Idiom Of Kinship Research Articles

Boxing family: Theorising competition with boxers in Accra, Ghana

Anthropologists have often conceptualized competition by contrasting it with cooperation, even when collective ends are sought and achieved by competing. This approach tells us little about the qualities of the relationships and subjectivities that competition sustains. I explore the qualities of competitive relationships and subjectivities among Accra boxers, many of whom feel a constant, simmering sense of competition with one another. Boxers describe these competitive relationships using kinship idioms, and distinguish keenly between these kinship metaphors and non-metaphoric kin relations. A sustained comparison between competitive relations and kin relations in Accra reveals how competition intertwines subjectivities and futures, rather than producing hyper-individualistic and self-interested ‘neoliberal subjects’. I thus argue that boxers use kinship as a metaphoric resource to help them navigate the fraught intimacies that competition fosters. Their rendering of competition as kinship suggests how anthropologists might theorize the contradictory nature of competitive relationships with more nuance.

Kinship Idioms and Care-Control Dynamics in Hungarian Co-ethnic Philanthropy

The paper investigates processes and consequences of ‘philanthropic kinning’, that is the use of kinship and family idioms in constructing and maintaining personal relations between donors and recipients in philanthropy. Usual studies collapse the occurrence of kinship metaphors in philanthropy either as evidence of ‘prosociality’ (e.g. trust, care or love) or more frequently as evidence of ‘paternalism’ (power and domination of donors over recipients, and their objectification). This paper claims that introducing kinship and parenting studies into researching philanthropy would greatly refine our understanding of donor–recipient relations. In the framework of a qualitative case study of a philanthropic ‘godparenthood’ programme organised in Hungary supporting ethnic Hungarian communities in Romania, this paper looks at the roles, responsibilities and obligations various forms of philanthropic kinship offer for the participants; and relations of power unfolding in helping interactions. With such concerns, this paper complements earlier research on hybridisation of philanthropy, through its sectoral entanglements with kinship and family. Also, it contributes to research on inequalities in philanthropy, by showing how philanthropic kinning may recreate, modify or reshape donor–recipient power relations in diverse ways.

‘May you live with us forever Father!’ Rethinking state and kinship among Bangladeshi long-distance nationalists in London

Based on ethnographic fieldwork around commemorative events in London and analysis of textual materials used during commemorations, this article explores how long-distance nationalists are involved in Bangladeshi state building practices. I demonstrate how long-distance nationalists, people who identify with Bangladesh and its government as their ancestral homeland, and who seek to influence the state, draw on family histories to narrate national pasts and justify dynastic political hierarchies that characterise Bangladeshi politics. Further, by paying attention to the uses of the idioms of kinship in transnational state practices, the article deconstructs thinking about states as natural entities that can only be studied as part of larger abstract political frameworks removed from peoples’ experiences. Narrating shared pasts are central in creating shared sentiments and form a justification for undertaking Bangladeshi state practices from London. Taken together, the materials presented in this article illustrate the need to take the use of kinship idioms in state apparatuses seriously, because they provide key insights into the ways these apparatuses work within and beyond the borders of the nation-state.

Reconfiguring the culture of kinship: poor people's tactics during South Africa's transition from apartheid

AbstractOne product of the vicissitudes of apartheid-era labour migration, of persistent constraints on urban settlement and of continuing post-apartheid oscillating migration between South Africa's cities and countryside has been extensive domestic fluidity for many South African working people. As a consequence, they have repeatedly created new social networks across the urban–rural social field. In making sense of those networks by reconfiguring their notions of kinship and clanship, they have demonstrated the significance of kinship as an identity idiom. Based on research in Cape Town's largest African township during the early 1990s period of transition from apartheid, the article shows how, through people's use of notions of clanship, they have recursively reconstructed their idiom of kinship in a context of systemic instability. This article uses ethnographic data from that time and context to argue that we need to understand kinship as a cultural resource, pragmatically used and reinvented over and over again, each time emerging anew. In doing so, the article shows that kinship is not a fixed, recordable structure and that, like so many aspects of culture, it is repeatedly reinvented and reconstituted in order to address pragmatic circumstances.

