Critical Kinship Studies

An Introduction to the Field

Damien W. Riggs, Elizabeth Peel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349700516, 9781137505040
• eBook ISBN: 9781137505057
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Personality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book draws together research on posthumanism and studies of kinship to elaborate an account of western human kinship practices. Studies of kinship have increasingly sought to critique the normative assumptions that often underpin how caring relationships between humans are understood. The categorisation of 'human' and 'kinship' is brought into question and this book examines who might be excluded through adherence to accepted categories and how a critical lens may broaden our understanding of caring relationships. Bringing together a diverse array of analytic foci and theoretical lenses, Critical Kinship Studies opens up new avenues for understanding what it means to be in relationships with others, and in so doing challenges the human exceptionalism that has often limited how we think about family, loss, love and subjectivity. 

© The Author(s) 2016

Damien W. Riggs and Elizabeth PeelCritical Kinship Studies10.1057/978-1-137-50505-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Damien W. Riggs¹ and Elizabeth Peel²

(1)

School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

(2)

Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

End Abstract

A Story

In each of the chapters of this book, we begin with a story. These are stories we have collected over the years, stories that speak of kinship across a range of settings, that speak of diverse groups of people and species, and perhaps most importantly for this book, speak of how kinship is naturalized through often mundane, everyday, depictions of life.

The first story is an actual story, or more precisely a children’s storybook: King & King & Family (De Haan and Nijland 2004). The book is a sequel to the authors’ first book, King & King (De Haan and Nijland 2002). The first book has been praised for its sensitive and endearing depiction of a prince who is looking to find someone to marry (at his mother, the queen’s, behest), culminating in him meeting another prince whom he marries, whereupon they both become kings. Despite this praise, the first book has also been met with considerable controversy, with a number of American states attempting to ban the book, in some locations it being shelved in the adult section (Wachsberger 2006). In 2007 the then US democratic primary front runners were asked for their opinions on the book, with both John Edwards and Barack Obama supporting it, and Hilary Clinton indicating that she felt the book was a matter of parental discretion.

Perhaps surprisingly, the sequel book, which we focus on here, has met with little controversy. Surprising, we suggest, not because such a book should be met with controversy, but because the sequel tells the story of the two kings welcoming a child into their family. Given widespread and ongoing opposition to gay men having children, it is thus surprising that the book has not been more of a cause for public concern. One explanation for this discrepancy in reactions may be that in the first book the two kings are shown kissing—a scene that provoked outrage from some—and the sequel does not include this type of intimacy. Indeed, this sanitizing of gay couples who have a child is commonplace in public representations of gay families (Riggs 2011).

So why is King & King & Family of particular interest to a book on critical kinship studies? It would be fair to presume that the topic—gay parenting—and the responses to the first book—homophobia, moral panics—are the reason why we chose to open this book with a discussion of King & King & Family. This, however, was not our primary reason for focusing on the storybook. Rather, our choice of this storybook was due to the particular ways in which it represents kinship. Specifically, the book is of interest to us given that it depicts kinship through characters who would typically be considered marginal (i.e. gay men). Yet in so doing it demonstrates one of the key points of this book, namely that the naturalization of kinship as a dominant trope or, indeed, perhaps a founding logic of Western societies—our focus in this book—is flexible enough to encompass all forms of so-called ‘family diversity’ that come along. To put it another way, Western kinship categories as they are normatively understood are fluid enough to incorporate gay male parents into a standardized narrative precisely because kinship as a technology serves to locate itself within nature (i.e. it is naturalized).

Let’s then turn to King & King & Family and explore these claims in a little more detail. The book opens with the two kings leaving for their honeymoon, to a ‘land far from their kingdom’. From this first page, then, notions of home and away, familiar and strange, are evoked. A fear of the strange is voiced by King Bertie on the second page, where he says ‘I must admit I’m a little worried about the jungle animals’, a statement he makes to King Lee who is holding a book titled ‘Exciting wild life’, written by a D. Anger. Here, then, difference becomes a source of fear, a source of potential ‘DAnger’. When they arrive at their destination, however, they find that their unusually heavy suitcase contains Crown Kitty, their cat. The strange is therefore neutralized by her familiar presence.

