Milk kinship in Southeast Europe. Alternative social structures and foster relations in the Caucasus and the Balkans

Abstract

Developing an earlier analysis of milk kinship allegiance in the Hindu Kush mountains of northern Pakistan – elaborated along the lines of Eugene Hammel's pioneering analysis of Serbian spiritual kinship – this essay appropriately returns to other ethnographies of adoptive kinship in Southeast Europe. I examine a hitherto neglected account of milk kinship and child fosterage in the Caucasian statelet of Abkhazia, comparing its tributary formations of clientage with apparently similar institutions of milk kinship documented in the Balkans. It is suggested that reiterated ties of milk kinship were often combined with spiritual sponsorship among both Muslim and Christian populations of Southeast Europe, comprising reciprocal allegiances of co-parenthood between asymmetrically ranked but allied descent lines. The comparative anthropological implications of these composite ‘alternative social structures’ of constructed kinship – orchestrating feudatory allegiances and inter-ethnic alliances throughout Southeast Europe – are discussed in the conclusion. This indicates the broader theoretical significance of Hammel's Serbian ethnography in understanding the social and political assortment of ‘elementary structures’ of adoptive kinship in peripheral regions throughout western Eurasia, where milk kinship orchestrated by women has often played a formative political role.