Comments on: What Kinship Is – And Is Not https://allegralaboratory.net/review-what-kinship-is-and-is-not/ Anthropology for Radical Optimism Tue, 17 May 2022 11:02:51 +0000 hourly 1 By: Laurent DeSerresBérard https://allegralaboratory.net/review-what-kinship-is-and-is-not/#comment-79541 Thu, 30 Jun 2016 19:05:37 +0000 https://allegralaboratory.net/?p=19900#comment-79541 I liked the article. I couldn’t help but link it to a book i read some time ago, by Ulfrid Beck, about the society of risk and where he talked about individualisation, and the weakened model of traditional families. I think we could say also that nowdays, in north america at least, rythm of life and values of self realisation bring us to take less responsability towards our aging parents. If i take the opposite, in China where those values are institutionally enforce and retirements home are a rare thing, families are expected to take care of elders. But it is known that with it’s recent capitalisation and societal change, the new generation find it hard to reconcile family values and the individualism brought by modern change. It is more worth for them to work far away, to go abroad, and to have their own proprety instead of the family heritage.

I mostly wonder how the change in elderly care, could be an indicator of the strenght of the semiotic value of birth, and interdependance. And how it could change in the future if the trend keep on going.

Even here in Quebec, during the student strike of 2012 for tuition of universities, big part of population ask the new generation of students ( not integrated in society yet, and still dependant) to ”pay and do their part”. Even new generation seems to be more detached from a parental or family responsibility, to be consider as a individual who need to rely on itself, at least in many societal discourse.

I think this view is the base to many questionning about modern relations.

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