Kinship: politics and practice

Abstract

If I were writing my original debate piece (Brück 2021) again, I would start at a rather different point. The tenor of my argument is that kinship is understood in fundamentally different ways in other cultural contexts. This, however, runs the risk of exoticising the unfamiliar, when, in fact, what is required is to turn the lens of critical reflection on how particular forms of kinship are naturalised in the contemporary Western world. This, of course, is exactly what the other contributors to this debate so eloquently achieve. In the recent history of Europe and North America, sexual relations have been central to the definition of rights over roles and resources (e.g. Rifkin 2011; Haraway 2016; Hamilton 2019). By controlling women and identifying certain types of intimate relations as immoral, the transmission of wealth could be regulated, class boundaries maintained and certain forms of labournotably, reproductive labour-obscured and appropriated. In a colonial context, as Frieman (2021) and Crellin (2021) observe, the distinction between culture and nature-and the positioning of women and Indigenous peoples as part of the latter-legitimised the seizure of land and defined land, animals and women as property. The imposition of patriarchal, heteronormative and monogamous family structures onto Indigenous groups was a key element of that process. It is little wonder, therefore, that the family of the Euro-American imagination has so often been experienced as a locus of violence and repression, for it is intimately bound up with the appropriations of capitalism and colonialism. Among many Indigenous communities, it is not sexual relations that determine rights over resources. Rather, it is relations with non-human others, such as animals or the land itself, that are central to the constitution of kinship (e.g. Sissons 2013): abiding, emotional attachments to place are a key component of kinship in many cultural contexts. Indigenous ontologies indicate that trees, or mountains, or animals are not like kin but rather are kin. As Ensor (2021) rightly indicates, the anthropological term 'fictive kin' is therefore highly problematic. I briefly reference these perspectives in my debate piece, but they deserve to be articulated more strongly. Western concepts of kinship consider it possible for kin relations to exist only between humans. This is due to the distinctions that are drawn between culture and nature, self and other, and humans and animals-distinctions that serve particular ideological purposes and that have been cogently critiqued, as Crellin (2021) points out, by posthumanist scholars, among others. By stripping the non-human world of agency, Western forms of kinship foreground and legitimise extractive, rather than meaningful, social relations between humans and non-human others. A similar conceptual framework underpins much of the classic, early and mid twentieth-century anthropological literature on kinship, which focused solely on relations between people; animals were viewed not as kin but rather as m...