Focusing on key themes, this chapter highlights how kinship and relatedness constitute a vital lens for understanding gender. First, the everyday is the principal ground for examining relatedness. It illumines how gender shapes our lives and is, in turn, formed, maintained, and altered over time. The borders between gender and other aspects of life can be porous. Second, the seemingly merely domestic or intimate can be generative – a theme that builds on earlier feminist insights. Kinship has wider consequences, including for politics or economics. Finally, kinship is imbued with the potential for hierarchy and inequality, ambivalence, ruptures, and failure. Its generativity includes its less amiable aspects. Gendered inequities and enmities arise from these aspects. Breaks in the fabric of kinship, however, imply the possibility of repair, which may depend on gendered forms of labor. Threading through these themes is care, a key aspect of everyday life and relatedness alike. Care encompasses whole economies and traverses national borders. Care speaks, too, to the vulnerability that is at the heart of what it means to be human. It mirrors, and at times heightens, the difficulties inherent in kinship.

In 2004, the HART Act legislated openness and identifiability regarding donor information for children conceived with the aid of donor-assisted technologies in Aotearoa New Zealand. As well as acknowledging the psychological and emotional well-being of openness for donor offspring, the rationale for change in policy and law also recognised the importance of tracing genealogy and the exchange of information about genetic origins. Of particular significance to Māori, the transfer of reproductive materials between known and unknown donors and recipients has implications for social identity in ways that may not be deemed as significant for non-Māori. This chapter draws on qualitative research data from a study conducted in Aotearoa with people accessing assisted reproduction for the purpose of family building. The aim of the chapter is to critically examine assumptions about the differences between Māori and Pākehā understandings of kinship affinities and relatedness in the process of making families.

Evolution by natural selection is not a process by which objects called “species” change over time under selective pressures. There are no such objects. It is a process by which organisms that are related in salient ways, by which they are specific we might say (as opposed to being members of a species), are replaced by others. There is more than one way in which they can be specific. One is related compatibility, which some organisms, the xs, exhibit just when they have common ancestry, when they are reproductively compatible, and when every organism so related to one of the xs is among the xs. Given this way of understanding specificity, we current humans, the Homo sapiens presently inhabiting the planet, could give way to future humans that resemble us only insofar as they are reproductively compatible with us. What is more, our humanity is not essential to us. Neither is our origin, in that we might have originated in a different time and place. So in theory – given technology that is currently out of sight – we could change ourselves into creatures that are very unlike us.

This contribution surveys various large-scale quantitative techniques that have been utilized in the literature on varieties and dialects of English to determine their typological relatedness: (a) aggregative measures of distance or similarity, based on atlas or survey data; (b) typological profiling, a technique that draws on naturalistic text corpora to calculate usage- and frequency-based measures of grammatical analyticity and syntheticity; (c) a corpus-based method, inspired by work in information theory, that is designed to map out varieties based on how they differ in terms of language/dialect complexity: and (d) an approach to calculate distances between varieties as a function of the extent to which grammatical variation patterns in usage data are dissimilar.

Chapter 5 attends to the notions of siblinghood between female friends or lovers of the same age group. Drawing on the idealized closeness and harmony afforded to uterine sisters, especially among the matrilenal Akan, a same-sex lover can be invoked as a sibling in order to front a non-sexual connection. Among insiders however, claims to being “of the same blood” signal emotional and sexual attachments. Thereby everyday practices such as bathing, washing, and eating together over extended periods of time emerge as the crucial markers of these familial intimacies. Conversely, it examines the spectre of incest that lingers among same-sex lovers who do share lineage ties and are thus both metaphorically and genealogically related. The chapter argues that female friends who raise children together, take care of each other’s elders, and build joint networks that include male husbands and relatives, do much of the work afforded to (queer) families.

The introduction situates the book in relation to academic and activist developments concerning same-sex cultures and intimacies in Africa at the turn of the century. Prominent among the key terms concepts it introduces, is the African feminist critique of the “ethnopornographic” colonial gaze on Black women’s sexual bodies and the queer destabilization of categories of sexual identity and its attending LGBT identity politics. The epistemological challenge of researching female same-sex desires from a queer postcolonial perspective, is illustrated through a discussion of the conflicting African and queer feminist representations of “women marriages,” a historical institution found in a variety of African societies. Considering the few anthropological references to female same-sex practices and to the historical practice of “friendship marriage” in colonial Ghana, it highlights the conceptual potential of friendship and kinship, as opposed to and alongside sexuality for an intersectional feminist analysis women’s erotic desires and intimacies.

