Kinship, Love, and Life Cycle in Contemporary Havana, Cuba

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.

• 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 Trouble4. Becoming a Woman: Quince as a Moment of Female Sexuality5. Love, Sexuality, and Adult Gender Relations: Nobody Likes Sleeping Alone6. Old Age, Funerals, and Death: Reciprocating Care 7. The State as FamilyConclusion: Time, Care, and Kinship

"In this masterful ethnography, Heidi Harkonen weaves together discussions of the material conditions of post-Soviet era Cuba, critical moments in life such as coming of age, having children, and dying, and personal stories of kinship, love, and caring. In so doing, this book offers new perspectives on the issues of political economy, matrifocality and gender in the Caribbean, while relating these issues to global transformations of postcolonialism and postsocialism." - Kevin Birth, Professor of Anthropology at Queen's College, CUNY, USA and author of Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality