This volume had its genesis in a workshop on child fostering held in Bayreuth, Germany, in 2007. The editors and majority of the contributors are social anthropologists, concerned to unite theoretical and empirical studies of child fosterage (the term they favour, although not exclusively) in West Africa. The book is divided into two main sections, preceded by an editors’ Introduction. In Part One, ‘Perspectives on Theories’, two classic papers are reprinted, representing the British structural-functional, descent-school of kinship studies and French structuralist, alliance theories. These are Ester Goody's 1982 chapter, ‘A Framework for the Analysis of Parent Roles’ from her book Parenthood and Social Reproduction. Fostering and Occupational Roles in West Africa and a translation from the original French of Suzanne Lallemand's 1988 article ‘Adoption, Fosterage, and Alliance’. In the third and final chapter in Part One, ‘The Transfer of Belonging: Theories on Child Fostering in West Africa Reviewed’, Erdmute Alber sets the scene for Part Two, in which contributors seek to combine elements of both approaches, together with more recent kinship studies that stress process, belonging, relatedness, flexibility, and fluidity rather than formality and structure. Alber also discusses the use of various terms used to describe the movement of children from birth parents to relatives, neighbours, or strangers. It quickly becomes apparent that there is a very wide range of practices covered by the single term ‘fosterage’.

Part Two, ‘Negotiating Structure: Perspectives from Anthropology, History and Law’, has six chapters that complement one another and expand on the themes introduced in the first section of the book. Collectively they demonstrate the manner in which traditional alliance and descent theories of kinship and marriage can be fruitfully combined with the less formal and more relational, fluid approaches. Most contributors draw on a similar body of recent works on child circulation in other parts of the world, relating them to a region in which it is often normative for large numbers of children to live for all or part of their childhood in households that do not contain a biological parent.

Jeannett Martin's research with foster children in Northern Benin looks at fosterage from the child's perspective. She asks whether previous studies that show more affective relations with maternal than paternal kin apply to fosterage. Martin concludes that, from the child's perspective, even after allowing for individual circumstances, personalities, and relations, the general structural pattern of relatively hierarchical, formalised, distant relations with father's kin, and more supportive, egalitarian relations with mother's kin, do pertain in situations of fostering. To balance this focus on descent, Barbara Meier in her study of the Bulsa in Northern Ghana, looks at alliance relations and fosterage, in this case the practice of fostering a brother's daughter as a co-wife. In what is known as a ‘doglientiri’ set-up, older women are entitled to claim one or more of their brothers’ daughters, incorporate them into their own household, and marry them off to their own husband, or one of his clan members, when the girls reach marriageable age. This is a classic case, according to Meier, in which an understanding of the ‘doglientiri’ institution and its ritual underpinnings, requires a combination of descent and alliance theory, as well as an understanding of both kinship and ritual.

In Chapter Six, Catrien Notermans draws on her many years of research on child mobility in Eastern Cameroon, a region in which large numbers of children spend much of their childhood in households other than that in which they were born. In this particular study, Notermans uses case histories to explore the feelings of foster mothers when their foster children leave to return to their biological parents. She finds Janet Carsten's emphasis on kinship as a process of becoming, rather than a fixed state, particularly useful in coming to terms with the fluidity of childrearing practices in the East Cameroonian town of Batouri, where family life more generally is characterised by mobility.

While Chapters Four, Five, and Six mirror the interests of the first three theoretical chapters in Part One, the final three extend the scope of the volume with Heike Drotbohm's comparison of local and transnational fostering in Cape Verde, Cati Coe's historical study of fosterage and debt-pawning in the nineteenth-century Gold Coast (Ghana), and Ulrike Wanitzek's use of contemporary court records in Ghana to look at local interpretations of transnational adoption and international law. This volume is a delight to read and should be of interest to scholars and students of kinship, West Africa, and cross-cultural studies of fostering and adoption.