Once the party of three leave for their hike through the jungle, they encounter a range of animals, through which again the strange is made familiar through the operations of anthropomorphism. So, for example, we see two birds who are feeding a worm to a baby bird referred to as ‘such good parents!’, a ‘papa [monkey] and his baby’, and a ‘hippo family’. Through these terms, the potentially radical difference represented by ‘wild life’ is domesticated through the human language of kinship. Of course, our point here is not to suggest that there would be another, readily intelligible, way of talking about non-human kinship. Rather, our point is how human language of kinship can so readily incorporate ‘wild life’, animals who had previously been represented in a fearful way.

In the pages that follow King Lee and King Bertie continue to enjoy their holiday, though they are concerned at every turn that they are being watched or followed. King Bertie’s travel journal recaps ‘rustling in the bushes’, ‘something following us in the water’, ‘footprints in the mud’, and a snorkel ‘pipe in the water’. On the last night of their holiday King Bertie sighs ‘[a]ll those animals with their babies…I wish we had a little one of our own’, evoking a standard developmentalist logic in which humans grow up, get married, and have children. And in so doing they extend this same developmental logic, and indeed desire, to non-human animals. When they arrive home, their suitcase is again unusually heavy, though this time because in it there is ‘a little girl from the jungle’, to whom King Lee and King Bertie state ‘you’re the child we’ve always wanted’. The story concludes with scenes in which, in a rush, the kings ‘adopted the little girl who had traveled so far to be with them. This took lots of documents and stamps’. Then there is a party to celebrate the official arrival of Princess Daisy where ‘her daddies make a big fuss’, and the final image is one of the child and the cat embracing under the caption ‘[w]hat a happy little one!’.

Here again, in both the surprise arrival of the child, and her envelopment in a standard narrative in which she is the child the two kings have always wanted, difference is assimilated into a logic of the same. While at the start of the story the country to which the kings travel is depicted as ‘wild’ and something to worry about, by the end of the book these concerns are gone, with the little girl depicted as able to share her stories with the two kings (using, presumably, the same language), and where she is given a name that arguably reflects the culture of the kings, perhaps less so than her own. The adoption seals the deal, wrapping the new princess in the logic of sameness in which the ever-expansive Western narrative of kinship is able to incorporate any difference.

King & King & King, then, is not simply a story about gay parenting, nor is it simply an example of the domestication of gay parenting into a standard developmental logic that evokes an incremental rites of passage narrative. Rather, it is also a story in which human kinship norms are able to encompass, indeed domesticate, animal kinship practices. Furthermore, it is a story in which difference is assimilated into a logic of sameness, cross-culturally, cross-species, and unregulated across borders.

As we shall see in the sections that follow, the incorporation of what is considered ‘nature’ into what is referred to as ‘culture’ is a common theme across this book, just as the cultural is naturalized in ways to make it appear pre-determined. And, as we shall argue, concerns about incorporation and naturalization sit at the heart of critical kinship studies as we understand it. The aim of critical kinship studies, then, is to examine practices of naturalization, to think of kinship as a technology rather than as a taken for granted social structure, and to think about the ‘human’ in human kinship in ways that destabilize the centrality of humanism within kinship studies.

The Study of Kinship

In this section we provide a brief overview of some of the core tenets of the field of kinship studies, primarily as it has been conducted within the context of anthropology. Importantly, in outlining the field as it has historically been constituted, our intention is not to suggest that there is a clear break between ‘kinship studies’ and ‘critical kinship studies’. Much of the previous work we cite in this section is a direct basis for our account of critical kinship studies. And much of the work we cite in this section is critical in many senses of the word. As such, it is certainly the case that in attributing a label to a body of research (as have Kroløkke et al. 2015), a large part of what we are doing is signalling something that already exists: studies of kinship that are critical of the assumption that kinship is a product of nature—a key point of critique in much of the work that has been undertaken under the banner of kinship studies both in the past and in the present, as we shall see below.

