The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries (review)

Abstract

James D. Faubion (ed.) Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 277 pp. This is a book about ethics of affect as manifested in kinship relations. James Faubion asked a number of one-time doctoral students of anthropology at Rice University (Texas) and two like-minded colleagues to write essays about their own personal experiences of kinship. resulting collection is very welcome as it not only constitutes an interesting read in its own right but is also a contribution for present renewal of debates in anthropology of kinship. Each of contributors chose to focus on some aspect of their own kinship history which they somehow problematized. result is a number of fascinating essays dealing with what one might call margins of kinship:1 forgotten' relatives, manipulations of law of kinship, clandestine adoptions, love and hate, class and kinship, sibling cooperation and rivalry, sexual preference and legal family, etc., all accumulate to bring out a marvellously varied picture of middle-class kinship in United States. Indeed, although a number of contributors expound interestingly on their family histories in diverse places of origin around world (Eastern Europe, North Africa, Indian subcontinent, Trinidad), what they tell us are stories of kinship as lived in America. As a matter of fact, whilst writing their accounts, most of contributors not born in United States were undertaking a move to permanent residence there-to use Nityanand Deckha's words, they were becoming new citizens of West (153). book resonates with this sense of America as land of success and liberation which merges with authors' own pride in their individual success within academia as doctoral students. Karim, for example, tells us of her diasporic urge to remake myself into a subject who transcended kinship ties and was not bound by local and national habits and prejudices-a cosmopolitan subject. (118) Reddy, Deckha and Youngblood all make similar statements. Nevertheless, their location is decidedly in North America, which belies their cosmopolitanism. Indeed, not all venues and not all classes can grant aura of cosmopolitan subjecthood. Cosmopolitanism is a paradoxically local privilege that only some can exercise when they are accepted by certain countries and belong to certain classes. As Susan Ossman puts it elsewhere, The abstract, far-sighted nature of this cosmopolitan vision can easily lead us to ignore actual movements of people (2006: 561). In essays, logic of marginality2 is put to work wonderfully to reveal both relation between kinship and other aspects of social life and relation between people's discursive practices and those aspects of their lives which they know and share but which they normally have no means to speak of. Clearly, judging from emotional depth of accounts, for every single one of contributors, exercise came to have a self-revelatory, exutorial function. Thus, book is both a good read and a comment on how anthropological examination can breakthrough convention. Denise Youngblood (presently editor at CountryWatch, Houston) writes an essay about her family background in Trinidad, dealing mostly with issue of marriage across race and its relation to ethnicity, nation, and color. She shows us how the ideology of cosmopolitanism in Trinidad relates to production of both family and nation (48). She turns interestingly to Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital to show how marital and extra-marital sexual relations were used to produce family in a context where, due to dramatic boom and bust cycles which characterize Trinidad's economic history, wealth was seen as rather transient. According to her account, intermarriage3 is actually encouraged in Trinidad, as it produces a hybrid identity which furthers nation's sense of itself as cosmopolitan. …