For my cours
e on the anthropology of kinship, I had to draw a genealogical chart of my own kinship. That's basically a family tree, with triangles for men and circles for women (and I'm not even going to go into that right now...), equals signs for marriage and lines going from parents to children. Looking at it, it seemed pretty incomplete. The assumption that those lines are what make up my life – which is still, at quite a basic level, assumed in our society – would leave me floating in a sea of temporary relationships while I wait to find a permanent sexual partner and settle down. This is not to devalue the relationships that this does map - my genealogical family are still really important to me. But what about all the other relationships in my life? What about my flatmates? I see them every day, and our lives together have meaning which doesn't fit into that scheme. What about my best friend, whose importance in my life totally defies conventional description? Why should friendship be second to variations on procreation? What about the possibility that I might not get married or have children? What about the possibility that I might love more than one person at once? The study of kinship is a really big deal for oldschool anthropologists, and it's historically based on exactly this kind of genealogical chart. When kinship first became and area of study in its own right, genealogy – who was involved in your procreation and who you're supposed to be procreating with – were used as the basic units of kinship, regardless of what culture was being considered. It obscured everything else, despite these things simply not being that important in some places. The reason for this was because it really was a big deal for the anthropologists themselves, because that's the basis of our official kinship system in Euro-American culture, and that's what they were basing their analyses on, without quite realising it. Kinship is naturalised to the point where it seems self-evident; they did not necessarily question this official kinship in their own lives, and they did not question it in terms of talking about other cultures either.
And meanwhile, outside academia, people struggle with being outside official kinship all the time.
What happens if you don't fit in? The changes of the last 50 years (readily available contraception, growing acceptance of queer relationships, later marriage, the increasing possibility of not getting married at all, the greater likelihood of divorce and remarriage) sho
wed up genealogy as not the be-all-and-end-all that we thought it was. And yet, so many important parts of life are based on it – broadly, it still forms the basis for what is recognised as an important relationship by the rest of society. It shapes the trajectory of our lives in a way which are seriously limiting, and using it to try and understand people who do kinship in different ways is limiting too.
Lots of anthropologists have gotten over it and started looking at kinship in terms of which people are seen as important to each other, and in what ways, doing their best not to make any assumptions about “biology”. Practical kinship – that is, kinship which doesn't necessarily fit with the official rhetoric of any given culture but which is important to people's everyday lives – is gaining ground as an important area of study. The general trend in anthropology is to try not to see cultures as homogenous but to see the conflicts and disagreements over things, so the different versions of kinship within any given group also get some attention.
It can actually be kind of hard when there's no way of validating or confirming how important these relationships are – it's difficult to validate something that there's no word for, that's seen as trivial or a stop-gap. It makes me angry that the lines that join us are considered less important just because there's no vows or procreation involved. Gay relationships are slowly gaining ground as valid, aided by the fact that they can be approximated to straight relationships, but other relationships still loose out – polyamourous relationships, friendships, relationships based on shared ideals or activism. In that context, to tell people how much they mean to me, I have to sort of triangulate my way with words that mean something like it – often kinship words. But it's never that they're metaphorically those things, or that they are in the traditional sense of the words. It's just that, there's an approximation there, and although the rest has to be said in other ways, we only have our shared language to try to articulate it out loud.
Understanding all this is important for the acceptance and validation of all kinds of kinship for ourselves, where practical relatedness is changing quicker than the official way of talking about it (as is probably the case anywhere), and anthropology, if it is going to do its job, has to understand this too. The idea that queer kinship (in the broadest sense) as important in its own right (rather than an emulation of, y'know, “proper” kinship) is aided by the idea that traditional, official ideas about kinship are just a cultural construction rather than “natural” and inevitable. Opening up to the possibilities of kinship is not only good for the basic anthropological project of fostering understanding between cultures, but also for understanding the huge possibilities of our own kinship and expanding the horizons of our own relationships. And in the end, these things are the same ideal.
