Social Anthropology

Kinship studies are certainly a hallmark for anthropology as a discipline. Yet, it has been more than a decade since Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale has published a paper on kinship (except for a review article by Giovanna Bacchiddu [2015] on two books about international adoption and the reconfiguration of the American family model). We have to go back as far as the late 2000’s to read one, when Warren Shapiro wrote a peremptory critique of Susan McKinnon's book in which the latter had strongly argued against “neo-Darwinian biological assumptions” underpinning the kinship theories developed by evolutionary psychology. The long absence of kinship from issues of this journal elicits an obvious comment: it was about time Social Anthropology / Anthropology Sociale devotes a full issue to this topic and engages with recent ethnographic theory on kinship and kinship matters. While we don't believe that it is our role as new editorial team to ponder the reasons for the omission of this topic, let us simply notice the major turn in kinship studies as a beginning for explanation. At the turn of the century, kinship as a topic has evolved from theoretical discussions about “systems” and social organization to a urge for describing and understanding new patterns of relatedness, transnational families, parenting, and adopting. Entire journals were created out of the need to explore ignored and emerging universes of relatedness and reimagine family studies. Despite the seismic shift from concerns about terminologies, ways and varieties of affiliation, and primary forms of structuring human lives to questions of care, parenting, and having kin, kinship studies have not been the hotspot of anthropological debate for years. However, they have consistently been addressed by books reviewed for this journal.

‘Kinning and De-kinning’ introduces a special issue that considers how houses, heirlooms and other owned items reproduce kinship and family in diverse societies. It revisits death and inheritance in kinship studies, with a focus on processes of ‘passing on’ and the materiality of things as well as bodies. Incorporating temporalities and materialities in the changing expression of deeply felt emotions that extend between people and between people and things, we echo classic concerns in kinship studies around the incorporation of strangers via affinity, while mobilising the notion of house societies, bringing classic anthropological insight on intergenerational transfer of wealth to bear on questions of identity and belonging. Showing how processes of kinning are always selective and negotiated, the articles in this special issue argue that they also carry with them the potential for kinning's shadow: just as property can enable kin relations to be re/produced, they can also be used to release people from kinship through what we term ‘de-kinning’: instances of failed appropriation and disrupted kin relations. The article outlines an approach to kinship that takes seriously the enduring qualities of material and property, while maintaining the argument that kinship is achieved (or negated) through the active performance of acknowledged relations.

Divorce, remarriage and new partnerships create blended families with complex configurations of emotional and financial engagements. The latest reform of the Danish Inheritance Act in 2008 was an attempt to cope with the legal challenges posed by blended families with regard to inheritance. The solution was to grant the surviving spouse greater rights as well as a greater share of the estate, thus favouring the horizontal conjugal bond between current spouses. Since the surviving spouse is often not the parent of all the deceased's children, the vertical transfer of assets and heirlooms between generations is challenged. This has consequences for the way material things can generate continuities and act to reproduce kinship over time, as a way of kinning former and coming generations. This article addresses the role of inheritance and heirlooms in processes of kinning and de-kinning.

In this article we explore the inheritance of hytte, or secondary homes, in Norway. Inspired by the notion of ‘kinning’, we extend the notion of kinning to include various materialities and temporalities. In particular, we trace the passing on of the hytte ethnographically as a stretched moment, and argue that temporality adds another layer to the understanding of the hytte as a participant in kinning. Our material indicates a number of connections between the hytte as a property to be passed on and the family/kin as a reproducing unit, connections that unfold over time, decades, a lifetime or more. Through this approach, it is possible to trace processes of kinning, but also what we call ‘de-kinning’, involving detachment, refusals and rejection. The article shows that a focus on materials and built structures adds to the understanding of kinship in contemporary societies.

This article examines the narratives and practices of return experienced by long-term Nairobi-based Luo seeking to make a home in rural western Kenya. Building a rural home, and being buried there, remain crucial to many urban Luo understandings of a successful life. This is a project full of contingency: it relies on resources gained in the city, as well as access to land and the cultivation of rural kin relations. Although ‘home’ and ‘return’ were often spoken of in idealised terms, desires to return were as much focused on living towards the future as on a nostalgic sense of a lost past. Practices of building a rural home grapple with expectations of rural and urban kin, the challenges of doing things properly, and responsibilities of caring for home and landscapes in a way that can ensure future generations’ capacity to dwell on the same land. This desire to belong to the future is at the heart of Nairobi Luo dreams of ‘return’.

This article explores the relationship between property, law and everyday life in two self-managed collective housing sites in England, a housing co-operative and a co-housing development. In each of these sites the residents are bound together by a property law framework, by their built environment and by the spaces they share and manage. The residents are developing alternative legalities, their own informal norms and non-legally enforceable rules, which are transmitted to new residents in a form of inheritance. This article offers a new perspective on sharing property and belonging to a collective, within a housing culture based on individual ownership. The argument that the concepts of kinning and inheritance can be ‘stretched’ to take account of the intangible ‘properties’ generated by intentional communities’ residents, contributes to both socio-legal studies and legal anthropology.

Focusing on the collective memories and life stories of local people regarding their courtyard house siheyuan in the old town of Beijing, this article examines how the dramatically shifting state discourses influence inheritance practices and perceptions of kinship over time in modern China. Narratives of the siheyuan constructed by the elderly residents feature extended family vis-à-vis a ‘Confucian state’, favouring male heirs during pre-revolutionary times. Siheyuan were nationalised during the following period of high socialism, when men and women were granted equal rights in property. After being returned to their former owners in the post-Mao reform era, the dilapidated siheyuan were confronted by neoliberal privatisation and commercialisation. Despite the physical survival of the siheyuan, it is now common for siheyuan siblings to turn against each other, as people struggle over shares of their suddenly valuable but neglected ancestral home. Departing from Freedman's lineage theories and Lévi-Strauss's house society, this article explores house and relatedness in the sense of ‘de-kinning’ as part of China's modernising process. While drawing attention to the subtle continuities and the emergence of new forms of relatedness, it also suggests that the siheyuan dwellers have demonstrated high degrees of resilience and adaptability when coping with the vicissitudes of life.

In the atoll society of Tokelau, intergenerational succession has occurred since approximately 1925 without a concomitant exchange of enduring material objects, with the exception of land. The article explores how a significant increase in material wealth, including more permanent housing, and the ultimate threat represented by climate change, that of losing the land altogether, affects the intergenerational transfer of goods and relationship patterns. The case of Tokelau illustrates how kinning and de-kinning operate in a society where the passing on of property is neither associated with death (inheritance) nor with private property, but with the ongoing transmission of collective belonging and selected, inalienable things.

Nucho, Joanne R. 2016. Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 192 pp. Ebook: US$29.95. ISBN: 9781400883004.

Schorch, Philipp, Martin Saxer and Marlen Elders (eds.). 2020. Exploring Materiality and Connectivity in Anthropology and Beyond. London: UCL Press. 282 pp. Pb.: £20.00. ISBN: 9781787357495.

Cvajner, Martina. 2019. Soviet Signoras. Personal and Collective Transformations in East European Migration. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 279 pp. Pb.: US$30.00. ISBN: 978-0226662398.

McGonigle, Ian. 2021. Genomic Citizenship: The Molecularization of Identity in the Contemporary Middle East. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 220 pp. Pb.: US$75.00. ISBN: 9780262542944.

Sax, William and Claudia Lang. 2021. The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 346 pp. Hb.: €129.00. ISBN: 9789463721622.