Brother- and Sisterhood in Changing and Uncertain Times

Brother- and sisterhood in changing and uncertain times Erdmute Alber and Sjaak van der Geest

BIGSAS symposium Bayreuth University, castle of Thurnau, 5-7 November 2009

List of abstracts

Erdmute Alber, Bayreuth: Brother- and sisterhood in a context of fosterage and plural relations of belonging

My paper analyses sibling relations in Northern Benin, in a society where fosterage is not an exception but the norm. It tells the story of a Baatonu-girl who worked as a maid in an urban household of relatives without being paid. She escaped from that situation through the intervention of a half-brother whom she convinced to take his role as brother. The story tells us how she struggled in a complex situation of negotiated kinship, including not only the sibling relation, but also that of in-laws, parents and foster parents in urban as well as rural settings. The example shows how brother- and sisterhood can play a crucial role in a family conflict that touches on fundamental values about child labour and belonging of girls.

Cati Coe, Camden: Social Class, Family Ideology, and the Separation of Siblings in Ghanaian Transnational Families

In my research with Ghanaian transnational families, there is some variation in children’s emotional expression about their families being scattered, in particular about being separated from their siblings. Sibling separation or “scattering” can often occur in transnational families: a new baby may be born abroad when the mother joins the father abroad, while older siblings are left behind in Ghana; or an older or younger sibling may be brought to live abroad, while another is left behind to finish schooling. Some of the variation in whether this separation troubles young people seems due to social class. Young people who grew up in a large urban area and attend an elite school, such as a private school or a secondary boarding school with a good reputation, are more likely to be troubled by their separation from siblings than those young people who live in a small town and attend day or less elite boarding secondary schools. On the one hand, the expressions of emotional pain among urban young people are not surprising: siblings have long been significant in Ghanaian family life, with older siblings often serving as caregivers for younger siblings. At the same time, the expressions of emotional pain among urban young people is surprising given how siblings are often separated from one another in families not affected by transnational migration, as they live in different households or stay at school. With some attention to the longer history of changing family ideologies in Ghana, this paper explores the differences in expectations of sibling connection among young people of various social classes, to explain the differences in their emotional reactions to the experience of transnational migration. Sjaak van der Geest, Amsterdam: Kinship as Friendship: Brothers and Sisters in Kwahu, Ghana

After the structural-functionalist descriptions and analyses of brother-sister relations in the matrilineal Akan society of Ghana, siblings - as kinship in general - have become a forgotten topic in Akan ethnography. More than half a century later, conversations with people in Kwahu, an Akan society, show that it has become impossible to speak in general terms about brother-sister relationships. People have the most diverse experiences and feelings about their brothers and sisters. Age difference, migration, economic dependence, life stage, disintegration of the lineage and personal character are some of the factors that people name to explain their different views and sentiments.

What is special in the brother-sister relationship, however, is that it is a trans-gender bond without - usually - any sexual implication. Furthermore, the brother-sister bond lasts a life long, and passes through the various life stages of people. It changes its character along the way without however losing its fundamental appeal of mutual affection and dedication. Unlike the trans-generational relationship that covers only part of one's life, the connection between a brother and a sister stays from beginning to end.

Yet, the paper argues, with extensive quotes from conversations and essays written by students in a local secondary school, that brother and sister relations and kin relations in general do not exist as a given reality but are created in concrete life situations, almost as unpredictably as striking up a friendship.

Signe Howell, Oslo: Cognatic kinship and same-sex and cross-sex sibling relations: The case of Chewong, a hunting-gathering society in Malaysia

According to Radcliffe-Brown, it is “difficult to establish and maintain wide range of system based on a purely cognatic basis: it is only a unilineal system that will permit the division of society into separate organized kin groups” (1950: 82). This statement has been widely criticized by anthropologists with fieldwork experience from societies whose kinship system demonstrated bilateral reckoning of descent and would therefore be characterized as cognatic (e.g. Freeman). The purpose of my presentation is not to debate validity or not of the term “cognatic” but to explore the role that siblingship plays in a society whose kinship and social organization are extremely undifferentiated. Chewong society, a small hunting-gathering.- shifting cultivating group of people who live(d) deep in the rainforest of Peninsular Malaysia is not organized into lineages, clans or, indeed corporate groups. Arguably, the whole population constitutes one corporate group. They live in small scattered temporary settlements whose population make-up is fluid. Chewong value individual freedom. However, they practice uxorilocal residence following a marriage (although no sanctions may be activated should a couple not wish to do so) and groups of sisters are often found living with, or in the vicinity of, the girls’ parents. Although not stated as part of their socio-cultural practice, a pattern of groups of brothers marrying groups of sisters is observable and also that that these couples tend to move around the forest together after the death of girls’ parents. This is continued through generations. Such marriages may also be contracted by children of cross- sex siblings, although this is less common. Certainly, sibling identify themselves more easily through their siblingship, and that of their parents, than they do with “cousins” from other lines, and people thus related move in the same areas of the forest. This means that some kind of “semi-corporate group” come into existence which is not explicitly reflected in their kinship order – nor in their own understanding. I shall explore further some of the ramifications of this pattern. I may contrast my findings to another group I have studied in southeast Asia (Lio in eastern Indonesia) whose kinship system is a classic example of prescriptive matrilateral cross-cousin marriage. One tentative suggestion will be that sibling relationship among the Chewong is marked by informality and affection and (to some extent) choice, whereas sibling relations (especially cross-sex) amongst the Lio is marked by distance and formalised behaviour.

