Materializing relationships: Embodying kinship in Japanese child welfare

This presentation suggests that the lived meanings of kinship and family are sometimes best understood through exploring the absence of locally meaningful kinship ties. Rooted in long-term ethnographic research in Japan, I consider kinship relationships as both culturally and biologically rooted, focused not on heterosexual reproduction or biogenetics, but on the ways that relationships—particularly their absences—are perceived and experienced in the body, in sometimes surprising ways. Data for this paper come from research in a child welfare institution outside of Tokyo (a “children’s home), research with foster and adoptive parents and families, workers within child welfare institutions, and people who themselves were raised in institutional and foster care. I show how Japanese child welfare caregivers interpret children’s bodily signs to guide their own understandings of the care (and neglect) a child has received in the past. I then explore how one of my own research subjects takes up contemporary understandings of attachment, neuroscience, and interpersonal trauma, suggesting that cultural anthropologists should take “biology” as seriously as our interlocutors do in their efforts to understand the material ways social ties shape lived experience.

(image by Sasha Buckser)

Kathryn Goldfarb is a cultural and medical anthropologist. Her research focuses on the ways social relationships impact embodied experience, intersections between public policy and well-being, and the co-production of scientific knowledge and subjective experiences, including narrative creation. She is an Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at University of Colorado Boulder.