The Practice of Mothering: An Introduction

Abstract

This special issue demonstrates the value of close examinations of mothering as actually practiced by particular mothers in particular circumstances. The articles in this issue analyze instances of mothering in Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, China, and the United States and are followed by commentary from leaders in the field about what might be learned by attending to such everyday practices. These ethnographic studies extend lines of research within psychological anthropology that have focused on mothers as socializers, by drawing on contemporary developments, including those concerned with schema theory, psychodynamic and intersubjective processes, the interpenetrations of political‐economies and domestic relations, feminist perspectives, and questions of agency in the lives of women and children. This examination of projects, processes, and practices of mothering affords insights into a range of related questions concerning human nature, processes of enculturation and socialization, individual agency and lived worlds, cultural patterning and change. [mothering, practice, child socialization, cross‐cultural child development, psychological anthropology]

Shared Precarities and Maternal Subjectivities: Navigating Motherhood and Child Custody Loss Among North American Women in Street‐Based Sex Work

“…Psychological anthropologists have argued that critical engagement with mothering as a cultural construction “affords insights into a range of related questions concerning human nature, processes of enculturation and socialization, individual agency and lived worlds, cultural patterning and change” (Barlow and Chapin , 324). Feminist scholars likewise emphasize the need to disentangle the socioeconomic, psychological, and political roles and identities associated with mothering from the roles and identities generally ascribed to all women (O'Reilly ).…”

Motherhood and Resilience among Rwandan Genocide‐Rape Survivors

“…This shift led to the formation of an “anthropology of women” where motherhood was cited as the root of women's universal subordination to men (Quinn ). However, today, the steadily growing field of the “anthropology of motherhood” champions the importance of understanding the cultural variation in the conceptions of motherhood and mothering practices as a linchpin of studies of gender (Barlow and Chapin ). This emphasis parallels current directions in the field of “motherhood studies,” which “simultaneously insists on the particularity and specificity of motherhood while at the same time reject[s] any notion of a fixed or essential aspect of maternal experience, desire, or subjectivity” (Kawash , 969; see also Glenn ).…”

“…The anthropology of motherhood offers frameworks for studying the everyday lives of mothers to reveal a deeper understanding of what mothering entails and means and how motherhood relates to broader sociocultural forms (Barlow and Chapin ). One framework conceives of motherhood, mothering, the mother, and mothers‐to‐be as lenses through which to understand multilevel social processes (Rubin and Zraly ; Walker ).…”

“…One framework conceives of motherhood, mothering, the mother, and mothers‐to‐be as lenses through which to understand multilevel social processes (Rubin and Zraly ; Walker ). While “motherhood” tends to articulate normative and contested cultural models involving ideologies, identities, or roles (Walker ), “mothering” is positioned as an emergent process that relates to the practices that women participate in by virtue of “being a mother” that contribute to constructing gender, kinship, and social status and identity (Barlow and Chapin ). Alternatively, the “mother”—an experience, lived reality, subject, object, or moral being—draws attention to how mothers make meaning of motherhood and mothering (Arendell ).…”

Fertile Connections: Thinking across Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Parenting Culture Studies

“…Parenting has long been considered of great importance when it comes to the transmission of social norms and values, the continuation of kinship, family and household, and for reproducing local and national communities (Barlow and Chapin, 2010). Rather than focusing on 'relatedness', familiar to scholars of kinship (e.g.…”