Natal Family Research Articles

Derbforgaill: twelfth-century abductee, patron and wife

AbstractThis paper explores the themes of abduction, patronage, female wealth and marital relationships through their intersection in the life of Derbforgaill (d. 1193), whose abduction in 1152 sparked a chain of events that contributed to the English invasion of Ireland. Derbforgaill is also remembered for her donations to Mellifont in 1157, during the consecration of its ‘church of the monks’, and to the construction of a nuns’ church in Clonmacnoise in 1167. Focusing on the broader political context of these donations offers strong grounds for reconsideration of both Derbforgaill's and other women's experiences. Among the wider implications of this study must be the reconceptualisation of female political importance as functional through or in concert with marriage partners, rather than the natal family.

Decolonizing the Gender and Land Rights Debate in India: Considering Religion and More-than-Human Sociality in Women’s Lived Land Relatedness

This article links the feminist debate on women’s land rights in India to the current academic debate on critical human-nature relationships in the Anthropocene by studying how married Hindu women weigh the pros and cons of claiming land in their natal family and how they practice their lived relatedness to land in rural Udaipur (Rajasthan, North India). The article disentangles the complex issue of why women do not respond eagerly to Indian state policies that for a long time have promoted gender equality in the domain of land rights. In reaction to the dominant feminist debate on land rights, the authors introduce religion and more-than-human sociality as analytical foci in the examination of women’s responsiveness to land legislation. Their ethnographic study is based on fieldwork with married women in landowning families in four villages in Udaipur’s countryside. The authors argue that women have well-considered reasons not to claim natal land, and that their intimate relatedness to land as a sentient being, a nonhuman companion, and a powerful goddess explains the women’s reluctance to treat land as an inanimate commodity or property. Looking at religion brings to the fore women’s core business of making land fruitful and powerful, independent of any legislation. The authors maintain that a decolonized perspective on women’s land relatedness that takes religion and women’s multispecies perspective seriously may also offer a breakthrough in understanding why some women do not claim land.

Global householding and gendered citizenship: Family visits as care support for Vietnamese marriage migrants in South Korea

The citizenship of marriage migrants in South Korea has been discussed in terms of their roles as mothers in the context of Korea’s aging population and care crisis. However, as marriage migrants increasingly participate in the labor market, their individual rights as workers, and more specifically as working mothers, bring attention to the question of women’s citizenship in South Korea. Care provision is a key issue in the discussion on working mothers’ citizenship. This article focuses on global householding as a process of supporting the participation of marriage migrants in paid work. It highlights the role of the natal family of marriage migrants, especially their parents, as sources of care support to marriage migrants as well as recipients of care. The family visits of the parents of marriage migrants show how parents participate in the internationalization of social reproduction. This article contributes to understanding the household and family as a unit of analysis in the discussion of social reproduction and citizenship in East Asia. It also raises the issue of the embedded gender division of labor in the process of global householding.

Entrepreneurship Experiences among Vietnamese Marriage Immigrant Women in Taiwan

Since the 1990s, Taiwan has experienced growing numbers of commercially arranged marriages between Vietnamese women and socioeconomically disadvantaged Taiwanese men. Most Vietnamese marriage immigrant women proactively engage in the labor market due to the heavy financial burden of their Taiwanese and natal families. Employing a sociocultural and post-structural feminist approach, this study draws from life-story interviews of 13 married Vietnamese women to investigate the entrepreneurship experiences among Vietnamese marriage immigrant women in Taiwan. These women are pushed and pulled towards creating demanding micro-entrepreneurships based on their self-employed socialization, thereby fulfilling family obligations and achieving career goals. Targeting their host market, these women operate their businesses using Taiwanese customer networks and their institutionalized learning and sustainable resilience while negotiating self-identity. Running entrepreneurships empowers these women, facilitating their self-identity, social integration, family position within the boundaries of gender, family expectations, and business while they struggle with unexpected challenges. Clearly, these individuals and their significant others, homeland culture and socialization, and their life experiences and positions in Taiwan shape these immigrant women’s businesses and their sense of meaning. This study extends the feminist perspective of this topic, focusing on the sustainable agency and sense of competence of female marriage immigrants.