Julia Pauli, Köln: Siblings’ Sharing: Becoming and Being Sisters in Mexico and Namibia

Sharing of essential experiences is an important means to create kinship during childhood and youth. Living together through periods of hunger and situations of violence and loneliness, but also the irritations of first menstruation and first love creates bonds that often last a lifetime. In my paper I will focus on sisterly bonds and ask how a sister becomes a sister and what it means to be sisters in Mexico and Namibia. In the Namibian case, growing up together, in Khoekhoegowab called kai//are, and sharing central experiences like sleeping in the same bed are the main sources for sisterhood. Bonds based on kai//are flexibly extend classificatory kinship ties through incorporating shared time and experiences as social mechanisms to become sisters. In rural Mexico, the sharing of significant experiences shapes which of the many possible sisters become soul mates and lifetime companions and which not. Despite many differences between the two cases, the identification and interpretation of emotionally highly charged and substantial experiences are fundamental for an understanding of sisterhood in both regions.

Sophie Roche, Halle: Siblings are as ‘different as the five fingers of a hand’. Diversification strategies in between siblings.

The study of siblingship has been discussed along basically two different argumentation lines. On the one hand, siblings (most often brothers) are portrayed as rivals and potential enemies and, on the other hand, siblingship implies ‘equality of status among like-sex siblings in contraposition to the inequality of status that characterizes other relations of kinship, descent, and affinity’ as Meyer Fortes articulates it. Whereas classic anthropological studies focus on the social equivalence of siblings vis-à-vis their parents, other approaches have emphasized the competitive aspect of siblingship. Both approaches are however not necessarily opposing but rather represent two different ways to portray siblings’ relationships. In the Tajik context siblings are first of all hierarchically organized reflecting the basic social organization of society, the seniority principle. Younger brothers are subordinate to elder brothers whom they have to obey and serve with their physical power, in return the eldest brother supplies his younger brothers with goods and advices. With this organizational principle brothers maintain a distant emotional relation of mutual interdependence. I argue that siblings follow ‘diversification strategies’ to increase the social security of the individual within his social network. Through educational and job diversification siblings increase the family’s social security in times of high political and economic insecurity. The grade of diversification depends on the positions available, the siblings’ competition for those, the kinship position of a sibling, and the families’ strategic response to economic shortage under political instable conditions.

Claudia Roth, Luzern: Social security and the role of siblings – the case of urban Burkina Faso

During my former research on social security and gender in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso (West Africa) I noticed the special significance of siblings. Sibling relations offer – on the basis of a specific structure and the norms and values connected with it – the protection people need who become impoverished: affective proximity, confidence and comprehension. The unity of the children of the same mother – the “badenya” – turns under difficult socio- economic conditions into an important social security arrangement (Roth 2003). In the context of my actual research on intergenerational relations under stress in Bobo-Dioulasso, the sibling relations appear again as relations of great significance. As hypothesis I suggest that under conditions of poverty siblings relieve the intergenerational burden of support.

Roth, Claudia. 2003. Der mütterliche Schutz. Fünf Hypothesen zur sozialen Sicherheit in Burkina Faso. In: Schneider, Jürg et al. (Hg.) Werkschau Afrikastudien 4 – Le forum suisse des africanistes 4. Münster: Lit. S. 113-132.

Helena Obendiek, Halle Siblinghood, educational opportunities and social support in rural China

The basic feature of siblinghood is sharing. In poor rural regions of China this implies sharing a tight family budget and the obligation of caring for the common parents in their old age. In rural China, the one-child family planning policy of the early 1980s has been accommodated to the lack of alternative sources of elderly care and to the customary gender bias of the sons’ (and daughters-in-law’s) primary obligation in this respect. Families with rural household registration are thus allowed to have a second child in case the first one is a daughter. Even though the policy has induced smaller sibling sets, the experience of siblinghood still remains prevalent and has become one of the main differences between rural and urban families.

