The Middle Child

The second volume of the project Kinship and Social Security (KASS) offers ethnogra phies of nineteen localities, ranging from small village communities to suburbs and housing developments of large cities, in eight European countries. The authors aim to complement and further develop the anal ysis of concepts about kinship, familial obli gation and care introduced in the other two books of the series. This 500-page edited vol ume is an enlightening read and a creative rethinking of the use of qualitative research methods and comparisons. Yet as the arche typical middle child who must navigate through life between the older sibling and the baby of the family, it seems to have trou ble finding a true identity. Containing much too little detail on kinship practices, most chapters are not quite ethnographies, but neither do they aspire to produce novel theoretical claims on the basis of the inter

Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving · Migration, Aging, and Tourism Studies · Psychology · Rural development and sustainability