The gendered workplaces of women garment workers in Istanbul

Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews with women garment workers in a low-income neighbourhood of Istanbul, and observations in the ateliers where they worked, this article examines their work experiences in the gendered and sexualised work atmosphere of garment workshops. There are three interrelated levels upon which the gender-related issues emerge in women garment workers’ stories. The first set of discourses portrays young female garment workers in highly sexualised terms, and the second concerns the use of kinship vocabulary and avoidance of impersonal work relationships. That is, women workers’ experiences in capitalist production sites were trivialised and regulated through the sexualisation of their bodies and the deployment of kinship idioms while addressing their role at the workplace. The third level analyses women’s submissive, subversive or contradictory responses to these gendered disciplinary techniques and representations, i.e. the construction of their subjectivities. These three levels point to two things: first, cultural presumptions about marriage, women’s sexuality and reproductive cycles are materialised at the workplace. Second, gendered instantiations of these presumptions in a specific work environment are both informed by their familial roles (such as daughter, wife, mother, widowed) and inform their future reproductive preferences (whether they marry, have a child, get a divorce, etc.). This article shows how the ways in which women’s difference is construed and acted upon in the garment industry are inseparable from women’s reproductive decisions.

Antimafia families: Cooperative work and flexible kinship in Sicily

This article focuses on the formation of flexible ideas of kinship to accommodate reform ideologies (antimafia) and collective platforms of work (cooperatives) in Sicily. While the anthropology of cooperatives often shows how coops reproduce family work, assessing how flexible kinship idioms accommodate cooperativisation can reveal how cooperatives are constituted around family life. In the Sicilian antimafia, kinship and work are strictly separated, on paper, for fear of mafia corruption. In actual fact, members of Sicilian antimafia cooperatives experience their merging of family life and antimafia cooperativism as a belonging to ‘antimafia families’. This article explicates the tension between this ethnographic finding and antimafia ideology and policy. Antimafia families provide a backdrop for a cooperativism inclusive of kinship. The analysis shows both how antimafia families are mutually constituted with cooperatives and how cooperatives are embedded in the domestic lives of their members. This cooperative-family interplay can help us bridge conceptual separations between workplace and family life.

“Nwuna׳s body is so sexy”: Pop culture and the chronotopic formulations of kinship terms in Korean

This paper examines the indexical and chronotopic meanings of two Korean kinship terms, oppa ‘older brother of woman’ and nwuna ‘older sister of a man’, as they emerge in South Korean popular culture. These kinship terms are commonly used in South Korean society not just to address siblings, but in a tropical sense to address intimates of superior age to the speaker, extending to romantic contexts. The paper demonstrates that oppa and nwuna become chronotopic spaces for negotiation between traditional Korean morals and gender roles tied up in the status and intimacy indexed by these forms, and new competing discourses of gender equality, free love, consumerism and enlightenment. Crucially, the analysis shows that the underlying kinship metaphors contained in oppa and nwuna play a crucial role in negotiating the balance between modernity and tradition, particularly in the depiction of sex and romance in Korean popular culture. By packaging romance and sex within the idiom of kinship, sexual desires and fantasies are rendered innocent and pure, or obscured altogether, thus allowing Korean popular culture to escape censure for being overtly sexually provocative.

Mediated Paternalism and Violent Incorporation: Enforcing Farm Hierarchies on the Zimbabwean–South African Border

Paternalism and violence on South African farms have been famously intertwined. In a kinship idiom, fatherly white farmers confer ‘gifts’ on black workers, their ‘people’. This discretion maintains the conditions for racialised violence. But, on the Zimbabwean–South African border, mass-migration and globalised agriculture give paternalism and violence new significance. If white extra-legal violence was previously key to maintaining racialised, hierarchical order in rural areas, today a similar order is maintained through collusion between white farmers, senior black workers, and border guards. Such distributed coercion has precedents, with white and black patriarchs enforcing their positions and agendas through physical force. Today, however, white farmers are keen to perform a corporate style and appear removed from any vigilante violence. Senior black workers actively entrench themselves as powerful arbiters of farm order amid transience and widespread unemployment, drawing on the coercive power of border guards. But as the latter mediate paternalism down the chain of command, this remains at the pleasure of their employers. It all depends on having a job. Moreover, even as everyday influence is devolved down the hierarchy, senior workers are kept in their place by an absolute distinction between black and white.