Regardless of the skyrocketing expenses connected to tertiary education since the later reform policies of the mid-1990s and the increasing difficulties of the graduate labor markets, in poor rural regions of China formal education remains to be considered as the most efficient strategy to ‘change fate’ away from the difficulties of the peasant lot through mobility from physical to mental labor, from rural to urban life and towards improved access to important urban support resources (such as information and personal contracts in terms of job possibilities, health care and educational opportunities). At the same time, the Chinese notion of providing someone with the opportunity to study (供…上学) entails definite reciprocal obligations for the support recipient.

In respect of local experiences of siblinghood in the context of educational opportunities and social support, we can identify three different patterns that exemplify sharing between siblings as an obligation as much as an opportunity.

Firstly, according to the national law, the duty of elderly care for the parents is to be equally shared between siblings. Locally, respective obligations are, however, shaped in respect to gender and educational mobility within the sibling set. Sons’ responsibility for parents’ elderly care is seen as an unquestionable obligation (天经地义,‘heavenly duty and earthly justice’), while daughters’ support is interpreted to be based on ‘feelings’ (感情) but not obligation (责任) and thus being not reliable (不可靠). For daughters, supporting their brothers’ education financially (through labor migration, bride wealth or after marriage by contributions from the budget of their nuclear family) implies them doing their share in contributing to the elderly care of the common parents. On the other hand, due to educational hypergamy, supporting a sister educationally means advancing the likelihood of her later being able to make financial contributions to the parents’ old age care. Between brothers, the duties concerning their parents’ old age are defined according to the level of education and respective social mobility of each brother. Those socially mobile are expected to contribute financially, while others staying back in the village (or their wives respectively) face the duty of caring for the elderly parents on a day-to-day basis.

Secondly, supporting a sibling’s education financially can be interpreted as a strategy aimed at improving one’s own social support situation. Providing educational support is regarded as a remunerative and sustainable ‘investment’, it implies the hope that the supported sibling will turn into a potent reciprocating provider of support in the future. Since educational opportunities are restrained to a certain period in a life-time, educational support and its reciprocation are often passed within circles that span generations. A sibling’s educational support is usually reciprocated indirectly and diagonally via the next generation through educationally supporting the sibling’s offspring. The latter’s vertical reciprocation towards their parents is taken for granted.

Thirdly, if elder siblings have been supported educationally on the basis of a tight family budget, they shoulder the burden of reciprocating by supporting their younger siblings accordingly. This may imply being forced to compromise on one’s own aspirations in terms of further education, job choices and consumption desires.

David W. Sabean, Los Angeles: Brother/Sister Incest Discourses in the West since the Mid 1990s

From the Renaissance until today in Europe and the United States, discourses about incest have frequently centered their representations on particular pairs. Strangely, during the Baroque era, everywhere in Europe, the pair of interest was a man and his wife's sister, and no one was interested in the biological consequences of incest. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, there was an obsession with brother and sister relationships, and while much of the discussion was framed in terms of moral sentiment and analyses of family and household, again biology was not at the root of cultural unease. By the late nineteenth century on into the 1930s, the central pair (now clearly brought into a biological frame) seems to have been mother and (eldest) son. And finally, for the first time, as far as I can see, father and daughter emerged as the central pathology by the early 1970s, although I do not want to underplay legal, cultural, and social differences between say, the US and Germany. Much of that discourse was carried out in psychotherapeutic terms, and biology really, I think, played a secondary role. Interest was much more centered on power relations. From around the mid nineties, if I have properly observed the Zeitgeist, Western culture has focused attention on brothers and sisters once again. This can be seen in the many films that have played with the relationship, new discussions of relationships between siblings who are the "offspring" of the same sperm donor, issues of blended families, adoption searches and the like. And last Fall, the BBC devoted a long documentary to "Brothers and Sisters in Love." I find striking the latest evolutionary biological language of "genetic sexual attraction." Clearly I cannot survey all of the cultural markers of this new "obsession," nor document at this point the contention of a culturally generalized problematic, but I would like to explore a few "texts"--movies, newspaper accounts, the BBC documentary, and the concept of "genetic sexual attraction."

Xiujie Wu, Halle How brothers are being related - Transforming brotherhood notions in north China

The culture of the Han-Chinese designates brotherhood as a valuable form of alliance. Codes of behaviour towards one’s brother(s) are ascribed in cultural norms. However, within the concept and practices of kinship, ambiguous borderlines of hierarchy and egalitarianism among brothers leave certain areas free for contesting individual interests. This paper takes a case of conflict between two brothers in their old age over their elderly support provisions to analyse how notions of brotherhood are in transition as the Chinese peasants, in comparison with other social groups, are confronted with increasingly worsening subsistence conditions due to lower incomes and seriously insufficient social security resources; how conventional concepts of hierarchy, equality, and fairness have been mobilised in different ways to justify their own rights and rightness before the civil judgements of other villagers and the verdicts of the juridical system. This case study offers a micro-scene taken from the societal transformation of current rural China.