, have transformed child fostering. One of the most striking changes is the increase in birth parents who resist child fosterage. Among other things, this leads to the questioning of the normality of child fosterage and an increase in negotiations and conflicts surrounding the practice. Alber elegantly ends her book with two examples of these emerging conflicts.
Alber’s monograph has many strengths, foremost historical depth, theoretical sophistication, and ethnographic rigor. The work stimulates new questions. The comparison of the cases described in the book could go beyond Benin and West Africa, including more in-depth treatments of the Latin American practice of compadrazgo or different forms of multiple parenthood based on new reproductive technologies. I highly recommend this excellent monograph to readers interested in kinship, parenthood, and gender within and beyond West Africa.