Different predictors of intimate partner and natal family violence against women.

BackgroundViolence against women is often studied in the context of violence from intimate partners. However, women receive violence from a wider range of individuals—such as their natal kin—including their siblings, parents, uncles and cousins. Applying insights from evolutionary theory, we examine whether cousin marriage, which has been hypothesized to both reduce the risk of partner violence but increase the risk of natal family violence, associates differently with each type of violence. Second, we test whether common risk factors for partner violence, such as wealth, associate similarly with natal violence.MethodologyWe analyse over 16 000 Jordanian women from three cohorts of the Jordan Demographic Health Surveys. Predictor variables include type of cousin marriage (patrilateral or matrilateral), education, wealth, number of children, urban living and polygyny. Outcome variables include whether a woman’s husband or her natal family has ever been physically violent towards her.ResultsBeing married to a patrilateral cousin but not a matrilateral cousin is associated with a reduced risk of reporting intimate partner violence (IPV). By contrast being married to a matrilateral cousin but not a patrilateral one is associated with a reduced risk of reporting natal family violence. As expected, wealth is negatively associated with reporting partner violence, but we find no association with reports of natal family violence. Finally, individuals with more children are more likely to report IPV.Conclusions and implicationsFindings indicate the importance of distinguishing between types of cousin marriage and highlight substantial differences in risk factors for intimate partner compared to natal family violence.Lay SummarySociodemographic risk factors, such as wealth, may associate differently with intimate partner and natal family violence. Results suggest that whether cousin marriage is protective of violence may depend on the type of cousin and secondly, that violence can have fitness relevant outcomes.

Management of issues relating to marriage, mental illness, and Indian legislation.

Management of issues relating to marriage, mental illness, and Indian legislation.

Marriage, Face, and the Body: Human Body Health and the Body Symbols of Hui'an Woman in Southeastern China.

The body is not only a physical body but also a communicative body which constructs meaning through communication, and the human body health exerts a considerable influence on self-identity and society. The most fundamental power contained in the communicative body of human constitutes our concept and existing culture. Through in-depth interviews, this paper attempts to analyze the daily microphysical practice of Hui'an women of Xuehua Village in Southeastern China and analyze the meaning of symbol which generates from the body of Hui'an women coming and returning between the husbands' and the natal family. Because of the marriage customs of “extended natal residence marriage,” how the interaction of the human body health continues this special marriage custom and preserves the face of women in this community is shown.

Show and Tell: Life History and Hijra Activism in India

The late twentieth-century economic liberalization that transformed India from a License Raj to a so-called NGO Raj paralleled a burgeoning interest in Indian hijra communities, aided by discourses about gender/sexuality rights circulating via transnational NGO networks. The opening decades of the twenty-first century witnessed the emergence of multiple life histories written by NGO-based hijra activists that were read as representing authentic hijra life; for instance, A. Revathi’s The Truth about Me and Laxminarayan Tripathi’s Me Hijra, Me Laxmi. Despite the linkage between autobiography and autonomous personhood in metropolitan literary cultures, these texts were read as testimonials of hijra communitarian experience. As one reviewer put it, autobiography “positions the reader as an anthropologist of hijra life.” A closer examination reveals that these works do not present evidence of hijra experience in all its raw immediacy. I will argue, instead, that like the testimonio, the nascent genre of hijra life history presents an idealized time line of movement from exploited subaltern to respectable professional social activist while the actual lives described by it don’t follow such a straightforward trajectory. The subject positions of woman, transgender person, disciple, migrant sex worker, employee, citizen, and author in these writings offer more diffuse genealogies of hijras’ political consciousness. Hijra activists both inhabit and resist incorporation into normative conceptions of belonging by leveraging their embeddedness within multiple competing filial and affiliative networks, from their natal families to their adopted imagined communities to their activist coalitions. Their writings are better read as autoethnographies of activism and enable us to rethink the role of NGOs in queer political life.

The Peony Pavilion as a picture of sexual individuation

The Peony Pavilion is a story central to Chinese gender identity. It vividly portrays a story of the path of sexual individuation of a Chinese woman. In comparison to female images in Western stories, Chinese women are the active ones in their intimate relationships with men. They have been oppressed for many years because they are recognised as the subject of desire and as having reflexive aggression. However, with enough love, a girl dares to separate from her natal family, to fight against the patriarchal system, and to be herself. Identifying with the father’s aggression can facilitate her in this process.

Family Social Reproduction: Conflict and Compromise in Cross-Border Marriages between Chinese Malaysian Men and Vietnamese Women

In this paper, we use the framework of family social reproduction to investigate care relationships within cross-border marriages in Malaysia. Examining the narratives of Chinese Malaysian men and their Vietnamese spouses, we find that (i) the Malaysian men’s labour migration during their twenties and thirties leads to the deferment as well as enablement of marriage, reconfiguring social reproduction temporally and spatially within their life courses, while (ii) the Vietnamese women’s aspirations for migration, work, and marriage interlink with their desire to seek a better life, and their motivations to secure better options to contribute to the social reproduction of their natal families. Tensions in cross-border marriage arise from unmet expectations of care and sustenance, leading to frictions over contested roles and responsibilities in daily household maintenance and care activities, and compromises as marriage partners formulate social reproductive strategies. Exchanges of care, reproductive labour, and money within these marriages are embedded in relational meanings, pointing to the significance of recognising that the care work that shapes and sustains marital relationships is bidirectional, reciprocal, and undertaken by husbands as much as wives.

Movement of Rehabilitated African Elephant Calves Following Soft Release Into a Wildlife Sanctuary

The ability to locate essential resources is a critical step for wildlife translocated into novel environments. Understanding this process of exploration is highly desirable for management that seeks to resettle wildlife, particularly as translocation projects tend to be expensive and have a high potential for failure. African savannah elephants (Loxodonta africana) are very mobile and rely on large areas especially in arid environments, and are translocated for differing management and conservation objectives. Thus, research into how translocated elephants use the landscape when released may both guide elephant managers and be useful for translocations of other species that adjust their movement to social and ecological conditions. In this study, we investigated the movement of eight GPS tracked calves (translocated in three cohorts) following their soft release into a 107 km2 fenced wildlife sanctuary in northern Kenya and compared their movement with that of five tracked wild elephants in the sanctuary. We describe their exploration of the sanctuary, discovery of water points, and activity budgets during the first seven, 14, and 20 months after release. We explored how patterns are affected by time since release, ecological conditions, and social factors. We found that calves visited new areas of the sanctuary and water points during greener periods and earlier post-release. Social context was associated with exploration, with later release and association with wild elephants predictive of visits to new areas. Wild elephants tended to use a greater number of sites per 14-day period than the released calves. Activity budgets determined from hidden Markov models (including the states directed walk, encamped, and meandering) suggested that released calves differed from wild elephants. The first two cohorts of calves spent a significantly greater proportion of time in the directed walk state and a significantly lower proportion of time in the encamped state relative to the wild elephants. Our results represent a step forward in describing the movements of elephant orphan calves released to the wild following a period of profound social disruption when they lost their natal family and were rehabilitated with other orphan calves under human care. We discuss the implications of the elephant behavior we observed for improving release procedures and for defining success benchmarks for translocation projects.

Who’s your Neighbour? Social Influences on Domestic Violence

We examine the impact of neighbourhood physical domestic violence on the likelihood of being exposed to physical abuse within a household using nationally representative data from the fourth wave of the National Family Health Survey of India. To address potential endogeneity issues in analysing neighbourhood influences, we utilise an instrumental variables approach that compares households in the same state but different neighbourhoods. Using exogenous variation in neighbouring women’s exposure to parental violence in her natal family as an instrument for average neighbourhood domestic violence, we find that a 1 standard deviation increase in neighbourhood domestic violence leads to a 0.2 standard deviation increase in the probability of domestic violence within a household. We establish that domestic violence is not only driven by intra-household factors but also observable changes at a neighbourhood level.