Transnational Political Cosmology: A Central Mediterranean Example

AbstractThis paper examines the workings of kinship and marriage idioms in transnational political imaginary in the central Mediterranean to challenge current academic reliance on the notion of fraternity as the symbolic building block of both national and global political relations. Since the 1960s, the Sicilian town of Mazara del Vallo and its fishing fleet have become entwined in intensifying interactions with Tunisia and the wider Maghreb. These interactions—specifically the Tunisian-Italian “Fish War” and construction of a trans-Mediterranean natural gas pipeline between North Africa and Europe—rejuvenated the old geopolitical imagination of the Mediterranean and helped produce the central Mediterranean as a spatio-temporal field of political action. Italians and Tunisians perceived each other as related, and staged the trans-Mediterranean infrastructural project as a sort of European-African (cross-cousin) marriage. I begin by examining the tensions between two central kinship idioms—fraternity and cousinage—in current understandings of transnational relations. I then discuss the growing prevalence of a transnational political cosmology of affinity across difference over that of shared descent and sameness that characterize national alignments. I conclude by examining how Tunisians and Sicilians in Mazara today cast each other in roles deriving from segmentary schemes they share, but on the content of which they disagree. By applying concepts associated with kinship and marriage studies to recent Mediterranean history, I show how segmentation, a concept anthropologists abandoned when they crossed the Mediterranean on their way into Europe, can help us understand transnational politics.

The Currency of Kinship: Trading Families and Trading on Family in Colonial French India

In the French colony of Pondichéry, French and local actors alike drew on the shared idiom of kinship to strategically advance their political and commercial agendas. Recent scholarship has shown that the structures of family underlay early modern European state building and imperial expansion. This essay deploys this insight in the colonial context, to examine how indigenous families in the Tamil region entered into the European colonial project. For native commercial brokers, involvement with European newcomers could actually strengthen local family ties. Simultaneously, French employees of the Compagnie des Indes were eager to insert themselves into Tamil networks and did so by deploying public and inscribed performances of kinship.

(Re)produksi Piil Pesenggiri: Identitas Etnis Lampung dalam Hubungan dengan Pendatang

This research is based on the mindset that any of heterogeneous in a society, they still could be identified based on the values or symbols that referred to them as an ethnic groups. The problem in this research comes from seeing the issues of Lampung ethnic as an experienced local ethnic domination that increasingly being desperate in  their own cultural environment. Ambiguity and vagueness of identity as a local ethnic also reinforced by the attitude of immigrants towards them that affect the relationship between them and if it still left unchecked can potentially lead to conflict. This ethnography research aims to reveal how Lampung ethnic establish their existence of identity through cultural values of Piil Pesenggiri, which upholds the dignity contextually as Lampung identity which carried out in their actions as a strategy of contestation in the immigrant communities. The emergence of a awareness of their identity, reviving Piil Pesenggiri uphold the values of honour in local wisdom become a strategy and a capital that being used when they are dialing with immigrants. In their actualization, the reproduction of Piil Pesenggri still being based on its own basic values such as Pesenggiri, nemui nyimah, nengah nyappor, juluk adok, dan sakai sambayan. Contextually, Piil Pesenggiri become a strategy to manifested their existence as Lampung ethnic and it also used to change the stereotype that immigrants pinned to them with a new value such as (a) changing the work ethic that has been known so low that they are often associated with lazy, less ductile, weak competitiveness, and human resources are still limited; (b) are not stuck with the romance of the past as a landlord; (c) re-interpretation of the titles of nobility (juluk buadek) which has been become the pride and purpose to be achieved in the internal structure so that could be received in the external structure; (d) Piil Pesenggiri become an ethnic identity and politics identity. Piil Pesenggiri is a way of life how ethnic Lampung have to act and behave. For them, Piil Pesenggiri is an identity or reflects the identity so that their existence is recognized and valued in relation to immigrants. In order to confirm their identity as Lampung ethnics, then the actions and strategies they are doing is building a network through the structure of society, also using the idiom of kinship  as a strategy to deal with the migrants so that their existence as an ethnic Lampung still got appreciation in accordance with the values of honour that contained in Piil Pesenggiri.   Key words: Piil Pesenggiri, Reproduction, Identity

