The Stuff of Kinship

Introduction Urban kinship: the micro-politics of proximity and relatedness in African cities

“…In order to understand how social and spatial proximity affects the dynamics of everyday sociality, we suggest the notion of urban kinship to capture how idioms of relatedness in the city build on more enduring socio-cultural legacies, often explicitly articulated in the language of family. As Janet Carsten (2004) demonstrated in her influential deconstruction of the classical kinship studies in anthropology, kinship ties are often thought to be naturally given, both in the sense of being biologically rooted in descent and in the sense of being inevitable social ties. Kinship, in this understanding, ‘is like your buttocks, you can't cut it off’, as the Nyole proverb cited by Reynolds Whyte and Whyte (2004: 77) puts it.…”

Kinship in Action, Kinship in Flux: Uncertainties and Transformations in Okiek Marriage Arrangement

“…By combining different scales, this article examines how people manage and make sense of central life changes and social transformations. This marries traditions of social theory that analyze social processes, political economy, and history (Fortes 1958, 1970; Roseberry 1989; Williams 1977); concepts of “relatedness” in new kinship studies (Carsten 2000); classic work on African marriage; and studies of how verbal art and performance shape social relations, politics, and history. It also contributes to an enduring strand of analysis of ambiguities, ambivalences, and tensions in social relations and the social workings of uncertainty generally.…”

Introduction: Reason and passion: the parallel worlds of ethnography and biography

“…In more muted forms, repeated consumption of family meals or accumulated experiences of living together in one house (which anthropologists are accustomed to see as ‘non‐political’ and everyday kinship) can also be seen as acts of materialisation. House furnishings, clothing, food, heirlooms, photographs and genealogies may form part of the ‘shared substance’ that brings relatives together over time and space (see Bahloul ; Carsten , , in press; Trautmann et al . ).…”