‘Kinshipping’: Diasporic infrastructures of connectivity, circulation, and exchange

Abstract

This paper interrogates the neglected yet potent interplay between kinship and infrastructure. It develops the concept of ‘kinshipping’ to describe how kinship relations manifest across a proliferating number of localities and spatial scales through the stitching together of otherwise diverse infrastructures, institutions, and actors. Contrasting and complimenting perspectives on African migration that emphasise either care and intimacy or vulnerability and exclusion, kinshipping reveals how contemporary translocal kinship relations have technical, material, and infrastructural properties that are inseparable from the rationalities of capitalist modernity. Importantly, this lens brings into fuller view the activities of groups often ignored in studies of international and global processes, such as the (Somali) diaspora. Drawing on multisited fieldwork across Somaliland I demonstrate the at times contradictory entanglements between kinship and infrastructure through three intersecting dynamics of connectivity, circulation, and exchange. The analytical lens of kinshipping renders visible widespread processes of developmental and humanitarian activity ongoing across Somalia and outside of the formal humanitarian system. In turn, kinshipping reveals the relation between the intimate and the global to be central to processes of place-making and in sustaining of translocal social relations.