Erdmute Alber
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 91875 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Erdmute Alber |
| PRENOMES | Erdmute |
| SOBRENOME | Alber |
| ASSINATURA | ALBER E |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Bayreuth |
| ORCID | 0009-0002-4078-4391 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 121 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 5 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1997 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
“We are just like ploughing bulls”
Polygynous households constitute a significant share of agricultural producers in sub-Saharan Africa, which can influence productivity and food security through intrahousehold cooperation. Economic analyses often focus on the outcomes of cooperation while overlooking the diverse institutional mechanisms that shape it. This study aims to address this gap by analysing cooperation within polygynous households as a collective action problem using an …
Situating Political Engagement in Their Life Courses and Class Positionalities
Taking an anthropological perspective of the life course, this article contributes to debates on why women's engagement in politics is so low in West Africa, with special attention to the Republic of Benin. It argues that women's political engagement must be understood as deeply entangled with their multiple relations, especially their positioning in roles related to gender and the life course. Given that they must balance their engagement with h…
Rethinking Women's Political Power in West Africa
Literacy and illiteracy, its relational other
Collaborative work between anthropology and psychology on literacy and particularly on illiteracy helps to rethink general disciplinary backgrounds, concepts, and complex empirical phenomena in the field of (il)literacy. Since the formational period of the social sciences, the concept of literacy has been key to the self-understandings of anthropology and psychology. However, it was long neglected in empirical research. Nonetheless, implicit and …
"Veränderungen elterlicher Verpflichtungen durch „Bildung für alle". Eine Untersuchung im ländlichen Raum Nordbenins
Ausgelöst durch die großen Bildungskampagnen und die Neoliberalisierung des Bildungswesens zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts haben sich elterliche Verpflichtungen gegenüber heranwachsenden Kindern im Norden der Republik Benin tiefgreifend verändert. Dies betrifft nicht allein die Kosten, die durch die vermehrte Einschulung von Kindern und den damit verbundenen gestiegenen Finanzbedarf für den Unterhalt der Schulen anfallen. Darüber hinaus übernehmen…
Multiplicities of (Il)literacy. An introduction
Few ideas have travelled the globe as successfully as the idea that literacy is a universal standard and a basic need, and right.People's lifeworlds are everywhere shaped by written signs and numbers and by forms and text messages.Almost all professional work seems to rely on the capacity to read and write.At a minimum, people who have to deposit their wages in a bank account or sign a work contract must be concerned with their capacities to inte…
Entangled navigations
Though often overlooked, parental navigations play an important role in the difficult pathways of rural children through changing eduscapes in northern Benin. Arguing that parents are deeply involved in their children's trajectories towards making a living, I analyse the care and support parents see themselves as responsible for. A neoliberal and increasingly privatized schooling system creating unequal chances in combination with the demand of '…
The Politics of Making Kinship
The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no lon…
Politics of Making Kinship
The Politics of Making Kinship
The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no lon…
Politics and Kinship
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the partitions as well as the investment in and challenging of their boundaries from the point of view of politics. It presents the emergence of Eurocentric classifications of polities, such as the contrast between ‘small-scale’ or ‘kin-based’ societies and ‘state-based’ societies purified of kinship. The book defines th…
Politics and Kinship
Afterword
Verwandtschaftshandeln in einer ökonomisch auseinanderdriftenden Gesellschaft
Politics of Kinship
This article argues that not only changing kinship practices are deeply entangled with political change, but also processes of political ordering could be influenced by and engrained with kinship practices. The argument is exemplified with regard to the political history of child fostering in northern Benin. A common and widespread everyday practice already in pre-colonial times, child fostering has been overseen by colonial officers, but neverth…
Adoption and Fostering
This entry offers an overview and critical account of adoption and fostering. It delineates the worldwide evidence and variability of these phenomena, as well as the limits of the analytical concepts. It summarizes various theoretical approaches toward child fostering and adoption and outlines the current research. It questions the distinction drawn in the research between child fostering , mainly related to practices in “traditional,” “non‐Weste…
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 be…
Reconnecting State and Kinship
Reconnecting State and Kinship seeks to overcome the traditional dichotomy between state and kinship, asking whether concepts associated with one sphere surface in the other, tracking the evolution of these concepts through time and space, and exploring how this binary is reinforced within the social sciences.
