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With the increase in life expectancy, many people with intellectual disabilities (ID) are living in the family home with their parents. This research focuses on the experience of 17 fathers of adults with ID. These fathers answered a questionnaire including open and closed questions. During the individual interview, fathers described their motivations to cohabit with their son or daughter, cohabitation benefits and constraints, housing options considered and planning for the future. Results indicate that fathers chose this cohabitation. However, they experience anxiety because they do not know who will support the adult with ID when they can no longer do so. Postparental planning considerations include legal concerns and informal discussions with siblings or the extended family. These results describe a complex parental situation in which there is interaction between their emotions, their attachment to the adult with ID and their previous experiences with residential, social or rehabilitation services.

Theories of parental alienation abound in high-conflict custody cases. The image of one parent brainwashing a child against the other parent fits with what we think we know about family dynamics during divorce. The concept of a diagnosable "Parental Alienation Syndrome" ("PAS") developed as an attempt to explain this phenomenon, but it has been widely discredited by mental health professionals and thus fails the standard for evidentiary admissibility. Nevertheless, PAS and related theories continue to influence the decisions of family courts, and even in jurisdictions that explicitly reject such theories, judges still face the daunting task of resolving these volatile cases. In the midst of this highly adversarial process, children deserve independent representation to ensure that their interests remain front and center. Mandating the appointment of guardians ad litem in cases involving allegations of abuse or alienation will assist courts in conducting individualized, fact-specific investigations into such allegations to craft custody orders that serve the best interests of children.

Over the years a number of countries have abolished anonymous gamete donation and shifted toward open-identity policies. Donor-conceived children are said to have a fundamental "right to know" the identity of their donor. In this article, we trace the arguments that underlie this claim and question its implications. We argue that, given the status attributed to the right to know one's gamete donor, it would be discriminatory not to extend this right to naturally conceived children with misattributed paternity. One way to facilitate this would be through routine paternity testing at birth. While this proposal is likely to raise concerns about the conflicting interests and rights of other people involved, we show that similar concerns apply to the context of open-identity gamete donation. Unless one can identify a rational basis for treating the two groups differently, one's stance toward both cases should be the same.

Using a modified grounded theory method and Black feminist theory, the author explored the factors that influence the decision-making processes of Black aunts parenting nieces and nephews. Analysis revealed six themes that facilitated beliefs in a lack of agency in the decision-making process: perceptions of a crisis, fulfillment of family obligations, personal identities, faith in God, gendered expectations, and the role of the Black aunt. Findings emphasized the impact of cultural traditions and gendered expectations on the meanings that Black aunts attach to familial roles and the influence of past and current racism on their definitions of the situation.

The legal debate about patient autonomy focuses mainly on mental capacity and provision of information. The influence of the family on the decisions of the competent adult patient has scarcely been discussed in English medical law. Dominated by the bioethical principle of individual autonomy, the law concentrates on the patient and takes an exclusionary stand regarding relatives. Hence, the aim of this article is to examine the attitude of English law towards the involvement of relatives when patients make decisions, and to investigate the views and experiences of patients and their relatives in reality. To fulfil this aim, a qualitative study was carried out in six NHS trusts in England. The study was based on in-depth interviews conducted with patients who suffer from long-term illnesses, and their relatives. In the interviews, patients stated that the relatives assisted them in making informed decisions about treatment. Patients said that relatives had an influence on the decision-making process and on the decision itself, but also reported that ultimately relatives left the final decision to the patient. The findings reflect a relational approach to patient autonomy. When making decisions about treatment, patients needed to know that their relatives would support them no matter what they decided. However, exceptional cases which demonstrated substantial familial influence suggest that the law should secure the patient's interest in making their own decisions. In light of these findings, it is argued that the current exclusionary attitude expressed in English medical law towards the role of relatives should be changed.

