Otent in caregiving negotiations because it is ‘the idiom for gender relations in which everyone is fluent’ (Wardlow 2006: 133). In an African context, it is also a system with enough flexibility and opportunity for manipulation that it serves the negotiator in navigating the idealized patrilineal landscape. While bridewealth may emerge as the most frequently used negotiation tool, the underlying principle driving the negotiations is care. It is within a context of embedded child fostering, changes in marriage, a decline in bridewealth practices, and high rates of migrant labour and disease that a shift towards matrilocal care must be viewed. Contemporary approaches to the diverse field of kinship emphasize the various and dynamic ways of constructing and understanding relatedness in order to illuminate processes of social change. As many kinship theorists have demonstrated, relatedness is not fixed but is processual and exists in a particular historical, socio-economic, and geopolitical context (Carsten 2000; Franklin McKinnon 2001). As Bloch and Sperber (2002) note, while a complete shift between matrilineal and patrilineal systems is rare, dispositions towards certain relatives are locally and historically specific and change over time. In Lesotho, kin relations have changed because of a number of historical and political-economic pressures, including AIDS. This work is based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the rural highland community of Mokhotlong, Lesotho, between 2007 and 2013. I employed a multifaceted ethnographic approach which included surveys, in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant observation, archival work, and textual analysis. I primarily explore the care of young children (birth to 5 years old) because they require labour intensive daily care that highlights the challenges of this work BQ-123 biological activity without the immediate potential for household assistance that an older child might provide. Because of the young age of the children, there was little difference in gender preference by caregivers. The majority of caregivers in this study were caring for children who had at some point received services from a local NGO, Mokhotlong Children’s Services (MCS). MCS clients are typical of families fostering orphans in that they suffer from poverty, food insecurity, drought, and are impacted by the ravages of AIDS. Like the general rural population, MCS clients also range in their vulnerabilities. The majority of orphaned clients are situated with a caregiver before receiving services from MCS, so caregiving trends described here were not impacted by caregivers’ service OrnipressinMedChemExpress POR-8 participation. Although my initial contact with caregivers was facilitated by MCS, long-term engagement, my ability to measure caregiver selfreporting against observations, and my own reflexivity about potential biases helped to minimize the pitfalls associated with the nature of my relationships with caregivers. In this article, I contextualize patterns of children’s migration in contemporary Lesotho with an overview of child fostering practices and the ways they have been impacted by AIDS,Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptJ R Anthropol Inst. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 April 08.BlockPagemigrant labour, and changes in the institution of marriage. I then explore ideologies of care and caregiving practices, acknowledging a shift away from patrilineal patterns of social organization. Finally, I demonstrat.Otent in caregiving negotiations because it is ‘the idiom for gender relations in which everyone is fluent’ (Wardlow 2006: 133). In an African context, it is also a system with enough flexibility and opportunity for manipulation that it serves the negotiator in navigating the idealized patrilineal landscape. While bridewealth may emerge as the most frequently used negotiation tool, the underlying principle driving the negotiations is care. It is within a context of embedded child fostering, changes in marriage, a decline in bridewealth practices, and high rates of migrant labour and disease that a shift towards matrilocal care must be viewed. Contemporary approaches to the diverse field of kinship emphasize the various and dynamic ways of constructing and understanding relatedness in order to illuminate processes of social change. As many kinship theorists have demonstrated, relatedness is not fixed but is processual and exists in a particular historical, socio-economic, and geopolitical context (Carsten 2000; Franklin McKinnon 2001). As Bloch and Sperber (2002) note, while a complete shift between matrilineal and patrilineal systems is rare, dispositions towards certain relatives are locally and historically specific and change over time. In Lesotho, kin relations have changed because of a number of historical and political-economic pressures, including AIDS. This work is based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the rural highland community of Mokhotlong, Lesotho, between 2007 and 2013. I employed a multifaceted ethnographic approach which included surveys, in-depth semi-structured interviews, participant observation, archival work, and textual analysis. I primarily explore the care of young children (birth to 5 years old) because they require labour intensive daily care that highlights the challenges of this work without the immediate potential for household assistance that an older child might provide. Because of the young age of the children, there was little difference in gender preference by caregivers. The majority of caregivers in this study were caring for children who had at some point received services from a local NGO, Mokhotlong Children’s Services (MCS). MCS clients are typical of families fostering orphans in that they suffer from poverty, food insecurity, drought, and are impacted by the ravages of AIDS. Like the general rural population, MCS clients also range in their vulnerabilities. The majority of orphaned clients are situated with a caregiver before receiving services from MCS, so caregiving trends described here were not impacted by caregivers’ service participation. Although my initial contact with caregivers was facilitated by MCS, long-term engagement, my ability to measure caregiver selfreporting against observations, and my own reflexivity about potential biases helped to minimize the pitfalls associated with the nature of my relationships with caregivers. In this article, I contextualize patterns of children’s migration in contemporary Lesotho with an overview of child fostering practices and the ways they have been impacted by AIDS,Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptJ R Anthropol Inst. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 April 08.BlockPagemigrant labour, and changes in the institution of marriage. I then explore ideologies of care and caregiving practices, acknowledging a shift away from patrilineal patterns of social organization. Finally, I demonstrat.