The Conflation of Single Mothers and Prostitutes in Morocco

The Conflation of Single Mothers and Prostitutes in Morocco

The Tibetan stem family in historical perspective

ABSTRACT Despite decades of scholarly interest in the Tibetan marital practice of fraternal polyandry, very little is known about how the Tibetan family system operated in historical contexts. This study, based on a 1958 household register from Kyirong, a former district in Tibet, reconstructs nuances of family dynamics through the aid of interviews with people who were listed in the document. Kyirong’s family system is shown to be very flexible. Although patrilocality was preferred, matrilocality was a viable contingency, and although polyandry was favored, monogamy and polygyny were acceptable. Despite the heterogeneity of Kyirong’s family households, case studies demonstrate how people strove to achieve the monomarital stem family through polyandrous marriages in successive generations. Because polyandry created a surplus of marriageable women, joint families often arose, at least in form, when unmarried women remained with their natal families and had children, or when men discontent with their polyandrous unions moved into an adjunct house with a partner of choice. However, the offspring of these people had no rights of inheritance and thus were not integral to family continuity, so joint families in form functioned more like stem families in practice. Therefore, a discrepancy between etic definitions of form and emic understandings of process emerges when family typologies developed to facilitate cross-cultural research are incompatible with the way people actually understand rights and privileges associated with succession. The data and analysis demonstrate that Kyirong represents a unique version of a stem family society with an unambiguous stem family ideology.

Intimate partner violence and social connection among married women in rural Bangladesh

BackgroundIntimate partner violence (IPV) is high among married women in Bangladesh. Social isolation is a well-established correlate of women’s exposure to IPV, but the role of such factors in low-income...

The Argument for a Woman’s Authorship of the Hou Honglou meng

Abstract This article argues Hou Honglou meng (Later Dream of the Red Chamber; in circulation by 1796), the earliest sequel to the 120-chapter Dream of the Red Chamber, was likely written by a woman. The author of Hou Honglou meng makes the reborn Lin Daiyu the central protagonist of the novel. Over the duration of thirty chapters, Daiyu transitions from the role of daughter, to bride and daughter-in-law, and finally to mother. This pragmatic Daiyu has no patience for the romantic cult of qing values of the parent novel; instead, her sentimental attachments are directed toward her natal family, and her expressed will is to escape marriage in order to pursue Daoist transcendence. Daiyu returns to life as an extremely practical household manager who revives the fortunes of the Jia family. This image of an empowered Daiyu who insists on her autonomy from Baoyu, who is still obsessed with his qing-based yearning, conforms to the types of protagonists found in female-authored tanci. The article concludes with the argument that the prolific woman of letters Yun Zhu (1771-1833) deserves serious consideration as the author of Hou Honglou meng.

Introduction: premodern queenship and diplomacy

ABSTRACT Queens, be they consorts, dowagers or regents, often played pivotal roles in the lives of medieval and early modern kingdoms. As women who often married across geographical, political and, sometimes, religious borders, they were ideally placed to serve as diplomats and ambassadors, whether directly as agents or indirectly as transmitters of cultural practices, values and ideas. This introduction celebrates the position which queens occupied at the heart of international and transnational affairs in the premodern era. It argues that queens were figures who enjoyed meaningful public authority. Their ceremonial actions were imbued with significance, and their deliberate and considered interventions in court politics, and in the wider affairs of their marital and natal families’ kingdoms placed them on the international stage and at the heart of European monarchy. This introduction also offers an overview of the articles within this special issue and their contribution to recent historiographical debates on queenship and the nature of pre-modern diplomacy.