Childcare across sub-Saharan Africa is often socially distributed among adults, with care by the biological mother being one of several options available for children. Children typically move within and outside of large extended kin networks. Based on an ethnographic study of four Ovambo families in Namibia, this article seeks to understand the cultural logic of fostering. Several themes that emerged from the study are discussed here, including the varied motivations of fostering, the cultural scripts of equality, and the rules of reciprocity in exchange, which are involved. Education shapes a mother's choices of care-giving and creates both a supply of children and a demand on households. The implications for HIV/AIDS orphans are discussed.

In this article, the author explains how the support of new technologies has helped historians to develop their research over the last few decades. The author, therefore, summarizes the application of both database and genealogical programs for the southern Europe family studies as a methodological tool. First, the author will establish the importance of the creation of databases using the File Maker program, after which they will explain the value of using genealogical programs such as Genopro and Heredis. The main aim of this article is to give detail about the use of these new technologies as applied to a particular study of southern Europe, specifically the Crown of Castile, during the late modern period. The use of these computer programs has helped to develop the field of social sciences and family history, in particular, social history, during the last decade.

This article examines suicide prevention among children in India's “suicide capital” of Kerala to interrogate the ways temporalization practices inform the cultivation of ethical, life-avowing subjects in late capitalism. As economic liberalization and migration expand consumer aspiration in Kerala, mental health experts link the quickening of material gratification in middle-class parenting to the production of insatiable, maladjusted, and impulsively suicidal children. Experiences of accelerated time through consumption in “modern” Kerala parenting practice reflect ideas about the threats of globalization that are informed both by national economic shifts and by nostalgia for the state's communist and developmentalist histories, suggesting that late capitalism's time–space compression is not a universalist phenomenon so much as one that is unevenly experienced through regionally specific renderings of the past. I demonstrate how experts position the Malayali child as uniquely vulnerable to the fatal dangers of immediate gratification, and thus exhort parents to retemporalize children through didactic games built around the deferral of desires for everyday consumer items. Teaching children how to wait as a pleasurable and explicitly antisuicidal way of being reveals anxieties, contestations, and contradictions concerning what ought to constitute “quality” investment in children as temporal subjects of late capitalism. The article concludes by bringing efforts to save elite lives into conversation with suicide prevention among migrants to draw out the ways distinct vulnerabilities and conditions of precarity situate waiting subjects in radically different ways against the prospect of self-destruction.

This article addresses the Maltese traditional family, taking St. Mary's (Qrendi) as a test case. It results that couples married in their early twenties, while a high proportion of men and women never married at all. Marriage was not popular so that one-fifth of all marriages were remarriages. Very few widows remarried and it was only for some economic reason that they sought another man. There is no evidence though that a high rate of celibacy resulted in flagrant promiscuity even if there is evidence that the Qrendin were not so particular about their sex life. No birth control was practiced within marriage and children followed one another regularly. This brings into relief the parents' unconcern for their offspring's future as well as the inferior status of women because husbands made their wives several offspring. Relations between the spouses were poor so that dissatisfied couples went their own ways.

This article analyses three areas that limited the effectiveness of the English Legitimacy Act of 1926. First, re-registration was public, expensive, and time-consuming. Second, the Treasury Office used the change in the law of intestacy to refuse more distant relatives' claims on estates. Third, the law separated legitimacy from nationality, thus denying citizenship to legitimated children born abroad of British fathers and foreign mothers. In short, both because of parliamentary oversights and civil servants' narrow interpretations of the law, relatively few children took advantage of the Act, and the minority who did, rather than being 'illegitimate' or 'legitimate', were a third category, the 'legitimated'.

