Kinship, Love, and Life Cycle in Contemporary Havana, Cuba To Not Die Alone [Hardcover]

Kinship, Love, and Life Cycle in Contemporary Havana, Cuba is an ethnographic analysis of gender, kinship, and love in contemporary Cuba. The book documents how low-income Havana residents negotiate their social relations through gendered caring practices over the life cycle from birth to death.

1. Introduction: Bodies, Love, and Life in Urban Havana???

2. Kinship as an Idiom for Social Relations??

3. Fertility and Reproduction: Having a Child is Worth the Trouble

4. Becoming a Woman: Quince as a Moment of Female Sexuality

6. Old Age, Funerals, and Death: Reciprocating Care

7. The State as Family

Conclusion: Time, Care, and Kinship

H?rk?nen has provided readers with a comprehensive survey of life-cycle rituals that is sophisticated in showing how rules of reciprocity in Cuban kinship have changed over the life cycle, in history, and vary between genders. & an important contribution to the anthropology of Socialism, exposing readers to another example of the diverse cultural practices that have flourished in post-Socialist societies. & will be of particular interest to gender studies, post-Socialist studies, and Cuban, Latin American and Caribbean area studies researchers. (Hope Bastian, Social Anthropology - Anthropologie Sociale, August, 2017)

Heidi H?rk?nen gained her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology in the University of Helsinki, Finland, in 2014. She has been Visiting Research Scholar at the City University of New York Graduate Center, USA, and Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Kinship, Love, and Life Cycle in Contemporary Havana, Cuba focuses on the lives of low-income Havana residents over the life cycle from lƒz