Having said this, what distinguishes this section from the next is the fact that the research summarized in the present section is arguably informed by a humanist logic. That is, a logic in which human beings and our values and worldviews, however diverse, are by default treated as more salient or important than those of any other species. More specifically, and given our focus in this book on Western accounts of kinship, our suggestion is that much of the work that has been conducted under the banner of kinship studies reifies a very particular Western individualistic account of humanity, even if at times such work has involved cross-cultural comparative studies. Our intention in this section in briefly outlining two of the key tenets of previous work in the field of kinship studies, then, is not only to celebrate the important insights afforded by those working in the field, but also to suggest why appending, or foregrounding, the word ‘critical’ to the field introduces a shift in orientation that warrants close consideration, a shift that we outline in more detail in the following section.

The work of David Schneider arguably constitutes one of the key examples of a shift in anthropology from an account of kinship where it had previously been seen as a reflection of nature, to one where kinship is seen as an artefact of culture. Published in 1968, Schneider’s American Kinship: A Cultural Account provides an in-depth ethnographic analysis of kinship terms in the USA. What has now become a standard feature of work in the field of kinship studies is clearly highlighted in this early work by Schneider, namely in his suggestion that:

The cultural universe of relatives in American kinship is constructed of elements from two major cultural orders, the order of nature and the order of law. Relatives in nature share heredity. Relatives in law are bound only by law or custom, by the code for conduct, by the pattern for behavior. They are relatives by virtue of their relationship, not their biogenetic attributes (p. 27).

This statement follows a lengthy and detailed examination of American kinship categories, in which Schneider distinguishes between categories that are treated as though they are constituted by nature (what he refers to as unmodified categories, so, for example, ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘sister’) and those that are constituted by law (what he refers to as modified categories, so, for example, ‘foster child’, ‘mother in-law’, ‘step-father’). What is important about the quote above, however, is that it draws attention to the fact that while unmodified categories are treated as though they are a reflection of nature, in fact they are naturalized categories that are a product of a cultural order. This is thus a central premise of kinship studies: that anything in regard to human kinship that is treated as ‘natural’ is more correctly that which has been ‘naturalized’. In other words, unmodified categories such as ‘mother’ or ‘father’ (which, in the context of Schneider’s data, referred to women and men who had conceived and birthed children together as a product of reproductive heterosex) are not simply a reflection of ‘natural’ relations between men and women. Rather, they are the product of a wide range of cultural institutions that (1) normalize heterosexuality, (2) privilege reproductive heterosex, and thus (3) provide environments that are conducive to this mode of conceiving children.

Schneider went on to develop these points about the naturalization of particular kinship relations in his next major work, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), where he states that:

The distinction between genealogy and norm or role seems to permit us to say that genealogy is structurally or logically prior to norm or role. But that priority follows directly from the definition of kinship as genealogy and not from any empirical or independent consideration. It is purely a matter of definition. The structural and logical priority of genealogy is built into the premises embodied in the way in which kinship is defined. There is nothing ‘structural’ about it (pp. 129–130, italics in original).

Here Schneider makes the point that while the supposed naturalness of genealogy (as a mode of inheritance, seen as a product of genetic relationships between kin) is treated as producing a norm in which genetic relatedness is valued, in fact both the privileging of genetic relatedness and the emphasis upon tracking genealogy through genes are the product of a very particular (in this case American) way of understanding kinship.

Building on and extending the work of Schneider, Marilyn Strathern (1992a, 1992b), Sarah Franklin (1997), and Janet Carsten (2004)—three leading voices in the field of kinship studies—explore how particular forms of kinship are naturalized. Strathern does so by considering English kinship patterns, Franklin by exploring how assisted reproductive technologies are naturalized in the English context, and Carsten through cross-cultural work undertaken across a range of sites, including China, Sudan, Northern India, and Madagascar, through which she problematizes the normative status of Western human kinship practices. Strathern, in particular, takes the work of Schneider, and suggests that not only is kinship ‘the social construction of natural facts’, but also that in the context of British kinship ‘nature has increasingly come to mean biology’ (1992a, p. 19). This suggestion by Strathern is vital in its emphasis upon the particular aspects of British kinship that have becom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Objects of Critique
• 3. Tools of Critique
• 4. Reflecting (on) Nature: Cross Species Kinship
• 5. Donor Connections
• 6. Kinship and Loss
• 7. Motherhood and Recognition
• 8. Kinship in Institutional Contexts
• 9. Conclusions
• Backmatter