Paper short abstract:

In my paper I explore the negotiations of care responsibilities between state agents and families in a social welfare office in Tanzania. Based on a relational approach I show the interdigitation of different social domains and competing ideologies and moralities about kinship and parenting.

Paper long abstract:

“One out of three children experiences violence”; “Husband and wife in jail for killing their child”. During my fieldwork in Tanzania, hardly a day passed without an article in the newspapers addressing various forms of violence against children. The obvious question, as one of the articles states, is thus “how to protect children”. As a state agency, one of the main responsibilities of the social welfare office is to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the ‘most vulnerable’ citizens. Parents who ‘failed’ to meet the basic rights of their child(ren) make up the majority of the clients. Once summoned to appear at the agency they enter long negotiations about their parental roles and care responsibilities, often involving various parties.Drawing on several cases I collected during 12 months of ethnographic research in the department of health in a district in Tanzania, I explore the negotiations of care responsibilities between families and the state. Based on the Convention on the Rights of the Child and “vested with the power of the state” (Dubois 2014) the social welfare officers intervene into the lives of mainly poor families revealing often competing ideologies and moralities about kinship and proper parenting. The social welfare office thus presents a promising example to follow recent calls for a relational (state) anthropology (Thelen/Vetteres/Benda-Beckmann 2018) and show the interdigitation of different realms such as kinship/state or public/private. Furthermore, the perspective on care offers insights into social order and change (Thelen 2015) and prompts additional questions about need and deservingness.