Of seals and siblings: Teresa/Matilda (d. 1218), queen of Portugal and countess of Flanders

ABSTRACT The present article demonstrates that material culture offers medievalists an often untapped primary source, in this case the seals of Matilda of Flanders (d. 1218). Born Teresa of Portugal, she was the daughter of King Afonso Henriques of Portugal and Queen Mafalda of Savoy; as wife, then widow of Count Philip of Flanders, Matilda issued two double-sided seal types. By foregrounding the material traces connected with the countess, an unexpected picture unfolds of a self-conscious royal heiress and staunch promotor of her natal family. Here it is shown that Matilda's seals share signifying elements with those of her royal siblings Sancho and Urraca, arguing that her seal was part of an explicit statement of familial connections. This visual declaration reveals a previously unrecognized chapter of the countess’ history, in which she asserted her place within the Portuguese dynasty from her new lands in the County of Flanders.

THE INFLUENCE OF MIGRATION, EDUCATION, AND PARENTS ON THE FERTILITY OF FIRST-GENERATION JAPANESE WOMEN IN THE U.S.

This study examines fertility of Japanese women who migrated to the United States (U.S.) in the early 1900s. It uses data originally collected from 98 first-generation Japanese immigrants, addressed as Issei, living in Seattle, Washington in the mid 1970s. Main questions are 1) how Issei women?s fertility differed based on their levels of educational attainment, and 2) how the natal family fertility influence differed according to their levels of education. The study findings indicate that highly educated women (more than high-school level) had significantly fewer children than other women with lower educational attainment. This finding may relate in part to the levels of education that they had their children obtain. Interestingly, there is no indication that the fertility of these Issei women was positively influenced by the number of children that their natal parents had regardless of their educational levels; on the contrary, the fertility of women who had a high-school level of education was negatively related to their natal family fertility. Several possible factors may be responsible for these patterns, including experience with child-death, reaction to the realities of their immigrant parents, assimilation into society in the U.S., and occupational and regional backgrounds of their natal family.

Youthful parricide: child abuse is not the primary motivator (invited paper)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to share nascent theory, suggesting there are five types of parricide offenders. The old theories are not valid: child abuse is not the primary motivator for parricide events. Design/methodology/approach This research draws on archival data derived from public sources (i.e. court records, offender statements, newspapers, etc.). Findings Child abuse is not the primary motivator for youthful parricide events. However, it appears to remain a factor in the parricide equation. The Good Child Postulate romanticizes youthful parricide offenders and could introduce potentially harmful positive bias into investigations, trials and treatment. The nascent theory suggests the five fatal personality clusters for youthful parricide offenders. Research limitations/implications The identified clusters are still being developed and statistically validated. More research and analysis is needed to delimit, refine and verify the five fatal personality types of parricide offenders and to create a clear, cohesive theory. Practical implications Murder in general has decreased over the past decade, parricides have not. A better understanding of the phenomena may help to slow the rate of parricide events. Law enforcement, natal families and the courts can help to improve rehabilitative outcomes if children could be recognized as the type of killer they are and treated differently during the investigative and defense phases of their cases. For example, if parents are placed on trial (i.e. are used by defense to mitigate/excuse the murders), some types of children will adopt the defense arguments laid out in court and feel no need for rehabilitation at all. Families of the murdered parents can come to a better understanding of what has happened – allowing them to grieve without being forced to defend the murder of their love one. This research serves as further correction for the promulgation of the notion that all parents who are victims of youthful parricide abused the perpetrator, thereby causing their own deaths. This does occur on occasion, but is not a complete picture of the phenomenon. Social implications Although murder, in general, has decreased over the past decade, parricides have not. The standing typology stymies fresh research and researcher’s abilities to explore models that may help to teach parents, law enforcement and other caring members of society how to prevent parricides in the future. Additionally, the Good Child Postulate works to create positive bias in the courtroom as attorneys for well-off, white children can easily build an imperfect defense for a population that is not actually the abused population. This has many social justice implications. Originality/value This information can be utilized by law enforcement, attorneys, the courts, parents and the prisons/therapeutic settings to better meet the needs of the youthful parricide offender.