The blood of Abraham: Mormon redemptive physicality andAmerican idioms of kinship

For Latter‐day Saints, blood is one important idiom of kinship, and ofChristian worship, but not in the ways one might expect. This paper asks how the logic of the resurrected and ‘perfected’ body inhabits both registers, beginning with the surprisingly ‘bloodless’LDSSacrament Service. I then explore the paths by which Latter‐day Saints navigate meanings of blood kinship in tension, especially attribution to the ‘Abrahamic lineages’. I argue, in agreement with Armand Mauss, that contemporary Mormonism has largely shed racist readings of ‘blood’, but suggest that both lineage and cognatic kinship as mystery remain salient through a ‘reduplicative logic’ which collapses physical inheritance, agency, and revelation. This illuminates both similarities to and differences from conservativeAmerican Protestant positions, including understandings of the life of the unborn foetus and the rights and wrongs of stem cell research.

Youth and the revolution in Egypt: what kinship tells us

Studies of youth in Arab societies have tended to posit and explore their social exclusion, marginalization and even de-politicization. Events sparked by the January 25 uprising in Egypt have reconstructed youth in a contradictory light, hailing them as new symbols of the nation. Careful consideration of current thinking in the anthropology of kinship and the nation, however, cautions the audience of the revolution to think twice. Taking for granted the ‘blurred boundaries’ between kinship and the nation, this paper suggests that the transformation from ‘totalizing and patricentric rule’ in Egypt evokes the symbolism of kinship and its wider metaphorical uses, manipulations and transformations. It uses kinship to re-examine the role of youth in the Egypt revolution, on the one hand, and the end of Hosni Mubarak's totalizing and patricentric regime, on the other. Firstly, it shows how a discursive concern with youth's place in the revolution is simultaneously and more strongly a concern with kinship. It then sheds light on the kinship idiom that has defined the Egyptian nation since its birth to its ‘demubarakization’. Finally, it shows how kinship and nation are mutually susceptible to manipulations and transformations in the aftermath of the revolution. The paper concludes by noting the relevance of kinship to contemporary political events.

Origins and originators: lesbian couples negotiating parental identities and sperm donor conception

Donor conception challenges conventional kinship idioms: the involvement of a gamete donor culturally raises questions about parentage and also the meaning of genetic heritage. Although there is now a growing body of literature exploring how people resorting to donor conception negotiate kinship and connectedness, this predominantly focuses on heterosexual couples. Little is yet known about how lesbian couples navigate these processes. This paper builds on a qualitative interview study comprising 25 lesbian couples in England and Wales with experiences of pursuing donor conception in the context of their couple relationship to explore how these couples negotiate the contribution of the donor. It explores how couples negotiate meanings of parenthood, genetic origins and the bodily process of conception. The paper argues that lesbian couples negotiate parental identities, biogenetic relationships and also the meaning of conception by disassembling and reassembling the meaning of kinship, parenthood, creation, origin and originator. Findings suggest that lesbian couples weave together old and new understandings of relatedness in complex patterns and that this enables them to assert authority as parents.

Relationality, Intersubjectivity, and Culture: Experiences in a Therapeutic Discourse of Virtual Kinship

The contextual vision of relational therapies needs to expand beyond the therapeutic dyad to include the cultural context and the indigenous beliefs and practices that can impact on the relationship. An example of this claim is the “virtual kinship” discourse common in some sectors of Turkish society, which involves the use of a kinship idiom in interactions with nonkin, especially across class and gender lines, so that an implicit code governing social reciprocities in actual kinship relations can be invoked. This article provides clinical examples of its use by patients who differ in class and gender from the therapist. Also discussed are the impact of the discourse on the therapist and the way in which the discourse serves to create an intersubjective space for the cocreation of therapeutic meaning.