In this article, I explore the synergy and disjunctures of the consumer credit system and care for the mentally ill and addicted in the lifeworlds of the urban poor in Santiago, Chile. In Chile, the expansion of the credit system has had a double-edged effect on the poor. Although it produces perpetual indebtedness, it also is a resource amid unstable labor. Following an extended family over several years, this article examines how women take up credit through a wider field of domestic relations and institutions to care for kin with mental illness and addiction within the home. Such gestures of care enact a temporality of waiting, allowing different, but unpredictable, aspects of others to emerge. Through longitudinal ethnographic research with this family, I demonstrate both how possibility is actualized within the home as symptoms of illness and forms of domestic violence, and how a wider network of dependencies—from neighbors to lending institutions—shapes the temporality of relations within the home. Such a study of care in relation to the credit economy may offer other analytic perspectives on discourses of individualism, consumerism, and cost-effectiveness accompanying the expansion of consumer credit as they are absorbed into the everyday.

This article uses cases studies of Dundee and Manchester to explain juvenile property-offending in terms of young people's use of objects and spaces in the period 1945-60. A composite picture is assembled of objects stolen, which reflects growth of the specifically "teenage" consumer market as well as continued significance of young people's contribution to family economies. Concerns about youth, property, and space were reported in newspapers in terms of vandalism and hooliganism. "Play" and "nuisance" were overlapping and contested categories; re-education of young people in the correct use of place, space, and property was a key aim of the postwar juvenile justice system.

This paper reports on the findings from a large-scale study of public attitudes to inheritance law, particularly the rules on intestacy. It argues that far from the assumption that the family' is in terminal decline, people in England and Wales still view their most important relationships, at least for the purposes of inheritance law, as centred on a narrow, nuclear family model. However, there is also widespread acceptance of re-partnering and cohabitation, producing generally high levels of support for including cohabitants in the intestacy rules and for ensuring that children from former relationships are protected. We argue that these views are underpinned by a continuing sense of responsibility to the members of one's nuclear family, arising from notions of sharing and commitment, dependency and support, and a sense of lineage.

A systematic sample of the petitions presented to the English Divorce Court from 1858 through 1908 makes it possible to assess the differential contribution of discrete social and economic subgroups to the litigation the Court oversaw. An examination of four of these -- the titled aristocracy, those employed in the theater, those in receipt of financial aid, and laborers -- shows that English divorce litigants exhibited a broader social profile than commonly attributed to it by the newspaper coverage of divorce litigation, which gave a skewed impression of its social profile. Analysis of these cases underscores the gendered, class, and geographically inflected demand for divorce in a judicial setting that imposed severe restrictions on access to divorce as a remedy for marital breakdown.

This article analyzes the factors shaping egalitarian family relationships among those with two Swedish-born parents and those with at least one parent born in Poland or Turkey. We ask: (1) What factors affect sharing domestic tasks and do they also shape the division of child care responsibilities? (2) Do these effects differ, depending on the extent of exposure to Swedish life? We analyze data from a longitudinal survey conducted between 1999 and 2003. Holding egalitarian work–family attitudes affects actual sharing of housework, but much more for those growing up in more socially integrated than in less integrated families.

According to international human rights treaties, what rights do family members, parents, and children have in family engagement in child welfare decision-making? A socio-legal analytical approach produces a typology of rights, then applies the typology to eight countries' approaches to family engagement to show that strong bundles of rights are available in some countries, but not in others. This study reveals international treaties have articulated many rights necessary to family engagement, but some rights are missing.

Through written life stories of lone mothers, this article examines changes in lone motherhood in twentieth-century Finland. While the older life-story writers' narratives are clearly influenced by an 'ethos of survival' and the regulation of female sexuality, the younger writers relate their experiences with the help of scripts on gender equality and the psychological importance of 'good' parenting. These narrative shifts point to important changes in cultural scripts on women's positions in families, on the labour market, and in society.

Drawing data from the local population registers in two northeastern agricultural villages, this study examines the patterns and factors associated with divorce in preindustrial Japan. Divorce was easy and common during this period. More than two thirds of first marriages dissolved in divorce before individuals reached age fifty. Discrete-time event history analysis is applied to demonstrate how economic condition and household context influenced the likelihood of divorce for females. Risk of divorce was extremely high in the first three years and among uxorilocal marriages. Propensity of divorce increased upon economic stress in the community and among households of lower social status. Presence of parents, siblings, and children had strong bearings on marriage to continue.

