Kinship, Love, and Life Cycle in Contemporary Havana, Cuba focuses on the lives of low-income Havana residents over the life cycle from birth to death. The book documents how kinship and love relations are created, reproduced, and negotiated at different life stages through gendered dialectics of care, important to both individuals' relationships and state politics. In the process, through a variety of practices and meanings ranging from rituals to understandings of sexual desire, gender becomes affirmed as the central social difference characterizing Cuban society. The book argues that Cubans live their lives embedded in social networks of care that are both emotionally and pragmatically central to individual existence. At the same time, the island's contemporary political and economic changes carry gendered consequences to everyday relationships, with the potential to introduce unexpected changes to the life cycle.

Autorentext

Heidi Härkönen 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.

Zusammenfassung

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.

Inhalt

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
5. Love, Sexuality, and Adult Gender Relations: Nobody Likes Sleeping Alone
6. Old Age, Funerals, and Death: Reciprocating Care
7. The State as Family
   Conclusion: Time, Care, and Kinship