Not Your Grandparent s Kinship

While kinship as an institutional category of training has had a rocky route over the past several decades, the roles that received and transformed terms of relatedness shape the way people make and brake social relations and political projects enjoy periodical waves of interest. After introductory critical engagement with foundational texts, we will examine current theoretical and methodological issues in the analysis of kinship, relations, and relatedness. We will focus the social processes through which (and projects in which) people define, create, extend, limit, sever or transform their relatedness with others within and over generations. We will ask what is the relationship between the reach of relatedness and the bounds communities and associations; how people distinguish who is or is not their kin, kith, friend, relative, family member, and so forth; when and how they propose to replace one term of relatedness for another, to act “as if” those unrelated are related, or vice versa; what roles substances (blood, water, milk, &c.) play in conveying, expressing, and forging relations. We will focus on the vicissitudes of relatedness through settlement and migration, as well as on the intersections of kinship and political economy.