Child Fostering in West Africa ─ New Perspectives on Theory and Practices

Child fostering in West Africa connects classical and new kinship theory and offers ethnographic studies on a mobile and creative kinship practice.

Erdmute Alber holds the chair of Social Anthropology at Bayreuth University. Her empirical and theoretical interests are in kinship, inter-generational relations, childhood and parenting, as well as in political anthropology. She has realized long term fieldwork in Latin America and West Africa.Jeannett Martin is a postdoctoral research fellow in Social Anthropology at Bayreuth University. She has done research on educational migration between southern Ghana and Germany and on child fostering and inter-ethnic relations in northern Benin. Catrien Notermans is an anthropologist and senior researcher at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She has been doing long-term fieldwork in West Africa, Europe and Asia, concentrating on kinship, gender, and religion.