This study tracked the occurrence of death, widowhood, institutionalization, and coresidence with others between 1994 and 2002 for a nationally representative sample of 1,580 Canadian respondents who, at initial interview, were aged 55 and older and living in a couple-only household. Although the majority of seniors remained in a couple-only household throughout the duration of the survey, nearly one in four who experienced a first transition underwent one or more subsequent transitions. Age, economic resources, and health were significant predictors of a specific first transition and multiple transitions. More work is needed to understand the dynamics of the aging process.

The present article aims at reviewing the legislation in Poland and other countries concerning the consent to DNA sample collection, with the special reference to genetic relatedness analyses (including paternity tests) in anonymous samples of biological materials. The Polish legislator has not regulated this issue in a direct manner. Therefore, in view of progressing commercialization of genetic paternity tests, it is necessary to undertake legislative actions towards regulation of DNA tests admissibility, both in civil proceedings and by commission of private individuals.

In the early twentieth century California became a big exporter of some agricultural products that, until then, had only been grown on a large scale in the mediterranean basin. As a result, exports of those products diminished or stagnated in Mediterranean countries, with important repercussions on their economies. The Spanish orange industry, however, continued to expand, despite the fact that a substantial percentage of Spanish oranges came from farms owned by (often illiterate) small peasants who, in comparison to the California growers, used a great deal of labor, small amounts of capital, and little science. This paper shows that Spanish farmers were in fact capable of growing high-quality oranges at prices that were more competitive than those in California, although interested they often preferred to satisfy the strong demand for middling fruit from Great Britain because it was a more profitable business. This, combined with a deficient use of brand names, gave the Spanish citrus industry serious reputation problems by the 1930s, from which, however, it recovered quickly.

Boys growing up in rural Gabon between 1900 and 1940 negotiated with many challenges: the rise of migrant labor, famines and hardships brought on by World War I, the growth of Christianity and African-based spiritual traditions, and the undermining of clans, which had been the main form of social and political organization in the nineteenth century. Parents, extended family members, missionaries, and European businesses recruited boys to serve their varied interests. Boys in turn developed new self-understandings by leaving their homes as students, workers, and clients of older men. This article examines the life histories of four boys to trace the successes and challenges that individual boys encountered in this turbulent era. Interestingly, older biological relatives of boys generally succeeded in maintaining their authority over children living far from home, although the education and wages that boys received forced older men to offer boys more benefits.

The most distressing consequences of the HIV/AIDS pandemic's impact on children has been the development of child-headed households (CHHs). Child 'only' households challenge notions of the ideal home, family, and 'normal' childhood, as well as undermining international attempts to institute children's rights. The development of these households raises practical questions about how the children will cope without parental guidance during their childhood and how this experience will affect their adulthood. Drawing on ethnographic research with five child heads and their siblings, this article explores how orphaned children living in 'child only' households organise themselves in terms of household domestic and paid work roles, explores the socialisation of children by children and the negotiation of teenage girls' movement. Further, it examines whether the orphaned children are in some way attempting to 'mimic' previously existing family/household gender relations after parental death. The study showed that all members in the CHHs irrespective of age and gender are an integral part of household labour including food production. Although there is masculinisation of domestic chores in boys 'only' households, roles are distributed by age. On the other hand, households with a gender mix tended to follow traditional gender norms. Conflict often arose when boys controlled teenage girls' movement and sexuality. There is a need for further research on CHHs to better understand orphans' experiences, and to inform policy interventions.

Grounded in literature review and an ethnographic study, this article examines contemporary Brazilian domestic life. Relations among women (employers and maids) and between women and men are analyzed with a focus on the home as a space in which gender, race, and class inequalities are constantly reproduced. The article argues that what happens in domestic life is constitutive of wider social divisions and that the domestic is a universe integral to the national social context. A case in point is the connection between the widespread use of paid domestic labor and the naturalization of black women as subservient, complementing the pairing of whiteness and class entitlement. Another case is the buffering role of maids in the development of gender conflicts in well-off homes, thus blurring gender hierarchies at a broader scale. Locating the domestic within the recent discussion on global domestic labor, the article compares particularities of Brazilian domestic life to those elsewhere.

King v. Smith, the first welfare case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, overturned the Alabama substitute father law. Such laws directed or allowed welfare officials to use the sexual behavior and reproductive capacity of poor African American women to alienate this population from "cash-money"; to reassert political and bureaucratic control over the intimate relationships of African Americans, demonstrating that this population was unprepared for civil rights and full citizenship; and to shore up white supremacy in the civil rights era. The context for this case which originated in Selma, Alabama in 1966 illustrates that even if poor African American women had had access to contraception and legal abortion at that time, they would still have lacked reproductive autonomy and dignity as the state surveilled their sexual behavior and enforced laws making sex, itself, as well as reproduction, and the right to define their own intimate relationships and families, a race and class privilege.

The relationship between tuakana and teina (the older and younger sibling or cousin of same sex) is the tumu (foundation, origin, cause) of rank in eastern Polynesia. By examining historical documents from selected island societies, namely, Mangaia and Aotearoa, we can understand the dynamics of this relationship as part of their world-view. Normally tuakana and teina had close, cooperative, mutually respectful and loyal relationships; the teina supporting their elder. Sometimes, however, the moral balance between them was affected either by one of them acting inappropriately towards the other, or by hostile acts from others. To remedy these threats to social cohesion, various strategies were adopted, including peace-making, flight or spatial separation, or fighting. Stories about this relationship continue to serve as the tumu for today's younger generations.

French Polynesia is an overseas collectivity of France whose kinship practices accommodate transgender parenting through the involvement of gender-variant (mahu) people in childrearing, including as adoptive parents in customary (faamu) adoption. While the existence and visibility of gender-variant people in French Polynesia is well documented, there is no literature on their involvement in parenting, reflecting a more general dearth of research on LGBT parenting in non-Western contexts. Drawing on the author's fieldwork in French Polynesia, this article fills this gap. The article also discusses the negative implications of France's ambivalence towards LGBT parenting for French Polynesian gender-variant parents and the children they raise.

The physical and ideological boundaries between public and private in early modern Scotland were constantly contested, resulting in a shifting reality of what was public and private. This fluidity has been recognized by historians, but how, when, and why the shifting took place is not as clear. The moral church courts (Kirk Sessions) of Reformation Scotland allow a unique opportunity to begin to understand the largely elusive boundaries between public and private in the early modern era.

This note revisits the author's June 2009 PDR article, "Reconsidering the Northwest European family system." Using an array of contemporary and historical census microdata from around the world with simple controls for agricultural employment and demographic structure, I detected no significant differences in complex family structure between nineteenth-century Western Europe and North America and twentieth-century developing countries. This article adds two new measures designed to detect stem families and joint families. The results suggest that Western Europeans and North Americans have had a long-standing aversion to joint family living arrangements, and that this pattern cannot be easily ascribed to demographic and economic conditions.

This article offers a reassessment of the contemporary relevance of the political thought of Henry Adams through a focus on his ideas about the relationship between family and politics. Adams' ideas have been dismissed by contemporary thinkers, like Richard Rorty, who rely on similar ideas about the role family should play in politics. The article traces the role of ideas about family as a unifying theme in Adams' history, fiction, and autobiography. It shows both why Adams believed familial sentiments, especially feminine and motherly love, were crucial to political unity, and why he thought these sentiments had become increasingly difficult to rely upon. In showing how Adams wrestled with the difficulties that emerge in putting familial sentiments to use for politics, the article suggests that Adams' ideas offer useful lessons for contemporary thinkers interested in the relationship between family and politics.

This article explores young women's orientation to work and motherhood in the post-communist context of radical socio-economic transformation in Europe. Based on a qualitative-explorative study into meanings of work and unemployment among young people in post-Soviet Lithuania, the paper introduces an empirically grounded classification of imagined gender-work arrangements. The single patterns of the classification are based on the three configurations of work and motherhood, work and partnership, and work and provision. The findings inform the reconstruction of the 'landscape' of imagined gendered adulthoods in Europe as well as the analysis of emerging gender relations under conditions of rapid social change.

This study examines the total package of child support that mothers receive from the nonresident fathers of their children, by focusing on three components of total support: formal cash, informal cash, and in-kind support. Using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this article considers how contributions change over time and the effects of child support enforcement on these contributions. Findings suggest that total cash support received drops precipitously over the first 15 months of living apart (as informal support drops off) and then increases slightly after 45 months (as the increase in formal support overtakes the decrease in informal support). While the study finds no effect of enforcement on total support received in the first 5 years after a nonmarital birth, the substantial differences in total cash support received by the length of time that parents have not been cohabiting suggest that strong enforcement may be efficacious over time.

Migration from Peru has increased dramatically over the past decade, but the social and relational repercussions of these transnational movements have not yet been fully explored. Examination of the way migrants manage their responsibilities to dependent kin in Peru reveals that child fostering makes it possible for adults to migrate in search of better work opportunities by ensuring care for their children and company for their older relatives. For Peruvians engaging in labor migration, child fostering tempers some of the challenges of continuing to participate in established social networks from a distance.

The aim of the article is to modify our understanding of the history of middle-class marriage. It draws upon the detailed examination of one Wolverhampton couple's marriage to explore relationships between husbands and wives-and between ex-husbands and ex-wives-in early twentieth-century provincial England. It argues that patriarchal and companionate marriages co-existed alongside one another; that even in patriarchal marriages wives were prepared to seek legal redress for their grievances; and that even in insular and unfashionable regions of the country such as the Black Country the courts, both civil and criminal, policed masculinity and femininity in their assessment of where fault lay.

During 2008, rumours about revolting incestuous encounters between sons and their mothers circulated in the Bushbuckridge municipality of the South African lowveld. This article views these rumours as expressing moral panic, paying particular attention to the historical contexts of their emergence and circulation, and to their temporal orientation. I locate these rumours in the periphery of South Africa's de-industrialising economy, marked by increased unemployment and criminality among men and by a growing prominence of women-headed households. They express a regressive temporalisation and pessimistic vision, not of development, progress and civilisation, but rather of deterioration and de-civilisation. Through the alleged act of incest, sons who engage in crime usurp the authority of fathers who once produced value in strategic industries and mines. As such the rumours envision a dystopia marked by the 'death of the father' and chaotic disorder without morality and law.

This paper illustrates the factors and features of the revival of paid care and domestic work in Italy. While Italy is experiencing a boom in the recourse to carers for the elderly, there is not a corresponding expansion in paid private childcare, in spite of growing female employment and limited public services for children. One of the reasons for this is the growing involvement of grandparents in childcare. In Italy, a country characterised by a “Mediterranean welfare regime”, people also have recourse to their own mothers (and fathers) to care for their children, in spite of the fact that they can afford to pay for childminding and babysitting. Thus it is not only (migrant) domestic workers who frequently rely on their parents to care for their own children, an issue widely discussed in the literature on global care chains. Their employers, too, may rely on them. Grandparents, however, have turned out to play an important role in childcare not only in Italy but also in Western countries with better childcare services. Focusing on these issues, the paper contributes both to the debate on global care chains and to that on the role of the family within different welfare systems.

