Politics and kinship: An introduction (original) (raw)

The State and Ideology of Kinship

With transition to the state kinship ceases the role of the central organizing principle of society. However, the very social nature of kinship provides the opportunities for manipulating it as ideology in societies of all types. It was typical for early states to represent the state and the sovereign by analogy with the family and its head. Not infrequently the same connotations are exploited for the sake of power’s legitimation in modern states either. However, the ideology of kinship’s exploitation in states should not be confused with the cases of completely another sort. In some societies of the overall complexity level not lower than that of early states (in “alternatives to the state”), one can observe the whole socio-political construction’s encompassment not from above (as it must be in states) but from below – from the local community level, while the community itself is underpinned by kin ties. Here kinship is not only ideology but also the real socio-political background. So, there is no direct conformity between the socio-political (transition to the state) and ideological (departure from the ideology of kinship) processes and this seemingly clear fact should be acknowledged and given due attention by researchers.

Kinship in international relations. Introduction and framework (chapter 1)

Kinship in International Relations, 2019

This introductory chapter discusses some ways in which kinship may be of use to IR scholars. We begin with some examples of how kinship relations have manifested themselves historically in international relations, seeking to demonstrate how blood kinship from the beginning has been accompanied, reinforced and challenged by metaphorical kinship – that is, how certain non-blood related relations in or via practice come to be treated as kin, with the duties, obligations and expectations that entails. We then proceed to observing how kinship has been dealt within its home discipline, social anthropology. Some early anthropologists, like Lewis H. Morgan (1877), treated kinship as a chief principle of social organization, while others, like Bronislaw Malinowski, did not. Disciplinary developments led structural-functionalists to focus on the law-like tendencies of kinship (Yanagisako 2002), and by the mid-twentieth century, British anthropology focused on what we may call ‘kinshipology’: identifying kinship structures and their effects on lived life. Over the last half century or so, the focus has moved towards treating kinship from what it is to what it does. This move from the structures of kinship to kinship’s role for social organization, which may be summed up as treating kinship as an enabling metaphor, has produced a number of insights on the level of everyday political practice, which IR scholars may apply to the level of relations between polities. We conclude the chapter with a presentation of the individual contributions to this volume.

The family of nations: Kinship as an international ordering principle in the nineteenth century

Kinship in International Relations, 2019

despite the historically widespread use relative to ‘our’ terms – the concept has received scant attention from IR scholars. Second, however, we also indicate how this use is not a coincidence, but is linked to prevalent liberal ideas about empire, civilizational differences and hierarchies. The central contribution of this chapter is that we explicitly link kinship to the exclusionary mechanisms of ‘standards of civilization’. Observing that Europe for a long time sought to limit membership in the family of nations based on civilization is not new. However, few studies have sought to link this to kinship. ‘Civilized’ has trumped ‘family’ in accounting for the role of the ‘family of civilized nations’.

Doing politics – making kinship: back towards a future anthropology of social organisation and belonging

2014

Kinship and Politics are often conceptualized as distinct realms of social life, in Western societies as much as in Western social science. The distinctness in Anthropological research in the sub-disciplines kinship and political anthropology began with the 1940s. However, recent process oriented kinship anthropologists tend to work increasingly on state regulation of reproduction and adoption, while political anthropologists studying nationalist identification and focus on entanglements of state and kin. Both research tendencies helped to progressively erode the conceptual boundaries between the subfields. The focus on the interconnections between kinship and politics expressed in the title „Doing politics – making kinship“ of the international workshop organized by ERDMUTE ALBER (Bayreuth) and TATJANA THELEN (Vienna) is thus very timely.1 In their introductory comments, the organisers historicized the workshop topic and suggested four cross-cutting themes: the impact of kinship on...

Time, Kinship, and the Nation

Genealogy 2018, 2(2), 17., 2018

There remains both a great deal of confusion over the nature of kinship and an inappropriate resistance to understanding the nation as one form of kinship, specifically, territorial kinship. Although one finds the relatively early and occasional analysis of the nation in terms of kinship, for example, by Lloyd Fallers, anthropologists, including paradoxically Ernest Gellner, have avoided understanding nationality in this way. Despite Anthony Smith's attention to ethnie, those associated with nationalism studies have also generally avoided analyzing the nation in terms of kinship, as can be seen by the ill-informed hostility to the category "primoridal". This article rectifies this mistake by reexamining the category of kinship, along both its vertical, temporal axis and horizontal, geographical axis, with attention to nationality in general and, in particular, in antiquity.

Kinship in International Relations

Routledge New International Relations, 2018

While kinship is among the basic organizing principles of all human life, its role in and implications for international politics and relations have been subject to surprisingly little exploration in International Relations (IR) scholarship. This volume is the first volume aimed at thinking systematically about kinship in IR – as an organizing principle, as a source of political and social processes and outcomes, and as a practical and analytical category that not only reflects but also shapes politics and interaction on the international political arena. Contributors trace everyday uses of kinship terminology to explore the relevance of kinship in different political and cultural contexts and to look at interactions taking place above, at and within the state level. The book suggests that kinship can expand or limit actors’ political room for maneuver on the international political arena, making some actions and practices appear possible and likely, and others less so. As an analytical category, kinship can help us categorize and understand relations between actors on the international arena, it presents itself as a ready-made classificatory system for understanding how entities within a hierarchy are organized in relation to one another, and how this logic is all at once natural and social.

Carsten, J., Chiu H-C., Magee, S., Papadaki, E., Reece, K., 2019. ‘Talking about kinship’, Anthropology Of This Century. Issue 25.

Kinship, Migrations and the State

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society

Anthropologists have long studied ‘exotic’ kinship patterns in distant places that differedfrom what was seen as the traditional nuclear family. The second half of the twentiethcentury witnessed a number of changes (new patterns of birth and marriage, new reproductive technologies, the increased visibility of step- and adoptive elations) that changed scholars’ perceptions, convincing them that the traditional—even in Europe and North America—was no longer a helpful concept in understanding contemporary family dynamics. Accordingly, anthropologists reformulated their analytical tools to take stock of the variety of contemporary understandings of family life, placing the emphasis not on sexual procreation and blood connections, but on an enduring sentiment of diffuse solidarity: relatedness (Carsten 2000).