seminar prep

How do people become kin amongst the Malays in Pulau Langwaki?

• “it is through living and consuming together in houses that people become complete persons - that is, kin"

  • “the core substance of kinship in local perceptions is blood, and the major contribution to blood is food. Blood is always mutable and fluid - as is kinship itself”

• “co-eating, which is constitutive of kinship, begins before birth”

What does define incest amongst the Malays in Pulau Langwaki?

• full siblings

• “milk feeding also defines the prime category of incestuous relations: kin who have drunk milk from the breast of the same woman may not marry" » “foster siblings”

• “only eating the blood could render relations potentially incestuous”

Take note of the multiple definitions of “blood” in the article

• “the core substance of kinship in local perceptions is blood, and the major contribution to blood is food. Blood is always mutable and fluid - as is kinship itself”

• “food creates both persons in a physical sense and the substance - blood - by which they are related to each other”

• “people say that ‘blood becomes milk,’”

• “…human milk is believed to be produced from blood circulating in the body…shared blood is shared female substance…co-feeding can create shared blood"

• “mothers and their offspring and full siblings are most closely related, having blood in common”

• “it is because children share blood with their mother that   a mother’s curse is thought to be especially powerful”

• “people say that the blood of the mother becomes the child”

• “women say there are 44 different kinds of sickness, and their origin invariably lies in the blood"

• “the hot blood lost in childbirth cools the body excessively, rendering it vulnerable to the effects of the consumption of cooling foods"

• “if a person dies in the house, the blood from the corpse is believed to flow everywhere and become mixed with all the food in the house. ‘Everything becomes soaked in blood.'

• “the act of drinking blood lent the murdered superhuman powers"

  • “feeding on blood is the negation of feeding on rice cooked in the house hearth: it is death dealing rather than life giving: it negates human ties rather than producing them”

• “kin share blood, but the degree to which this is true varies”

• “blood is not simply a substance with which one is born - it is continuously produced and transformed from food that is eaten”

In which ways do “the biological” and “the social” intertwine in Malays’ experiences of relatedness?

• “in Langkawi, ideas about relatedness are expressed in terms of procreation, feeding, and the acquisition of substance, and are not predicated on any clear distinction between ‘facts of biology’ (like birth) and ‘facts of sociality’ (like commensality)”