This recommendation was written by a social worker in 1977 in her assessment of a family living in a village in southwestern Hungary. I read the case file in the Somogy County Archives in 2013, as part of my fieldwork on the relationships of children living in state care in late socialist Hungary. I had spent the previous six months carrying out oral history interviews with care leavers who had grown up in children’s homes in Hungary in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was now looking for further data on the connections between parents, caseworkers and children in care. This book studies the nature and range of relationships and kinship ties for children living in Hungary’s residential childcare system as a means of analysing how care, kinship and state practices are mutually constituted and interrelated.The mother as well as the father of the minor can get angry very quickly and they have made it clear that they will take their child out of the children’s home if the fees are not reduced. Of course, a child who has left the family under such circumstances [due to rough treatment by his parents] cannot go back there. We recommend that the fees be lowered so that József can remain in state care because in our opinion the parents do not treat the other three children [siblings living at home] in the nicest way.
Until he was five, József lived with his maternal grandparents and their children (József’s uncle and aunts—four of whom were still minors). After his fifth birthday his parents collected him, but his stay with them was short and he was taken cut and bruised into residential care, prompting the negotiations over state care fees mentioned above. His grandparents wished to take József out of care, but were not permitted because they were not his parents. They thus decided to legally adopt him in 1978. When his adoptive father died a year later, the adoption was dissolved and József returned to his biological parents. This time around caseworkers deemed József’s parents to be ‘calmer’ and praised the ‘orderly financial circumstances’ and that they had solved their housing problems. The village school teacher was asked her opinion and she saw hope that József would develop with his family, but added that as both parents work during the day their oldest daughter, József’s eleven-year-old sister Ildikó, missed school to do housework and look after the younger children. The case was closed soon thereafter. József was allowed to stay with his parents and there was no record of a follow-up of the teacher’s impression that Ildikó was endangered.
József’s views are not included at any point in the thick case file, so it is not clear how he felt about being circulated among his (extended) family and state care. We do not know what he thought about being collected by his mother, thus separating him from his grandparents and young aunts and uncles. There is also no information on his feelings about being adopted and then un-adopted. There were two further children when he returned to his parents’ house—his new siblings born in his absence. It is such constellations of relatedness and the personal views of people who lived in state care about their relationships to parents and siblings as well as care received outside of kinship relations that I explore in this book. I look at the varied nature of kin relations, their sometimes absent or cruel nature and processes leading to their possible dissolution.
József’s case hints at the competing images of ‘proper’ parenting and the ideal family that different professionals working with children held in late socialist Hungary. While the social worker focused on the household budget and approved that the mother of five children was in paid employment, the teacher prioritised the education of the children and thus advocated a mother-at-home policy. The case also illustrates how norms of ‘appropriate’ family units that seemingly excluded grandparents from the upbringing of children became enacted on the ground through the refusal to let József’s grandparents care for him. Finally, the case provides an example of the room of manoeuvre that families could have to get state officials to act in their interest. Not only did the parents negotiate lower fees, but the grandparents adopted József, so that they officially fitted the nuclear family ideal promoted in most central family policies.
In this book, I argue that the various relationships of children in care were shaped by images of the family, childhood and the state held by different actors. I will show how images of ‘proper’ kinship focussed on parent-child relations, thereby systematically undervaluing the relationships of children in care to institutional carers, teachers and local residents, along with connections to classmates and siblings. The nature of these multiple relationships provides the topic for this book. I ask how being in state care interrupted, ended, maintained or created personal relationships for children in care in late socialist Hungary. Rather than assuming that biological parents are the key point in figuring out kinship relations, I look at the importance of care for establishing personal relations spanning the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres (Thelen 2015).
The starting premise of this book is that the child protection system and state care provide an entry point to explore the mutual constituency of state and family in children’s relationships. State care settings are particularly suited to observe the negotiation of boundaries between the state and family because state-paid staff take on tasks of raising and caring for children, which is usually seen as the ‘private’ realm of parents. I will explore how the concepts of ‘state’ and ‘family’ were constructed in interactions between parents, state officials and children in care and the implications of such classificatory practices in characterising certain kinship or state practices as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (cf. Thelen and Alber 2017). My research focuses on Hungary in the 1970s and early 1980s and will show how children’s relationships were shaped by increased ‘expert’ scrutiny of parenting and a policy shift to holding parents responsible for social ills. Conceiving of parents as incompetent and thus in need of expert advice on how to raise children was not a reserve of socialist policy and demonstrates the wider implications of this book for understanding the increased state activity in regards to parent-child relations beyond the immediate Hungarian context.
