Transfers of Belonging

In Transfers of Belonging, Erdmute Alber traces the history of child fostering in northern Benin from the pre-colonial past to the present by pointing out the embeddedness of child foster practices and norms in a wider political process of change. Child fostering was, for a long time, not just one way of raising children, but seen as the appropriate way of doing so. This changed profoundly with the arrival of European ideas about birth parents being the ‘right’ parents, but also with the introduction of schooling and the differentiation of life chances. Besides providing deep historical and ethnographical insights, Transfers of Belonging offers a new theoretical frame for conceptualizing parenting.

Erdmute Alber (Ph.D. 1997) is chair of Social Anthropology at Bayreuth University (Germany). She has undertaken long-term field research in West Africa, especially in northern Benin. She has directed several research projects on kinship, generational relations and child fostering in West Africa and published widely in the field of political anthropology, childhood, kinship, intergenerational relations and care.