Reconnecting State and Kinship 9780812294415

Table of contents :
Contents
Reconnecting State and Kinship: Temporalities, Scales, Classifications
Part I. Traveling Concepts Temporalities, Scales, and the Making of Political Order
Chapter 1. Corruption as Political Incest
Chapter 2. Kinship Weaponized
Chapter 3. Inside and Outside the Language of Kinship
Chapter 4. Appropriate Kinship, Legitimate Nationhood
Chapter 5. From Familial to Familiar
Part II. Classifying Kinship and the Making of Citizens
Chapter 6. The Politics of “See-Through” Kinship
Chapter 7. Undoing Kinship
Chapter 8. Producing “Good” Families and Citizens in Danish Child Care Institutions
Chapter 9. After Citizenship
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Reconnecting State and Kinship

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Reconnecting State and Kinship

Edited by

Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber

u n i v ers i t y o f p e n n s y lva n i a p ress phil adelphia

Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available ISBN 978-­0-­8122-­4951-­4

Contents

Reconnecting State and Kinship: Temporalities, Scales, Classifications Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber

1

Part I. Traveling Concepts: Temporalities, Scales, and the Making of Political Order 1. Corruption as Political Incest: Temporalities of Sin and Redemption Michael Herzfeld

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2. Kinship Weaponized: Representations of Kinship and Binary Othering in U.S. Military Anthropology Thomas Zitelmann

61

3. Inside and Outside the Language of Kinship: Public and Private Conceptions of Sociality Frances Pine

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4. Appropriate Kinship, Legitimate Nationhood: Shifting Registers of Gender and State Victoria Goddard

108

5. From Familial to Familiar: Corruption, Political Intimacy, and the Reshaping of Relatedness in Serbia Ivan Rajković

130

vi Contents

Part II. Classifying Kinship and the Making of Citizens 6. The Politics of “See-­Through” Kinship Jeanette Edwards

155

7. Undoing Kinship: Producing Citizenship in a Public Maternity Hospital in Athens, Greece Eirini Papadaki

178

8. Producing “Good” Families and Citizens in Danish Child Care Institutions Helle Bundgaard and Karen Fog Olwig

200

9. After Citizenship: The Process of Kinship in a Setting of Civic Inequality Apostolos Andrikopoulos

220

List of Contributors

241

Index 243 Acknowledgments 249

Reconnecting State and Kinship Temporalities, Scales, Classifications Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber

Kinship and statehood are central categories for describing and classifying social organization. They have accompanied the disciplinary development of anthropology since its formative years in the nineteenth century and also facilitated a general division of labor within the social sciences. Correspondingly, the study of allegedly traditional societies characterized by kinship in either stateless forms of political organization or hereditary power (e.g., kingship) was to be the primary focus of social anthropology. In contrast, the political sciences and sociology were conceptualized as disciplines invested in the study of the “modern” state, envisaged as political order without kinship epitomizing the Weberian notion of rationalized bureaucracy. The juxtaposition of kinship and the (modern) state as mutually exclusive is thus so deeply ingrained in the Western worldview and in processes of knowledge production that decoding their coproduction poses a considerable challenge. Untangling this separation is fundamental to understanding contemporary processes of social organization, including boundary making that leads to diverse forms of marginalization. The conceptual and geographical distinction, or even opposition, between a supposedly modern Western state and a premodern political organization elsewhere was further mapped onto scalar and temporal axes. This resonated with other binary distinctions, such as public-­private, small-­big, and individualistic-­communitarian, that continue to powerfully influence worldviews and public discourses outside of academia. Whereas large modern or developed societies were imagined as being constituted by

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small family units, small premodern or developing societies were associated with large kinship groups. This cohered with the distinction between public (politics) and private (family). These paradigmatic distinctions fed into classifications that coupled the notion of modernity with the conviction that to an increasing degree individuals possessed free choice in both the public and private realms. Casting families as “small” and “private” units also denotes a refusal to recognize the weight and influence of kinship issues in state formation to which, for instance, practices facilitating intergenerational transfer of properties (e.g., inheritance) adequately testify. Seen as practices outside the realm of the political (although regulated by state laws), the role of kinship in reproducing diverse forms of capital and, by implication, power has largely remained under the radar. The insistence on separating politics from family, the classificatory other that is relegated to the private sphere in so-­ called modern societies, seems almost paradoxical in light of the centrality attributed to defining and regulating kinship in vital state documents, such as national constitutions.1 This tendency to underestimate the mutual constituency of state and kinship was reinforced when within the disciplines of sociology and anthropology the study of politics was decoupled from that of family or kinship to form distinct subfields (kinship anthropology—political anthropology and family sociology—political sociology). Toward the end of the twentieth century, the construction of kinship and the (modern) state as inherently independent units of analysis was increasingly challenged within the social sciences, both theoretically and empirically. The emergence of a more processual and actor-­centered framing of research agendas as well as new studies on nationalism, gender, and assisted reproductive technology (ART) considerably transformed the scope of research and led to the emergence of new disciplines such as gender studies. Nevertheless, the presumption of a deep-­rooted opposition between kinship and the (modern) state, often linking them to seemingly divergent or even incommensurable temporalities and scales, has remained surprisingly stable. In fact, corollary public debates and policy initiatives testify to the continued potency and pervasiveness of this distinction as a tool for classification beyond the scholarly domain. In light of the surprising persistence of these ideas and divisions despite the emergence of newer theoretical perspectives, we seek in this volume to trace the efforts invested in reproducing the boundaries around these supposedly discrete and even opposing units of analysis as well as the consequences of the dialectical processes of classification through



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which political formations have been labeled and, at the same time, reproduced as either (modern) state or kinship. Within the discipline of anthropology, we note an imbalance between the two sides of the disciplinary aisle. That state and kinship are continually coproduced is picked up on preponderantly by kinship researchers, whereas these processes of coproduction are researched to a lesser extent in political anthropology (or only under the heading of “corruption”). Even kinship studies mainly show how new reproductive technologies and LGBT movements have resulted in heated public debates as well as in reforms in state regulation of parenthood, whereas less attention is diverted to their wider implication for state formation. Thus, we argue that the parallel epistemic shifts in both fields of interest—kinship and state—have not yet been fully exploited and leave potential for these conjoining lines of inquiry. As important if not more so, it seems to us, is the need to broaden the scope of the studies beyond a mere acknowledgment of the interrelation between state and kinship. Therefore, in this volume we propose two broad strands of inquiry. First, we suggest exploring the boundary work and the classificatory practices through which these distinctions are reinforced and upheld. Second, we seek to investigate and track the itineraries of traveling concepts that nevertheless journey across the conceptual divide in both directions, linking kinship and the (modern) state in indelible ways. Besides developing a more holistic approach for research on social organization, this approach shows the productivity of these classifications in terms of both the boundaries thereby engendered and the understandings and practices they shape in contemporary societies. Thus, the case studies compiled in this volume trace concepts as they travel across the conceptual, temporal, spatial, and scalar boundaries between these two realms and acquire new meanings in the process. The authors follow such concepts from kinship studies as descent or incest that have made inroads into concrete politics as well as those that are privileged mainly in the realm of politics that have traveled into the realm of kinship, such as transparency and corruption. This perspective opens up new insights into how such categories emerge and materialize as well as the normative shifts they undergo in these processes. The practices of classifying humans and their way of organizing, as described in this volume, often affirm but can also alter the understandings of traditional (kinship-­based) and modern (state) societies as well as the adjacent dichotomies and their placement within different temporalities and scales. The chapters specifically delineate the implications of such classifications in characterizing certain kinship or state practices as “good”

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or “bad,” which impacts processes of inclusion and exclusion and sometimes even life-­and-­death decisions. This twofold aim requires us to first delve deeper into the history of how kinship and political organization are understood and deployed in knowledge production within discrete research subfields. We argue that the temporal, spatial, and scalar mapping of kinship and the modern state—its disciplinary other in the social sciences—led to the expulsion of the state from both subfields of anthropology. Not surprisingly, this neglect has impeded the inclusion of influential kinship issues in key disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates on statehood, which reinforced rather than destabilized the conceptual opposition and the division of labor within the social sciences. Therefore, in a second step we focus on the concepts of embeddedness, citizenship, and belonging that are common to both research fields and have the potential to contribute to a more multilayered perspective that will facilitate interdisciplinary discussions. The assumptions about a “modern” state (as opposed to kinship-­based organization) and its adjacent classifications have been fundamental to the self-­description of Western societies vis-­à-­vis a colonial other. As these understandings were exported and even today continue to travel to other parts of the world, be it through globalization processes and development policies or through more direct forms of domination, such as colonialism or “wars against terror,” we decided to bring the focus “back home.” In this volume, we therefore concentrate on the work of classification and its consequences in European and former settler states. The continued resilience to critical theoretical debates necessitates that we start out with the emergence of the conceptual split, tracing its normative implications mirrored in temporal, spatial, and scalar ordering of forms of social organization.

Emerging Ideas and Shifting Norms in the Classifications of (Modern) Statehood and Kinship In line with the nineteenth century preoccupation with evolution, many early anthropological debates centered on the development of the “modern” state from preceding, seemingly less complex, forms of political organization (Bouchard 2011; Lewellen 1983: 43–63). Kinship was a part of the discussion insofar as it was believed that the emergence of this state form coincided with the birth of the “modern” (nuclear) family, leading to the decline of earlier



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forms of social organization based on descent groups. Maine (1861), for example, postulated that the patrilineal structure of agnatic families provided the basis for the original form of society and for forging political relationships. Accordingly, territorial bonds and contractual relations would only later gain in importance, when blood ties no longer constituted adequate grounds for power and status (Kuper 2005: 44–45).2 These and similar evolutionary ideas have had enduring consequences for research and continue to be ingrained in core elements of Western self-­understanding. First, having two main categories—kinship-­based and state-­based—as the starting point and end point of development required the classification of newly “found” forms of social organization and the creation of new subcategories and their integration into the stage theory of history. Although early theories have tended to be speculative and variously contested, the dominant idea has survived: There was a fundamental move from the ascribed “traditional” ties toward individualistic “modern” relations of choice, both in intimate relations and in political alliances. As Adam Kuper (2005) has commented about the myth surrounding the so-­called primitive societies, it is surprising not just how fast this idea became pervasive but also, more so, how often it was reproduced in the past hundred years. The rapid, widespread acceptance that this idea found had much to do with the dominant view of the early theorists that within their own societies they would witness a decisive transformation, from traditional to modern, after completing, or even perfecting, the progression along the temporal axis.3 On the scalar axis, state replaced kinship as the political organization that, in hierarchical perspective, stands “above” families or “encompasses” them (on spatial imaginaries of the state, see Ferguson and Gupta 2002). Over time, several shifts occurred. Normative assumptions associated with the categories, and the transformations they intended to describe, varied based on the theoretical and political sympathies of the proponents. While early evolutionary studies privileged the (patriarchal) nuclear family as morally superior (for instance, Morgan 1877; McLennan 1865), the later feminists found the idea of early matriarchy more appealing. In a similar vein, some proponents of left-­wing politics and theories relished the possibility of unregulated sexuality in societies without a state.4 More generally, societies without a state were imagined as a kind of utopian space (Kramer and Sigrist 1983) albeit sometimes without reflecting upon the meaning of kinship in these societies. In contrast, modernization and development studies viewed the assumed dominance of kinship relations critically—as the main obstacle to economic

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development or to “proper” political functioning.5 To them, too much kinship in the wrong place—as Herzfeld (this volume) denotes conceptualizations of corruption—signaled a weak or only partially established state in the so-­called developing countries. In contrast, revelations about the organization of political power and processes around kinship in states claiming to be modern tended to be either overlooked or interpreted as an exception to the rule. Within the temporal interpretation, such political practices could be construed as “remnants” of distinctly nonmodern political organization.6 Some interpreters would also diagnose a reversal of the temporal axis, calling such phenomena a “return” to an allegedly premodern social organization.7 These interpretations have allowed the elements of an idealized Weberian modern state (monopoly of power and a disinterested state bureaucracy) to continue to occupy center stage in the Western self-­descriptions and to evolve into an almost global ideal (see also Migdal and Schlichte 2005). These evaluations coexisted with the above-­mentioned opposite normative view of kinship as an alternative organizational form or as a source of resistance to an omnipresent state (Scott 1985, 1998).8 In addition, the notion that the nuclear family had replaced “traditional” webs of kinship could also being viewed as a morally deficient trend, leading to either anomie in society, as Durkheim (1951 [1897]) called it, or a “care crisis,” as more recent depictions would have it. Specifically in regard to aging populations, public programs in Western countries aim to “reeducate” citizens in virtues of “traditional” obligations. At the same time, caring obligations to kin are still considered impediments to modernity in some other countries.9 Despite their contrasting normative views about kinship (as either a resource or a waste) and the state (as either a benevolent order or an enemy), both perspectives posited them as discrete units to be analyzed as conflicting modes of organization. A more integrated and relational perspective on the mutual constitution of state and kinship through works of classifications and their embeddedness in policy making is hampered by their bifurcation into two discrete subfields, to which we now turn.

The Bifurcation in the Study of Kinship and Politics As outlined above, kinship and the state have for a long time been studied together as part and parcel of the evolutionary paradigm that predicted the sequence and direction of progress for different forms of social organization.



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This changed profoundly in the mid-­twentieth century, when kinship studies and political anthropology parted ways. This bifurcation sustained and was simultaneously supported by the disciplinary division of labor in the social sciences, as mentioned earlier, thereby diminishing the contribution of anthropological insights to wider debates. Its former position could be regained only partly at the end of the twentieth century as a result of parallel epistemic shifts in both subfields. We follow their trajectories as distinct subdisciplines to bring to light what was lost by virtue of the dissolution of the holistic approach that had prevailed earlier.10

Political Anthropology: Expulsion and Rediscovery of the (Modern) State

Political anthropology commonly traces its roots to the pioneering publication of African Political Systems (Fortes and Evans-­Pritchard 1940). In their introduction to the volume, Meyer Fortes and Edward Evans-­Pritchard reinvigorated the modernist dichotomy between state and stateless societies, envisioning a decline in the importance of kinship in so-­called complex, state-­ organized societies. In his own monograph on the Nuer, Evans-­Pritchard (1940) laid out their segmentary political organization as a timeless model—a “stable equilibrium” as Leach (1954: 4) called it—that merged descent with residence, the temporal with the spatial dimension (Kuper 2005: 171; see also McKinnon 2000, Bouquet 1993).11 Despite much criticism, and although Evans-­Pritchard had not claimed that his model fully encapsulated the lived practices of the Nuer, it became one of the most prominent exports of anthropology within interdisciplinary debates as well as in policy circles (see also Zitelmann, this volume). Another important influence of African Political Systems was that the (modern) state was largely expelled from anthropological inquiry, and in the decades to come the central focus would be on “traditional” forms of authority, preferably not those influenced, or “polluted,” by Western influences (Vincent 2002). This development is commonly attributed to Radcliffe-­ Brown’s statement in the foreword to the volume: “State, in this sense, does not exist in the phenomenal world; it is a fiction of the philosophers” (1940: xxiii). Although this depiction comes very close to contemporary understandings of the state (see below) and could be taken as a plea for an empirically grounded inquiry of political organization, many took it to mean that

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the (modern) state did not represent an appropriate object of anthropological inquiry.12 This narrow interpretation largely ignored Radcliffe-­Brown’s following assertion that what indeed existed was “an organization, i.e., a collection of individual human beings connected by a complex system of relations.” In the decades following the publication of African Political Systems, the main thrust in political anthropology was on lineages and clans as distinct types of organization based on descent. This withdrawal from the study of the state began at a time when almost all the societal formations under scrutiny had been or were being integrated into (colonial or postcolonial) states. The notion of a so-­called traditional stateless organization seemed to have acquired eternal qualities, while its (re)production as part of modern states as well as of Western states themselves remained nonissues. In subscribing to the established disciplinary distinction between state-­based and stateless societies, reinforced through the division of labor within the social sciences, political anthropology had divested itself of a quintessential anthropological concern, namely to contribute to mainstream social scientific discussions by providing a holistic analysis of social organization.13 There are always exceptions to the rule. Some anthropologists sought to track historical change brought about by the colonial state. In his “Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand,” Max Gluckman (1940) depicted precolonial conflicts as more predictable and colonial conflicts as increasingly unpredictable and violent, since they could no longer rely on mechanisms of de-­escalation based on cross-­cutting ties of segmentary lineage oppositions. Although he viewed cross-­cutting ties as being linked to kinship, and thus by definition distinct from politics or statehood, and despite his general acceptance of the traditional-­modern divide, Gluckman signals his recognition of the (colonial and postcolonial) state as an important site of inquiry in political anthropology.14 Furthermore, other members of the Manchester school of social anthropology also pioneered ethnographic studies on local politics in Western states and on “modern” bureaucracies (Frankenberg 1990 [1957]; Handelman 2004 [1976]). With the wisdom of hindsight, one can see how the early works of the Manchester school had already anticipated a disruption in the spatial axis of the disciplinary division of labor and in anthropology’s jurisdiction over “the traditional Rest” outside “the West.” In the more processual approach they developed, the modern state was integral to societal change and no longer constituted a “polluting” influence.15 From the 1980s onward, political anthropology increasingly conceptualized



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organizational formations in a more fluid manner. Sharon Hutchinson’s (1996) restudy of the Nuer exemplifies how kinship and marriage among them were modified through changing modes of domination and warfare as well as through shifts in the constitution of Sudanese statehood. Clans and lineages were now seen as flexible units, capable of adapting to changing circumstances and influenced by individual agency.16 This processual approach is also emblematic of the newly, and somewhat independently, developing anthropology of the state in the 1990s, which no longer conceptualized the state on a temporal axis or as an idealized stable formation of Weberian imagination. Instead, the new studies characterized the state as a fragmented form of social organization, always in the making and contingent upon the cultural imaginary. Interestingly enough, anthropology’s rediscovery of the state as a subject of research occurred at a time when other social sciences were agonizing over its dwindling importance. Furthermore, it suited the demand in other social sciences for greater cultural awareness following heated discussions in the 1970s and early 1980s over the role of the state in relation to capital interests.17 For example, Gupta and Sharma (2006) stressed studying state images as a genuine anthropological contribution to the study of the state. Increasingly the state was also being researched at the margins and in unexpected sites, beyond the conventional scope of the nation-­state.18 This emphasis on representation and marginal sites indicates that the authors had in part unwittingly subscribed to the disciplinary division of labor that ascribes the responsibility for exploring “exotic” cultures to anthropology (Thelen, Vetters, and Benda-­Beckmann 2014). More recent concepts, such as “states at work” (Bierschenk and de Sardan 2014) and the “local state” (Thelen, Sikor, and Cartwright 2008) as well as an emphasis on state spacialties (Reeves 2014; Ferguson and Gupta 2002) and state moralities (Fassin et al. 2015), have renewed the emphasis on the actual state practices and on gaining an empirically grounded understanding of the state that cannot be reduced to a macro or structural level of social organization. Kinship, however, has remained marginal to these recent developments in the anthropology of the state. When invoked at all, it was to describe actors who had strategically deployed kinship idioms to position themselves favorably enough to secure scarce state resources. For example, Yang (2005: 487) studies how the marginalized Bunu of Taiwan “use their own idioms of kinship and political leadership to understand and construct their relationship with the state.” Similarly, Dale (2007) describes how female refugees use the kinship categories of international organizations oriented to the model of

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nuclear family in flexible ways so that some of them are gaining the status of “big women.” Notwithstanding the importance of these studies, there is still much to be gained by looking more closely at the coproduction of state and kinship through, for example, processes of kinning of and by state actors (Thelen, Thiemann, and Roth 2014). Overlaps between kinship and the state are more palpable in studies of national identities, a line of inquiry that has gained considerably more attention and influence since the 1980s. In his analysis of the nation-­state, Herzfeld (1992) focuses on the symbolism of family and the language of blood and race in the service of building, maintaining, and manipulating national classificatory systems of inclusion and exclusion. Similarly, Borneman (1992) shows how ideas of kinship, state, and nation were mutually constitutive in the two rival German states. Across the East-­West divide, both states constantly mirrored each other and tried to regulate the life courses of their respective citizens according to their distinct political self-­understandings. Although since the 1970s the scope of the political began to be expanded to a point that rendered it almost limitless (Vincent 2002; Candea 2011), these works did not become central within mainstream political anthropology. Kinship continued to be seen largely as irrelevant to the analysis of political formations, specifically to the (modern) state. Thus, we consider it imperative to bring kinship back into the analysis of state politics, power, and domination. In addition, while viewing the separation of politics and kinship in research as inherently problematic, we argue that it is still important to track the boundary work necessary to construct them as separate entities. Moreover, exploring how different classifications bound to the state-­kinship binary translate into practice is useful for generating a productive encounter of both subfields of research within a holistic framework. Before turning to these issues, we broadly outline the epistemic trajectories within kinship studies that ran somewhat in parallel.

