The emotional world of kinship: Children’s experiences of fosterage in East Cameroon

Abstract

This article focuses on children's narrated experiences of fosterage in East Cameroon. It seeks to complement the predominantly adult approaches to fosterage with children's views of the intimate, emotional and competitive aspects of kinship in everyday life. As kinship evolves in homes through sharing food and intimacy, children directly experience how kinship is created, disputed and defined and how lived kinship is inextricably linked with mobility, flexibility and power dynamics. It is argued that children's multiple and changing experiences of fosterage depend on three interconnected factors: changing household compositions, power dynamics in the homes and the changes in women's life histories.