Negotiating parentage: the political economy of "kinship" in central Sulawesi, Indonesia

Abstract

I begin with the story of a young woman whom I mistook for "Cinderella." This particular Cinderella was the poor cousin of my landlady, whom she addressed as "mother." Cinderella worked ceaselessly in the kitchen, performing the domestic chores of those I duly recorded as her classificatory "siblings." She rarely left the kitchen but secretly pined for her prince, a local musician and recording artist, forbidden to her by her "parents," my landlords. We spoke one day about why she was rushing home to do the cooking when there were so many other people available in the household to do the work. Thinking of the smoky hearth at which I inevitably found her, I jokingly called her Cinderella and was surprised that she knew the reference; she had seen the Disney movie. She begged that I never repeat the comparison to my landlady. She was not like Cinderella at all, she said. These were her parents; they provided for all her needs, were trying to get her a job as a teacher, and would eventually arrange her marriage. She worked as hard as she did because she wanted to show her appreciation, not because they made her work. She was, above all, a "good daughter."My initial tendency to place her kinship status within quotation marks is a familiar anthropological technique, the rendering of a classificatory kinship system in descriptive terms. Such a move, Schneider pointed out, assumes that "blood is thicker than water" (1984:165) and that Cinderella's "real" parentage could be distinguished from "fictive" or "merely cultural" constructions. Schneider argues against anthropologists' assumption of the universal primacy of blood and birth in kinship systems, proposing that blood and birth should be reconceptualized as metaphors of social relatedness-of only situational importance (1984:187-201). Around Lake Poso, the concept of blood (daa) as a shared substance is indeed of central importance to To Pamonan notions of kinship. Birth simultaneously establishes filiation with grandparents and other members of these children's laterally extended family. The To Pamona's undifferentiated notion of shared substance (daa) highlights Marshall's argument that "what is common to Widespread fosterage and adoption has recently emerged around Lake Poso in Central Sulawesi within the wider constraints of peasantization, whereby kin are ideologically set off as a source of noncommodified labor for a newly constituted peasantry. The differentiation of this peasantry has been blunted and a kin-based "moral economy" created through the transfer of dependents (rather than resources) between households. This transfer of kin has been eased by a concept of parentage that stresses nurturance and sharing, not just filiation. Class tensions are muted by the insistence that the calculation of costs and benefits between kin is unseemly. Fosterage, however, opens up tensions as some "parents" exploit their newly acquired "free" domestic labor. This article focuses on the terms foster children use to resist this exploitation, namely their refusal to acknow...

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