Kinship Studies: The Rediscovery of Descent and the State

In parallel to its diminished salience in political anthropology, by the mid-­ twentieth century the state had also almost vanished from the study of kinship. This occurred in direct response to the disciplinary bifurcation. Kinship scholars began to resort to ever more sophisticated terminologies capable of grasping the diverse patterns structuring significant relations. The ensuing



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crisis of dwindling scholarly interest has often been attributed to David Schneider’s fundamental critique of Eurocentrism and the predominance of biologistic interpretations within kinship analysis (Carsten 2000; Parkin and Stone 2004; Alber et al. 2010). While we do not entirely disagree with this diagnosis, we argue that the crisis started much earlier with the dissection of kinship from the political sphere. As Marilyn Strathern (1994: 279) once remarked, there was no precedent to the view that kinship “was just to do with households, marriage and the family. Rather in the creation of ties through reproduction and succession, British social anthropologists saw in many of the societies that were their subject of study models of social life.” Stripped of its inclusive and deeply political dimensions, kinship, once the most hotly debated field in anthropology, had lost ground and no longer carried the same theoretical weight in the discipline.19 In the aftermath of the decline of interest in kinship, women’s studies— and later gender studies, often inspired by neo-­Marxist theory—provided an alternative framework to study local reproduction. With this development, for instance, the concept of the household came to denote an entity that may have formerly been imagined as a kin group. This change in focus was not unique to anthropology, for sociology also responded to the shifts in the terms of analysis.20 Some early feminist anthropologists also took inspiration from Fortes’s distinction between the politico-­jural (legitimate power and ritual language) and the domestic (affective) domain (Fortes 1969). By shifting the emphasis in their analysis to the mutual influence of the two domains, they questioned the rigidity of the dividing lines (see also Pine, this volume). Since the 1970s, another important impetus for rethinking the terms of analysis has been Michel Foucault’s study on power and sexuality, which also became influential in the study of state regulation of families (for an early example, see Donzelot 1980). By the 1990s, kinship had regained much of its lost ground. In rediscovering Mac Marshall’s (1977) earlier insights into kinship as “nurture” and “sharing,” first mainly British social anthropologists were instrumental in developing a more constructivist perspective on the issue. Under the label “new kinship studies” they demonstrated the importance of studying practices of feeding, nurturing, and caring as fundamental to creating lasting relations (Weismantel 1995; Carsten 1997; Notermans 2004; Leinaweaver 2010). Much like the parallel trends in political anthropology at that time, a more processual understanding of the object of study was thereby developed. Rather than a given, kinship was now seen as produced through practices

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of “doing kinship” (Carsten 2004: 19) or of “kinning” (Howell 2006). Pioneering later interdisciplinary debates, many ethnographic studies early on traced the formation of kinship ties in LGBT families and through international adoption or by resorting to new reproduction technologies (Weston 1991; Edwards et al. 1999). Just as political anthropology had rediscovered the state as its object of study, kinship anthropology had revived the salience of descent (now mostly invoked under the label of parenting) in Western societies.21 Similar to the rediscovery of the state in political anthropology, the rediscovery of descent through explorations of reproductive technologies in kinship studies produced new insights into the reconfiguration of “the” political as well as political decision making. In this respect, new technologies and parenting practices were influential for state classifications of “appropriate” kinship and, by implication, of “appropriate” succession, marriage, and reproduction practices (see also Carsten 2004: 136–38). They have given rise to a series of unexpected actors—such as educators and social workers as well as medical personnel and religious authorities—imbued with the authority to identify “good” kinship and “proper” citizens (Kahn 2000; Klotz 2013; Ticktin 2011; see also Papadaki, this volume, and Bundgaard and Fog Olwig, this volume). Besides, we also note a renewed interest in understanding the degree to which political systems rest on particular ontologies and on assumptions about “natural” aspects of social relations (Edwards 1999). It is also widely recognized that diverse state laws, such as laws of inheritance and the rights and obligations of care, to name a few, greatly impact kinship (Alber and Drotbohm 2015). However, studies of ART have only rarely been brought into relation with research on how new genetic technologies in forensics reconfigure ideas of kinship and political belonging, including the relationship between citizens and the state. In addition, the question of how new kinship forms shape modern statehood is only rarely put on the research agenda. In contrast to political anthropology and its broadening of the concept of power, central concepts in kinship studies did not expand to the same degree after leaving behind the former structure-­oriented approaches.22 Much the opposite happened. Even potentially expansive concepts, such as relatedness (Carsten 2000) and belonging (Edwards and Strathern 2000), were restricted to the “traditional” realm of kinship (Thelen 2015). Carsten (2000) points to the fact that relatedness through feeding and commensality practices could extend beyond the compound, beyond the village, even to the borders of



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the Malay nation-­state. While her concept of relatedness was widely discussed among kinship scholars, this opportunity to realign kinship and the state went largely unheard. Imagining a link along the imagined descending scale, from state to family, seems less challenging than incorporating into the analysis a opposite, seemingly bottom-­up connection. In order to facilitate such a multidimensional analysis, we propose tracking what we call the travel of concepts across the conceptual divide in different times and on different scales.23 Summarizing the parallel development of kinship and political anthropology, it is possible to note that with few exceptions, the conceptual dichotomy between the “West” and the “Rest”—one governed by a “modern” state and the other by kinship-­based political power—has been only gradually surmounted. Nevertheless, since the second half of the 1970s, we note a growing tendency among political and kinship anthropologists to ignore the spatial dichotomy and to expand their field of research to include virtually any form of society, thus also those characterized by a “modern” state. Furthermore, by the 1990s new social movements and technological developments had effectively put the descent back on the agenda. Rather than returning to the older kinship terminology, new conceptual tools were developed. Some of them can be fruitfully combined with older insights to explore the mutual constituency of state and kinship.

Bridging Concepts: Embeddedness, Citizenship, and Belonging With the surge in interest in the state as a fragmented, continually reconstituted framework that is always in the making, issues that once were considered ancillary, such as borders, policy making, bureaucracies, and citizenship, began to take center stage in political anthropology. In very much the same way kinship researchers demonstrated the impact of state policies on kinship formations in connection to the use of ART and adoption in the context of different citizenship concepts and international borders. However, despite their parallel development and overlapping concerns, the subdisciplines have not yet fully explored the potential of these conjoining fields of research. We aim to reconnect the subdisciplines by studying the translations and negotiations entailed in the traveling of concepts and in boundary-­making processes

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by concentrating on potentially helpful bridge concepts that highlight “doing kinship” as a mode of knowledge production that generates diverse forms of (political, jural, and social) marginalization.

Embeddedness

As the aforementioned basic insights of the Manchester school already indicate, an analysis of the social embedding of actors at various levels of the hierarchy holds one promise for connecting the study of kinship and the state. Gluckman’s analysis of the intermediary position of the village headman in a colonial state (1949: 93) documents the difficulty of balancing contradictory demands. The “dilemma of the village headman” arose from his embedding in overlapping power constellations within the village, where he was entangled in local kinship relations while also acting as the political representative vis-­à-­vis the colonial state.24 Even if Gluckman saw both positions as principally different, his analysis of their convergence in the figure of the village headman opened up the question of the intersections between the colonial state and the local kin-­based structures. This classical theme has lost none of its urgency.25 Local state actors are embedded in manifold other relations that demand adherence to different sets of norms. In their day-­to-­day practice, these street-­level bureaucrats, as the political scientist Lipsky (1980) refers to them, operate with these norms and in so doing not only shape policy but also, importantly, impact specific state formations and images. This strand of research on state bureaucratic practices is typically ignored by kinship researchers, and as Papadaki as well as Fog Olwig and Bundgaard plainly demonstrate in this volume, their analyses could profit from it. They shine the spotlight on local state actors who become gatekeepers as they routinely apply kinship norms to classify cases in bureaucratic processes. Their decisions have serious consequences for the individuals concerned but also affect citizenship and belonging within their intimate as well as extended web of relations.

Citizenship

Citizenship studies focus on how states organize inclusion and exclusion. Since the seminal study by Marshall and his historical depiction (1998



Reconnecting State and Kinship 15

[1950]), the earlier focus on legal entitlements has been expanded to include social rights as the basis for political participation.26 Research could also draw on feminist traditions that have emphasized the linkages between private and public as well as inequalities within kin groups (Skornia 2015) in addition to those who questioned the scope of the inclusivity of a concept of citizenship that was rooted in male filiation or brotherhood (Pateman 1988). Citizenship based on descent has at times figured as an instrument of inclusion.27 More recently, the exclusionary effects of citizenship, as in the efforts of state authorities, especially in Europe and the United States, to control migratory processes, have garnered more attention. Specifically in the context of migration processes, access to legal citizenship is being largely regulated through constructions of kinship. The language of kinship (as descent, alliance, and blood and genetic ties) as well as kinship practices (including marriage, parenting, and filiation) are widely deployed to assert the right to migrate or to prevent border crossings (see, for instance, Kastner 2007; Drotbohm 2009; see also Andrikopuolos, this volume). Such circumstances can reinforce the said classification of cultures, as Miriam Ticktin (2011) has shown in relation to various categories of immigrants in France. New technologies, such as ART and genetic testing, can complicate but also reinforce prevailing notions of citizenship. Even if the premise of common descent has often fostered political exclusion and racism, since the 1990s its strategic invocation has also been pivotal in the demand for citizens’ rights and for legitimizing ethnic and national belonging. This has been prominent, for instance, in the claims of the indigenous rights movement to land, where notions of common ancestry and descent have played a key role. Similarly, with the aid of new technologies in discourses of heritage, old ideas have been revived to achieve new political aims (Schramm 2014). Also, DNA testing has provided the basis for addressing compensation claims and for ensuring broader inclusion after civil wars, such as in the former Yugoslavia, or, as Victoria Goddard’s chapter in this volume on Argentina brings to the fore, by victims’ associations formed in the aftermath of dictatorship.28 Owing to their disciplinary history, anthropologists have often harbored mixed feelings about forms of biological reductionism and their translation into politics (Kuper 2005). Nevertheless, we have to investigate how specific ideas and languages of kinship and the state move between scales (see Pine, this volume), why certain concepts are not only “good to think with” but also “good to act with,” and how despite the constraints they seem to offer new spaces of agency, as Goddard so persuasively argues in this volume (as does

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Nelson 2015). In all of these discourses, the establishment of descent is key to legitimizing ethnic and national belonging, but they are seldom discussed together, and an explicit mention of kinship as a concept is even less common. We contend that there is still much to be gained by framing citizenship in terms of succession, inheritance, modes of relatedness or care practices, and duties, which are key concepts of kinship anthropology.

Belonging

In order to grasp these different constructions and avoid the moral as well as political implications of descent, the concept of belonging emerged relatively independently in both subdisciplines. Belonging in some recent kinship studies has even been used synonymously with kinship (Edwards and Strathern 2000), whereas in political anthropology today it is often seen as the key concept for describing constructions of ethnicity (Lentz 2013; Londsdale 2013), nationalism (Pfaff-­Czarnecka 2011a, 2011b), community (Kößler, Neubert, and von Oppen 1999), and other “we-­groups” (Elwert 1989). Belonging thus constitutes another overlooked field of overlapping concerns between kinship and political anthropology. Although it often remains curiously nebulous, we consider it useful to enlarge a perspective of citizenship that is still mostly state-­and law-­based in order to be able to grasp the affective elements of diverse forms of belonging as well as to map the different scales on which political organization is formed. The ambiguousness may also enhance its potential as a bridge concept by allowing a constructivist perspective, which makes how belonging in different contexts is made or transformed an empirical question. In sum, there is thus no dearth of common points of departures or of common concepts, but broadly speaking, kinship and political anthropologists have continued to go their separate ways. As mentioned, connections between kinship and the state are analyzed mostly in terms of how political processes influence transformations in kinship and not how changes in kinship practices or imageries trigger political change. For instance, few studies that focus on how relatedness is constructed in LGBT families pay attention to how these developments influence contemporary state building. It is not as conspicuous, for example, that the recent “tolerance” extended to sexual minorities has come to be viewed as an almost eternal element of the self-­ascribed “modernity” of Western states. The concomitant “intolerance”



Reconnecting State and Kinship 17

toward the same minorities is now ascribed to and used against the “others”— within and outside the national borders—who are (again) deemed in need of Western education or even discipline. Finally, the epistemological history of the conceptual interdependencies and the consequential coproduction of state and kinship have only received scant attention.

Reconnecting State and Kinship: Toward a New Holism While 1940 conventionally marks the “birth hour” of political anthropology as a subdiscipline, we argue that the consequential separation between politics and kinship broadly impacted how the anthropological gaze was redirected to both fields of study. Since then, kinship continues to be dissociated from (modern) statehood so that surmounting the solidified binary requires devising a broader analytic prism. The chapters in this volume therefore advocate a new holism in thinking about social organization. Of course, we do not seek to return to a study of societies as wholes or as closed corporate communities (Wolf 1957). Rather, we argue for an integrated view of the coproduction of the (modern) state and its other and for the need to interrogate the boundary work between them. This might entail returning to earlier kinship concepts such as kin-­based society in order to suggest that kinship is not reducible to a microlevel of society but instead has always been an important factor in the making and shaping of political organization. It might also involve introducing new conceptual tools for grasping the coproduction of scales, such as the notions of state kinning and kinning the state (Thelen, Thiemann, and Roth 2014). Additionally, research should spell out the ramifications of concepts traveling across the divide between politics and kinship in different times and on different scales. For that reason, the chapters in this volume have been divided into two sections that are interlinked. They demonstrate the transformative power of traveling concepts in time and space that constantly merge the realms of and scales between kinship and the state. Part I, titled “Traveling Concepts: Temporalities, Scales, and the Making of Political Order,” traces how central concepts or, as Herzfeld (this volume) calls them, technologies of knowledge developed within each subdiscipline shape specific understandings of kinship and state configurations in their travel in time and across space and scale. Traveling concepts lose part of their specific social embedding in transit and take on new meanings. Their

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translation into other temporalities also brings about a change in the scale of their application. In the first chapter, Michael Herzfeld emphasizes the parallels between the conceptualization of incest and corruption, two central concepts within kinship and political anthropology. Invoking Mary Douglas’s definition of dirt and pollution as being “matter out of place,” he delineates incest and corruption as two forms of “polluting”: both jeopardize the collective interest and privilege a more selfish concern in diverting resources intended for general circulation toward the profit, pleasure, and self-­interest of a few. In parallel, there is a temporal tension dividing these cases so that a condition of “pollution” can be differentially understood either as a timeless element of social life and politics or as a form of eradicable individual guilt. Bringing the concepts of incest and corruption into one comparative framework, Herzfeld—like the following chapters by Pine and Goddard—demonstrates their ability to move between the scales. Laments about “too much kinship in the wrong place” (incest or corruption) in a village also carry over to the regional and national levels and, as the appraisal of the recent financial crisis in Greece and Italy shows, even to international politics. Furthermore, these international reactions and statistics that “prove” corruption at high levels (thus “political incest”) are often based on and reproduce the familiar “us” and “them” distinctions outlined above. The second chapter, by Thomas Zitelmann, carries forth the trope of classification by following the travel and translation of kinship concepts as the basis of the distinction between “us” and “them” within military strategies. In the new postsocialist world, distinctions are drawn less along political lines and more on the basis of kinship conceptions. Zitelmann delineates how the ideas of the evolutionist and structural-­functionalist periods of anthropology made their way into U.S. military strategy manuals. Drawn specifically from the aforementioned model of the segmentary political organization developed by Evans-­Pritchard, the same concepts are used by different strategists to advocate for either modifying or destroying existing kinship relations in situations of military conflicts. Favoring one or the other solution thereby depends on the degree to which kinship is essentialized. Some thinkers believe that “traditional” kinship should (and can) be reformed, while others conceive of kinship as a given that cannot be changed at will and must therefore be destroyed by shock and awe. These issues bring the discipline of anthropology full circle back to an urgent need to deal critically with the



Reconnecting State and Kinship 19

older notions of kinship and political organization that occupy a fixed place on the temporal axis. While the first two chapters focus on how kinship concepts traveled into the world of state politics, spanning large geographical areas and historical periods, the chapter by Frances Pine draws attention to travel in both directions within only one country, namely Poland. She describes the relationship between the languages of kinship and the state, emphasizing how differently these concepts are understood at a given point in time by different segments of the population. The boundaries between the two realms and scales are thereby constantly blurred and reconfigured. Pine shows how the state—usually represented as distinct from the family and a site of power—uses the language of kinship to make moral claims about belonging, care, and equality. Conversely, the use of an idealized language of kinship in the domestic domain also masks often violent, hierarchical, and exclusive daily life practices. Besides showing the “dark side” of kinship, Pine also demonstrates the potential of the language of kinship to merge scales, when used to convey what is proper in the realm of the political order as well as in intimate relations. Kinship and politics constantly echo and mimic each other, at times reproducing but also inverting and undermining the “proper” order in each. Victoria Goddard’s chapter on Argentina complements the preceding one in that it addresses the mutual constitution and the overlapping of public and private domains. Arguing that the dynamics can be adequately understood only if both realms, supposedly distinct, are viewed in tandem with one another, the study traces how state and resistance groups use the language of kinship to denote political belonging in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While “brotherhood” was the predominant political term in the nineteenth century for constituting the nation, the twentieth century heralded a shift in terms, invoking the nuclear family. Each phase and usage produces different forms of invisibilities and exclusions but also different spaces of agency. While the revolutionary notion of national brotherhood in the nineteenth century aimed at legitimating nationhood by obscuring gender, class, and ethnicity, a possible recourse to genetic testing in the aftermath of the dictatorship privileges the evidence of a biological connection while also leaving space for recognizing new bonds. In a final shift, the “private” morality of motherhood becomes highly politicized in a manner that is resistant to state appropriations in the postdictatorship phase. Most important, Goddard

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argues that these understandings, expressed in the language of kinship, produced new languages of politics and the state. In the last chapter of this section, Ivan Rajković takes up the concepts of familiarity and familiality to merge scales in contemporary Serbia. The West has long viewed the Balkans through an Orientalist lens, often accusing them of “too much kinship in politics”—much the way Herzfeld describes the classification process with respect to Greece. This is mirrored not just in concepts such as zadruga, an extended family arrangement that despite scant historical evidence is deemed typical for the region (Todorova 1993, on the Balkans as internal other; see also Todorova 1997), but also in the evaluation of politics as constantly flawed. Rajković complicates the understanding of kinship conveyed in the literature as a type of organization that either supports the state or resists it, emphasizing instead the double move of his interlocutors in both directions. Drawing on resemblances to family structure, they express their understanding for informal gains in politics by comparing the politician to the head of a family who has to make ends meet (familiarity). At the same time, they distance themselves from the “political families” of the politicians, denying identification (familiality). Rekindling the “old” topic of corruption and patronage in political anthropology, Rajković offers an innovative twist, showing that the complex mixture of empathy and disidentification can present new ways of bonding that simultaneously preclude collective identifications. Part II of the volume, titled “Classifying Kinship and the Making of Citizens,” shifts its attention to the translation of kinship categories into practices of marginalization and toward new constructions of belonging in political collectives. The chapters in this section thus focus on everyday processes of producing “appropriate” citizens by demarcating “good” from “bad” kinship. Seemingly positive state policies, such as social citizenship rights, public child care, and transparency policies, can generate new decisive actors and processes of marginalization in unexpected sites such as maternity wards and kindergartens. This section shows that the classic distinction of “they have kinship—we have family” encapsulating the modern-­traditional dichotomy seems to have a rather timeless ring to it. In chapter 6, Jeanette Edwards takes up the widely used political concept of transparency in order to examine the new connotations it obtains as it travels into the realm of kinship. The chapter looks at recent political debates on disclosure in donor conception and argues that transparency, as currently understood, is compatible with ideas of neoliberal personhood that



Reconnecting State and Kinship 21

emphasize autonomy and individual responsibility. As such, these ideas are valued among British middle-­class families and the trope of transparency thus offers insights into what “ideal” family and parenting styles are encouraged. In consequence, other forms and practices are potentially devalued so that, for instance, parents who are resistant to revealing much are marginalized. Edwards’s perspective on kinship as an artifact of the organization of knowledge has parallels with Herzfeld’s notion of too much kinship in reference to common conceptions of corruption and incest. Nontransparency, here the refusal to disclose or the withholding of information, could be seen as another way of polluting or spoiling kinship. In both cases, the “right” kinship is reproduced only by managing and disclosing knowledge in an appropriate manner. The focus on the “right” way of knowing and living kinship is also central to Eirini Papadaki’s chapter on processes of differentiating “good” from “bad” kinship in one of the biggest public hospitals in Athens, Greece. At the center of the discussion are practices and evaluations of social workers who make recommendations to the district attorney about whether the kinship ties of birth mothers to their newborns should be dissolved. These gatekeepers themselves adhere to middle-­class ideals of intensive parenting, and it comes as no surprise that mothers who are (undocumented) migrants or Greek citizens in unstable situations are branded as “chaotic” or “alien.” Their decisions are based on dominant norms regarding “proper” motherhood in Greece as well as on the implicit hierarchies of culture.29 The chapter shows how state actors play an active part in producing or breaking up kinship relations. Even more important, Papadaki demonstrates cases in which the production of citizenship relies on challenging prior seemingly “natural” kinship relations. It is through the processes of active de-­kinning by local state actors that babies of undocumented migrants become Greek citizens, while in many other cases a classification of kinship practices as “bad” would lead to an exclusion from citizenship. Middle-­class family values also play an important part in the classification practices of local state actors in chapter 8. Karen Fog Olwig and Helle Bundgaard explore everyday processes through which (different kinds of) citizens are made in Danish public day care institutions. These practices entail evaluating not just the children but also their parents in relation to commensality practices, food habits, and reading cultures. While the practices of Danish middle-­class families are generally supported by the day care experience, those of the children of other groups are often drawn into question.

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These varying experiences in state day care have important implications for how children cultivate a sense of belonging and place in society. Similar to Edwards’s argument in chapter 6 in relation to transparency, Fog Olwig and Bundgaard indicate that the processes of classifying can turn highly valued ideas, such as integration, tolerance, and individual development, into mechanisms of marginalization. In the last chapter, Apostolos Andrikopoulos departs from the focus in Part II on classification and translation of dominant kinship ideas by diverting our attention to the production of kinship and the use of kinship as a language of relatedness among legally unauthorized African migrants in Greece and the Netherlands. Migration practices that involve the lending and borrowing of inalienable possessions (state identity documents, such as passports and social security numbers) sometimes establish longer-­lasting reciprocal and kinship relations. In the context of high inequality, migrants are forced to rely on and create new kinship bonds rather than bringing kinship with them from traditional backgrounds. Similar to discourses of brotherhood in Argentina, as described by Goddard in chapter 4, young West African DVD sellers in Greek cities idealize brotherhood. As siblingship can be based on mutuality and closeness, shared experiences, or shared parenthood (see also Thelen, Coe and Alber 2013), it seemingly provides a useful concept for framing ambivalent, fragile, and also unclear social relations, such as those between legally unauthorized and legally authorized migrants. Returning to the discrepancy between kinship norms and practice, Andrikopoulos, similar to Pine in Part I of the volume, stresses the exploitative and abusive dimensions of kinship in practice. This again draws attention to the need to understand kinship as a language for expressing not only different kinds of shared social relations and interests but also tensions and conflicts. Maybe it is this openness of kinship to different meanings that makes the language of kinship so attractive for describing states of social closeness.

