CU Boulder anthropologist Kathryn Goldfarb spearheads new book that examines the difficult aspects of family connection.
Historically, anthropologists defining kinship tended to begin with who people are related to by birth and by marriage. Family was often considered a bedrock of society.
Over time, the idea of what constitutes kinship has evolved, but a key underlying assumption has remained largely unchanged when it comes to the idea of families being a source of caregiving support, says Kathryn Goldfarb, an associate professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Anthropology, whose research focuses on social relationships, including kinship.
“The literature in anthropological scholarship on families often still supports this notion that, definitionally, family is what keeps us together,” she says. “There is a perception that kinship is where social solidarity lies, how social continuity works, how society hangs together.”
The problem with that idea, Goldfarb says, is that empirical data, including Goldfarb’s own fieldwork in Japan connected to the child-welfare system, often contradicts that idealistic portrayal. That, in turn, posed a problem when assigning readings to her students.
“As I’ve taught kinship over the years, I had this increasing sense that many of my students don’t see themselves reflected in the literature,” she says. “We often talk about diversifying our syllabi, making sure that the authors come from diverse backgrounds and have diverse perspectives. That was really lacking in the materials that I had available to assign to students, because a lot of the reading doesn’t take serious the fact that some people’s lives with their families are really problematic and really hard.”
Goldfarb’s solution was to spearhead the book , which was recently published by Rutgers University Press. Goldfarb led the conceptualization of the book’s theme, served as co-editor and co-author of the introduction, and wrote one of the chapters.
As Goldfarb and her co-author, Sandra Bamford, note in the book’s introduction, “If family is, by definition, about nurturing and caregiving, then how do we understand kinship when it is not?” The authors do not attempt to redefine kinship, but instead seek to expand the types of scholarship that can be considered central to the field.