Lecture by Jacob Bessen
Chaired by Jeremy Kessler

Children are often framed as the embodiment of a shared future – which makes them powerful grounds for projects of collective life, imposed from above and improvised from below. This lecture traces one such project: "Children of Saints," a devotional practice in Sutera, a mountaintop town in central Sicily. Broadly interpreted by its practitioners, "children of saints" refers to the redistribution of children across parents in a neighborhood, but also encompasses collective care, communal support, and periodic fosterage sharing in this same ethos. Today, as Sutera faces both mass emigration and new immigration, this century-old institution takes on a new role – becoming a tool for stitching together neighborhood solidarity amid constant arrival and departure. Past and present alike, these practices of collective childrearing reveal competing visions of how kin relate to kith, family to community. Drawing on interviews with former "Children of Saints," parents, and communal caregivers, the lecture develops a theory of social reproduction as an ongoing negotiation – between the roles and obligations that people receive as prescribed and those that they choose to claim as their own.

Fall Thursday Lecture Series events are open to Columbia-affiliated faculty, students, and invited guests. All others interested in attending, please email the SOF/Heyman at [email protected].

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