Financialized Adulthood in Germany
Final Report Abstract
The past couple of decades have witnessed a vast change in how family life is regulated in Germany. Family policies have reorganized the resources and responsibilities of families in caring for their children and for their elderly: reconciling them with (mostly women’s) paid employment on the one hand, while intensifying the family’s care-work demands on the other. This project consisted of an ethnographic study of family-based childcare and eldercare policies, practices, and discourses in Germany. Its goal was to identify and explain the new norms of family care for one’s children and elderly parents in terms of the exigencies of privatized and commodified social reproduction in contemporary Germany. The project further examined how the enlistment of family members for the management of childcare and eldercare according to these norms shapes sentiments and relations among family members. Finally, the project contributed to the anthropology of kinship and to social reproduction theory by bringing these separate bodies of knowledge into an ethnographically grounded conversation with each other. The project resulted in two peer-reviewed conceptual publications on social reproduction theory and its relation to the family. It also resulted in two peer-reviewed ethnographic and theoretical articles describing the sentiments and practices of family caregivers in Germany; policies regarding such care work in Germany; and the ways in which the family is entangled in and affected by these policies and broader trends in German capitalism.
Publications
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Elusive adulthood and surplus life-time in Spain. Critique of Anthropology, 41(2), 149-164.
Weiss, Hadas
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Intensive Parenting in Germany. American Anthropological Association annual meeting, Baltimore, November 17
Weiss, Hadas
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Social Reproduction. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
Weiss, Hadas
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Family and the Reproduction of Capitalism. European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference, Belfast, August 28
Weiss, Hadas
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From Desire to Endurance: Hanging on in a Spanish Village. Cultural Anthropology, 37(1).
Weiss, Hadas
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Social reproduction as the reproduction of capitalism. Focaal, 2022(93), 105-111.
Weiss, Hadas
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The extended family and social reproduction. Political Economy Workshop. Tel Aviv University, January 5
Weiss, Hadas
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Depopulation and Social Reproduction. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozialund Kulturanthropologie, München, July 25-28
Weiss, Hadas
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Social reproduction and the family: contradictions of childcare and eldercare in Germany. Dialectical Anthropology, 47(4), 299-314.
Weiss, Hadas
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Family ideology: uneasy entanglements of eldercare in Germany. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 30(3), 555-570.
Weiss, Hadas