Conclusion Juxtaposed as opposite modes of organization since the nineteenth century, (modern) state and kinship were often conceived as mutually exclusive entities mapped onto temporal, spatial, and scalar axes. In the spatial imaginary, state-­based societies comprised “the West,” and, correspondingly, kin-­based societies represented “the Rest.” Early evolutionary and modernization



Reconnecting State and Kinship 23

approaches presupposed a teleological process in which premodern, stateless, and kinship-­based societies no longer relied on kinship but instead aspired to and eventually evolved into modern state-­based societies. Scalar classifications that situated kinship on the local scale of micropolitics, with the state encompassing both family and kinship above it on the macroscale, contributed to a disciplinary division of labor in the social sciences. The oppositional positioning in the hegemonic imaginary at the two ends of the temporal axis, indicating that reliance on kinship ebbed in the wake of the (modern) state, has neither borne out in the past nor can it be affirmed on the basis of contemporary case studies. What we instead see—in the past and the present—is an ever-­shifting interconnection between both conceptual realms and their mutual constituency (see Pine and Goddard, this volume). Anthropology’s turn away from the evolutionary notion of historical change contributed to the emergence of kinship and political anthropology as two distinct subdisciplines by the mid-­twentieth century. Kinship developed into a formal and depoliticized field, suspended in a temporal void. However, the (modern) state, widely excluded from kinship studies, also faded out of political anthropology partly due to the disciplinary division of labor, which ascribed to anthropology the task of studying “traditional” societies predominantly characterized by political rule without a (modern) state. Even though both subdisciplines reinstituted the state into their analytical framework following a phase of in-­depth critique, the interconnections have not been fully explored. One way of generating a dialogue between the disciplines is to track the itinerary of traveling concepts and their underlying norms through space and time. The scientific delineations of kinship embody its ambivalent role in the self-­understanding of the West, which fed into diverse state policies directed at internal as well as external populations. Multiple historical factors affect how conceptual boundaries between kinship and the state are drawn and in turn impact political processes that absorb these binary distinctions as well as the adjacent temporal and scalar classifications into their framework. Over a long period of time, kinship was seen as a fragmenting and particularizing force that had to be overcome by an integrative (modern) state. The persistence of kinship in the so-­called modernization processes came as a surprise and was a challenge to colonial and postcolonial state building. Specific kinship practices continue to be viewed as premodern or “alien,” such as cousin marriage, polygamy, and clans, and seem to challenge the monopoly of violence (required for building modern states, according to Weber 1978), sometimes

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even as confronting international military forces or hindering the successful integration of international migrants into self-­defined modern societies. At the same time, “more” kinship seems to be needed in relation to care. State practices seeking to produce “appropriate” kinship norms and practices have also engendered specific marginalizing mechanisms within the body politic. Turned against the outside, such classifications—for instance, in corruption barometers and accusations of “too much kinship in politics” in general—can lead to a devaluation in international politics, as described in chapter 1 by Herzfeld, or even provide justification to destroy (see Zitelmann, this volume). Such processes of classifying kinship practices as “good” and “bad” accompany the human life course, whether already in relation to conception (Edwards, this volume), shortly after delivery in the maternity ward (Papadaki, this volume), or at preschool institutions (Bundgaard and Fog Olwig, this volume). Ideas about “proper” citizenship are rarely uncontested, and in their negotiations, different state actors sometimes unexpectedly acquire gatekeeping roles. In those positions, they often make, shape, and transform different kinds of belonging, which are neither “only” private and kinship-­based nor exclusively political and state-­based. Exclusion from citizenship affects not just the individual concerned. As the basis for determining succession, kinship impacts the possibility of the children acquiring citizenship as well. In the ultimate analysis, it affects the perception and possibilities of lived kinship. In these processes, the selection criteria of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and disconnecting, are partly naturalized and grounded in what is perceived as a natural need, as in relation to the method of conception and identity formation described by Edwards in chapter 6 or as an inheritance of “bad influences” in the Danish case (Bundgaard and Fog Olwig, this volume). This, however, has different consequences, as in the British case where the identity of donors must be known (Edwards, this volume), while in the other two cases the difference is played down. In the Greek case outlined by Papadaki in chapter 7, the birth mothers are even erased from the life of the newborn. Temporalities are decisive in these processes: the “political incest” of corruption can be perceived either as an eternal behavioral feature or as an individual and punctual failure—which has different consequences, as Herzfeld (this volume) demonstrates at the example of different framings of the crisis in Greece. Perceptions of temporality and timing affect how state actors view migrants: as hailing from “traditional” societies with kinship practices that do not provide them the option of a “proper” family life. A paradoxical consequence of such classifications is described by Papadaki (this volume) whereby



Reconnecting State and Kinship 25

children are separated from their noncitizen relatives and eventually become Greek citizens as state wards. This indicates that the dichotomist construction of state versus kinship works best if it is constantly transgressed, as we also see in the shifting usages and merging of scales through the language of kinship in chapters 3, 4, and 5. Scientific discourses have never been devoid of value judgments, nor have they been entirely disconnected from dominant public discourses and state policy making. The layers of intersections between the dominant styles of thought in scientific and public debates as well as the wide scope of their translation make for a complex and at times bewildering field of exploration in which moral assessments are as much bound to concept as to context and are occasionally turned on their heads rather quickly. Sometimes even ascriptions of different temporalities to societies change rapidly from characterizations as being governed by eternal or cyclical time linked to unchangeable ascribed “traditional” kinship relations, to having a chronological understanding of time and thus automatically associated with small nuclear families, citizenship, liberal values, and progress. The policies modeled on these classifications have lasting consequences for mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, for processes expressing entitlement or marginalization, and sometimes for those pertaining to life and death. They deserve our attention.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on a first version of this introduction as well as the participants of the Ethnography Group at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (University of Vienna), specifically Astrid Baerwolf, Anna Ellmer, Evangelos Karagiannis, Christof Lammer, and Deniz Seebacher, for their insightful suggestions on an earlier draft. Last but not least, thanks to Gita Rajan and Jennifer Rasell for helping us to transform our text into a readable English.

Notes 1. Many national constitutions around the world clearly position the family and its privacy under the protection of the state (including, for example, Article 6 of the German Basic Law [Grundgesetz]). Even those that do not mention the family explicitly—such

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as the U.S. Constitution—do so under the premise of a strict separation of state and kinship. In all cases, constitutional rights concerning the formation of kinship/family (who is allowed to marry whom, what is considered incest, the regulation of rights such as care and inheritance between parents and children, etc.) are usually contested. The ensuing debates and court case give rise to a plethora of studies in the legal sciences (including legal anthropology) about the interrelation of state and kinship. 2. Parallel hypotheses asserted an earlier matriarchy (Bachofen 1897) or group marriages as predating the patriarchal family (Morgan 1877: 480ff.). The assumed stages of development were further complicated through awareness of other social dimensions, such as economic relations (e.g., Engels 1884) and religious ideas (most prominently Frazer 1922). 3. Kuper (2005: 11) refers in this respect to Marx, Tönnies, Durkheim, and Weber. This narrative would also work for a differentiating within Europe, in the course of which Southeastern Europe or the Mediterranean countries were cast away as internal “others.” As Pina Cabral (1989) has argued, these distinctions often tell us more about the Northern/Western self-­understanding than about actual political practices. 4. The fact that Margaret Mead has become one of the most well-­known anthropologists outside the discipline can be taken as one sign of this fashion. 5. Modernization is often also linked to secularization, both of which in turn rest on crucial distinctions about ascribed relations and political choice (McKinnon and Cannell 2013). Although classical modernization theory seemed to have been defeated at the latest in the 1980s, some of the basic ideas, such as kinship as a basis for deficient “unmodern” pathways, have experienced a resurgence in phases of rapid social change, such as the postsocialist transformations (Thelen 2011). 6. However, for a description of corruption in the “developed” world, see also Wolf (1966) and Blok (1975). 7. Pfeffer (2016) calls this a combination of nonbureaucratic orders with bureaucratic rules. Although this terminology is meant to provide a non-modernist approach, he also follows a dichotomistic logic, namely by differentiating between bureaucratic and nonbureaucratic orders. As none of the manifold examples of kinship as nonbureaucratic order deal with (modern) statehood, Pfeffer reinvents the Weberian category of bureaucracy as a decisive category and therewith implicitly reproduces the picture of kinship as opposed to the modern state. 8. Even more recently, when describing Southeast Asian highlanders escaping and resisting modern statehood in the first half of the twentieth century, James Scott (2009) followed this line of argument. However, he also points out in his conclusion that these kinds of resistance against statehood are no longer possible. 9. For an interesting account of this double movement in regard to social security, see Benda-­Beckmann (2005). 10. We do not intend to give a comprehensive review of the history of political kinship anthropology as a whole but instead intend to condense and highlight what we see as general and major trends in theorizing the relationship between state and



Reconnecting State and Kinship 27

kinship. Trends and shifts do, of course, never completely cut off other ideas and lines of thought. There are always temporarily marginalized sidelines always in existence that might resurface at other points in time. In this respect, not only the entanglements of kinship and politics but also those between kinship and economics should be taken into account, as Guyer (1995) and Geschiere (2000) show. 11. Leach (1954: 7) attributed this anthropological proclivity to stability at least in part to the borrowing of concepts from Durkheim instead of Weber and Pareto. 12. While the move away from a historical perspective would also lead to an abandonment of long debates about the development from an early premodern to modern state, some sidelines of the debate—especially among the circles of neoevolutionists in the United States—“survived” the paradigmatic shift. In Europe, Krader (1968) continued to research and publish on the origins and evolution of states, emphasizing increasing scale and complexity specifically in the transformation of clan systems into states. Claessen and Skalnik (1979) suggested that there would not be enough historical evidence for further arguments. Thereafter, hardly any research was pursued on the state within the evolutionary paradigm. 13. One expression of this development is that the textbook The Anthropology of Politics (Vincent 2002) does not devote a special section to the state (although it contains parts of the work of Gluckman, which in fact is on the colonial state). 14. Another remarkable exception is Frederic George Bailey’s illuminating Stratagems and Spoils (1969), in which he explicitly argues for conceptualizing a theory of social actors in political anthropology that applies to all kinds of social formations. 15. On the insights of the Manchester school, see also Thomassen (2008). 16. Christiane Falge (2015) followed the Nuer into the United States and describes the changing kinship patterns, including lineages and marriage patterns, under new political circumstances. Notwithstanding these follow-­up studies on Nuer social organization, in wider discussions the segmentary model developed by Evans-­Pritchard remains dominant (see also McKinnon 2000, and Zitelmann, this volume). 17. Up until the 1980s, political scientists and political sociologists engaged in intense debates about the nature of the state. In the 1960s and 1970s the Marxist-­ oriented circles, especially those engaged in the Poulantzas-­Miliband debate, discussed to what extent the state was exclusively an instrument of the capitalist class interest (Miliband 1983; Poulantzas 1969, 1976). In contrast, the largely American pluralist school of community studies at the time viewed the state as an extension of the power of either elitist or pluralist societal interest groups (Dahl 1961; Domhoff 1990). Finally, in the 1980s neo-­Weberian theorists sought to “bring the state back in” by treating it as an autonomous entity, analytically separable from intrasocietal power struggles (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985). By the late 1980s these approaches to the state had lost much of their appeal, and in the search for conceptual alternatives to overcome this theoretical stalemate, notions of ideology (Abrams 1988; Bourdieu 1994) and culture (Mitchell 1991; Steinmetz 1999) took center stage (see also Thelen, Vetters, and Benda-­ Beckmann 2014).

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18. Large parts of the literature on sovereignty, as a defining element of statehood, have also stressed new forms of sovereignty outside or beyond the confines of the nation-­state (on Africa, see Mbembe 2005; on graduated sovereignty in Southeast Asia, see Ong 2000; on transnational sovereignty, see Sassen 2004; on fractured sovereignty in India, see Randeria 2007). 19. Although we cannot go into any detail here, it is interesting to note that after the split, political anthropology seemed to be dominated by men, while kinship studies became largely feminized. 20. See Alber and Bochow (2011), who outlined how the imagery and the anthropological as well as the sociological research questions on family and kinship in Africa depended on the respective questions and preoccupations in the Western world and among Western scholars. 21. Interestingly, even the anthropologists in this field now talked about “family” rather than “kinship.” In an effort to distance themselves from earlier anthropological research, they had thus bought into the “modern-­traditional” divide. 22. It is an interesting intellectual game to imagine what would have happened with social theory if the notion of power had not expanded up to a point that it was seen as influencing and often even explaining all social configurations, but the notion of kinship instead has been viewed as this influencing and explanatory factor for everything that happens in the social world. 23. Czarniawska and Joerges (1996) first introduced the notion of “travelling ideas” in their research on organizational change. Behrends, Park, and Rottenburg (2014) extended the original idea to “travelling models” in relation to conflict and conflict resolution. In our field we follow three movements: the general idea of a historical shift between from “traditional kinship” to “modern family” across temporal and scalar boundaries (Papadaki, this volume), the movement of concepts from the realm of kinship to politics (Zitelmann, this volume; Rajković, this volume; Herzfeld, this volume; Goddard, this volume), the movement from the realm of political to kinship (Bundgaard and Fog Olwig, this volume; Edwards, this volume). 24. Commenting on Gluckman, Kuper (1970) has emphasized the agency entailed in the position, stressing the room for maneuver of these intermediaries. 25. In their study on rural Indonesia, Franz von Benda-­Beckmann and Keebet von Benda-­Beckmann (1998) label these overlapping fields “state-­on” and “state-­off ” activities. 26. A more recent shift in perspective has swung the focus to how residents (citizens or not) choose to frame and claim citizenship rights and benefits from the state. Especially in urban locations and situations of high mobility, researchers attest to new struggles for inclusion and to the emerging notion of cultural citizenship. 27. This was the case with the citizens of the former Soviet Union (and its former allies in the Eastern bloc) who could prove German ancestry. Before 1990, they only had to travel to the Federal Republic of Germany to be automatically conferred with German citizenship.



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28. DNA testing might not be only a voluntary confirmation but can also be used involuntarily to establish personal identification and belonging and can alter the state-­ citizen relationship profoundly (Vaisman 2012). 29. In that respect, the social workers take on very similar functions as gatekeepers that Miriam Ticktin (2011) describes for French medical staff.

Bibliography Abrams, Philip. 1988. Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State. Journal of Historical Sociology 1(1): 58–89. Alber, Erdmute, and Astrid Bochow. 2011. Changes in African Families: A Review of Anthropological and Sociological Approaches Towards Family and Kinship in Africa. In Frontiers of Globalization: Kinship and Family Structures in Africa, ed. Ana Marta González et al., 1–30. Trenton, NJ: Africa World. Alber, Erdmute, et al., eds. 2010. Verwandtschaft Heute: Positionen, Ergebnisse und Perspektiven. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag. Alber, Erdmute, and Heike Drotbohm, eds. 2015. Anthropological Perspectives on Care: Work, Kinship and the Life-­Course. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Bachofen, Johann Jakob. 1897. Das Mutterrecht: Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur. Basel: Benno Schwabe. Bailey, Frederick G. 1969. Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. New York: Schocken. Behrends, Andrea, Sung-­ Joon Park, and Richard Rottenburg. 2014. Travelling Models: Introducing an Analytical Concept to Globalisation Studies. In Travelling Models in African Conflict Management: Translating Technologies of Social Ordering, ed. Andrea Behrends, Sung-­Joon Park, and Richard Rottenburg, 1–40. Leiden: Brill. Benda-­Beckmann, Franz von. 2005. “Nicht mehr” und “noch nicht” Umkehrungen von Tradition und Modernität auf der Suche nach der passenden Solidarität für soziale Sicherung. Rechtsgeschichte 6: 29–39. Benda-­Beckmann, Franz von, and Keebet von Benda-­Beckmann. 1998. Where Structures Merge: State and Off-­State Involvement in Rural Social Security on Ambon, Indonesia. In Old World Places, New World Problems: Exploring Resource Management Issues in Eastern Indonesia, ed. Sandra N. Pannell and Franz von Benda-­ Beckmann, 143–80. Canberra: Australian National University, Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies. Bierschenk, Thomas, and Jean-­Pierre Olivier de Sardan. 2014. States at Work: Dynamics of African Bureaucracies. Leiden: Brill. Blok, Anton. 1975. The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860–1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs. New York: Harper & Row.

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Borneman, John. 1992. Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bouchard, Michel. 2011. The State of the Study of the State in Anthropology. Reviews in Anthropology 40(3): 183–209. Bouquet, Mary. 1993. Reclaiming English Kinship: Portuguese Refractions of British Kinship Theory. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1994. Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field. Sociological Theory 12(1): 1–18. Candea, Matei. 2011. “Our Division of the Universe”: Making a Space for the Non-­ Political in the Anthropology of Politics. Current Anthropology 52(3): 309–34. Carsten, Janet. 1997. The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. ———. 2000. Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Claessen, Henri J. M., and Peter S. Skalnik, eds. 1979. The Early State. New York: Mouton. Czarniawska, Barbara, and Bernward Joerges. 1996. Travels of Ideas. In Translating Organizational Change, ed. Barbara Czarniawska and Guje Sévon. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Dahl, Robert A. 1961. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dale, Lacey Andrews. 2007. Bulgur Marriages and “Big” Women: Navigating Relatedness in Guinean Refugee Camps. Anthropological Quarterly 80(2): 355–78. Domhoff, G. William. 1990. The Power Elite and the State: How Policy Is Made in America. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Donzelot, Jacques. 1980. The Policing of Families: Welfare Versus the State. London: Hutchinson. Drotbohm, Heike. 2009. Horizons of Long-­Distance Intimacies: Reciprocity, Contribution and Disjuncture in Cape Verde. In The History of the Family: An International Quarterly 14(2): 132–49. Durkheim, Emile. 1951 [1897]. Suicide: A Study in Sociology. New York: Free Press. Edwards, Jeanette. 1999. Why Dolly Matters: Culture, Kinship and Cloning. Ethnos 64(3): 310–24. Edwards, Jeanette, et al. 1999. Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the Age of Assisted Conception. New York: Routledge. Edwards, Jeanette, and Marilyn Strathern. 2000. Including Our Own. In Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, ed. Janet Carsten, 149–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elwert, Georg. 1989. Nationalismus und Ethnizität über die Bildung von Wir-­Gruppen. In Ethnizität im Wandel, ed. Peter Waldmann and Georg Elwert, 2160. Saarbrücken: Breitenbach Verlag.



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Engels, Friedrich. 1884. Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats. Hottingen-­Zürich: Schweizerische Genossenschaftsbuchdruckerei. Evans, Peter B., Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. 1985. Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evans-­Pritchard, Edward E. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Falge, Christiane. 2015. The Global Nuer: Transnational Life, Religious Movements and War. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. Fassin, Didier, et al. 2015. At the Heart of the State: The Moral World of Institutions. London: Pluto. Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. 2002. Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality. American Ethnologist 29(4): 981–1002. Fortes, Meyer. 1969. Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. Chicago: Aldine. Fortes, Meyer, and E. E. Evans-­Pritchard. 1940. African Political Systems. London: Oxford University Press. Frankenberg, Ronald. 1990 [1957]. Village on the Border: A Social Study of Religion, Politics and Football in a North Wales Community. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. Frazer, James George. 1922. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. London: Macmillan. Geschiere, Peter. 2000. Money Versus Kinship: Subversion or Consolidation? Contrasting Examples from Africa and the Pacific. Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 1: 54–78. Gluckman, Max. 1940. Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand. Bantu Studies 14: 1–30. ———. 1949. Social Beliefs and Individual Thinking in Tribal Society. Memoirs of the Manchester Literary Society 91(5): 73–98. Gupta, Akhil, and Aradhana Sharma. 2006. The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Guyer, Jane I., ed. 1995. Money Matters: Instability, Values and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities. London: James Currey. Handelman, Don. 2004 [1976]. Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events. Oxford, UK: Berg. Herzfeld, Michael. 1992. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Oxford, UK: Berg. Howell, Signe. 2006. The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective. New York: Berghahn. Hutchinson, Sharon E. 1996. Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kahn, Susan. 2000. Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Kastner, Kristin. 2007. “My Baby Is My Paper!” Familiäre Bindungen nigerianischerMigrantinnen auf dem Weg nach Europa. Afrika Spectrum 42(2): 251–73. Klotz, Maren. 2013. Genetic Knowledge and Family Identity: Managing Gamete Donation in Britain and Germany. Sociology 47(5): 994–1011. Kössler, Reinhart, Dieter Neubert, and Achim von Oppen, eds. 1999. Gemeinschaften in einer entgrenzten Welt. Berlin: Das arabische Buch. Krader, Lawrence. 1968. Formation of the State. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Kramer, Fritz, and Christian Sigrist, eds. 1983. Gesellschaften ohne Staat. Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat. Kuper, Adam. 1970. Kalahari Village Politics: An African Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. The Reinvention of Primitive Society. London: Routledge. Leach, Edmund R. 1954. Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. London: Bell and Sons. Leinaweaver, Jessaca B. 2010. Outsourcing Care: How Peruvian Migrants Meet Transnational Family Obligations. Latin American Perspectives 37: 67–87. Lentz, Carola. 2013. Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa Natives and Strangers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lewellen, Ted. 1983. Political Anthropology: An Introduction. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Lipsky, Michael. 1980. Street-­Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Lonsdale, John. 2013. Anti-­Colonial Nationalism and Patriotism in Sub-­Saharan Africa. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism, ed. John Breuilly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maine, Henry Sumner. 1861. Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas. London: John Murray. Marshall, Mac. 1977. The Nature of Nurture. American Ethnologist 4(4): 643–62. Marshall, T. H. 1998 [1950]. Citizenship and Social Class. In The Citizenship Debates, ed. G. Shafir, 93–111. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2005. Faces of Freedom: Jewish and Black Experiences. Interventions 7(3): 293–98. McKinnon, Susan. 2000. Domestic Exceptions: Evans-­Pritchard and the Creation of Nuer Patrilinearity and Equality. Cultural Anthropology 15(1): 35–83 McKinnon, Susan, and Fenella Cannell, eds. 2013. Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press. McLennan, John. 1865. Primitive Marriage: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Captive in Marriage Ceremonies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Migdal, Joel S., and Klaus Schlichte. 2005. Rethinking the State. In The Dynamics of States: The Formation and Crises of State Domination, ed. Klaus Schlichte, 1–40. London: Ashgate.