This article statistically analyzes quantitative data from numerous sources in order to assess changes in marriage patterns, family structure, and rates of social mobility during the period from 1282 to 1494. During this period, three systems of social stratification coexisted -- wealth, political office, and age of family -- but these contending status systems were not consistent in their rankings of families. Each status system was conservative in the sense that elite families at the top of that hierarchy married each other in order to stabilize their position. But because of inconsistency in rankings, contradiction within the elite opened up the Florentine marriage system to widespread upward social mobility by new men. In their own families, successful new men aggressively imitated their economically and politically declining status superiors. Sharp class divisions thereby blurred into continuous and negotiable status gradients. These open-elite patterns of social mobility, present throughout the early Florentine Renaissance, were most extreme during the Albizzi regime, immediately following the Ciompi Revolt.

By analyzing the migration behavior and transnational residential strategies of first-generation, aging migrants from a particular Moroccan sending region, this study contributes to a conceptual critique of migration theories that identify the household as the most relevant decisionmaking unit. It highlights the role of intra-household power inequalities and conflicts in migration decisionmaking as well as the effects of migration decisions for intra-household power relations. Many labor migrants who left Morocco to work in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s did not realize their wish to return but instead ended up reunifying their families at the destination. An increasing proportion adopts a pendulum migration strategy to reconcile their own wish to retain strong ties with Morocco with the reluctance of children and spouses to return. Migrants who unilaterally decided not to reunify their families usually return after their active working life. However, this unilateral decision also blocks legal entry into Europe for their children, which has generated considerable intergenerational tensions.

The harem image has dominated the conceptualizations of the family and the private sphere in the Ottoman empire at the turn of the century. This essay aims to review these conceptualizations and locate family life in both public and private spheres. The main source of inquiry will be the literary writings of Fatma Aliye (1862-1936) who wrote about women, marriage, education, poverty, and slavery. In these works, she outlined common dreams for Eastern and Western women, such as the love and companionship of an honest, monogamous man. These dreams envisioned Muslim women performing a variety of roles and thus transcended the given expectations from the family and from Muslim women as a monolithic category. In this light, this essay seeks to contextualize Aliye's works within the history of the family by evaluating Aliye's views particularly on marriage.

Using the controversy surrounding marriage with a deceased wife’s sister that occupied Presbyterian and Congregationalist theologians of the early Republic, this essay explores the eroticization of the sentimental family and the contours and crises of the incest prohibition in the wake of the Revolution. The essay begins by tracing the history of ecclesiastical trials of incestuous marriage in the Presbyterian church, arguing that the failure of the synods and General Assembly to offer definitive judgments of such marriages suggests a tension in the force of a transcendent incest prohibition. Two cases from the late 1820s, in particular, gained national attention in both the theological and secular press, and force the Presbyterian church to explore the legitimacy of their incest prohibition, and exploration that lead, ultimately, to a constriction of the incest prohibition as written in the Westminster confession of Faith. I then turn to the conjunction of kinship, sexuality, and sentiment that animates the texts comprising the controversy and argue that, in an effort to defend an expansive interpretation of the Levitical incest prohibitions these theologians were among the earliest writers to argue that sentimental, affectionate relations between family members were inherently erotic. In this sense, the family becomes the primary site for the deployment of sexuality. Such a concern about the incestuous nature of family relations, in turn, forced theologians to consider the problem of incest in the postlapsarian origins of society.

This study looks at multiracial boys and girls, often referred to as "half castes," in Nyasaland. It reconstructs the status and agency of these children by assessing the ways in which they maneuvered local African and European communities to explore opportunities that would improve their individual situations. At times they took initiative by writing letters to the Nyasaland administration for financial support. Furthermore, state responses to these letters provide evidence of how the state perceived these children, particularly the moral responsibility felt given that their fathers were often white settlers and at times colonial officials. This article also discusses the general challenges and opportunities that childhood experiences raise, with specific attention to the kind of subaltern social knowledge that such evidence presents--knowledge that challenges conventional visions of what constitutes history and who makes it.