Beschreibung
“One out of three children experiences violence”; “Husband and wife in jail for killing their child”; “Minister releases position of the government on violence against children”. During my fieldwork in Tanzania, hardly a day passed without an article in one of the national newspapers addressing various forms of violence against children or calls by the government to ensure the safety of children. Thus, the obvious question, as one of the newspaper articles states, is “how to protect children”. As a state agency, the protection of children is one of the main work areas of a social welfare office in Tanzania. Based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, their responsibility is to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the “most vulnerable” citizens. Parents who ‘failed’ to ensure the basic rights of their child(ren) make up the majority of the office’s clients, often reported by either their co-parent, relatives, or community members. Once the social welfare officers, as agents of the state (Fassin 2015), open a case file, they enter in an often long process of negotiating their parental roles, care responsibilities and obligations.Drawing on several cases I collected during 12 months of ethnographic research in the department of health in a small district in Tanzania, I explore the various forms of state interventions into the lives of mainly poor families. Living at the margins of society they are thought to need advice and assistance in ’proper’ parenting, sometimes starting with instructions on breastfeeding. Based on recent calls for a relational (state) anthropology (Thelen/Vetteres/Benda-Beckmann 2018), the social welfare office thus presents an interesting intersection that shows the mediation between different realms such as public/private or state/kinship. By reading across social domains, I want to explore political, economic and social processes in the Tanzanian society and pay attention to questions of care responsibilities, moralities and political belonging.
| Zeitraum | 26 Nov. 2020 |
|---|---|
| Ereignistitel | Parenting and the State: State intervention in the age of the family |
| Veranstaltungstyp | Seminar/Workshop |
| Ort | Budapest, UngarnAuf Karte anzeigen |