His flexibility in order to achieve certain caregiving ends. Yet this flexibility is shaped by structural conditions that also create significant challenges for caregivers. Generalized poverty, a significant decline in bridewealth practices, and women’s increased access to education, land, and cash income all serve to make marriage more easily dissolvable or even less desirable to begin with. This lessens the power and appeal of patrilineal fosterage patterns. These trends are economically and ideologically ambiguous as maternal kin increasingly have both the burden and the privilege of caring for their daughters’ children, while children have narrowed options for receiving support. According to the ‘official kin’, the rules of child fostering are rigid and fixed. In practice, however, fostering allows for a wide array of household configurations that are negotiated based on a range of competing ideologies. As Alber notes in her study of child fostering in Benin, the lived experiences of people are ‘more flexible and varied than the rules suggest’ (2004: 36). Caregivers who are trying to legitimate their right to care for a child emphasize the rigidity of the rules because it allows them strategically to point to the ways in which others are contravening the rules. Comaroff suggests that negotiations around power are ‘mediated by the properties of a specific set of rules’ (1978: 17).While his study examines the claims to power of Tswana chiefs, I argue that these same processes are replicated on a smaller scale in the negotiations over relatedness that occur in C.I. 75535MedChemExpress Isoarnebin 4 everyday life in Lesotho. Matrilocal caregivers are able to negotiate for the care of children while maintaining the dominant ideology of patrilineal care. In doing so, caregivers have been able to manipulate the tenets of ‘official kin’ in order to achieve a range of caregiving outcomes, many of which legitimate matrilocal care within the patrilineal system. While these shifting values have markedly changed the caregiving landscape, they have yet to be formally institutionalized precisely because of the focus on patrilineality. In this way, maternal kin are reinforcing the patriarchal structure of the Basotho family in order to privilege their role as caregivers.Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptJ R Anthropol Inst. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 April 08.BlockPageAcknowledgmentsThis research was funded by the W.K. Kellogg Family Fellowship in Children and Families and the Population Studies and Training Center (PSTC) at Brown University. The PSTC receives core support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (5R24HD041020). I would like to thank MCS staff and caregivers for all their help and support. I am grateful to my writing group at Brown (Adia Benton, Melissa Hackman, and Jennifer Stampe), and to Jessaca Leinaweaver and Mandy Terc for reading earlier versions of this article. Thank you to Justin Dyer for his careful copy-editing.Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript
Female sex workers (FSWs) in China: social and behavioural studies and HIV prevention strategies Female sex work has a long-standing history in China as an integrated facet of social and economic life (Hershatter, 1997; Pan, 1997). Sex work became more visible in China starting in the late 1980s due to regular, government-ordered anti-prostitution crackdowns and growing Mangafodipir (trisodium) supplier epidemics of HI.His flexibility in order to achieve certain caregiving ends. Yet this flexibility is shaped by structural conditions that also create significant challenges for caregivers. Generalized poverty, a significant decline in bridewealth practices, and women’s increased access to education, land, and cash income all serve to make marriage more easily dissolvable or even less desirable to begin with. This lessens the power and appeal of patrilineal fosterage patterns. These trends are economically and ideologically ambiguous as maternal kin increasingly have both the burden and the privilege of caring for their daughters’ children, while children have narrowed options for receiving support. According to the ‘official kin’, the rules of child fostering are rigid and fixed. In practice, however, fostering allows for a wide array of household configurations that are negotiated based on a range of competing ideologies. As Alber notes in her study of child fostering in Benin, the lived experiences of people are ‘more flexible and varied than the rules suggest’ (2004: 36). Caregivers who are trying to legitimate their right to care for a child emphasize the rigidity of the rules because it allows them strategically to point to the ways in which others are contravening the rules. Comaroff suggests that negotiations around power are ‘mediated by the properties of a specific set of rules’ (1978: 17).While his study examines the claims to power of Tswana chiefs, I argue that these same processes are replicated on a smaller scale in the negotiations over relatedness that occur in everyday life in Lesotho. Matrilocal caregivers are able to negotiate for the care of children while maintaining the dominant ideology of patrilineal care. In doing so, caregivers have been able to manipulate the tenets of ‘official kin’ in order to achieve a range of caregiving outcomes, many of which legitimate matrilocal care within the patrilineal system. While these shifting values have markedly changed the caregiving landscape, they have yet to be formally institutionalized precisely because of the focus on patrilineality. In this way, maternal kin are reinforcing the patriarchal structure of the Basotho family in order to privilege their role as caregivers.Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptJ R Anthropol Inst. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 April 08.BlockPageAcknowledgmentsThis research was funded by the W.K. Kellogg Family Fellowship in Children and Families and the Population Studies and Training Center (PSTC) at Brown University. The PSTC receives core support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (5R24HD041020). I would like to thank MCS staff and caregivers for all their help and support. I am grateful to my writing group at Brown (Adia Benton, Melissa Hackman, and Jennifer Stampe), and to Jessaca Leinaweaver and Mandy Terc for reading earlier versions of this article. Thank you to Justin Dyer for his careful copy-editing.Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript
Female sex workers (FSWs) in China: social and behavioural studies and HIV prevention strategies Female sex work has a long-standing history in China as an integrated facet of social and economic life (Hershatter, 1997; Pan, 1997). Sex work became more visible in China starting in the late 1980s due to regular, government-ordered anti-prostitution crackdowns and growing epidemics of HI.