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Miliband, Ralph. 1983. Class Power and State Power. London: Verso. Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics. American Political Science Review 85(1): 77–96. Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1877. Ancient Society: Or Researches in the Line of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization. Chicago: C. H. Kerr. Nelson, Diane M. 2015. Who Counts? The Mathematics of Death and Life After Genocide. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Notermans, Catrien. 2004. Sharing Home, Food, and Bed: Paths of Grandmotherhood in East Cameroon. Africa 74(1): 6–27. Ong, Aihwa. 2000. Graduated Sovereignty in South-­East Asia: Theory. Culture & Society 17(4): 5–75. Parkin, Robert, and Linda Stone. 2004. Kinship and Family: An Anthropological Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Pfaff-­Czarnecka, Joanna. 2011a. From “Identity” to “Belonging” in Social Research: Plurality, Social Boundaries, and the Politics of the Self. In Ethnicity, Citizenship and Belonging: Practices, Theory and Spatial Dimensions, ed. Joanna Pfaff-­Czarnecka et al., 199–219. Madrid: Iberoamericana. ———. 2011b. Introduction: Belonging and Multiple Attachments in Contemporary Himalayan Societies. In The Politics of Belonging in the Himalayas: Local Attachments and Boundary Dynamics, ed. Joanna Pfaff-­Czarnecka and Gerard Toffin, xi–xxxviii. New Delhi: Sage. Pfeffer, Georg. 2016. Verwandtschaft als Verfassung: Unbürokratische Muster öffentlicher Ordnung. Baden-­Baden: Nomos. Pina Cabral, Joao de. 1989. The Mediterranean as a Category of Regional Comparison: A Critical View. Current Anthropology 30(3): 399–406. Poulantzas, Nicos. 1969. The Problem of the Capitalist State. New Left Review 58: 7–78. ———. 1976. The Capitalist State: A Reply to Miliband and Laclau. New Left Review 95: 63–83. Radcliffe-­Brown, Alfred R. 1940. Preface. In African Political Systems, ed. Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-­Pritchard, xi–xxiii. London: Oxford University Press. Randeria, Shalini. 2007. Legal Pluralism, Social Movements and the Post-­Colonial State in India: Fractured Sovereignty and Differential Citizenship Rights. In Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies, ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 41–74. London: Verso. Reeves, Madeleine. 2014. Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2004. Local Actors in Global Politics. Current Sociology 52(4): 649–70. Schramm, Katharina. 2014. Claims of Descent: Race and Science in Contemporary South Africa. Vienna Working Papers in Ethnography 3, Vienna, https://​ksa​.univie​ .ac​.at​/research​/vienna​-­­working​-­­papers​-­­in​-­­ethnography​/details​/​#c91957.

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Vaisman, Noa. 2012. Identity, DNA and the State in Post-­Dictatorship Argentina. In Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging, ed. Katharina Schramm, David Skinner and Richard Rottenburg, 97–115. New York: Berghahn. Vincent, Joan E. 2002. The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press. Weismantel, Mary J. 1995. Making Kin: Kinship Theory and Zumbagua Adoptions. American Ethnologist 22(4): 685–704. Weston, Kath 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press. Wolf, Eric. 1957. Closed Corporate Peasant Communities in Mesoamerica and Central Java. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 13(1): 1–18. ———. 1966. Kinship, Friendship, and Patron-­Client Relations in Complex Societies. In The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies, ed. Michael Banton, 1–22. London: Routledge. Yang, Shu-­Yuan. 2005. Imagining the State: An Ethnographic Study. Ethnography 6(4): 487–516.

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Part I

Traveling Concepts Temporalities, Scales, and the Making of Political Order

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Chapter 1

Corruption as Political Incest Temporalities of Sin and Redemption Michael Her zfeld

The revival of anthropological interest in kinship should occasion no surprise.1 Indeed, the discipline has never really turned its back on kinship, although its relevance has waned considerably since the heyday of Lévi-­ Straussian structuralism and componential analysis. Kinship has especially returned through anthropological interest in nationalism, an ideology that extends the idea of kin-­based, face-­to-­face intimacy to vast populations. Changes in political structure sometimes produce changes in the rhetoric thus invoked, as in the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (Delaney 1995; Özyürek 2004), and kinship infuses people’s current understandings of interethnic and international relationships (see, notably, Ben-­Yehoyada 2014). Despite the evidence of such connections, the widely assumed scalar split between kinship and the state has continued to impede the critical analysis of their mutual entailment, as the introductory essay by Thelen and Alber in this volume suggests. The linkage I propose here between incest and corruption, like the earlier argument I offered about corruption and heritage (Herzfeld 2015), may therefore initially occasion surprise or even shock. Such reactions, however, reflect background assumptions of scale rather than any transcendent logic. The extension of kinship to more anonymous collectivities did in fact already appear at an early date in the work of E. E. Evans-­Pritchard (1940), who recognized that the intimacy of kinship served as a technology of social knowledge on wider social platforms. The Nuer of his day did not all know each other personally, yet fictions of shared descent not only permitted them

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to “ethicize” (Burke 1954: 204–7) specific alliances but also, more recently, enabled them to turn those alliances into dominant factions in the civil war leading to the emergence of the South Sudanese nation-­state (Hutchinson 1996; Hutchinson and Pendle 2015). Recovering Evans-­Pritchard’s original insight seems especially timely today.2 It is probably no coincidence, for example, that societies with strongly segmentary and unilineal kinship systems have tended to be seen as breeding grounds for terrorism and other forms of violence or that kinship can be effectively deployed as a weapon of aggression and control (Zitelmann, this volume). If political leaders can use anthropological knowledge of kinship in this way, those who live in the kinship systems concerned presumably possess a comparable capacity to do so. As Pine’s essay in this volume nicely illustrates, moreover, the key word is “use”—a reflection of the entire gamut of ideas about practice, agency, and performativity that infuse virtually all anthropological thought today. It is not true that only “tribal societies” operate on principles of segmentation. In part, that assumption arises from the anthropological habit of seeing segmentation as exclusively kinship-­based. In fact, the flexibility of segmentation also allows virtually all nation-­states, despite their seemingly fixed and hierarchical bureaucratic structure, to deploy segmentary principles in the organization of their cultural identities, thereby dealing with potential tensions between national unity and local pride. While such states exhibit the transformation of genealogy into organizational structure and cultural form, the logic of segmentation remains a hidden source of potential instability. In some nation-­states, the relativity of segmentary political relations also translates into a conceptual relativity of truth; historical facts are contingent upon the current state of kin-­based alliances (Dresch 1986; Shryock 1997). With the emergence of nation-­states, what Evans-­Pritchard (1940: 106–8) called “structural time,” a genealogical construct, is converted into national claims to eternal existence—the immortality that, as Benedict Anderson (1991 [1983]: 17) argued, explains mortal citizens’ willingness to subsume their identities under that of the national collectivity. Evans-­ Pritchard (1949) himself documented this process in the emergence of the modern Libyan state.3 The segmentary properties of prestate social relations nevertheless remain in place, dormant and submerged but ready to erupt into factionalism and separatism at the first sign of bureaucratic weakness at the top; they may also be exploited by rival states, sometimes with disastrous results for the target state. Something of this sort arguably occurred during the nationalist wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, when



Corruption as Political Incest 41

the logic of agnatic kinship appeared to “justify” the rape and murder of captive women, their deaths a cynical means of preventing the infanticide of newborn children who would automatically belong to the “lineage”—and hence the “nation”—of their rapist fathers (see Herzfeld 2016a: 114–15). When segmentary relations do flare up in this way, “familism,” “tribalism,” and “corruption” are variously invoked as explanations of what the state treats as the malfunctioning of institutional structures. Even European nation-­states, sometimes credited as the source of nationalism worldwide (e.g., Gellner 1983), are internally riven by segmentary loyalties (Herzfeld 1987: 153). Where European states have been created out of rival ethnicities organized around principles of patrilineal clan organization, as in the former Yugoslavia, the relationship between the nation-­state and its segmentary substrate is abundantly clear. The recent near defections of Scotland (from the United Kingdom) and Catalonia (from Spain) illustrate this pattern clearly, as does the more chaotic pattern of regional disaffection that continually plagues the Italian nation-­state. Where there is kinship, there is incest; thus, we should expect to find that where the kinship metaphor of the nation-­state fails to protect it from individuals’ self-­interest, the language of corruption will suggest the violation of family trust. While a degree of guilty admiration for those who get away with cheating the state is fairly widespread, official reactions are couched in the language of symbolic pollution. Corruption is thus the political equivalent of incest. Both represent ways of damaging the collective interest in favor of more selfish concerns—concerns, moreover, that are never purely individual but inevitably also involve suborning others.4 This chapter is necessarily somewhat speculative. Nevertheless, the comparison between corruption and incest is much more than an engaging metaphor. It allows us to understand two very different kinds of temporality—not two kinds of time as such but rather two different ways of deploying time in the assessment of guilt and responsibility. These two perceptions of time are directly linked to two contrasting and very different models of the ideal national polity. I will focus mostly on Greece and specifically on the western highlands of the island of Crete—an area associated for many Greeks with extreme lawlessness and linked to the state by repeated scandals involving prominent politicians of local origin. Whether the argument can usefully be extended to other parts of the world is a matter for empirical investigation, but it seems likely, at least, that older substrates of political aggregation—such as I have identified in Thailand, for example (Herzfeld 2016c)—will offer contrasted visions of the ways

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in which time is used to deal with the stark fact of institutional corrosion. In Judeo-­Christian societies, that corrosion is understood as a variant of the corruption of the flesh, but culturally specific eschatologies and theodicies may inform quite different models of how time is deployed. Note that I emphasize the use and deployment of time. Fabian (1983) famously dissected the anthropological penchant for banishing exotic communities to other kinds of time, thereby effectively excluding them from modernity. Fabian rightly argues that time is not necessarily experienced differently in other cultural settings. But how people actually employ time to achieve pragmatic ends may vary considerably. Some of those methods are widespread; Thais are as fond of the idiom of “buying time,” and use it in much the same tactical sense, as English speakers. People living in the same society but having experienced and evinced radically different attitudes to that society’s problems, however, may develop distinctive styles of time management. In Greece, the generation that came into its own after the fall of the military junta in 1974, a time of rapid economic and social change resulting in part from a massive demographic shift from the countryside to the big cities, understands the relationship between history and corruption in terms markedly different from those whose attitudes were formed in the villages of an earlier age.

Incest and the Corruption of the Flesh Technically, incest is a sexual relationship between individuals whose relationship normatively precludes it. While the exact contours of the incest taboo vary, the forbidden categories are not solely biological, whatever their metaphorical basis; thus, in Christian contexts, sexual relations with a godparent’s child are usually forbidden. An incident from my fieldwork on Crete demonstrates the logic of the taboo particularly well.5 In a village marked by strong agnatic ties, an elderly man lamented the fact that two of his sons had children who entered into a sexual relationship by complaining that he no longer knew what to call the young woman: was she his granddaughter or his nifi (in-­marrying bride)? His tragic consternation clearly sprang from the categorical confusion that, as Douglas (1966) argued, is the essence of pollution—of matter out of place, as she famously defined dirt. To the old man, questions of potential harm to the children of the union, and even the embarrassment of a sin allegedly committed for the first time in a village that



Corruption as Political Incest 43

boasted of thereby surpassing its nearest rival, were secondary to his uncertainty about where these young miscreants belonged genealogically. In breaking down the ordinary reciprocities of social existence and especially alliances between unrelated families, incest short-­circuits the flow of “blood”—that is, regenerative powers biogenetically conceived. Incest thus resembles the civic pollution of corruption, which similarly diverts common resources to the self-­interest of the few. And just as incest may concentrate property in narrowly familial hands rather than allowing it to circulate, corruption denies the majority access to supposedly common political resources. While corruption and incest can be punished as individual crimes, moreover they infect the body politic as a whole. In Edmund Leach’s (1961) analysis of the story of Adam and Eve as a mythological representation of a primal act of incest and its consequences, Eve may conventionally be blamed for humanity’s fall from grace, but neither the serpent nor Adam come out of that story with much glory either, and all humanity is consequently burdened with the taint of original sin and with the concomitant temptation to commit evil. Incestuous unions perfectly reproduce the original offense. That story nevertheless also has a social benefit in our sin-­ridden world. The principals’ collective wrongdoing offers a template, or theodicy, for excusing everyday peccadilloes. Political corruption, too, is a product of humanity’s fallen state, hence the journalistic description of politicians as having “fallen from grace.” Such events are microcosmic reproductions of the original disaster. Political corruption thus directly suggests the eschatological explanation of human mortality as “corruption of the flesh.” We die; our bodies palpably and distressingly decay because pollution casts us into the corrosive effects of time. Corruption is an emic term; it is useful because it is used by our informants. But it is much less useful as an analytical (etic) term, and there is good reason for that difference.

Forms and Meanings of Corruption Anthropologists have rightly been uncomfortable with using corruption to analyze political phenomena globally. Its negative bias and its clearly Western and Christian moral inflections are nowhere so clearly indicated as in the various “corruption measures” whereby powerful or influential Western countries now judge everyone else. The concept of corruption is vague; it covers

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several categories of offenses against the civic order, each of which is far more precise as a description than that of corruption, because each addresses a specific type of action that contravenes the collective interest. Earlier anthropologists (e.g., Campbell 1964; Gellner and Waterbury 1977) effectively sidestepped the issue of what to call corruption by writing instead about “patronage” or “patron-­client relations.” These terms embedded the phenomenon—or at least a part of it—clearly and unambiguously in the realm of the social. Given a weak central state, or one that is reluctant to intervene in disciplining its more powerful citizens, patronage offers access to necessities that would otherwise not be available. Demanding votes in exchange for a hospital bed nevertheless contradicts the principles of the democratic welfare state; the greater ease with which the wealthy make such payments increases the injustice. Patronage is always hierarchical; while the patron needs the client’s votes (and the client reproduces the inequality at a lower level by controlling those votes within a given kinship group), Hegel’s famous aphorism about the master’s dependence on the slave does not conceal the fact that the slave is always, ultimately, worse off than the master. But recognizing patronage as a form of institutionalized structural violence at least avoids castigating both sides of the unequal social contract as equally culpable parties to a piece of wickedness. The apparent reciprocity of patron-­client relations, locally defended in moral terms (see Holmes 1989: 98), masks a fundamental unfairness.

The Inequalities of Patronage: A View from the Greek Countryside Thus, when John Campbell described the relations between the Sarakatsani and local merchants and between those merchants and their political patrons, instead of talking about “corruption” he allowed us to see the phenomenon with a double vision. On the one hand, there was the neutral observer’s perspective: this was a functioning system, albeit one that contravened the supposed European norms of democratic practice, and it worked at least to the point of granting the despised Sarakatsan shepherds some degree of access to national resources such as health care and government employment. Such controlled access is common to the rural Greek experience; when a Cretan villager asked me point-­blank “whether I had [influence over] a general,” he was invoking what all would have acknowledged



Corruption as Political Incest 45

as his only means of getting a conscript nephew transferred from a border post to one nearer home. The other side of Campbell’s analysis, however, is a clear recognition that the patronage system entails unequal access. The shepherds depend on the merchants, the merchants depend on the politicians, and the exchanges that sustain these dependencies sustain stratified monopolies: cheese to the merchants, votes to the politicos, small favors to the shepherds. Campbell (1964: 2–6), moreover, acknowledges the larger geopolitical context when he describes the nationalistic disputes over what ethnic or linguistic origins can be attributed to the inhabitants of those contested regions. He shows— as Evans-­Pritchard (1940: 7–10) did before him—that the larger geopolitical context partially shaped prevailing internal social relations.6 The politicians of the so-­called moderate Right who emerged after the junta years (1967–1974), representing the last vestiges of Cold War anticommunism, were able to safeguard their special privileges and resist the charges of corruption from the resurgent elements of the Greek Left by playing along with the rhetoric of reform. Much as the junta, in fact, had tried to disguise its own proclivities by dubbing communism “red fascism,” so these postjunta conservatives simultaneously touted their own actions as ways of safeguarding “European/Greek tradition” and continued their old ways in the countryside, where they expected to garner the easiest votes. Indeed, this is the probable backstory of Constantine Mitsotakis’s rise to power; it is at least arguable that without the huge network of sheep thieves’ patrilineal kin who felt morally indebted to him and his party colleagues, he would never have been in a position to enter the New Democracy party, wrest the helm from his astonished rivals, and go on to win an election against the still-­popular Panhellenic Socialist Movement of Andreas Papandreou in 1990. Accusations of corruption do not necessarily exonerate the accusers of the same charge. Thus, in the 1970s and 1980s a sometime minister of the interior was known to make comfortable arrangements with animal thieves on Crete, trading bribes to witnesses in exchange for votes, even as he denounced animal theft in the national parliament (Herzfeld 1985). These apparent contradictions reproduce larger political structures and stem from their global persistence. Greek conservative politicians emerged from a long tradition of protection by the Western nations most concerned, in earlier years, with limiting the spread of communism. Just as the United States arguably reinforced the mafia in Sicily at the end of World War II for that purpose, Britain and France had a long history of protecting those who would serve their interests

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within the Greek political sphere. This continued under American hegemony even while Western commentators began to complain about Greek “corruption” when it interfered with their business practices. The phenomenon has continued. Germany often accuses Greece of corruption, but among the major sources of bribes were three prominent German firms, one of them, Deutsche Bahn, a state enterprise (see Herzfeld 2016b). Despite its limitations as an analytical term, the idea of corruption remains a staple of political and ethnographic analysis. This is in part for good reason: the people we study use terms that are best translated into English as “corruption” because they carry very similar implications of moral indignation. As in the Italian corruzione, many of these terms are etymologically cognate with the English word. The Greek word dhiafthora, although from a different root, has related connotations of “wearing away, erosion,” suggesting that corruption also has a temporal dimension; it has history. This again recalls the biblical fall from grace as the beginning of historical experience, essentially an explanation (or theodicy) of human imperfection—a key point in Campbell’s analysis of the Sarakatsan worldview. Other countries, while not necessarily heirs to this theological tradition, have adopted the official view that corruption is wrong and therefore to be condemned. As Morris (2004) has argued for “transparency,” however, we can also say again that condemning corruption can be an excellent cover for engaging in it. It also appears as a counterpart to the obsession with monumental permanence that is so characteristic of nationalism (see Herzfeld 2015). Several factors thus necessitate taking corruption seriously as an anthropological problem: the relationship between corruption and nationalism; the importance to the state of maintaining spaces of permitted malfeasance, or “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 2016a); the theological implications of corruption as an inevitable consequence of humanity’s fallen condition even among those who do not expressly adhere to the Judeo-­Christian tradition; and the advantages of recognizing corruption as a discursive element of identity building. The term “corruption” itself expresses that slightly guilty but comfortingly familiar knowledge—the essence of cultural intimacy— that allows ordinary people to join together in acting like the very politicians from whose dirty tricks they rhetorically distance themselves, as Rajković (this volume) observes, or, to use the contrasting Brazilian case described by Aaron Ansell (2014), with whose weaknesses they can identify as a basis for mutual protection.7 Thus, we should deal with the concept of corruption as we deal with other stereotypes—not as an analytical description of reality



Corruption as Political Incest 47

but as part of the rhetoric that shapes and protects the cultural intimacy of that reality.