Of culture, consumption and cost
Age-Inscriptions and Social Change
This special issue introduces the concept of age-inscription. It accounts for the ways that transitions, expectations and markers around age and life-course stages are modified in interplay with social change. This new concept is necessary, we argue, because age-inscriptions correspond to more indeterminate and transitional levels of changes in aging trajectories and life stages than the concept of norms. Inscriptions lie between rules, laws, and…
Préparer la Retraite
New ways of imagining, planning and living old age are actually emerging in the republic of Benin, West Africa. This process could be understood as the dissemination of an idea of retirement from the sector of formal labor and the corresponding social security system to a general notion of a good life in the late life course. It is preceded by emerging age-inscriptions which are contouring the new up to a point that it is settled and becoming a n…
Anthropological Perspectives on Care
Fans and states at work
The FIFA World Cup for men (hereafter referred to as the FIFA World Cup) is possibly the biggest global media event. Winning or losing often gives rise to expressions of collective degrees of national pride or disappointment. But, it is not only the performance of the teams that is of significance in this respect; the devotion of fans to the game and their loyalty to their own national team are also an important vehicle of identity and self-affir…
Child Fostering in West Africa
Child fostering is an age-old and also modern phenomenon whose importance stretches much further than the boundaries of so-called ‘traditional’ African societies. As a mobile and creative kinship practice, child fostering is of growing importance in the global world as it goes along with other forms of mobility such as migration and transnationalism. The book aims to revitalize the study of fostering by situating the issue in more recent theoreti…
Child Fostering in West Africa
Grandparents as Foster-Parents
This article deals with an aspect of the special relationship between grandparents and grandchildren: the fosterage of grandchildren by their (classificatory) grandparents. By becoming social parents with full responsibility for their social children, grandparents-as foster-parents-take upon themselves the characteristics typical both of parental roles involving authority, and grand-parental behaviour involving joking, warmth and proximity to the…
Denying biological parenthood
Among the Baatombu in Northern Benin, child fosterage is not an exception in crisis situations, but the common upbringing pattern: until some years ago, most of the Baatombu children did not grow up with their biological parents, but were fostered by social parents. There is a strong attitude of shame related to biological parenthood and an attempt to deny it. Young children are given to paternal or maternal relatives in order to stay with them u…
Lifetimes Intertwined
In this volume we return to one of the treasures of our contributors' anthropological heritage: the study of kinship in Africa. We have chosen to focus on the intertwined lives of grandparents and grandchildren because they raise so clearly fundamental issues of temporality and relationship. While grandparents and grandchildren live together in shared time, their lifetimes overlap only partly. They have different pasts and different futures, and …
Changing Webs of Kinship
Changes in kinship relations are part of the broad social change in all African societies. This article highlights trends and characteristics of changing kinship relations in West Africa. Its analysis focuses on the twentieth century, which was shaped by the colonial conquest and profound societal transformations like the political independence of the African colonies. In analysing three important kinship relations - parent-child relations, marri…
Motorization and colonial rule
Transport systems are not just technical solutions to bring people from one point to another: they are embedded in social structures, reflecting and producing relations of power. The introduction of a new mode of transport means more than just a new way of moving around. Since cars were introduced to African colonies in accordance with the hierarchy of the colonial system, car ownership became an effective means of consolidating not only economic…
Entangled navigations
Though often overlooked, parental navigations play an important role in the difficult pathways of rural children through changing eduscapes in northern Benin. Arguing that parents are deeply involved in their children's trajectories towards making a living, I analyse the care and support parents see themselves as responsible for. A neoliberal and increasingly privatized schooling system creating unequal chances in combination with the demand of '…
Le pouvoir local face aux mutations au niveau de l'État
Les effets que les changements de la politique nationale produisent au niveau local se trouvent au centre de notre étude. Ainsi l'approche choisie contraste avec la discussion classique des sciences politiques, laquelle a pour objet central les relations macropolitiques entre l'État et la société. L'hypothèse principale est ici que les paysans formulent leur propre culture politique en réponse aux transformations nationales. La multiplicité des p…
Fans and states at work
