Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how different practices and ideologies of care reflect distinct modes of constitution of relationships of belonging. I focus on the issue of childcare transference and the ways in which these are handled and conceptualised contrastingly by different actors in the Ecuadorian capital Quito.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I explore how different practices and ideologies of care reflect distinct modes of constitution of essential relationships of belonging. I focus on the issue of child care transference and ways these are handled and conceptualized contrastingly by different actors in the Ecuadorian capital Quito: child welfare professionals and policy makers on the one side and mestizos from marginal neighborhood areas and of modest means on the other side. I am especially interested in how relational continuity is thought of and practiced in alternative ways by the actors' involvement in child care transferences.

Ecuadorian child welfare legislation in general and the adoption legislation in particular have through the whole of the 1990s and well into the 2000s gone through a series of substantial reforms. These reforms affirm through policy implementation and professional interventions the biogenetic basis of kinship. In contrast to public policy and practice a considerable number of Ecuadorian children who do not live with their original parent(s) form part of informal care transference arrangements. Informal child care practices among the mestizo population I have carried out fieldwork are characterized by a high degree of changeability, influencing ways children are cared for and circulated between caretakers. This is due to substantial internal and transnational migratory movements, and to a considerable fluidity in the crucial relationships involved in sexual reproduction: between procreating adults and between parents and children.

In the discussion I contrast the knowledge and practice of policy makers and professionals, with those of people of marginal neighborhood areas. The first of these privileges a reproductive sociability which affirms relational fixity and which applies a rationale of rupture and compartmentalization in the constitution of the adoptive relationship. The second of these practices reflects changing conditions of life and the tendency to overlap and accumulate social relationships when children are circulated to new caretakers. Child care transference is here embedded in a reproductive sociability based on relational fluidity and the making of relatedness through day to day activities of care. As I will exemplify in the paper, these practices are not just different they are also often in conflict in concrete situations of intervention.