Ethnographic Explorations Two European countries, Italy and Greece, have been disproportionately reviled for their alleged corruption and have been so attacked by governments that in the past had actually reinforced the same phenomena for which they are now berating them. Other countries have certainly appeared at still lower points on the published “corruption barometers,” but none has had to play the role of civilizational ancestor to the West that today has appointed itself the moral arbiter of modernity. The threat that Greece might have been expelled from the supposed political paradise of the European Union (EU) points up this irony, recalling the use of the original sin metaphor that some economists have already invoked to explain the sources of crushing national debt (e.g., Eichengreen, Hausmann, and Panizza 2003). Italy is a larger economic player than Greece, so Italy’s alleged corruption did not make it as tempting a target as that attributed to Greece; consequently, Italy plays a smaller part in the present analysis. The idea of cultural intimacy offers a way of reexamining the kinship metaphors so beloved of nationalist ideologies (Herzfeld 2016a). Politics, like kinship, has its persistent flaws; if kinship has incest, politics has corruption. Incest, like some forms of corruption, is about kinship: too much of it crops up in the wrong place. Nepotism—kinship-­based corruption par excellence— may entail favoring one’s specifically patrilineal kin, as the term “nepotism” (from Latin nepos, meaning both “son’s son” and “brother’s son”) implies. So, when corruption entails putting too many obvious kin in the same place— the numerous professors of medicine who were discovered to have the same surname at the Polytechnic University of Bari’s Medical School, for example, or the 42 out of 176 faculty in the University of Bari’s Faculty of Economics who turned out to be related to each other—we may reasonably suspect the presence of entrenched kinship-­based favoritism. The phenomenon of parentopoli (kin city), a term modeled on tangentopoli (bribe city), is especially credited to southern Italian universities; a recent attempt to stop the practice exempted wives, which prompted loud protests from the students. Agnatic kinship has continued to play an especially central role in the hiring of faculty, protestations of fair play and innocence notwithstanding.8 The

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submerged familistic metaphors of the nation-­state are thus turned against its institutions by both local social actors and international powers. The disapproval of “corruption” in Italy and Greece has a long history. Robert Putnam (1993; but cf. Sabetti 2000), for example, arguing from a sophisticated version of a tradition that goes back at least to E. C. Banfield’s (1958) castigation of southern Italian “familism,” argued that northern Italian cities demonstrated a greater sense of institutional civic values than their southern counterparts and sought historical explanations for the difference. The fundamental problem with this approach, however, lies in its refusal to recognize familism and indeed the mafia as moral systems in their own right. Moreover, what in southern Italy operates overtly as morally defensible behavior becomes, in much of the north, a covert understanding of how civic life actually works, as in Bologna and its doppia morale (Heywood 2015). One could even argue that southerners are simply more honest about their own moral system or are unconstrained by the post-­Reformation influences that have helped to shape northern sensibilities; attitudes long thought typical of the south, including male contempt for women, sometimes turn out to be at least as rife in the north (Plesset 2006). Italians at both ends of the country, and notably in Rome (Herzfeld 2009: 3–5, 79–84, 196), do not conflate the civic with the civil, regarding civiltà as encompassing a social capacity for reasonable accommodation—expressed in the saying Fatta la legge si trova l’inganno (Once the law has been made, the way around it can be found)—that adherents to a more literal form of legalism reject altogether. Political corruption is not an exclusively southern problem and is not locally perceived as such, as we can see in the stereotypical cracks about former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi and the “Milan mafia.” A too simplistic division of the country into north and south simply reinforces a social science perspective already based on stereotypes and repeatedly reproduced by Italian politicians (see Herzfeld 2009: 78). In the case of Greece, most corruption can be classified under three headings: tax evasion (also immensely common in Italy), bribery, and patronage. The bribery of Greek government officials by three German companies suggests that the structure of patronage in Greece, far from being exclusively a residue of Ottoman rule as is so often alleged, has been nourished by the relationship between Greece as a client state and large Western powers (especially Britain, France, the United States, and, more recently, Germany). At the level of everyday social relations, the relationship between poor clients and local politicians reproduces this larger structure of mutual but hierarchical



Corruption as Political Incest 49

dependency, locked in place by the more powerful countries’ preference for politicians who will act as the agents of an equally unequal relationship. If we examine the history of Greece from its emergence as a nation-­state in 1821, it has mostly been conservative and openly pro-­Western politicians who have both been supported by the Western powers during times of crisis and who have been widely regarded as the main offenders in cases of corruption. If the powerful international players support those politicians, why do they also criticize national “corruption” overall? The summaries published by the EU display an interesting discrepancy. The figures showing the percentage of people who admit to having been approached for a bribe are all very low, while the figures for the occurrence of corruption are all defined in terms of “perception.” The southern countries are charged with much higher rates of corruption than those farther to the north, but when asked whether they had ever accepted a bribe or been approached by someone offering one, an extraordinarily small percentage—in both Northern and Southern Europe— admitted to anything of the sort, and there is also a remarkably small difference between north and south in terms of the perception of government effectiveness in addressing corruption. These summaries thus beautifully illustrate how to create a self-­fulfilling prophecy that furnishes more powerful countries with a weapon for bullying weaker ones. As evidence of major differences, they tell us more about the self-­view of these countries’ citizens than they do about what actually happens.9 Here again we see a similarity with the more localized forms of patronage; just as politicians try to look innocent by complaining that their constituents expect favors in exchange for their electoral support, so too must the bigger countries complain loudly about the smaller states’ irresponsibility in order to conceal the role of the major lenders in generating the risk of defaulting on major national debts. The ongoing crisis in Greece richly illustrates this relationship (see, e.g., Krugman 2015). The EU has long followed the example of its constituent nation-­states in using the metaphor of the family. As with nation-­states, in such supranational organizations we similarly find numerous embarrassing failures concealed from view by some remarkably casuistic rhetoric. The EU is no more willing than any nation-­state to expose its dirty laundry to outsiders’ derision (see Shore 2000: 119), so the idea that the major players may be conniving at endemic corruption or may have kept it alive by long-­standing institutional means will not be happily received. Moreover, these players use a moral discourse to disguise their own roles. Lending between member nations can

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only be expressed in terms of reciprocity; thus, failure to pay back a loan is tantamount to disrupting the ordinary rhythm of exchange. Particularly relevant in the current Greek crisis is the fact that both sides to the dispute are claiming that key obligations have been left unmet. The bankers are simply demanding payment, as any creditor would, in a timely fashion and at the originally stipulated rate of interest. The Greek public, which has borne the brunt of the austerity packages inflicted on the country by the creditors, are taking the longer view: if it is true that Europe owes its civilization to Greece, as the West Europeans have always insisted, then the Western nations’ obligations cannot simply be reckoned in the standard neoliberal calculus of profit and loss; there is a specifically cultural debt that has never been repaid. Those Greeks who instead do not see classical Athens as the gold standard for their culture also argue in terms of debt: not the “theft” of the Elgin Marbles but the wrecking of everything familiar in Greek everyday life by foreign commentators and their local stooges. Obligation and reciprocity both admit of temporary imbalances but ultimately suggest the sense of equilibrium that was so important to much late functionalist theory (notably Gluckman 1955, 1963). That theoretical position is also built into local understandings; local people are often ardent functionalists. My village informants in Crete, for example, espoused a view of feuding and vengeance killings that startlingly resembled Gluckman’s: they claimed that awareness of the consequences of homicide was an effective deterrent, producing a low rural murder rate in comparison with urban settings. In political life, they similarly argued that people who failed to honor their electoral obligations to powerful patrons deserved the contempt and effective exclusion that would inevitably become their fate; villagers could not afford to tolerate the few who cheated or who informed the authorities of corrupt dealings. The former minister was only arraigned after several decades of openly bribing witnesses, and in a drug-­related case rather than in one concerned with the more “traditional” practice of stealing animals, because local sentiment militated against betraying what were seen as social acts; the man who eventually forced the issue was not locally greeted as a hero. Weaker clans were more open to persuasion that such underhand dealings were morally unacceptable, but their numerical and political weaknesses long prevented them from doing anything about it. Corruption thus resembled incest as a disapproved but acknowledged everyday reality. The diversion into a few grasping hands of goods and services intended for the populace as a whole was clearly understood both by



Corruption as Political Incest 51

the poor and by political commentators as a breakdown of reciprocity and exchange. Villagers indignantly recounted how they were obliged to accept patronage to achieve what they saw as entitlements, but they still did not, and dared not, refuse the helping hand that demanded votes in return. Why should citizens have needed to request from powerful intermediaries what was their ordinary right? The oft-­cited religious model of saintly intercession (e.g., Boissevain 2013: 168–69) provides the makings of an explanation. If in the divinely ordained world we cannot obtain divine justice without such mediation—if, in other words, our theodicy requires us to trade favors with saintly beings in order to overcome the consequences of our minor sins—why would we expect the visibly corrupt world of mundane politics to be any better? That world, moreover, already has a secular theodicy modeled on the religious one; the fall of Constantinople in 1453 is accorded the same explanatory power in the cultural politics of the Greek nation-­state as the fall from Paradise in the larger scheme of Orthodox Christian ideas about sin and redemption (see Herzfeld 1987: 35). In the perfect world evoked by the structural nostalgia of saying that once upon a time people trusted each other’s word of honor and never needed to make contracts or go to law (Herzfeld 2016a: 156–57), one would also not need to ask a patron for a hospital bed or a job for one’s child. And in a perfect world people would not be tempted to commit incest. Moreover, incest is above all a social sin; it may be expressed in the biogenetic language of blood mixing (emomiksia), but this symbolizes the categorical confusion already mentioned. Sexual relations entail passing blood around, not confining it to a restricted circle; corruption confuses the categories of democratic process by diverting common resources to the favored few. Incest happens; so, too, does corruption. But neither ever, or commonly, happens to “us”; it is always a mark of otherness. Thus, my Cretan village informants insisted that incest had never previously happened in their own community, only in that of their most serious political rivals. When a specific case of incest appears, it attracts immediate, sharp opprobrium. In Crete, the incest taboo is deeply embedded in metaphors of male sociality. Thus, men may not play cards against fellow villagers whose female relatives they cannot marry; stealing sheep from a covillager is an act of pollution (ghoursouza) analogous to incest (Herzfeld 1985: 161, 184). The father of the young man in the story told here professed himself anxious to kill his son in order to wipe away the stain on his and his clan’s standing. Yet friends of the young couple gave them refuge; they eventually

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returned to the village and raised four fine children—none of them, be it noted, showing any signs of mental or physical abnormality. Over time the couple was absorbed back into the community, the confused grandfather’s generation passed on, and the idea could again be revived that “we” in this community do not commit such offenses against nature and society. In the case of Europe and corruption, that generalization is institutionalized as an eternal verity. Corruption, like incest, is treated as a hypothetical threat rather than an active presence in the historically unidirectional self-­view of European and European-­derived states (and especially of Protestant states),10 in which the “idea of Europe” (Chabod 1964; Pagden 2002) is itself a timeless fixture. Declarations that Europe “is Christian,” from Giscard ­d’Estaing to Benedict XVI, offensive though they are to those who prefer to see the continent as a multicultural geographical expression, do reflect an existing political bias, especially given the EU’s grounding in Vatican bureaucratic philosophy and practice (see Holmes 2000). They also suggest how corruption can be denied as a generic feature of the institutional society and yet remain recognizably present in political practice. Against the atemporal representation of the idea of Europe as a site of pure democracy and the rule of law, acts of corruption represent attacks on that perfection—each a lapse that involves a return, temporary and corrigible as it may be, to the corrosion of temporality. One might also call it a return to reality. European nation-­states theoretically resist corruption, but in practice these states do not exist beyond the people who staff them and have repeatedly shown that they are not immune from temptation. Indeed, some scholars (e.g., Reed-­Danahay 1993; Scott 1998) have argued that formal structures cannot exist without some degree of creative departure from the rules. The parallel with incest does not appear directly in anticorruption rhetoric. Rather, corruption is treated in terms analogous to the language about incest; this language reflects a structural unease with anything that disturbs the appearance of categorical certainty. At the same time, these structures must deal with people for whom the actual personnel of the state represent a very different order from the one they claim to promote. In the rural Greek hinterland, where people are locked into unequal patron-­client relations, turning one’s patron over to the authorities for reasons of bribery or favor peddling is socially unacceptable. Elites are well placed to resist the intrusive eye and ear of the ethnographer, moreover, but it also seems likely that similar concerns with “playing the game”—and for much higher stakes—also



Corruption as Political Incest 53

dominate the attitudes of bankers, lawyers, and businesspeople. How else would insider trading be so hard to detect? Local actors, while subjugated to their patrons’ power, nevertheless enjoy the transient benefits that their complicity bestows on them. Such arrangements infuriate those with fewer material or political resources. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, for example, members of small clans and nonpastoral families—in other words, those who were at the greatest disadvantage from the competitive masculinity of the region—supported the emergent Panhellenic Socialist Movement party and were especially insistent that this party would demolish the foundations of patronage if it came to power. Matters turned out somewhat differently: the party won a national election in 1981, only to become embroiled shortly thereafter in various corruption scandals of its own. At one level, such recurrences simply show that no one is immune to temptation. To a rural Cretan, this would not occasion the slightest surprise. At another level, however, the sense of business as usual always allows all acts of favor peddling to generate outraged gossip, only to merge gradually with a generic perception that such acts are unremarkable facets of the real world of Greek politics. This comes about, I suggest, because of a particular understanding of the nature of time. There is no radical difference between the cyclical time of the countryside and the linear time of the city, as some have tried to argue (for a nuanced approach, see Halpern and Wagner 1984; but cf. Fabian 1983). In Greek rural communities, however, commemoration of proximate ancestors is metaphorically represented as their resurrection (anastasi) through repetition of baptismal names in alternating generations.11 This pattern, combined with the use of patronymics and patrilineally inherited surnames (and some nicknames, or paratsouklia), turns what starts out as a way of commemorating the immediately recent ancestors into their eventual relegation, after the passage of only a few generations, to generic oblivion; individualistic naming was until recently regarded as abnormal and immoral. We are thus looking at a system of temporal reckoning in which the very act of recording individual lives is what allows their individual characteristics to be forgotten in less than a century. That is not the monumental commitment to eternity sought by modern celebrities, nor is it the perception of time undergirding state logic. But it is the temporal modality by which rural Greeks recycle identities as a common stock rather than as a source of personal specificity. This differential structure of temporality can help us make sense of the way in which people use time in organizing their perceptions of favor

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peddling. For those who adhere to the older values of civility and loyalty to patrons, specific events converge in a generic view of how the world works; the inherent unfairness of patronage fades from view against the backdrop of the encompassing doctrine of original sin, which no one escapes. By contrast, those who adhere to legalistic understandings of civic virtue endorse the state’s perfectibility and wish to scale all moral and legal judgment up to the state’s domain of competence.

Modernity and the Search for Eternal Redemption While for those who adhere to the understanding of temporality as a recycling mechanism it is the betrayal of the patron’s or the client’s trust that pollutes, for those who claim to believe in the need to punish and remember individual crimes the state is imbued with eternal and unchanging value; for them, it is bribery and nepotism that pollute. The opprobrium that the very name of corruption implies might suggest a need for a term such as “corruption taboo.” The absence of such a term may rather reflect the likelihood that corruption occurs more frequently than incest. But even the taint of incest may show a capacity for vanishing that can only be countered by severe sanctions visited on succeeding generations, as happens in the case of Orthodox Judaism (see Kahn 2000: 88–95). The Cretan villagers’ gradual acceptance of a family tainted by incest may be more usual, especially in communities that treat established religion with suspicion; the original fall from grace becomes submerged under the solidarity of the community. As a result, the categorical confusion lamented by the grandfather disappears in a system that permits a restricted pool of names and recognizes repetition as normal so that personal identities merge into a generic ancestry over four or five generations. Moreover, it will eventually not matter much whether the young woman was his granddaughter or an in-­marrying bride, especially as in this particular community far greater emphasis is given to patrilineal affiliation than to uterine links, leading the specific details of her own ancestry to fade from collective recall. Time thereby erases the specific memory of the original act and so removes the stain from the children of succeeding generations. This social effect contrasts with official (legal) and ecclesiastical (theological) perspectives. Thus, the social parallel between incest and corruption not only subsists between two forms of pollution but also appears in the temporal tension between long-­term official condemnation and the social reality of short



Corruption as Political Incest 55

collective memory. In the business-­as-­usual logic of patronage, individual acts of bribery are only remembered if they fail spectacularly; in line with the Greek rural view that reputation is more important than knowing what actually happened (e.g., du Boulay 1974: 82), the greater offense is not the act of bribery or favor peddling but rather being caught and visibly held to account. Time is made real by such embarrassments, but it also cures those failures as they fade from memory. Identities merge over time, and while academics may recall the details of a particular corruption case, the local public simply sees such cases as accumulated evidence of what they cynically already “know” about politicians. Younger university-­educated critics are not so willing to go along with acts of political incest. Trained to think in more legalistic and historicist terms, they try to ensure that those who are found guilty of malfeasance cannot simply slink back into the system. In short, by calling for a more individuated approach to “corruption,” they are trying to reverse the corrosion (dhiafthora) of an older conception of time and ensure a return to Paradise athwart the visible wreckage of disgraced careers. For them there is only one possible “resurrection,” and that is the reform that will forever rid Greece of corruption.12 Whether it will succeed is an open question. Indeed, whether any political system can succeed by sticking rigidly to its own rules is dubious. As several essays in this volume illustrate, the people who constitute the reality subsumed in the term “state,” as well as those whose lives they control, use the cover of regulation for a variety of differentially directed ends and can invoke a range of rhetorical defenses when challenged. For modernizing social and political actors, however, the template of an original sin—the taint of “Turkishness” in Greece, for example—is just another excuse, and not a very good one, for selfishly subverting the abstract ideal of a common good. They want to see each and every act of political incest treated with condign retribution, paving the way for a return to democratic perfection—a denial of the tawdry facts of history. But now they must lead by example. Will they be able to resist the temptations that have laid others low? Or will they discover that the one eternal verity is the impossibility of achieving that idealistic goal?

Acknowledgments I would like to take this opportunity to thank volume editors Erdmute Alber and Tatjana Thelen as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice and guidance at various stages in the writing of this essay.

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Notes 1. See, e.g., McKinnon and Cannell (2013). 2. Goddard (this volume) takes the genealogy of such connections even further back, to Maine and Morgan in the nineteenth century. The intellectual labor performed throughout the present collection pushes back against the encroachment on both the state and anthropology of a too easily self-­ascribed “modernity.” For anthropology, as Goddard’s chapter makes clear, that smug assumption, even during its heyday, has repeatedly been belied by the specific achievements of careful ethnographic analysis. 3. It is significant that Zitelmann (this volume) makes a similar linkage with both of Evans-­Pritchard’s studies and their aftermath; although Evans-­Pritchard was critical of colonial rule, he can hardly have been unaware of the ways in which ethnographic knowledge could be used to enhance colonial control and to understand the emergence of national identities. 4. I have already mentioned this parallel in Herzfeld (2015) but do not develop the argument in detail there. 5. On that fieldwork, see especially Herzfeld (1985). 6. Rosaldo’s (1986) claim to the contrary with regard to Evans-­Pritchard is thus inaccurate, although it should be read in the context of the discipline’s then relatively novel and ultimately beneficial turn toward introspection and self-­critique. This is not to say that Campbell was not concerned with the impact of that context on his own situation. On the contrary, he made it clear—and amplified this in conversation with me—that his own political protection, essential to his survival, rendered him vulnerable to attack (and eventual expulsion from the border region) once his political patron fell and the Cyprus conflict made any Briton an easy target. 7. Ansell (2014) offers a compelling account of how such mutual complicity generates a strong sense of cultural intimacy, or what he usefully calls “intimate hierarchy.” His critique of the use of “clientelism” to describe such reciprocal engagements in the Brazilian context acknowledges the favorable view of such relationships among local people even while also admitting the power disparity that the phenomenon frequently entails; as I do here with the work of J. K. Campbell (1964), Ansell therefore urges a return to an earlier and less judgmental-­sounding terminology. 8. For a sampling of the cases and the reactions they provoked, see especially http://​www​.infonodo​.org​/node​/30491; http://​www​.studenti​.it​/universita​/nius​/divieto​ -­­assunzione​-­­parenti​-­­universita​-­­mogli​.php; https://​redshiftbari​.wordpress​.com​/2008​ /04​/26​/110​-­­sesso​-­­e​-­­lode​-­­inchiesta​-­­de​-­­lespresso​-­­del​-­­23​-­­aprile​-­­2008/; http://​www​ .studenti​.it​/universita​/inchieste​/parentopoli​-d ­­ inastie​-p ­­ rofessori​-c­­ oncorsi​-t­­ ruccati​.php (all accessed July 6, 2015). See also Allesina (2011); http://​www​.linkiesta​.it​/universita (accessed July 9, 2015). 9. See http://​ec​.europa​.eu​/dgs​/home​-­­affairs​/what​-­­we​-­­do​/policies​/organized​-­­crime​ -­­and​-­­human​-­­trafficking​/corruption​/anti​-­­corruption​-­­report​/index​_en​.htm for general statistics and access to the country reports; individual report summaries can be accessed



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as follows: Greece—http://​ec​.europa​.eu​/dgs​/home​-­­affairs​/what​-­­we​-­­do​/policies​/organized​ -­­crime​ -­­and​ -­­human​ -­­trafficking​ /corruption​ /anti​ -­­corruption​ -­­report​ /docs​ /2014​ _acr​ _greece​_factsheet​_en​.pdf;Italy—http://​ec​.europa​.eu​/dgs​/home​-­­affairs​/what​-­­we​-­­do​/policies​ /organized​-­­crime​-­­and​-­­human​-­­trafficking​/corruption​/anti​-­­corruption​-­­report​/docs​/2014​ _acr​_italy​_factsheet​_en​.pdf; Germany—http://​ec​.europa​.eu​/dgs​/home​-­­affairs​/what​-­­we​ -­­do​/policies​/organized​-­­crime​-­­and​-­­human​-­­trafficking​/corruption​/anti​-­­corruption​-­­report​ /docs​/2014​_acr​_germany​_factsheet​_en​.pdf; United Kingdom—http://​ec​.europa​.eu​/dgs​ /home​-­­affairs​/what​-­­we​-­­do​/policies​/organized​-­­crime​-­­and​-­­human​-­­trafficking​/corruption​ /anti​-­­corruption​-­­report​/docs​/2014​_acr​_united​_kingdom​_factsheet​_en​.pdf; all accessed July 6, 2015. 10. I use the term “corruption” in the Weberian sense and without any necessary connection with Christianity; although this has been Europe’s dominant religion, the importance of the term is that some systems exhibit a conceptual purism that is especially apparent in their handling of bureaucratic procedures. Gellner (1983) would have it that all nation-­states are constructed on the European model. While this is perhaps true in an administrative sense, alternative visions of what constitutes the nation infuse local understandings of the nation-­state in ways that defy that image of global homogeneity (see, e.g., Herzfeld 1985, 1987, 2016c). 11. See the extensive discussion of this phenomenon in, especially, Herzfeld (1982), Kenna (1976), and Sutton 1997. 12. This attitudinal shift between generations is becoming increasingly common as what I have called “the global hierarchy of value” (e.g., Herzfeld 2016a: 70) spreads across the globe and across social classes, creating an apparent consensus in favor of rejecting the culturally intimate enjoyment of supposedly corrupt relations. For a case of Roman condominium residents split across generations and educational levels, see Herzfeld (2009: 198–212).

Bibliography Allesina, Stefano. 2011. Measuring Nepotism Through Shared Last Names: The Case of Italian Academia. PLoS One 6(8): e21160. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0021160. Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. 1991 [1983]. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Ansell, Aaron. 2014. Zero Hunger: Political Culture and Antipoverty Policy in Northeast Brazil. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Banfield, Edward C. 1958. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Ben-­Yehoyada, Naor. 2014. Transnational Political Economy: A Central Mediterranean Example. Comparative Studies in Society and History 56: 870–901. Boissevain, Jeremy. 2013. Factions, Friends and Feasts: Anthropological Perspectives on the Mediterranean. New York: Berghahn. Burke, Kenneth. 1954. Permanence and Change. 2nd ed. Palo Alto, CA: Bobbs Merrill.