The FIFA World Cup for men (hereafter referred to as the FIFA World Cup) is possibly the biggest global media event. Winning or losing often gives rise to expressions of collective degrees of national pride or disappointment. But, it is not only the performance of the teams that is of significance in this respect; the devotion of fans to the game and their loyalty to their own national team are also an important vehicle of identity and self-affir…
Quand l'application du droit national est déterminée par la demande locale
Dans le Borgou, une région du nord-est du Bénin, le droit public et la pratique du droit dans le village divergent. En dessous d’un certain seuil d’escalade des conflits, l’État n’impose pas ses normes juridiques, mais ne fait que les proposer et fait dépendre leur application de la demande locale. Cette demande se trouve cependant limitée dans les villages par le fait que certains acteurs font appel à des idéologies communautaires qui ne sont pa…
The Politics of Making Kinship
The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no lon…
Politics of Kinship
This article argues that not only changing kinship practices are deeply entangled with political change, but also processes of political ordering could be influenced by and engrained with kinship practices. The argument is exemplified with regard to the political history of child fostering in northern Benin. A common and widespread everyday practice already in pre-colonial times, child fostering has been overseen by colonial officers, but neverth…
Age-Inscriptions and Social Change
This special issue introduces the concept of age-inscription. It accounts for the ways that transitions, expectations and markers around age and life-course stages are modified in interplay with social change. This new concept is necessary, we argue, because age-inscriptions correspond to more indeterminate and transitional levels of changes in aging trajectories and life stages than the concept of norms. Inscriptions lie between rules, laws, and…
Préparer la Retraite
New ways of imagining, planning and living old age are actually emerging in the republic of Benin, West Africa. This process could be understood as the dissemination of an idea of retirement from the sector of formal labor and the corresponding social security system to a general notion of a good life in the late life course. It is preceded by emerging age-inscriptions which are contouring the new up to a point that it is settled and becoming a n…
Le pouvoir local face aux mutations au niveau de l'État
Les effets que les changements de la politique nationale produisent au niveau local se trouvent au centre de notre étude. Ainsi l'approche choisie contraste avec la discussion classique des sciences politiques, laquelle a pour objet central les relations macropolitiques entre l'État et la société. L'hypothèse principale est ici que les paysans formulent leur propre culture politique en réponse aux transformations nationales. La multiplicité des p…
Motorization and colonial rule
Transport systems are not just technical solutions to bring people from one point to another: they are embedded in social structures, reflecting and producing relations of power. The introduction of a new mode of transport means more than just a new way of moving around. Since cars were introduced to African colonies in accordance with the hierarchy of the colonial system, car ownership became an effective means of consolidating not only economic…
Lifetimes Intertwined
In this volume we return to one of the treasures of our contributors' anthropological heritage: the study of kinship in Africa. We have chosen to focus on the intertwined lives of grandparents and grandchildren because they raise so clearly fundamental issues of temporality and relationship. While grandparents and grandchildren live together in shared time, their lifetimes overlap only partly. They have different pasts and different futures, and …
Denying biological parenthood
Among the Baatombu in Northern Benin, child fosterage is not an exception in crisis situations, but the common upbringing pattern: until some years ago, most of the Baatombu children did not grow up with their biological parents, but were fostered by social parents. There is a strong attitude of shame related to biological parenthood and an attempt to deny it. Young children are given to paternal or maternal relatives in order to stay with them u…
Quand l'application du droit national est déterminée par la demande locale
Dans le Borgou, une région du nord-est du Bénin, le droit public et la pratique du droit dans le village divergent. En dessous d’un certain seuil d’escalade des conflits, l’État n’impose pas ses normes juridiques, mais ne fait que les proposer et fait dépendre leur application de la demande locale. Cette demande se trouve cependant limitée dans les villages par le fait que certains acteurs font appel à des idéologies communautaires qui ne sont pa…
Grandparents as Foster-Parents
This article deals with an aspect of the special relationship between grandparents and grandchildren: the fosterage of grandchildren by their (classificatory) grandparents. By becoming social parents with full responsibility for their social children, grandparents-as foster-parents-take upon themselves the characteristics typical both of parental roles involving authority, and grand-parental behaviour involving joking, warmth and proximity to the…
The kinning of foreigners
Changing Webs of Kinship
