FHS 1: Kinship

Sahlins’ (2011) Mutuality of Being

-based on intersubjective belonging

-kin are people who are intrinsic to one anothers’ existence

-are ‘of’ each other, live each other’s lives and die each others’ deaths

-encompasses mutualities based on cosanguinality, affinal relations, and more

Strathern’s Dividual Beings (In Sahlins 2011)

-based on fieldwork in Melanesia by herself and Bastide

-not fully distinct from others, aspects of the self distributed among others, has an exterior soul

-the same entity in discrete subjects

-ex: Maori pronoun “I” used to refer to entire kinship group, intrinsically linked

Sahlins (2011) example: Iñupiat of Alaska

-natal relations virtually ignored

-join the family of the person they are named after

-can acquire up to four or five such names and families over the course of their lives

Kinship views of Wari’ of Amazonia: Vilaça (2002)

-kinship emerges through dialogue with non-human entities

-corporate descent groups inadequate to describe Wari’ kinship, kinship instead made through shared substances (bodily or otherwise), “corporal descent groups”

-to change identity is to change body, by modifying body through eating, habits, social relations, etc, gain new perspectives (eg. shamans)

-proximity: classify people as true kin and distant kin. True kin usually cohabitants

Making kin out of others: Vilaça (2002)

-semen forms baby, but menstrual blood forms baby’s blood

-procreation as ongoing: widows have weak babies unless they have lovers while pregnant, all men who have sex with a woman are part of the baby

-father is the man who socially accepts paternity, not necessarily genetic

-after childbirth mother, father, and other men who had sexual relations during pregnancy have to partake in rituals like not eating certain game, fish, and fruits and not being in contact with animals or else child will get animal diseases and traits, not be fully human

-means of making kid like yourself

Vilaça (2002) takeaways

-kinship/relatedness not a default of birth but constructed through ritual and intentionality

-babies have to be made into kin and even into humans

-emphasis on proximity in closeness of “true kin” rather than genetic similarity, see “mutuality of being”

-although not based in “genetics” in the western sense, still emphasis on shared body and substances: mother and father(s) all make up baby and are linked to it through biological processes (eg other male partners have to follow postpartum protocol)

Evans Pritchard on the Nuer (in Hutchinson 2000)

-ethnographic work in the 1930s and 40s

-describes social structure as based on segmentary lineage system, kinship networks on unchallenged supremacy of agnatic principle (patrilineal

-critiqued for making static a dynamic people, inconsistencies with empirical evidence

Blood among the Nuer (Hutchinson 2000)

-substance out of which each and every human life begins

-conception merger of male and female blood- emphasis on procreation

-blood passes from person to person and generation to generation

-not just biological blood: also milk, semen, sweat, newborn babies

-women who breastfeed another’s child become related to it through shared blood

Food among the Nuer (Hutchinson 2000)

-regard blood as generated from food and food from blood

-some foods richer in blood than others- milk is the perfect food: “milk is blood”

-relatives celebrate oneness of blood through constant sharing of food

-cannot eat in front of strangers

-men who are initiated together share food, become blood brothers

Cattle among the Nuer (Hutchinson 2000)

-used as symbolic counters for human blood

-shared human blood and shared cattle complementary means of defining the same relationship

Changing relationships among the Nuer: Money, guns, and paper (Hutchinson 2000)

-money seen as inappropriate medium for exchange because does not bind people together like blood but way to store cattle wealth in hard times

-cattle purchased through market individually owned instead of collective, blurring of cattle ownership rights

-money can be used to rupture dangerous social bonds, eg adultery compensation

-rifles: now commonly used as an element of bridewealth payments, advantage over pure cattle

-guns owned collectively by families/brothers like cattles

-paper: where one sends one’s tax papers political commitment in times of fighting, mirrors blood and catttle

Cultural specificity of kinship (Clarke 2008)

-kinship inherently situated in the historical contexts of societal institutions of personal status, sex, and sexual morality

-in Euroamerican society taken form of a move away from a focus on the importance of sexual legitimacy as a defining feature of kinship relatedness

-should not be assumed that all other societies have made the same move

-eurocentricity of New Kinship

IVF in Lebanon (Clarke 2008)

-IVF used but with great secrecy due to ongoing stigmas around sexual legitimacy

-donor IVF seen as comparable to adultery, especially when using donor sperm

-only married women can donate eggs as said to take a woman’s virginity

IVF in Lebanon: takeaway (Clarke 2008)

-while IVF in Lebanon produced non-biogenetic relations, not functioned to change the way kinship relations are understood in society

-instead made to fit into a rhetoric of insistence on immutable kinship relations according to the norms of sexual propriety

-emphasizes that ‘New Kinship’ theories that downplay the importance of (real or performed) biological relations may reflect a Western liberal attitude rather than a cross-cultural social fact

Societal implications of kinship studies (TallBear in Strathern et al. 2019)

-kinship inherently tied to power structures and Western ideologies

-kinship still entrenched in pro-natal stance of the settler family structure

-supports and reinforces US nationalist project at the expense of Indigenous people and their relations

-state deems some forms of kinship acceptable, disregards others

Relatedness (Carsten 2000)

-relatedness rather than kinship signals an openness to other ways of being rather than a reliance on pre-given ethnocentric definitions

-ex: Iñupiat people do not consider biology and procreation to be a basis for relations in any way

-instead cultural value of relatedness in which individuals constantly seek to acquire more ties of relatedness through naming practices, adoption, and marriage