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Campbell, John K. 1964. Honour, Family, and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Clarendon. Chabod, Federico. 1964. Storia dell’idea d’Europa. Bari: Laterza. Delaney, Carol. 1995. Father State, Motherland, and the Birth of Turkey. In Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, ed. Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, 177–99. New York: Routledge. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Purity and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dresch, Paul. 1986. The Significance of the Course Events Take in Segmentary Systems. American Ethnologist 13: 309–32. du Boulay, Juliet. 1974. Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village. Oxford: Clarendon. Eichengreen, Barry, Ricardo Hausmann, and Ugo Panizza. 2003. Currency Mismatches, Debt Intolerance and Original Sin: Why They Are Not the Same and Why It Matters. Working Paper 10036. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. Evans-­Pritchard, Edward E. 1940. The Nuer: A Description of the Mode of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1949. The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gellner, Ernest, and John Waterbury, eds. 1977. Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies. London: Duckworth. Gluckman, Max. 1955. The Peace in the Feud. Past and Present 8(1): 1–14. ———. 1963. Gossip and Scandal. Current Anthropology 4: 307–16. Halpern, Joel, and Richard A. Wagner. 1984. Time and Social Structure: A Yugoslav Case Study. Journal of Family History 9: 229–44. Herzfeld, Michael. 1982. When Exceptions Define the Rules: Greek Baptismal Names and the Negotiation of Identity. Journal of Anthropological Research 38: 288–302. ———. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1987. Anthropology Through the Looking-­Glass: Critical Ethnography in the Margins of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2009. Evicted from Eternity: The Restructuring of Modern Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2015. Heritage and Corruption: The Two Faces of the Nation-­State. International Journal of Heritage Studies 21: 531–44. ———. 2016a. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. ———. 2016b. The Hypocrisy of European Moralism: Greece and the Politics of Cultural Aggression. Anthropology Today 32(1): 11–13; 32(2): 10–13. ———. 2016c. Siege of the Spirits: Community and Polity in Bangkok. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



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Heywood, Paolo. 2015. Freedom in the Code: The Anthropology of (Double) Morality. Anthropological Theory 15: 200–217. Holmes, Douglas R. 1998. Cultural Disenchantments: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2000. Integral Europe: Fast-­Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hutchinson, Sharon. 1996. Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War and the State. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hutchinson, Sharon, and Naomi R. Pendle. 2015. Violence, Legitimacy, and Prophecy: Nuer Struggles with Uncertainty in South Sudan. American Ethnologist 42(3): 415–30. Kahn, Susan. 2000. Reproducing Jews: A Cultural Account of Assisted Conception in Israel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kenna, Margaret. 1976. House, Fields, and Graves: Property and Ritual Obligation on a Greek Island. Ethmology 15: 21–34. Leach, Edmund R. 1961. Lévi-­Strauss in the Garden of Eden: An Examination of Some Recent Developments in the Analysis of Myth. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 23: 386–96. McKinnon, Susan, and Fenella Cannell, eds. 2013. Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent life of Kinship. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press. Morris, Rosalind. 2004. Intimacy and Corruption in Thailand’s Age of Transparency. In Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture, ed. Andrew Shryock, 225–43. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Özyürek, Esra. 2004. Wedded to the Republic: Public Intellectuals and Intimacy Oriented Publics in Turkey. In Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture, ed. Andrew Shryock, 101–30. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pagden, Anthony, ed. 2002. The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plesset, Sonja. 2006. Sheltering Women: Negotiating Gender and Violence in Northern Italy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Putnam, Robert D. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Reed-­Danahay, Deborah. 1993. Talking About Resistance: Ethnography and Theory in Rural France. Anthropological Quarterly 66: 221–29. Rosaldo, Renato. 1986. From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 77–97. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sabetti, Filippo. 2000. The Search for Good Government: Understanding the Paradox of Italian Democracy. Montreal and Kingston: Queen’s-­McGill University Press. Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Shore, Cris. 2000. Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration. London: Routledge. Shryock, Andrew. 1997. Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sutton, David E. 1997. Local Names, Foreign Claims: Family Inheritance and National Heritage on a Greek Island. American Ethnologist 24: 415–37.

Chapter 2

Kinship Weaponized Representations of Kinship and Binary Othering in U.S. Military Anthropology Thomas Zitelmann

In many countries, kinship and tribal membership are major factors in a person’s ability to find a job, get a promotion, rise to a position of power and authority, or even to gain access to essential goods and services such as water or medical care. . . . Marines need to be aware of the way that kinship relationships organize and control access to physical and social resources in the community. —Salmoni and Holmes-­Eber (2008: 126–27) As for what constitutes ethnographic intelligence, consider how people typically associate in the non-­ Western world. Kinship matters. —Simons (2011a: 88) Kinship systems are the organizational structure of families and extended families, clans, tribes and so forth. . . . [K]inship may influence individuals to join insurgencies or resist insurgencies. . . . Knowing social organizational structure and kinship systems and how they operate allows counterinsurgents to increase awareness and situational understanding. —U.S. Army (2015: 1.22–1.27)

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Instead, why not apply “shock and awe” to “hearts and minds”? Let family members of those who serve in adversaries’ militaries know what awaits their loved ones in graphic detail, or make clear to the population at large how much terror they can expect at home, where they think they are safe. In other words, stoke fears. —Simons (2014a)

Kinship Matters Kinship matters in the U.S. military as well as beyond, in the global military sphere. As this chapter will show, kinship considerations are globally relevant, even in such pivotal decisions as whether to join or resist insurgencies, because kinship relations are largely presumed to play a significant role in organizing and controlling access to the operational and instrumental information needed to influence the outcome. In a sense, knowledge about kinship systems and the ability to navigate them are also seen as tantamount to control—which can be as easily gained as lost. This chapter discusses to what ends U.S. military strategies use such knowledge and on what terms they obtain or produce it. Given the centrality of kinship to military strategizing, to which ethnographic knowledge becomes indispensable, the role of the anthropologist takes on complex new dimensions. When anthropologists make behavior-­changing recommendations—in the context of the U.S. military—they alternate between “good cops” and “bad cops.” The “good cops” would claim that resorting to soft anthropological knowledge of the local kinship systems and other anthropological domains for counterinsurgency (COIN) missions could potentially bolster hearts-­and-­minds campaigns among local populations and, as a result, minimize or even prevent civil casualties. The “bad cops” are motivated by the conviction that learning about the deep-­seated kinship systems of the potential adversaries helps to win wars with decisive shock-­and-­awe missions. In other words, these understandings and uses of kinship concepts in military strategies mirror the centrality attributed to kinship by (modern) states or of kinship for (modern) states (as also described in the introduction). This chapter discusses approaches to kinship within the emergent discipline of applied military anthropology in the United States and introduces a perspective on the epistemological and heuristic legacies of knowledge production rather than on a practical ethnographic case.1



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By tracking different lines of argument as to why kinship matters for military thinking, my focus is on tracing the linkages between kinship and politics within the scope of U.S. military anthropology. “Kinship weaponized” refers to a complex subfield of knowledge production within military anthropology, which derives from a wider “cultural turn” within warfare: the assumption that “non-­Westerners” have a different approach to warfare and that knowledge of their “culture” was essential in order “to know the enemy” (Porter 2007: 47). This includes perspectives on kinship systems and family relations among a potential enemy-­other but also on civil populations with uncertain attitudes and the sociocultural particularities of local auxiliaries in warfare. The promises and practices of the cultural turn in warfare have constantly changed during the past decade. While the first part of the chapter outlines why kinship matters for the U.S. military, the second part concentrates on the academic underpinnings of kinship perspectives in military anthropology starting with the anthropological legacy of Edward Evans-­Pritchard, whose classical model detailing the relationship between kinship and politics was based on his study of the South Sudanese Nuer (Evans-­Pritchard 1940). This classical but antiquated representation of the Nuer model of segmentary (tribal) polity has had an enduring impact on important trends in military anthropology, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan. The third part concentrates on individual and corporate contributions to the cultural turn in military strategy. Examples cited in this study are mainly drawn from past studies conducted by David Ronfeldt at the U.S. civil-­military think tank RAND Corporation; by the cultural anthropologist Montgomery McFate and David Kilcullen, whose input on anthropological catchwords underpinned the conception of U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS) and of the famous COIN handbook FM 3-­24, which effectively brought about the cultural turn in military strategy; and, not least, the study conducted by Anna Simons, anthropologist and professor for defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. By tracking their ideas about the role of kinship for military tactics and strategy, the chapter shares the widespread concern of critical anthropologists with the growing tendency to militarize culture (González 2010) and weaponize anthropology (Price 2011) in the field of applied military anthropology. This is also indicative of the dimensions in which kinship considerations are important for (modern) politics. My examples are thus taken from discourses circulating within the United States, particularly from paradigms linked to the post-­9/11 wars

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and insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Within the wider scope of the cultural turn in warfare, they represent trends that come and go in tandem with changing military strategies. Approaches to kinship are not uniform and range from seemingly softer to harder positions. For adherents of COIN, with ideas about stabilization, state building, development, and hearts and minds in their knapsack, kinship appears to be formable according to the normative distinction between “us” and “them.” The opposing shock-­and-­ awe faction, which Anna Simons represents, is skeptical about the soft instrumentalist position. The latter (soft) position had come to be largely associated with the U.S. COIN handbook, FM 3-­24 (U.S. Army 2006) and the HTS, an institutionalized civil-­military endeavor that deployed the ethnographic data gathered by civil researchers (anthropologists and others) and accompanied the combating U.S. Army units in Iraq and Afghanistan. The HTS was dissolved in November 2014 as an institutionalized endeavor; however, it is being rebranded as the Global Cultural Knowledge Network (González 2015; González and Price 2015). With the HTS’s demise, other uses of anthropological knowledge in the U.S. Army began to dominate the discussion. The current label for the operational use of a potpourri of anthropological, sociopsychological, and linguistic knowledge is “cross-­cultural competence,” or “3-­C” (Greene-­Sands and Greene-­Sands 2014). This is also the general label for expanding the scope of the anthropological and cultural knowledge to the wider North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) context. Over the past decade, applied anthropology has spread to heavily securitized and militarized sectors. The process has involved developing a self-­ conscious military anthropology, increasing the demand for a special tool to help understand and fight the “enemy other” called ethnographic intelligence. The differentiation between “us” and “them,” binary othering, converges largely (but not only) with what is perceived as a bundle of threats (political and social fragility, terror, drugs, criminality, migration, human trafficking, etc.) from the global South. In the thinking of militarized anthropology, enduring kinship structures (synonymous with family or tribe) represent a potential weapon of the so-­called dark networks in asymmetric warfare for facilitating hidden and threatening organizational structures that globalize through migration and global communication. At the same time, classical anthropological approaches to kinship systems that look at marriage patterns, gendered roles, intergenerational relations, transfers, and successions are reframed in terms of internal conflict-­driven/conflict-­driving factors with external impacts. So-­called tribal societies and segmentary systems figure



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high on the threat scale as breeding and recruiting grounds for terrorism and insurgencies (Perugini 2008: 321; González 2009; Zitelmann 2011a). Thus, earlier anthropological models of the linkage between kinship and politics reappear in a new global orbit and a new institutional context of traveling texts aiming to depict and explain the nexus between “us” and “them” (Pratt 1992; Robertson 1992: 39–40; see also the introduction to this volume). It becomes clear that the paradigms of military and civil anthropology are not worlds apart. Rather, they offer potential for a dual-­use system (Price 2012), a traveling understanding of techniques with military and civil applications.

Anthropological Legacies of Kinship and Politics in Military Anthropology The weaponized military approach to kinship is closely linked to general anthropological trends. It is rooted in a long and transnational legacy of the involvement of anthropologists in military strategizing or in militarized contexts (Price 2008; Johler, Marchetti, and Scheer 2010). At the same time, this legacy offers the potential for studying the dual use of anthropology and anthropologists in civil and military contexts, as David Price has described in reference to the “Human Relation Area Files” (Price 2012). Military anthropologists seem not to be as troubled by the colonial and military legacies of anthropology and claim them as their own (McFate 2005, 2014). For Evans-­Pritchard, the Nuer of South Sudan represented the ideal model for a stateless political order in theoretical and empirical terms, particularly owing to the fusion of kinship ties, segmentary lineages, and the political system. Within the notion of lineage, kinship relations assumed multiple functions. Kinship was seen as a transitory phenomenon as far as the bilateral kinship ties of an individual were concerned, so if a beloved kin died or moved away, kinship continued to function as a stable and continuous “corporate” group. Local groups formed segments of larger, more inclusive kin groups, which were interrelated by the rules of descent and formed a nested hierarchy of segments. Several lineages and wider descent lines coalesced in the higher unit of the agnatic clan, resulting in a system of clans that came to represent the Nuer tribe. Obligations to help each other in armed conflicts were expressed in kinship terms. Smaller lineages, which might be opposed on one level, cooperated on a different, aggregated level. Thus, a segmentary political system was characterized by shifting identifications between

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“us” and “them,” which could be more or less exclusive. More recently documented processes among the Nuer today (Hutchinson 1996; Dereje 2012; Falge 2015) are never taken into consideration. Notwithstanding the fetters of the anthropological past, to borrow Marx’s traveling metaphor, many recent developments in the field of kinship studies have shaped the ideological foundations of the U.S. military. A basic conviction is that the intimacy of kinship forms an archetypical sphere of trust as a stronghold against the intrusion of hostile strangers. This conviction translated into the idea of kinship as an organizational asset with either positive connotations, such as resources of resistance against an omnipotent state (e.g., in Scott’s “weapons of the weak” [1985, 1990]). or negative, as representing an asymmetric threat owing to sinister practices out of the sight of nonkin. A prominent field for research is the organization of Islamist terrorism by ties of kinship, in particular in Southeast Asia (Ryang 2004; Huda Ismail 2008; Magouirk, Atran, and Sageman 2008). Other fields include pseudokinship and mafia-­like structures (Schneider and Schneider 2008) and the legacy of the “family firm,” informal banking, the hawala system, and the swift flow of the bills of exchange within trusted family networks (Goody 1996; Ballard 2009; Thompson 2011). The nexus between kinship, cronyism, and corruption is viewed as a major hindrance to the process of democratization that enables political reform and hybrid processes of transformation (Aronoff and Kubik 2013: 220; Herzfeld 2005; on the shifting evaluation of kinship, see also the introduction to this volume). The more recent versions of the British and U.S. “cultural” army manuals accept notions of kinship, favoritism, and corruption as a fact to work with in the search for local allies (MoD 2013: 1–17; U.S. Army 2015: 1–27). This idea also informs the self-­reflexive studies on the social organization of elite army units, such as the U.S. special operations forces and the U.S. Marine Corps (Simons 1997; Holmes-­Eber 2014). Even in the civil-­military field of “development,” family and kinship systems may appear as potential sites for generating “resilience” and for enabling the social reconstitution after all types of upheavals (McLellan and Elran 2012). “Resilience” in a military reading could also refer to the means available to an asymmetric enemy for reassembling its forces (Simons 2013). The biological, “genetic,” anthropometric, and anthropomorphological legacy of kinship structures and the search for “criminal tribes” are revived by methods of body screening, blood tests, and remote sensing of the enemy other (Maguire 2009, 2012; Marr, Garner, and Thompson 2008).



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To be clear, local warlords, insurgents, terrorists, and other “bad” actors may and do draw on kinship terms for recruitment purposes, using them as technology of social knowledge (see Herzfeld, this volume). They enter warscapes in manifold ways. This could be observed during the outbreak of the Somali Civil War during the 1990s, when warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid modeled his presentation of the Somali clan heavily on the works of the anthropologist Ioan Lewis. A similar trend can be noted among the Nuer of South Sudan (Zitelmann 2015; Falge 2015). As critical studies from the Manchester school of social anthropology and the French Marxist anthropology of the 1970s have amply shown, lineage-­based kinship systems may enshrine multitudes of internal contradictions and conflicts based on age, gender, roles, modes of work and exchange, and, not least, rules of transition (see the introduction to this volume). Such critical perspectives were completely excluded from interpretations and analyses owing to the unifying features of the militarized approaches quoted below. The following case studies explore how classical models of kinship have been used within recent military strategizing and illustrate the journey of anthropological texts and concepts into the military sphere.

Case Studies of Individual and Institutional Contributions Evans-­Pritchard’s classic model of the segmentary system of the Nuer, unmitigated by critique and empirical revisions, continues to inform strategizing in military anthropology. The journey of this model can be partly tracked. One of the stops it made was with David Ronfeldt of the RAND Corporation, who fused Evans-­Pritchard’s description of a segmentary order with the neoevolutionist and cultural ecologist legacies of the 1960s to develop ­models for post-­Cold War threat scenarios. Montgomery McFate took up Evans-­ Pritchard’s mechanical account of lineage mobilization for feuds and warfare. The quest for conflicts and equilibrium, which fascinated Max Gluckman, was to a degree taken up by David Kilcullen. McFate and Kilcullen fueled the early institutional practice of the HTS with the functionalist paradigm, which involved providing central catchwords for a corporate text such as the 2006 U.S. Army COIN field manual FM 3-­24. While McFate, Kilcullen, the HTS, and the COIN handbook called for a benevolent “winning-­the-­hearts-­ and-­minds” approach to the use of anthropological knowledge, also baptized “armed social work” (Petraeus 2015: viii), the shock-­and-­awe faction

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developed its own reading of the classics. This perspective is provided by Anna Simons in the last section.

David Ronfeldt and the (Neo-­) Evolutionist Legacy

David Ronfeldt was influenced by early social anthropology, neoevolutionism, cultural materialism, and the cultural ecology of the 1960s (E. E. Evans-­ Pritchard, Julian Steward, Marvin Harris, Marshall Sahlins, Elman Service, and Morton Fried). During the 1990s he developed an evolutionist model of social ideal types that placed nonhierarchical, decentralized segmentary systems with an archaic form of collectivism and simple hierarchic states on the lower end of the evolutionary scale. The higher end of the scale was characterized by competitive market systems, individualism, and the ability to organize various kinds of networks (Ronfeldt 1996, 2006). As a neoevolutionist, Ronfeldt believed in multievolutionary developments. Hence, some aspects of the previous model had been retained, of which the egalitarian kinship-­ based “tribe” is a case in point. For Ronfeldt, the Nuer system, as developed by Evans-­Pritchard, remained an unchanging model (Ronfeldt 1996: 18). At the same time, outcomes of different permutations and combinations were also being worked out. If tribal collective values merged with an advanced state system but without a market economy, the result would be communism. Alternately, if collective values mixed with the market and the state, the eventual outcome could be fascism (Ronfeldt 1996: 22). Functional collective values of the past could thus give rise to pathological attitudes in the present time. In light of these conjectures, the redeeming future seemed to lie with the trajectory provided by the market, individualism, and networks as they developed in tandem as national and transnational nongovernmental organizations. But networks also posed problems and dangers; for instance, there was the neoinstitutionalist problem of rising internal transactional costs to keep networks running. Who would pay for the internal trust, and who would prevent free riders from free riding (Ronfeldt 1996: 12)? Aside from the costs of trust building, a second problem Ronfeldt identified was that from an empirical perspective, not all networks appeared to be benevolent. After 9/11 kinship began to receive additional attention, especially in conjunction with the notion of the archaic past. In this context, Ronfeldt succeeded with a strategic reformulation of the nonbenevolent network into the net war model. The problem of trust and transactional costs within the modern



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networked organization could be solved by stabilizing its internal organization with “kinpolitik,”2 intermarriage between tribal segmentary modes of social organization and collective values, such as pride, hospitality, and reciprocity, that catered to the demands of potential local supporters (Ronfeldt 2006: 33). Ronfeldt used this model to explain the emergence and spread of al-­Qaeda in different parts of the Islamic world. By fusing the “threatening” aspects of both models, al-­Qaeda was cast more as a metatribe rather than as a metanetwork. Even if radical Islam was ideology, its transition to a somewhat stable, self-­perpetuating movement relied on the kinship model, which offered both strategy and ideology (Ronfeldt 2006: 33). By using the tribal/kinship model as the basis for developing the threat matrix, Ronfeldt also avoided linking the new enemy other too strongly with Islam, an important maneuver given the dependence of the United States on allies in the Middle East (Ronfeldt 2004). But additionally, the underlying thinking was also that certain archaic values existed even in non-­Islamic contexts; they were older, more prevalent, and perhaps more time-­honored than religious ideology (Ronfeldt 2007: 38). In sum, two remnants of the “archaic” world characterized Ronfeldt’s threat matrix. One was the shifting “us”/“them” dichotomy as a continuous form in the evolutionary sense. Ronfeldt saw the dichotomy as being related to the tribal phase of human development, which reappears in contemporary tribal and segmentary contexts. Hence, combined with new networks, it fuels the post-­Cold War threat scenario. The other survival was “switching.” Families placed members in different political camps. Groups and individuals could easily change camps or found parallel organizations (Ronfeldt 2006: 40–41). Clear-­cut ideology and commitment toward allies is an expression of “our” stage of evolution.

