Ethnologia Europaea

FROM ACCOMPANYING FAMILY MEMBER TO ACTIVE SUBJECT

This article explores transnational spiritual motherhood in women’s congregations from a historical and anthropological perspective, considering the question as to how ideas of motherhood have changed across geographic borders and over an extended period of time. Within a religious context, kinship terms (mother, sister, daughter) are based not on biological, but on ritual relationships. In the past, social contact to biological parents and to the family of origin was reduced to a minimum or cut off entirely when a young woman entered a religious congregation. In view of the transnationalization of convent life and the accompanying increased mobility of Catholic sisters, this presents new challenges for many religious orders.

This paper discusses the grounding of the family in popular genealogy today. It applies a historical and comparative approach to the use of parish registers in three empirical cases from Austria. This use consists in a continued process of rooting the family locally, while simultaneously delocalizing it through the digital connection of data kept separate by the Catholic Church for many centuries. Grounding the family is thus a complex articulation of the modern discourse of settledness, closely bound up with a popular historical culture able to access archival sources directly for the first time in history. The paper questions the category of “imagined families”, which may marginalize this popular practice of producing kinship and perpetuate the essentialist notion of otherwise “authentic” (e.g. juridical, social, biological) families.1

Based on a two-year ethnographic research project on the making of European migration policy, this article explores the ways in which gender is deeply inscribed in the articulations, practices, and rationalities of the new European migration regime. It focuses on the area of “anti-trafficking” policies at national and transnational levels, showing how and why an “anti-trafficking dispositif ” has been created over the last twenty years. Anti-trafficking policy, which targets women in particular, has become one of the main pillars of a restrictive, Europeanized migration and border regime. The article offers theoretical and methodological approaches to this gendering of migration policy, and asks what such a co-optation of feminist discourses and practices means for reflexive feminist cultural theory, research, and practice.

The in-vitro fertilization (IVF) technology has been in use in Poland for over 20 years, with success and social approval. However, in 2007 a vehement debate on moral, legal, and economic aspects of applying this technology of assisted procreation broke out. This was related to the gaps in Polish legislation lacking the regulations concerning the IVF, especially concerning the coverage by the public health-care system. Moreover, the Catholic voices demanding prohibition of the IVF had been multiplying and intensifying. The article follows this debate, investigates the discursive strategies employed to oppose IVF, and analyses different positions, especially the argumentation of the opponents, and the narratives by those who struggle with infertility.