Book review: Transfers of Belonging: Child Fostering in West Africa in the 20th Century.

Alber, Erdmute (2018), Transfers of Belonging: Child Fostering in West Africa in the 20th Century, Leiden: Brill, ISBN 978-90-04-35980-2 (paperback), 269 pages A central feature of anthropology is to question what is assumed to be natural. Erdmute Alber questions any naturalistic assumption with the very first sentence of her fascinating and very timely book on parenthood and fosterage in Benin: "Nothing is seemingly more natural than the idea that children belong to their birth parents who are caring for them" (1). Beyond globalisation, Alber's monograph shows the importance of long-term ethnographic fieldwork in one field site. [Extracted from the article]