Montgomery McFate and the Human Terrain System: “Winning the Hearts and Minds”

Like David Ronfeldt, Montgomery McFate also intermittently worked for the RAND Corporation, but her work fed directly into the HTS and COIN. McFate received her doctorate in anthropology from Yale University in 1996. Her study “Pax Britannica: British Counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, 1969–1982” was based on her fieldwork during 1989–1994. In the ensuing years, McFate became heavily enmeshed in the shadows of the “security space,” working for different security institutions until she found employment

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with the RAND Corporation and the Office of Naval Research (Corn, Ridgeway, and Schulman 2008; Gezari 2013: 115–17), where she started lobbying for the HTS.3 McFate’s central theme of “winning hearts and minds” would later become the public message of the HTS: the HTS and the use of anthropology for the military would serve to civilize war by “anthropologizing the military.” McFate had served as a lightning rod in that period for conceptualizing and fashioning the central message, which was that the knowledge that the HTS created would not be appropriated for killing but would be used to help to protect civilians (Rhode 2007; Whittaker 2009). Champions of the HTS believed that all collateral damage had to be avoided in order to protect civilians. At the same time, the military-­security-­academic-­industrial sector flourished through public and private institutions in search of “human dynamics” (DSF 2009; Pool 2011). Under the heading of Human Social Culture Behavior Modeling Program, civil-­military think tanks and research networks mushroomed to promote securitized social engineering with “virtualized tribes” and villages in simulated environments (González 2012: 50). Based on the HTS, the COIN manual had two distinctive slots for the anthropological kinship theory. In this context, its quest to determine the internal organization of the enemy-­other, either to stabilize its organization or to understand its internal dynamics (Kriebel 2008: 345), was linked to the need to gain a deeper understanding of the tribal kinship-­based systems of honor and the legitimacy of retribution and revenge to the extent that they directly resulted in confrontations with the U.S. military. McFate’s central message with regard to Middle Eastern kinship systems was that the army should avoid being drawn into endless “bloodline” conflicts due to the tribal honor systems that demanded retribution for killed relatives. “Bloodline” conflicts additionally fueled the alliances between external violent actors, such as al-­ Qaeda, and members of local “tribes” (McFate 2008; McFate 2010: 164). Like Ronfeldt, McFate used the Nuer model as a blueprint to construct an imaginary historical Middle East. The basic social structure of the Middle East was presented as a pluralistic legal entity, with the state and the tribe coexisting over a diachronic long-­term (McFate 2008: 291–92). Tribal value systems permeated society as a whole, as they would in a segmentary society. While social anthropologists have long critically discussed the applicability of an orthodox segmentary model to the Middle East (Gilsenan 1990), McFate reintroduced it in the classic functionalist version. Her recently published dissertation provides a clue to this stubbornness. There she confirms a deep



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belief in the classical functionalist equilibrium model of the early 1990s to understand “low intensity conflicts” (McFate 2014: chap. 1, passim; Sims 2015: 94). A recently added preface takes it a step further and elevates the “military organization” to an ideal type of survival and resilience: “Military organizations, in fact, are the only human organizations designed to continue functioning, after sustaining casualties; their resilience properties promote, even ensure, systemic equilibrium” (McFate 2014: 7). This bold statement can certainly be challenged by many studies that show the contextual dysfunctionality of military organizations. However, within military anthropology, the functionalist equilibrium model transported its own resilience pattern, even if it was “50 years out of date” to assume “that everything works to the maintenance of the totality” (Rosen 2011: 530). According to Christopher Sims, structural functionalism and the equilibrium model provided the HTS and military anthropology with a pragmatic language to mediate the knowledge transfer of sociocultural expertise between academic experts and military applicants (Sims 2015: 95). An instructive example is provided by David Kilcullen, a former Australian Army officer with COIN experience in Indonesia and a political scientist with some leanings toward ethnography and classical social anthropology (see below). Apart from employing classical functionalism, the HTS never outlined an intellectual agenda. McFate, who left the HTS in 2010, has published an account of some of the outcomes (McFate, Damon, and Holliday 2012) in order to show how knowledge production, while claiming a civil dimension, comes to be constantly drawn into the military domain: “the ontology we were designing was intended for the ease of use by the military, and therefore the organization of categories that were most familiar to the end user should predominate” (McFate et al. 2012: 105). In a recent volume about the fieldwork experience of HTS researchers, individual authors begin to mildly challenge the functionalist straitjacket for applied military anthropology (Dorough-­Lewis 2015).

David Kilcullen: Accommodation, Equilibrium, and “Stabilization”

David Kilcullen’s perspective was complementary to that developed by McFate. From 2005 to 2010, Kilcullen served as a special counterterrorist and COIN adviser to the U.S. Army in Iraq and to NATO and the International

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Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. In 2011 he founded a private consultancy company that specializes in security, development, sociocultural issues, and “frontier environments.” Kilcullen recycles a lot of already familiar ideas. This, in essence, is his argument: Hostile global networks linked up with localized communities, where kinship ties and a related collective value system were highly respected, and while the linkage between the global and the local resembled a patron-­ client relationship, at the same time war theaters of global Islamic jihad were linked by marriage ties and family relationships. But like Ronfeldt, Kilcullen believes that kinship trumped religion because kinship determined the internal organization and stabilized the networks (Kilcullen 2009: 172; Kilcullen 2010: 178). Kinship (echoing McFate’s argument), according to Kilcullen, stabilized organizational ties with the enemy other in a hybrid and asymmetric war. Local wars appeared to be embedded in local social structures, which had to be understood from both an etic and an emic perspective (Kilcullen 2009: 303), for which reason the globalized “war theater,” with its localized spots, was in need of “ethnographic intelligence,” a kind of “conflict ethnography” that should deliver “thick descriptions” to develop a holistic perspective of the “war theater.” The full breadth of Kilcullen’s perspective is seen in his depiction of the “accidental guerrilla” (2009). As Kilcullen delineates it, it is a local person par excellence, a male who is primarily motivated not by ideology or religion but instead by a mix of grievances, revenge, honor, prestige, material gains, power (sometimes mediated by generation conflict), local patriotism, or boredom. Religious fundamentalism, or other ideologies, may serve to stabilize the motivational basis but does not constitute the source. Kilcullen assumes an overarching network through which al-­Qaeda mobilizes capacities, using existing local tensions and motivations in Islamic communities and among migrants to mobilize local fighters. According to him, such local conflict settings are fueled by a global jihadist (holy war) ideology and especially by takfiri practices (which define an internal Islamic opponent as a non-­Muslim, or kafir). On the other hand, al-­Qaeda approaches the local tribal contexts by establishing marriage ties and paying lip service to local concepts of reciprocity and honor. Local allies of al-­Qaeda or of other militant groups become “accidental guerrillas” in a game that they do not fully recognize. Successful COIN would have to differentiate between motivations for rebellion and creating allies of its own in the “human terrain.” Kilcullen, based on his observations as a military adviser to the Indonesian Army of similar structures in East Timor, argued that the primary motivational factor



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was “tribal,” where the insurgents were “tribal” Catholics while the state army consisted mainly of Muslims (Kilcullen 2009: 199). Kilcullen also introduced the perspective of viewing internal conflicts (village, family, lineage, and clan) as a motivational driver to join an insurgence linked to external networks. In East Timor, he learned how local intergenerational conflict and the “generation gap” galvanized angry young men to participate in a wider conflict as fighters. In Afghanistan, local elders lost control over young men while also struggling against encroachments by religious and state authorities (Kilcullen 2009: 67, 200). What Kilcullen learned from his social anthropological readings (Evans-­Pritchard, Max Gluckman, and Elisabeth Colson) about “traditional societies undergoing accelerated modernization” and dealing with such conflicts was the importance of linking social cohesion with “energy pathways” and “safe institutional outlets” to relieve tensions by strengthening “parental authority, youth organizations, cultural mores, education systems, [and] authority of traditional leaders” (Kilcullen 2009: 251).4 This longing for balance and stability in the face of social upheaval is a topic familiar to critical readers of the history of functionalist social anthropology. The blueprint is Max Gluckman’s rather technocratic treatise “The Utility of the Equilibrium Model in the Study of Social Change” (Gluckman 1968). For military anthropologists following in Kilcullen’s footsteps, the abstract Afghan family became a model for a gendered division of roles, fields of dangers, and observations in the future of ethnographic intelligence: [M]en, women and children are part of the triangle of knowledge that must be targeted for information collection. “In Afghanistan, we observe rather consistent themes: Men interpret information and tell you what they think you want to hear. Women see and hear what goes on behind the walls. Children run free in the community— they see, watch and are involved in nearly every activity in the community.” (Stanton 2011).

Anna Simons: Capturing Complexities and Using “Shock and Awe”

The most radical position with regard to kinship within military anthropology was taken by Anna Simons, a social anthropologist and professor of defense studies at the Naval Graduate School in Monterey, California.

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Simons combines her anthropological roots with the imaginative spectrum of a professional securitist. During the 1990s she published two well-­ received books. One was an ethnographic description of the structural failings that led to the fall of Somalia’s longtime president, Siad Barre (1969– 1991) (Simons 1995). The other was an ethnography of the infrastructure of a U.S. special operations unit (Simons 1997). While the first study described the inversion of kinpolitik that turned networks of clan power in support of a state into networks of its dissolution, the second study concerned the making of an army unit into a cohesive social whole. One was about the infrastructure of an insurgency, and the other was about the infrastructure of the counterinsurgents. In light of Simons’s subsequent career, these two studies were complementary to each other. Since Simons is the most prolific and theoretically informed writer among the militarized anthropologists, I analyze her texts through the lens of three topics: (1) ethnographic intelligence, rebaptized as “ethnographic information”; (2) a threat matrix (latent networks, kinship, and angry young man); (3) and a legacy of collectivism versus individualism. The proposed solution was to destroy collectivism and introduce new social techniques to (re)integrate potential “bad boys.” The basic message justifying ethnographic intelligence as a military tool is the rationale that all “indigenous forms of association” (Simons and Tucker 2004: 5), even all “ ‘stuff ’ that ties people together beyond, beneath, and apart from the state” (Simons 2011b: 60), in other words “civil society,” may serve as a tool in asymmetric warfare. Global migration distributes invisible “indigenous or latent forms of social organization” worldwide (Simons and Tucker 2004: 5). The threat matrix outlined above by Simons is not unfamiliar to anthropologists. At the bottom are latent networks of persistent communal attachments that imply dormant threats because they can be used by “criminals, terrorists, and insurgents.” People are born into latent networks in the form of “extended families, lineages, clans,” which are “resilient and robust” (Simons 2005: 334). However, the future dangers are not linked only to the non-­ Western world. Failed structures and dangers deriving from this also exist at home (Simons 2007). In general, “bad boys,” or angry young men (motivated partly by phylogenetic drives), can be mobilized for all kinds of crime, terror, and insurrection (Simons 2013: 3). In more traditional societies elders may still be able to control bad behavior among young men by urging them to marry and establish a family. In the United States male elders are often absent without official leave, and money to attract women can be gained by crime,



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credit, and social welfare. Hence, it can be a function of the military to give angry young men an institutionalized outlet for channeling violence, competition, and disruptive potential “only to[ward] members of other societies” (Simons 2012: 55). Simons does not believe that democracy can be exported as long as communal structures exist. Wherever there are extended families, the principle of one man/one vote does not work. According to her, people will always vote for those who represent the interests of the kinship collective: the family, the clan, the tribe. Elections under such conditions are only “demographic contests” (Simons 2013: 36). According to Simons, who drew her conclusions from the frontier wars fought against Native Americans, long-­term kinship structures could not be destroyed merely through social engineering, so the whole social fabric within which the threat was embedded also had to be destroyed. While it was possible to change individual leaders by soft means, the sentiments and identity of a resisting people had to be broken by wiping out the entire local social structure. Thus, the soft hearts-­and-­minds approaches to COIN were short-­term responses to ongoing political and ideological trends (Simons 2005), whereas, from her perspective, only the experience of “visibly decisive pain” led to change (Simons 2012: 4). Furthermore, code switching was part and parcel of the non-­Western way of war (Simons 2013: 17), an idea that recalls Ronfeldt’s argument in the archaic roots of switching. Simons argues that Pashtun families in Afghanistan had to learn that they could not place one family member with the Taliban and demand that another family be on good terms with allied forces. Intimidation has to “sow generic fear” within the collective, and not simply target individuals (Simons 2013: 23, 26). The U.S. army, Simons argued, had to thus adapt to the “wily” practices of the enemy (38). In the final instance, the institution of the U.S. military itself becomes a normative redeeming factor, offering a role model worldwide for status-­ seeking young warriors, bad boys, and angry young men and, certainly, also their female counterparts. This position also coincided with the U.S. military strategy of the global deployment of special operations forces. In a recent publication, Simons (2014b) shows a deep skepticism of the general use of anthropology in U.S. Army training. Instead, she pleads for special training programs for special operations forces to enable gifted individuals to gain fieldwork experience and to feel their way into the non-­West in anticipation of future employment.

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Anthropology and the Counterinsurgency Manuals FM 3-­24 (2006, 2014) Apart from individual contributions, it was the COIN handbook FM 3-­24 (U.S. Army 2006) that highlighted the institutional interest of the U.S. Army in military anthropology and introduced the notion of “culture” into military strategy—insisting on the centrality of the kinship culture. McFate and Kilcullen contributed to FM 3-­24’s anthropological and cultural perspectives (Crane 2010; Kaplan 2013: 152; Sims 2015: 112). The new version of FM 3-­24 of 2014 relies on the experiences gained in the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War. Both versions of the U.S. Army COIN handbook are similar in terms of the discursive frequency of terms such as culture/cultural, network, and tribe/tribal, while references to gender remain minimal, possibly reflecting a compromise to avoid alienating potential male allies in patriarchal societies (a position advanced by Simons and Kilcullen). The family/kinship structures are still perceived as traditional networks that also constitute potential terrorist infrastructures. The idea that families were to receive condolence payments in cases of collateral damage in war situations (civil casualties) also remains undisputed. But in the context of the kinship constructions borrowed from anthropology, one important difference could be noted between the two versions. The new version dispensed with the need to regard extended kinship structures as networks “with common needs for physical and economic security” (U.S. Army 2006: §3–27). In particular, this broad definition of “security” induced civil supporters of the old COIN handbook to regard the “cultural turn” in warfare and COIN as a contribution to a holistic, civil, and benevolent “human security” (Sewall 2007: xxi–xliii). A recent supplement to the new COIN handbook, however, deals with kinship in more extensive and pragmatic ways, almost echoing the ideas of internal anthropological critics such as Paula Holmes-­Eber. An entire page in the supplement is devoted to kinship as one mode of organizational structure, and the main focus now is on the “multiple levels of relationships and roles people are in within kinship systems” (U.S. Army 2015: 1.22–1.27). Social structure in the old COIN handbook is presented as persistent, abstract, and skeletal, while culture, as a web of meaning that provides the muscle, is concrete and active. In the handbook, while the social structure concerns the tribe, the group, the network, institutions and organizations, and social arrangements and positions (roles, status, norms), culture relates to the realm of ideas, values, behavioral codes, habitus, and instrumentality as



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well as means for individual agency. Accordingly, kinship or family is social structure as far as collective norms and roles are concerned. Culture, on the other hand, covers the realm of individual choices. The handbook’s definition of a tribe follows the classical model of social anthropology, which had embedded the individual into genealogically structured lineages. Tribes are also regarded as flexible networks (U.S. Army 2015: §3–37). Networks within tribal structures seem to denote a “readymade infrastructure” for rebels and insurgents (B-­47). Close kinship relations indicate a high degree of trust and loyalty so that “terrorist, criminal, and gang organizations” may resort to kinship ties as preferred interpersonal relations (48). Anthropological critics regarded the old COIN handbook as a hodgepodge of anthropological theories (Price 2011: 113–31). This is certainly true for the assumed relation between social structure and culture, which mixes functionalism with Max Weber, Clifford Geertz, a piece of Pierre Bourdieu, and others in a corporate imaginative. The rise and fall of the old COIN handbook as a military doctrine was certainly not due to its hybrid mix of anthropological wisdoms but instead to the changing fortunes in the war theaters. The text claimed to promote cultural sensitivity toward the hearts and minds of civil populations under siege. But it contributed more to a temporal refinement of military intelligence. For Douglas Porch, an American military historian, the FM 3-­24 had a dual purpose. It had served to soften the media’s representations of war in order to appease a war-­weary home front. At the same time, anthropological arguments, which might have some local relevance, were used to avoid long-­ term political-­strategic thinking among politicians, military leaders, and the wider public. This was replaced by short-­term promises and tactical searches for local solutions. In contexts of COIN, anthropology has served as a currency to buy time (Porch 2013: 321).

Conclusion The start of the cultural turn in warfare was linked to the challenge of reducing collateral damage among civilians to garner civilian support in the fight against insurgencies. The public promise in 2007 was that knowledge about social structures, notably about the Iraqi “tribes,” would reduce kinetic action (González 2012: 56) so that those who “really deserved” it would be hit. David Kilcullen used the term “individualized lethality,” a veiling newspeak

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that derives from medical descriptions of the deadly side effects of medical drugs (Kilcullen 2009: 288; Zitelmann 2011a: 247–48). The HTS also came under constant review until it was dissolved (Forte 2013; Lamb et al. 2013; González 2015), and likewise, ideas about the functions of cultural knowledge have undergone changes. Until 2009–2010, the established trend was to separate the collection of everyday knowledge from military intelligence, but notions of cultural intelligence, in particular of ethnographic intelligence, implied an approach to data collection that was clearly enemy-­centered and self-­protective. Meanwhile, external HTS practices are applied to internal homeland security (Freeman and Rothstein 2012), which annoys internal military critics (Porch 2013: 343), for in light of the current situation of the National Security Agency’s universal espionage program, the development of military anthropology intelligence seems to be rather modest compared to the gigantic wish to know all. Early observers of the development of the HTS asked far McFate and Kilcullen might be “academically marginal figures, useful prophets without any scientific weight” (Perugini 2008: 222), and hence irrelevant for a deeper analysis of the intellectual/ideological dimensions of military anthropology. But in the United States and beyond, their perspectives have fueled a myriad of military-­academic master’s and undergraduate theses on knowledge about kinship structures, done in the “shadow universities” close to the military (Rossinow 2016). Their proposals for analytical and institutional approaches to include anthropology as a soft skill in the U.S. military were strongly linked to the Afghanistan War and the Iraq War and to the institutional structure of the HTS. The impacts of both survived the HTS and found a niche under the 3-­C paradigm either as ideological narratives that legitimate ethnographic intelligence as a special subfield of 3-­C or as a constructivist model of the “accidental guerrilla” and the global/local threat matrix of overarching terrorist networks, linked by patronage-­client relations to local, communal contexts and settings of grievances and revolt. In the case of Anna Simons, who always remained remote from the HTS, the idea of othering an enemy by dichotomous appositions of the West versus the non-­West remained consistent during the past decade. Here, strong and morally committing kinship systems were a salient factor of the non-­West. Ronfeldt’s approach flourished in the RAND Corporation, a civil-­military think tank that feeds on the defense-­commissioned modeling of realistic and potential threat scenarios. The basics of Ronfeldt’s modeling were developed during the 1990s. His linkage to neoevolutionism, including the early works of Marshall Sahlins,



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himself an outspoken critic of military anthropology (Sahlins 2009), has the touchy dimension of anthropology as it once was. But even in 2013, it informs civil-­military reasoning about possible organizational structures of collective crime and terrorist threats (Sullivan 2013). Within the wider 3-­C approach, the concepts developed by Ronfeldt, McFate, Kilcullen, and Simons are present as elements of a much larger dispositive of binary othering. I have pointed out trends, stereotypes, and reifications in the representation and use of knowledge about kinship and social structures in different versions of U.S.-­style militarized anthropology. While theoretical inputs derive from the conventional anthropological legacy, the activist output is mainly a pointed binary division between “us” and “them,” with extended kinship structures as a sign of the dangerous refusal of “modernity.” In the conventional academic discourse, the idea of kinship as an inhibiting factor for “modernization” would find immediate criticism (McKinnon and Cannell 2013). Military anthropology produces a niche in a securitized environment and a permanent state of emergency (Zitelmann 2011b: 210; Stepputat 2010: 31). Here, assumptions about extended kinship systems mutate into petrified bases for military decision making about friends or foes, about life and death.

Acknowledgment I thank Gita Rajan for her vigorous language editing.

Notes 1. A methodological note: This chapter is a late by-­product of a research project (2009–2012) about German development aid-­funded projects on civil conflict prevention in Afghanistan (Zdunnek and Zitelmann 2011; Baumann, Zdunnek, and Zitelmann 2014). The research was supported by a grant from the German Federal Ministry for Science and Education. With the U.S.-­led COIN campaign starting in autumn 2009, some German-­funded projects, in particular those linked to local conflict solution, were immediately hijacked by COIN practitioners. The civil factor became a military auxiliary, and I became interested in the ways COIN integrated practices of local conflict solution into the war. My research included inquiries into the soft skills, which military anthropologists and the evolving HTS brought into the war arena (Zitelmann 2011a, 2011b). At the same time, for security reasons my university (Freie Universität Berlin) prohibited field research in Afghanistan. I could not use the generous grant funds for

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field research. The research developed into a desk study. All the sources used are open sources. However, between 2010 and 2012 I participated in a number of events, organized by the German Army (Bundeswehr), where the German ethnological approach, an equivalent to the HTS, and the German adaptations of the 3-­C approach were discussed. This allowed for “situated listening” (Sanjek 2001) and enabled a number of formal and informal talks about unity and difference in military uses of anthropological and other soft skills. 2. “Kinpolitik” appears as a substitute for “realpolitik” under “tribal conditions”: “In tribal milieus, strategy and tactics revolve around what might be called kinpolitik, far more than realpolitik” (Ronfeldt 2007: 37). 3. Since 2015, McFate has held a chair for strategic research at the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island (“Montgomery McFate, Ph.D.: Profile” n.d.). 4. David Kilcullen (2009, passim) mentioned two contemporary “orthodox” adherents to classical social anthropology and the lineage system, Akbar Ahmed and Philipp Salzman, as direct informants. While Akbar Ahmed has recently developed a distanced approach to military anthropology (Ahmed 2013), Salzman (2008, 2011) sidelines a politicized and essentialist position on continuity of corporate tribes and tribal behavior in the Middle East.