In this introduction I present the conceptual frame for my book. My work is at the intersection of the anthropology of the state and the anthropology of kinship. I first draw on recent theorisations of care and kinship that look at the processes through which relatedness is formed and reverse processes of de-kinning. I next discuss the relational approach to the state that characterises my research. I pursue this approach in order to emphasise the various relational modes in which officials interacted with children in care and the significance of concrete relations in negotiating and producing state-kin boundaries. The third part focuses on understanding state care and the context of late socialist Hungary. This is followed by a discussion of my mixed-method qualitative research strategy. Finally, I outline the structure of my book, summarising the main arguments of each chapter about the diverse relations of children in care and the co-production of kinship and state through care practices. As the book will ultimately show, child protection policies, caseworkers and state carers did not diminish, and actually reinforced, an ‘ideal’ of relationships to biological parents for children in care, thereby devaluing other possible kinship connections.
Care to Kin Me
This study is framed by anthropological understandings of kinship as ‘produced through social practices rather than determined by the physical act of birth’ (Thelen et al. 2013: 1). Although anthropological studies of kinship were heavily criticised for rigid and ethnocentric schemas in the 1970s and 1980s (Needham 1971; Schneider 1984), the new kinship studies ‘taught us to study relations’ rather than presupposing relational classifications (Howell 2006: 38). Interest in the making of kinship relations around issues such as gay/lesbian kinship (Weston 1991) or reproductive technologies (Franklin and Ragoné 1998) fitted into the social constructivist turn in social anthropology and its neighbouring. By focussing on practices, processes and meanings, anthropologists raise questions of how kinship is negotiated and confirmed in daily actions and changed through an ever-evolving policy and legal system. This also entails exploration of what is known and passed on about kinship relations by different actors (see Astuti 2000 on who saves and produces knowledge about kinship in the context of Madagascar). My data will show that children in care since birth with no contact with their parents nonetheless received information about their relatives based on information in their case file and birth record that was relayed by social workers and staff in care homes.
Anthropological research highlights that there is a tension between the fluid notion of kinship in anthropological debates as constructed by processes of ‘kinning,’ relating, nurturing or belonging that can create kin with friends, colleagues (Fischer 2010), places and even the nation state (Carsten 1995) and the ways in which kinship can be fixed into legal or religious frameworks and restricted by state practices. Howell (2006: 40) points out that anthropologists argue that kinship relations are constructed whilst a different view is expressed in family law. In my research we will clearly see that biology and not relations mattered to the formal right of parents to take their children out of state care. Lambek (2013: 242) suggests that kinship should be understood as constituted through certain kinds of performative acts, which are recognised, regulated and even constituted by the law, and then as the histories produced by such acts. Registering a birth, for example, is intended to produce responsibilities and informs people of their commitments to one another. A birth certificate does not of course produce behaviour, but rather criteria for judging what is right and wrong with respect to specific relationships. Such state-produced or state-authorised acts of kinship can exclude other candidates such as the staff in state-run residential homes, local community or friends that feature in my research. There is no legal recognition in such cases of the actual relationships in which people experience the need to care and be cared for (Borneman 2001).
The focus of a large segment of new kinship studies on the processes that produce kinship gives kinship by default a positive overtone. Research on surrogacy (Goodwin 2010; Pande 2014) or gamete donation (Edwards 2015; Kahn 2006; Klotz 2014) presents kinship as created through intention, choice and love. It is often overlooked that hierarchy, exclusion, dominance and subordination are just as much part of kinship as amity or solidarity (Franklin and McKinnon 2001: 18). Thelen (2015: 507) highlights that care is also ‘still overwhelmingly seen as something positive’ despite the stress in disability studies on power and hierarchies within caring relationships. My study will show that not all care is good nor is care always intended to produce lasting relationships. The emphasis on kinship as a form of connection means there are few studies about disconnection, rupture or ‘de-kinning,’ to use Howell’s concept developed to understand transnational adoption practices. Howell (2006: 63) defines kinning, which is her focus, as ‘the process by which a foetus or newborn child (or a previously unconnected person) is brought into a significant and permanent relationship with a group of people that is expressed in a kin idiom.’ It is de-kinning, she argues, that makes adoption possible—creating the ‘socially naked child’ (Howell 2007: 26–27). It is important to ask from whose perspective the de-kinning takes place and whether it was successful. My book deals with this flip side of kinship: h...