Kate Goldfarb's Book Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care Featured in A&S Magazine
Kate Goldfarb's Book, Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care featured in A&S Magazine.
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.
