Review of “Like Family: Narratives of Fictive Kinship”

Social Forces ◽  
2021 ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 102831532110270
Author(s):  
Ireena Nasiha Ibnu ◽  
Norzaini Azman

This paper explores the transnational trajectories of female Malaysian Muslim students through their commitment to piety-minded forms of Islam. In particular, it seeks to identify the reasons for their participation in piety movements and its importance to their lives. The ethnographic research, conducted over 8 months, involved 18 Malaysian female respondents who were studying and living in Manchester between 2016 and 2017. The findings show that the students’ involvement in piety movements was due to fictive kinship providing generous hospitality upon their arrival to the United Kingdom, pre-departure programs on preparation for studying abroad, family influence and sisterhood relationships. Participation in piety movements is said to help relieve stress and overcome loneliness, and is considered vital in guiding Muslim students to lead fulfilling and virtuous lives. The findings contribute significantly to transnational student mobility theories and the importance of sociality and religion in transnational migration.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009579842110026
Author(s):  
Edward D. Scott ◽  
Nancy L. Deutsch

This case study examines the way an adolescent Black boy extends his kinship network as a part of navigating and demonstrating agency in mentoring relationships with nonparental adults. We purposively selected one participant, Bodos, from the sample of a larger mixed-method study involving youth, aged 12 to 18 years, in the southeastern United States. Drawing on narrative methodology, we used a holistic-content approach to analyze Bodos’ responses to semistructured interviews. Bodos used several narratives to describe his experiences. We offer three findings: (a) Fictive kinship is a positive feature of Black adaptive culture that can be leveraged by Black youth as a tool for creating a distinct relational dynamic with their mentors, (b) adolescent Black boys possess skills and knowledge that both preexist and emerge within positive mentoring relationships, and (c) youth agency and expectations manifest in mentoring relationships to inform and influence those adults’ significance. This case study furthers the field’s understanding of how cultural practices can positively influence relational development and create a unique relational context and experience.


2004 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 5-28
Author(s):  
Christine Trevett

In the close-knit valleys communities of South Wales where I was brought up, some fingers are still pointed at ‘the scab’, the miner who, for whatever reason, did not show solidarity in the strike of 1984-5, cement the definition between ‘them’ and ‘us’. In trouble-torn Palestine of the twenty-first century, or among the paramilitary groups of Northern Ireland today, suspected informers are summarily assassinated. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee continues its work in the post-apartheid era. In second-century Rome and elsewhere, the ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ who made up the fictive kinship groups – the churches – in the growing but illicit cult of the Christians were conscious both of their own vulnerability to outside opinion and of their failures in relation to their co-religionists. The questions which they asked, too, were questions about reconciliation and/or (spiritual) death.


Sociologija ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sladjana Dragisic-Labas ◽  
Milana Ljubicic

In this paper we explore the relationship between financial and residential independence of young people and some aspects of their psychological separation from parents. Namely, the adequate psychological separation of the youth from their parents is affected by the characteristics of family dynamics as a whole, by family narratives, and also by the ecosystem conditions (opportunities) for the financial and housing independence from parents. In order to examine these findings, which have been confirmed almost without exception in the foreign literature, we bring young people who live with their parents into the focus of this study, comparing them with their peers who have become independent in this respect. The analysis included a total of 1627 respondents aged 19-35 years, 909 of whom lived with their parents. We were interested in whether there were any significant differences in terms of statistics between these two diverse housing categories of respondents, considering material possibilities of the physical separation and some aspects of psychological separation from parents. These are: emotional, conflicting, and functional independence, and lack of privacy in the family. We obtained the following findings: there are clear differences in some aspects of psychological separation among those young people who continue living at their parents' home and those who chose (had a possibility of) physical separation. These findings must be interpreted from a broader, ecosystem perspective, in anticipation of the possible implications of the overall (non)independence of young people for their life outcomes.


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