The chapter examines attributes of public work environments that lead employees to develop ties to an organization's values. Empirical research indicates a supportive work environment is critical to sustaining public service motivation. Institutional arrangements promote employees’ basic psychological needs and create conditions for common pool resources. The chapter discusses two strategies for reinforcing supportive work environments: creating learning and growth opportunities and balancing job security and performance. Possibly the biggest key to promoting personal growth is creating opportunities for employee growth and learning throughout a career. Leadership development programs could also be offered to employees up and down the hierarchy. Finally, organizations should pay attention to subjective career success, ensuring that employees feel they are fulfilling their purpose in life. The chapter then examines strategies for developing organizational norms that balance job security with performance, including balancing performance and property rights, improving performance management systems and performance appraisals, and utilizing performance-based reductions in force.

Parental autonomy and relatedness support are crucial aspects of parental involvement and address core psychological needs. Although parental autonomy support has been incorporated into successful prevention programs, broader preventive possibilities will be examined. Six parental autonomy support intervention studies have been conducted with mostly middle to high socioeconomic status (SES) students in the United States, Canada, and Italy, yielding positive effects on intrinsic motivation, emotions toward learning, engagement, altruism, and mental health. Although cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have indicated that parental autonomy support promotes positive outcomes among students across all SES levels and in diverse countries, it is time to assess whether parental autonomy support interventions are equally or more effective for youth of low-SES backgrounds, diverse ethnicities, and diverse nationalities. The specific components of parental autonomy support will be discussed, as well as the potential to integrate autonomy supportive parenting with other valuable aspects of parent involvement.

This chapter explores the personal meanings and emotional effects of ruptured kinship ties, including challenges related to sustaining emotional bonds. By illustrating how the fragmentation of family communities continues in exile, the analysis adds to the growing awareness of daily stressors in receiving countries as challenging the well-being and agency of refugees. The analysis shows that forced separation is experienced in the context of relatedness created through social practices of family members beyond the nuclear family in home and transit countries. The emotional distress related to forced separation from kin are aggravated by ongoing war that is highly present in the everyday life of refugees. The impact and personal meaning of forced separation are also shaped by living conditions and possibilities for access to and participation in local communities. The analysis pinpoints the importance of exploring the variation of family practices and understandings in refugee populations in order to grasp the personal meaning of forced separation and support refugees in re-establishing their everyday life and coping with dramatically altered family configurations.

Self-determination theory is a generalized theory of behavior that focuses on motivation quality and psychological need satisfaction as preeminent behavioral determinants. The theory distinguishes between autonomous and controlled forms of motivation. Autonomous motivation reflects willingly engaging in behaviors for self-endorsed reasons, whereas controlled motivation reflects engaging in behavior for externally or internally pressured or controlled reasons. Satisfaction of the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness is necessary for optimal functioning and well-being, and influences the form of motivation, autonomous or controlled, experienced by individuals when acting. Autonomous motivation is consistently related to sustained behavior change and adaptive outcomes. Interventions to promote autonomous motivation have targeted psychological need support provided by social agents (e.g., leaders, managers, teachers, health professionals), particularly autonomy need support. Interventions using need-supportive techniques have demonstrated efficacy in promoting autonomous motivation, behavior change, and adaptive outcomes. Research has identified behaviors displayed, and language used, by social agents, or communicated by other means, that support autonomous motivation. Autonomy-support training programs have been developed to train social agents to promote autonomous motivation and behavior change. Future research needs to examine the unique and interactive effects of specific autonomy-support techniques, provide further evidence for long-term efficacy, and examine “dose” effects and long-term efficacy.

Chapter 1 discusses the use of archaeological and anthropological theory in Egyptology, characterised as an area study in need of analytical methods from other disciplines. Kinship and marriage are presented as a case study of how philological and archaeological approaches can be productively woven together through the use of two theoretical models, processual kinship and material agency, applied mainly to stelae from the Middle Kingdom.

A processual understanding of kinship needs to be framed within the emergence of culturalist critiques to kinship theory such as new kinship studies. This approach conceptualises kinship as a performative, context-bound sociocultural phenomenon and proposes ‘relatedness’ as its main analytical category. Material agency explores how objects have an impact on people, on other objects and on their surrounding landscapes. That entanglement can be fruitfully analysed through notions such as enchantment, distributed personhood, or object biographies. By virtue of these approaches, stelae are understood as objects that do not just represent reality, but they rather create a reality that embodies perceptions of the social fabric.

“Constructive disorientation” is a feeling of arousal brought about by a perceived disconnect between the current and a desired state, accompanied by a sense of efficacy that one is capable of dealing with that disconnect. The chapter discusses the qualities that make disorientation “constructive,” and ways of promoting constructive disorientation in others: posing a clear but manageable challenge, allowing flexibility in managing that challenge, providing an environment conducive to “deep work,” and communicating the freedom to fail.