The case of Sparkle Rai: A violent patriarchal narrative of conspiratorial kinship and race

Abstract

This article explores how the absence of a robust anthropological analysis of intersecting kinship obligations obscured a more complete public understanding of a horrific crime and the patriarchal (ir)rationality it underlined. The following court trial that I witnessed in its entirety on the CourtTV channel in the United States, necessitated an anthropological analysis that neither legal nor media analysts could perform, at the peril of failing to understand the contextual drivers of such criminal (ir)rationality. I argue that patriarchal affinities can often work beyond cultural, religious, or racial differences in reproducing gender and anti‐Blackness through unlikely partnerships predicated upon a shared disregard for women's lives. I proceed, therefore, from a standpoint that views violence against women as rooted in what I call conspiratorial kinship not in culture, religion, race, or ethnicity (Abu‐Lughod 2011, 17). The case in question will demonstrate how these social domains serve as validating proxies legitimating violence against offending women in the problematic name of honor.

A poetics of living rebellion: Sociocultural anthropology in 2021

“…Still, if the past decade has witnessed the “anthropological rise of Palestine” (Atshan 2021), the enduring colonial politics of the discipline have hindered US‐based anthropologists as a body from taking a political stance and meaningful action in support of Palestinian freedom. How can anthropologists forge “conspiratorial kinship” with rebellious practices in Palestine and beyond (Doucet‐Battle 2021)? 10…”

“…Afropessimism has argued for foregrounding the singular and unassimilable quality of Black nonhumanness, which theoretically (and politically) forecloses possibilities for relationality between the “subaltern and the Slave” as the basis for kinship or solidarities (Wilderson 2021). As James Doucet‐Battle (2021, 273) cautions, there are forms of “conspiratorial kinship” grounded not in culture, religion, race, or ethnicity but that converge at the site of gendered antiblack violence and are “exemplified through raced and gendered intersections of aspirational citizenship.”…”