Fragile kinships: Child welfare and well‐being in Japan By Kathryn E.Goldfarb, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2024. 220 pp.
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Kin-based social solidarity does profound work in society to nourish identity and well-being.It grounds us and bestows a sense of purpose, connection, and futurity.Goldfarb's longitudinal and intimate study of Chestnut House, a Child Guidance Center (CGC) or home for children who are wards of the state in a Tokyo suburb, explores how human beings form meaningful attachments outside socially normative definitions of "family," which in Japan, as elsewhere, is primarily defined by biological ties of inheritance.Fragile Kinships probes how social connection is created and imagined through cultivated relationships, and how trauma, separation, loss, and aloneness are manifested in the body.Simultaneously, the book explores the limitations of Japan's child welfare system, despite the loving bonds that committed caregivers often form with resident children.This is because of a core belief that biological families provide the most authentic and intimate social bonds-a prejudice that ultimately discourages foster care and hinders the broader acceptance of child adoption.Goldfarb is interested in what she calls "kinship technologies": historically and culturally specific scripts through which people "construct the feeling of being a family," including the search for physical similarities (15).Her analysis explores how the insistent focus on biology impedes the creation of alternative forms of identity and belonging and can ironically sabotage care and belonging altogether.Simultaneously, it captures the emotional interconnectedness that can be created in the absence of nonbiological ties.An important part of Goldfarb's project is to capture what "families we make" look and feel like, and how affective intimacy is created through social relationality and the occupation of shared physical space.Fragile Kinships is an impressive work-powerful, detailed, accessible, and closely researched.Goldfarb was associated with Chestnut House for several years.She also became close with a network of foster and adoptive parents and interviewed lawyers, and activists, as well as directors and staff at the multiple child welfare institutions she examined.After her most intensive period of fieldwork ended, she returned regularly to visit children and staff members whom she knew.She understood that as a participant-observer at Chestnut House, she too was responsible for the children's well-being and maintaining the fragile relations they had created.
Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/maq.70038
Author: Amy Borovoy
Institution: Princeton University
Language: English
Topic: Child Welfare and Adoption
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4416138036