Robert Pinsky, the Foundling Tokens, and Kinship Theory

Abstract

Asserting that kinship is culture all the way down, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins observes that kinship always takes shape as a “cultural particularity.” Robert Pinsky spotlights the cultural particulars of abandoned infants in eighteenth-century London in poems in At the Foundling Hospital (2016), also the focus of Lily Cole's film Balls (2018). In both, the cultural particulars called “foundling tokens” mournfully narrate reproductive motherhood as a lost horizon of meaning.