Changes in kinship relations are part of the broad social change in all African societies. This article highlights trends and characteristics of changing kinship relations in West Africa. Its analysis focuses on the twentieth century, which was shaped by the colonial conquest and profound societal transformations like the political independence of the African colonies. In analysing three important kinship relations - parent-child relations, marri…
Child Fostering in West Africa
Child fostering is an age-old and also modern phenomenon whose importance stretches much further than the boundaries of so-called ‘traditional’ African societies. As a mobile and creative kinship practice, child fostering is of growing importance in the global world as it goes along with other forms of mobility such as migration and transnationalism. The book aims to revitalize the study of fostering by situating the issue in more recent theoreti…
Child Fostering in West Africa
The Anthropology of Sibling Relations
1. The Anthropology of Sibling Relations: Explorations in Shared Parentage, Experience, and Exchange Tatjana Thelen, Cati Coe, and Erdmute Alber PART I: THE GIVEN AND THE MADE 2. Sharing Made Us Sisters: Sisterhood, Migration and Household Dynamics in Mexico and Namibia Julia Pauli 3. Kinship as Friendship: Brothers and Sisters in Kwahu, Ghana Sjaak van der Geest PART II: AMBIVALENCE IN SIBLING RELATIONS ACROSS THE LIFE COURSE 4. Within the Thick…
Fans and states at work
The FIFA World Cup for men (hereafter referred to as the FIFA World Cup) is possibly the biggest global media event. Winning or losing often gives rise to expressions of collective degrees of national pride or disappointment. But, it is not only the performance of the teams that is of significance in this respect; the devotion of fans to the game and their loyalty to their own national team are also an important vehicle of identity and self-affir…
Anthropological Perspectives on Care
Adoption and Fostering
This entry offers an overview and critical account of adoption and fostering. It delineates the worldwide evidence and variability of these phenomena, as well as the limits of the analytical concepts. It summarizes various theoretical approaches toward child fostering and adoption and outlines the current research. It questions the distinction drawn in the research between child fostering , mainly related to practices in “traditional,” “non‐Weste…
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 be…
Reconnecting State and Kinship
Reconnecting State and Kinship seeks to overcome the traditional dichotomy between state and kinship, asking whether concepts associated with one sphere surface in the other, tracking the evolution of these concepts through time and space, and exploring how this binary is reinforced within the social sciences.
Of culture, consumption and cost
Age-Inscriptions and Social Change
This special issue introduces the concept of age-inscription. It accounts for the ways that transitions, expectations and markers around age and life-course stages are modified in interplay with social change. This new concept is necessary, we argue, because age-inscriptions correspond to more indeterminate and transitional levels of changes in aging trajectories and life stages than the concept of norms. Inscriptions lie between rules, laws, and…
Préparer la Retraite
New ways of imagining, planning and living old age are actually emerging in the republic of Benin, West Africa. This process could be understood as the dissemination of an idea of retirement from the sector of formal labor and the corresponding social security system to a general notion of a good life in the late life course. It is preceded by emerging age-inscriptions which are contouring the new up to a point that it is settled and becoming a n…
Politics of Kinship
This article argues that not only changing kinship practices are deeply entangled with political change, but also processes of political ordering could be influenced by and engrained with kinship practices. The argument is exemplified with regard to the political history of child fostering in northern Benin. A common and widespread everyday practice already in pre-colonial times, child fostering has been overseen by colonial officers, but neverth…
Afterword
Verwandtschaftshandeln in einer ökonomisch auseinanderdriftenden Gesellschaft
Politics and Kinship
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores the partitions as well as the investment in and challenging of their boundaries from the point of view of politics. It presents the emergence of Eurocentric classifications of polities, such as the contrast between ‘small-scale’ or ‘kin-based’ societies and ‘state-based’ societies purified of kinship. The book defines th…
Politics and Kinship
The Politics of Making Kinship
The long tradition of Western political thought included kinship in models of public order, but the social sciences excised it from theories of the state, public sphere, and democratic order. Kinship has, however, neither completely disappeared from the political cultures of the West nor played the determining social and political role ascribed to it elsewhere. Exploring the issues that arise once the divide between kinship and politics is no lon…
Sociology (27 obras) · Political science (24 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Anthropology (13 obras) · Gender Studies (13 obras) · Kinship (11 obras) · Politics (11 obras) · Psychology (8 obras) · Gender Studies (7 obras) · Law (7 obras)