The People of the Five “Drums”: Gabra Ethnohistorical Origins

The “ethnic” origins of the Gabra camel pastoralists who live on the Kenyan-Ethiopian border and their relationship to the territorially adjacent Borana cattle pastoralists are matters of ongoing academic debate. This article, which is based on Gabra clan traditions, suggests that the five phratries are an aggregate of some of the communities that live in the Lake Turkana region and beyond it. It describes the precolonial relationship of the Gabra and Borana, which is expressed by the latter in the idiom of kinship as a territorial one.

Genetic kinship

The recent marketing of new genetic tests for popular genealogy is one significant interface between the science of new genetics and public culture in the West. These new commodities offer to situate individuals within global patterns of human genetic diversity, locate genetic origins and sort out true biological relatedness from practised kinship. Taking two cases of recent attempts to popularize genetic tests in popular genealogy, this paper considers how ideas of gender, reproduction, nation, ‘race’ and relatedness are being shaped by and deployed within their discourses of genetic kinship. In these efforts to geneticize genealogy, the idiom of kinship and the gendering of narratives of reproduction and descent are used to make these tests meaningful and to distance them from ideas of ‘race’ and ethnicity. Discourses of family relatedness provide a grammar for translating the complexities of new genetics into public culture. At the same time, geneticized genealogy produces new versions of genetic kinship, in the form of Y-chromosome genetic brotherhood, Mitochondrial DNA clan membership and global genetic kinship. Yet, notions of genetic kinship also provide cultural resources for the making of personal and collective identities in a myriad of ways and with diverse implications for the politics of ‘race’ and national belonging.

Evolutionary kinship therapy: basic principles and treatment implications.

The idiom of kinship is a powerful one that stretches across many levels of social behaviour (van den Berghe, 1979), and Daly, Salmon & Wilson (1997) recently outlined the basic principles of a comprehensive, evolution-based kinship psychology. Their approach merges traditional kinship theory, Hamilton's inclusive fitness model and the broader realm of evolutionary psychology into an exciting and provocative call to arms. They address biological, psychological (viz. fictive kinship) and kin-like levels of analysis, and they argue for a relationship-specific kinship psychology that deals with the particular demands of being a mother, father, mate, offspring or grandparent. Our particular approach to kinship psychology has focused primarily on the distinction between biological kinship and psychological kinship (Bailey, 1988; Bailey & Wood, 1993; Nava & Bailey, 1991), and more recently on the role of kin-like relations in psychotherapy and other social contexts (Bailey, 1997a; Wood, 1997). The kin-like category is especially noteworthy in modern industrialized countries where acquaintanceships and stranger-to-stranger interactions often predominate over biological and psychological kinships (Ahern & Bailey, 1997).

Community and Kinship in Southeastern China: The View from the Multilineage Villages of Hong Kong

The role of patrilineal ideology in Chinese village social organization varies more widely than the orthodox paradigm would predict. In minor multilineage communities closely interspersed among dominant elite lineages, interlineage rivalry and competition may indeed prevail. But in the many similar villages somewhat removed from the pressures of dominant lineage expansionism, lineage solidarity may coexist harmoniously with community solidarity, legitimized through a liberal extension of the kinship idiom. This article reviews several village studies and describes in detail a multilineage alliance that complements rather than supplants lineage unity, suggesting that principles of segmentary opposition and solidarity can provide positive means of integration among separate lineages in a shared territory as effectively as among branches of a single lineage.

Labor Groups in Thai Rice and Fishing Villages

The paper analyzes technical imperatives and constraints for recruitment and reward of extra-household work groups for commercial rice cultivation and for commercial fishing. On the basis of this analysis, a characterization of these respective kinds of groupings is derived using a modified version of Eric Wolf's scheme for classifying peasant coalitions. This procedure allows direct comparison of the two types of groups and facilitates an exploration of some implications of the structural differences they exhibit. The modified version of Wolfs scheme is very general and is applicable to groups which are formed in the kinship idiom as well as to those which are not. Moreover, it allows direct comparison of kinship and non-kinship groups. When viewed in this light, non-kinship based fishing groups appear to be structurally more similar to rice-farming households than to the extra-household transplanting and harvesting groups.