Negotiating parentage: the political economy of "kinship" in central Sulawesi, Indonesia

Abstract

Widespread fosterage and adoption has recently emerged around Lake Poso in Central Sulawesi within the wider constraints of peasantization, whereby kin are ideologically set off as a source of noncommodified labor for a newly constituted peasantry. The differentiation of this peasantry has been blunted and a kin‐based "moral economy" created through the transfer of dependents (rather than resources) between households. This transfer of kin has been eased by a concept of parentage that stresses nurturance and sharing, not just filiation. Class tensions are muted by the insistence that the calculation of costs and benefits between kin is unseemly. Fosterage, however, opens up tensions as some "parents" exploit their newly acquired "free" domestic labor. This article focuses on the terms foster children use to resist this exploitation, namely their refusal to acknowledge a parental tie. Drawing on historically constituted relations of subordination, these dependents draw on the now legally defunct vocabulary of master (kabosenya) and slave (watua) to describe their position,

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