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———. 2014. Pax Britannica: British Counterinsurgency in Northern Ireland, 1969–1982. New York: Wilberforce Codex. McFate, Montgomery, Britt Damon, and Robert Holliday. 2012. What Do Commanders Really Want to Know? U.S. Army Human Terrain Systems Lessons Learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. In The Oxford Handbook of Military Psychology, ed. Janice H. Laurence and Michael D. Mathews, 92–113. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McKinnon, Susan, and Fenella Cannell. 2013. The Difference Kinship Makes. In Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship, ed. Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell, 3–38. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press. McLellan, Alex B., and Meir Elran, eds. 2012. International Symposium on Societal Resilience: Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Societal Resilience, November 30–December 2, 2010. Fairfax, VA: Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute/U.S. Army War College Center for Strategic Leadership/Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. MoD. 2013. Culture and Human Terrain. Joint Doctrine Note 4/13. Development, Concepts and Doctrine Center, Ministry of Defence (MoD), London. Montgomery McFate, Ph.D.: Profile. n.d. U.S. Naval War College, https://​www​.usnwc​ .edu​/Academics​/Faculty​/Montgomery​-­­McFate,​-­­Ph—D-­.aspx. Perugini, Nicola. 2008. Anthropologists at War: Ethnographic Intelligence and Counter-­ Insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. International Political Anthropology 1(2): 213–27. Petraeus, David. 2015. Foreword. In Social Science Goes to War: The Human Terrain System in Iraq and Afghanistan, ed. Montgomery McFate and Janice H. Laurence, vii–xi. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pool, Robert. 2011. Sociocultural Data to Accomplish Department of Defense Missions: Toward a Unified Social Framework—Workshop Summary. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Porch, Douglas. 2013. Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myth of the New Way of War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porter, Patrick. 2007. Good Anthropology, Bad History: The Cultural Turn in Studying War. Parameters 37(2): 45–58. Pratt, M. L. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Price, David H. 2008. Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2011. Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in the Service of the Militarized State. Petrolia, CA: CounterPunch and AK Press. ———. 2012. Counterinsurgency and the M-­VICO System: Human Relation Area Files and the Dual-­Use Legacy. Anthropology Today 28(1): 16–20. Rhode, David. 2007. Army Enlists Anthropologists in War Zones. New York Times, October 5. Robertson, Robert. 1992. Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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Chapter 3

Inside and Outside the Language of Kinship Public and Private Conceptions of Sociality Frances Pine

Spaces of Kinship and Politics This chapter is concerned with spaces of kinship and spaces of politics, and the often very blurred boundary between them, in certain socialist and postsocialist contexts. I am taking politics to mean both formal political structures of the state and its discourses and less formal ways of engaging with the world of power, authority, economy, and resources outside or in opposition to the state. Similarly, I look at kinship in terms of both discursive ideology and practice. Ethnographically, the chapter is based primarily on my own field data from Poland over the past three decades, but it also uses comparative material from other anthropological sources. The questions I touch on here are concerned with the ways that kinship and politics—the house and the state—as discourses, ideal systems, and sites of practice (making and doing) both weave together and tear apart narratives of belonging, self, and other in the lived world and claims and counterclaims of equality and hierarchy, entitlement and exclusion, power and brutality, and safety and nurture. I have argued elsewhere that very commonly, stories, or narratives, serve as moral acts and practices, which in many instances form a vehicle for transmitting knowledge and understanding about proper relationships and proper ways of behaving and being in the world (Pine 2002, 2007; see also Cruikshank 1998; Gilsenan 1996); they do this, I suggest, by both positive and negative example—showing kinship as a moral framework for relations between citizens (comrades) and the state or

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as a hierarchical and power-­infused set of relations that, like the state, can be a site of violence, fear, and oppression. Further, not only do kinship narratives and stories serve as moral templates for behavior and relations between people and between people and the state, but narratives and stories of state and nation also address the same relations and behavior, from a top-­down rather than bottom-­up perspective. Often the same language and metaphors are used, although what might be considered the narrative register is usually different. I am interested in ways that, at various levels, different registers of kinship and sociality coexist, ranging from the tiny secrets of the inside to the huge and moral claims of the outside—the minuscule and the gigantic—and I am also interested in how the state claims, appropriates, and sometimes misuses key kinship metaphors (but can only do so because they too are implicitly based on, or permeated with, inequalities, hierarchies, and contradictions and so are ready and poised to be misused) and how citizens use kinship sociality both as a mask to hide behind and exclude the outside and as a powerful public tool to criticize and confront the state. In a rather different context, Goddard discusses these shifting claims of citizen and state, private and public, in her chapter in this volume. I am not suggesting that there is any structural arrangement or order here—as in a private world of kinship embedded neatly in a public world of the state, with each reflecting the other like a fractal. Rather, I argue that the terms or concepts of kinship and state mask an enormous complexity of different kinds of socialities, different expectations of entitlement, and ideas about morality that are always relational but not always equitable. And further, they rather consistently get all tangled up. It is clear that the language of kinship and the language of the state draw on the same very powerful, highly evocative images—shared blood and substance, roots in the soil and the land, common heritage, history and memory, shared labor. Thus, these two structures or institutions, so often understood as ranked, opposed, or complementary parts of a particular binary (see also the introduction to this volume), are also intertwined in complicated ways and at the very least refer to and use the same powerful symbols and metaphors to evoke concepts as material as biological reproduction and as abstract as morality, discipline, hierarchy, and entitlement. An example of this can be found in Humphrey’s discussion of what she calls (after James Scott) evocative transcripts; she describes how the same legends and myths of Chinggis Khan were told by state officials and used in state discourse and by ordinary people in private/domestic ritual and conversation (Humphrey 1994). In another

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context, Cruikshank examines one event, a murder that took place in the Yukon during the nineteenth century gold rush, through a range of very different narrative media: court records, police files, church records, newspapers, and descendants’ life histories and memories. In each context, the same “facts” are interpreted according to particular moralities, from ideals of indigenous close kinship to those of the politics of the colonial state, and in essence a different story is told in each (Cruikshank 1998). In other words, the stories by which kinship is made and the stories by which politics is done are often the same or emerge from the same source. Their power, as both Cruikshank and Humphrey show although in rather different ways, lies in their capacity for simultaneous transformation from one domain or register to the other but also for evocation of a range of ambiguous shadow or evocative references or connotations. These ambiguous and evocative contexts were particularly embedded and nuanced in the different scales of language in the socialist world.

Inside and Outside in the Podhale I first went to Poland in the autumn of 1977. The week before Christmas I moved into a mountain village very near what was then the Czechoslovak border. When I think back on my earliest visits to the village, trying to arrange a place to live, the images are overwhelming, stark and most characteristically closed. The woman in the tiny kiosk in the equally tiny central village square looked out at me absolutely impassively; I couldn’t judge her age or anything about her. Eventually she suggested that her brother-­in-­law might have a room to let in his house. All of the other women I saw in those first days were hurrying from place to place in the freezing cold, heads covered by shawls folded low on their brows, with absolutely closed, chiseled facial expressions. The young men—whom I referred to in my field notes then as the young thugs—moved as if they owned the village street, always carrying large sticks,1 often drunk, talking to each other in their own totally incomprehensible version of local dialect that I never really came to understand very well. Their presence also evoked a sense of closedness and more so one of physical threat and danger. I noticed that people were continually popping in and out of each other’s houses, often carrying leather bags when they went in but coming out empty-­handed or arriving empty-­handed and leaving carrying a bag or bundle. I noticed that people always asked everyone else where they had been or were going, what they were doing, what they had bought, and how much it had cost. And equally

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everyone tried to avoid answering, at least in these public exchanges on the street, where the question “where are you going?” was the normal form of greeting between kin and neighbors. In the fields behind the houses, however, people greeted each other in old language, and, I realized, they did so whenever they encountered anyone working for the house—not just farmwork but also fence building, and roof repair: “Daj Boże” (God gives; Blessing of God) and the reply “Bóg Złaplać,” meaning “God will repay you.” And these were also the public greetings for Sunday and for holy days of obligation. After some time, I realized that the closed faces of the women and the dangerous auras of the young men were effectively performative boundaries. As people came to know me and over months and years incorporated me and my family into their inside worlds, they greeted me on the street with “where are you going, where have you been, what did you do, what did you buy?” just as they greeted each other. I also realized that no one on the street expected an answer, or at least not much of one. The answers instead were provided as part of kitchen conversations, within the safety of the house. The contents of the bags, the handovers of things procured in town, the exchange of information about goods available, about deals, often dodgy, to be made and deliveries to be put in place, were the embodied enactment of kinship and neighborhood exchange carried out within the core sites of kin trust. This was the period of acute shortage in socialist Poland, when shops boasted bread in the morning, vinegar and pickled cucumbers most times, and otherwise empty shelves. So the question “where are you going?” or “what did you buy?” was not just idle curiosity. It was both a domestic question, about consumption, and, like all issues around consumption during socialism, a political question (see Verdery 1996). And it signaled to everyone a particular way of dividing the world into inside and outside spaces: “I am going to the kiosk” (inside the village), “I am going to market” (the generic word for Nowy Targ, the district town 10 kilometers away, not really inside but still local), “I am going to Morawczyna” (the next village, outside in terms of village loyalties but inside in terms of regional identity and continually bridged by intermarriage, creating and re-­creating kinship), and “I am going to the world” (anywhere beyond Nowy Targ, from Kraków to Chicago, definitely outside). I came to recognize the closed and sometimes menacing embodied stances of the villagers in other contexts, long after they had stopped erecting them against me. If milicja (police) came to the village, they were greeted with a polite “Good day” but never with questions and never with religious blessings; the villagers closed down in their presence. Priests were always met

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with religious blessings as well as extreme diffidence and signs of humility. Teachers were addressed in standard Polish, not in dialect, at least by the schoolchildren and their parents. After a time I realized that everyone in the village had at least two names, one linked to inside, kinship, and neighborhood and the other linked to external legal or formal identity. The first was “how you write yourself ” (jak sie pisać), and the other was “how you speak to someone” (jak sie mówi do niego). The written name, or surname (nazwisko), “how you write yourself,” was to be found in the parish records and local council documents, on land registers, employment records, medical records, identity cards, and wills. It was the name used by the milicja when they ventured into the village looking for someone or by the priest in commemorative masses or marriage ceremonies. Written names were never used among villagers themselves as terms of either address or reference. Rather, among themselves they used first name (imię) and house name (przydomek), and when there were several people with the same names they differentiated between them with a nickname or a reference to a parent or a place. Few strangers or outsiders—the people the villagers refer to as opcy—knew the house names, while everyone in the village as well as in the kin and labor exchange networks that extend over a group of three or four neighboring villages used them. So, for instance, an official name might be Jan Kowal. And there might be ten houses in the village where Kowal families live, and each of them might have a Jan. If a state representative came into the village asking for Jan Kowal, he was likely to be met with a blank, impassive stare and possibly a question—“Which one?” And as this exchange was taking place a small child would be speeding across the fields to the place where Jajasiek from the house of Duda, who writes himself as Jan Kowal and who everyone knew got into a drunken fight in town yesterday, is picking potatoes with his parents and siblings. The child shouts a warning, Jajasiek disappears into the forest, and no one admits to knowing where any of the Jan Kowals might be.

Speech, Resistance, and Stories as Moral Templates It is very tempting to see the use of different greetings, the use of impenetrable dialect, and the use of secret names as forms of resistance in a Scott-­like sense, and to some extent I think this is accurate—they are, at very least, a way of dividing the inside from the outside, the house from the village at the most minuscule level, and the village from the state and its institutions at the

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largest level. They are also performative ways of establishing social categories and different classifications of people: nasze (ours) or swoje (our own), from the house and totally intimate; nasze (ours), not of the house but closely linked; and opcy (outsiders), those who are to be treated with proper respect in public (even if ridiculed in private) such as priests and teachers and those such as police and state officials who are dangerous and to be avoided whenever possible and if they are encountered given no information whatsoever. In other words, different categories of people are met with different registers of sociality, and among them the close kin and fellow house members are most intimate, while the agents of the state are most distant. This could perhaps also be seen as a distinction between the people to whom you tell the truth, or some variety of it, and the people to whom you automatically and routinely tell lies or give misinformation. Children learn early to place other villagers, in relation to themselves and to their house, as they learn their house names; the names of their fields, woods, and pastures; and their kin terms of address if they are related. Through these and through their conscious choice of either dialect or standard Polish as well as their use of political language (the slogans and the secular, classless terms of reference and address of socialism and, later, consumer capitalism) in some contexts and of religious/ritual language in others, they learn to juggle their different publics and their different domestics (insides) as part of the process of learning to speak. Keeping in mind the shared language and metaphors and the distinct narrative registers, I want to consider various ways in which the language and sociality of kinship, in both practice and ideology, interact and intersect with the language and moralities of the state. Focusing primarily on socialist and postsocialist states, I look at different contexts: (1) marginal cultures where people live as far as possible outside the state and beyond its reach, avoiding the state’s gaze and discipline and creating their own “inside” spaces. which at least in ideal terms revolve around kinship and trust; (2) incorporated industrial cultures, where kinship and the state are both viewed as moral and legitimate structures and as equal, but different, spaces to which to belong, or where the state at least officially encompasses and even takes over the roles and relations of kinship, as in early Soviet ideology, when the state was depicted as replacing the biosocial family and providing nonexploitative, nonhierarchical, nonindividualistic family; and (3) postsocialist spaces, where the state took on too much kinship (to borrow [misuse] an idea of Butler 2000; see also Herzfeld, this volume) and went to war or exercised brutal regimes of exclusion on the basis of ideologies of inclusion and shared substance as well

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as difference and “otherness” (at best nonkin, at worst nonhuman); in other words when, in the name of blood and kinship, the common spaces where kinship and politics formerly intersected were abandoned or sabotaged. Here we can think, for instance, of an exaggeration of claims of kinship as embodiments of both entitlement and exclusion, particularly in relation to the Bosnian War and its aftermath, or the restructurings and moral realignments after socialism in the wake of privatization, when old affiliations between the state and the discourse of family and kinship—for example, manifested in unions and work collectivities—were broken (see Rajković, this volume).

Kinship Against the State In some of the more marginal, excluded communities where anthropologists work, kinship is evoked consciously and deliberately in opposition to the state as an alternative form of identity, identification, and belonging. In that sense, kinship and politics as they are made and done at the local level are intertwined and inseparable. Kinship may be portrayed as morally legitimate, while the state is portrayed as illegitimate. The example of names that I gave earlier demonstrates this tension well. Conversely, however, the claims to kinship through which the state legitimates itself are equally striking. As Verdery points out, “it is clear that both gender and nation are essential to the hegemonic projects of modern state-­building, and that a prime vehicle for symbolizing and organizing their interface is the family” (Verdery 1996: 64; see also Yuval-­Davis 1997; Goddard, this volume). Many of the most intrusive and oppressive states of the past centuries have evoked the language of kinship to rally their populations behind them in times of war, divide their populations and exclude or eliminate some sectors of them, and justify and promote their causes in contexts of both war and peace—most obviously in recent European history, National Socialism in Germany, Stalinism in the Soviet Union, and the militant nationalism of Serbia and Croatia during the wars of the 1990s. Under fascism, a (pronatal) campaign to promote motherhood, domesticity, and church located women’s reproductive sexuality and work in the family and the kitchen. The early Soviet state proposed to abolish the oppressive biosocial family, the source of drudgery and exploitation, and replace it by the real and egalitarian family of the party and the state. In both cases, we see the appropriation of the language and morality of kinship by the state. Verdery (1996: 65–66) describes this vividly in relation to Nicolae

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Ceausescu’s Romania, referring to what she calls the “zadruga (extended family) state” of the socialist period in which “socialism visibly reconfigured male and female household roles”: One might say that it broke open the nuclear family, socialized significant elements of reproduction even while leaving women responsible for the rest, and usurped certain patriarchal functions and responsibilities, thereby altering the relation between gendered “domestic” and “public” spheres familiar from nineteenth-­century capitalism. Biological reproduction now permeated the public sphere rather than being confined to the domestic one. At the same time, the space in which both men and women realized pride and self-­respect increasingly came to be the domestic rather than the public sphere, as they expressed their opposition to socialism through family based income-­ generating activities. (Verdery 1996: 65–66; see also Kotkin 1995) Throughout the socialist period in Eastern Europe, as Verdery so vividly describes, the state deliberately evoked and even subverted the language of family, household, gender, and kinship to its own ends to make claims about its own absolute moral and collective authority. These claims extended to the control of reproduction. Paradoxically, while critiquing the “antisocial” family as the foremost site of bourgeois individualism, the state appropriated the language of kinship and belonging to underline and extend its own legitimacy.

Encompassing, Overlapping, or Parallel Domains? Here it is helpful to revisit Fortes’s (1969) distinction between domains: the politico-­jural domain, the site of authority, legitimate power, ritual language, etc., which was the institutional structure or framework of roles reproduced over time that represented public or political order, and the domestic domain, the realm of affect, the space where real people lived and died, had sex, kept secrets, and worked and played. This is no simple binary opposition, because as feminist anthropologists of the 1970s stressed, the politico-­jural domain, in Fortes’s conceptualization of it, encompassed and regulated the domestic, while the domestic fed the politico-­jural and facilitated its institutional reproduction. Thus Rosaldo (1974), for instance, in her seminal chapter in Woman,

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Culture and Society, argued that the domestic domain universally revolved around women and their children and was subordinate to the public domain, dominated by men. Marxist feminists took a more historicized perspective, suggesting that different kinds of economic orders generated different kinds of kinship and gender relations. They linked increasing masculinization of power and the rise of the state and the nuclear family to relations of private property under patriarchal control and the control of women’s productive and reproductive labor (Reiter 1975; Edholme, Harris, and Young 1978; see also Thelen and Alber, this volume, and Goddard, this volume). More recent social theorists have drawn on the work of Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and others to think about the divisions, articulations, and overlaps between the public and the private or, as again feminist theorists (and others) have argued (see Pateman 1983), a range of publics and privates. Here my aim is think about the ways in which kinship and sociality may be understood and expressed within the inside world—the domestic, the house—characterized by Fortes as the domain of affect and how some of that same language may be used in the outside, in Fortes’ politico-­jural domain, to express a different register of identity, belonging, or collectivity. Fortes himself gives an example from the Tallensi of the overlap between people and domains. After a death, a ritual specialist dons his ceremonial robes to go, in his public capacity, to tend to the corpse. He then rushes home to change his robes and re-­presents himself as a major mourner of the dead man, his close kinsman. The roles and language are separate and distinct, but they are combined, in the doing, in one individual. Here perhaps we might consider whether the politico-­jural always encompasses the domestic or whether they are continually forming and re-­forming in relation to each other as individuals move across and between them. For instance, in Ceausescu’s imagined zadruga family of equal citizens under the rule of the wise party patriarch (above) there is a clear assumption that the politico-­jural domain was encompassing and regulating the reproductive processes, which would usually be associated with the domestic. Kinship has long been identified by anthropologists as a major building block of society. In the classical early structural functionalist accounts, it was seen as acting as the state in its absence—that is, the anthropology of “stateless” societies, the lineage taking on the role of “state,” etc.—or perhaps against and instead of an (existing, present) state (see, for example, Fortes and Evan-­Pritchard 1940). In the arguments of the major social theorists of the mid to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the public becomes

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defined as other than and as exercising dominance over the domestic (see also Thelen and Alber, this volume, and Goddard, this volume). The opposition between the central role of the state and the central role of kinship and the replacement of the latter by the former as a socioevolutionary trajectory that is portrayed as inevitable (see Alber and Thelen, this volume) presupposes a clear distinction and an implicit lack of overlap between the two domains. As various historians and anthropologists of Europe have shown, however, the house can be like the state or act as the state—substituting for and often subverting it—when the state is weak or can act as an agent of the state, subservient to the state’s interests, when the state is present as the dominant sociopolitical force (see, e.g., Sabean 1991; Pine 1996; Carsten 2004: 31–56). However, the anthropological or ethnographic record is frequently evoked to demonstrate that even in individualized, postindustrial, postmodern settings, kinship ties still provide a basic safety net or strategic network (e.g., Young and Willmott 1957; Stack 1974; Grieco 1987; Pine 2001). The underlying assumptions are clear. Kinship is about belonging and shared lives. Kinship is affect, if you will, while state politics is effect. Kinship is what and who you are, the place where your loves and desires reside, the site of trust and also of secrets. The state, on the other hand, is outside; it is what is done to you, the body that disciplines and attempts to mold you, and it is rarely a place of uncomplicated trust, although it may be a focus for fierce and often violent loyalty and emotion, and it is certainly also a place of secrets. This account of trust and intimacy located in kinship—however broadly defined—and the corollary, distrust, and distance located in the state is now fairly common in ethnographic accounts, particularly of marginal people— sex workers, Roma, and other “marginal” groups (Day, Papataxiarchis, and Stewart 1998; Pine 2002) as well as drug dealers and ghetto dwellers (Bourgois 2002; Wacquant 2003). But I think it is a part picture, and one we should handle with some care. In all of these examples, the inside or domestic (which are not the same thing but associated often with the same or similar characteristics) is both the site of trust and intimacy and a hierarchical, often patriarchal, and violent place, where questions of power and its abuse are as complicated as they are in contexts defined as statist. Power, violence, and inequality are as much a part of family/household/kinship as they are part of state structure. However, the emphasis, both emic and etic, on kinship as the prime site of trust and affection masks these other aspects. I want to suggest that this way of privileging the trust and intimacy of kinship, of the house, of the domestic world of safety and secrets and kitchen

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table conversations, can lead us to avoid looking at other registers of sociality. First, within kinship, within the intimacy of the house, we see not only trust but also hierarchy, inequality, and power relations often expressed through raw violence. We also see secrets held and lives disguised and hidden not from the outside but instead from the close kin, other house members, and other intimates. And at a different more structural level, we see the tension between the inside and outside worlds of kinship itself generating conflict and competition, manifested in a range of contested areas such as inheritance and property rights, negotiations over work and migration, and allocation of resources according to age, generation, gender—all played out both within generations among siblings, cousins, and spouses and between generations among grandparents, parents, and children. Second, the separation of inside and outside in terms of kinship and the state (in its widest sense incorporating the church and perhaps the market) draws attention away from the ways the state and kinship use the same language and symbols to evoke belonging and claims to identity and morality (see, e.g., Yanagisako 1987, who explores the mixed metaphors of different political economies/state systems in relation to spatial conceptualizations of gendered kinship; see also the introduction to this volume).

Contested Kinships When I began working in the Podhale, the older villagers remembered the time when much land had been owned by landed gentry, for whom the villagers performed day labor. They told stories about one manor family in particular who before the war had owned a lot of land around the village and had in many ways been seen by villagers as the local representative of the state. In the stories the old people told, the Pan (lord) was a drunken lout, violent, and a gambler. He had a daughter, a beautiful young woman, who was good and kind and cared for the villagers—she brought them food when they were hungry and medicine when they were ill and acted as godmother to their children. She was a doctor, many said, which seemed to embody their ideals of her beauty and goodness. One version of the story referred to her tragic marriage—her father sold her in the middle of a drunken card game when his money ran out. The images in this story resonate strongly with the way kinship metaphors are used to refer to and represent the nation and the state in Poland more generally, to which I shall return below. But they also echo the complications of kinship that I discussed above and the potential for the community of

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men, situated between public and domestic, or outside and inside, to disrupt and even destroy the more fragile world that is imagined as a balance between men and women, between generations, revolving around shared spaces, labor, knowledge, and secrets. This seems to reveal a way that villagers, who in that prewar generation had been the poorest of poor, understood the fragility and brutality of kinship as something that existed at all levels, from the manor to the peasant hut. They are essentially recognizing divisions and hierarchies within kinship or, in other words, different kinds of publics and domestics. A phenomenon that is recounted in relation to various social groups or cultures is the existence of an ideology that undervalues or devalues the domestic domain in favor of a particular public. I am interested in the cases below because although all are far removed from Soviet-­style socialism, in some way they all echo the ideological trope that recurs in socialist contexts, that the “family” or domestic group (implicitly or explicitly gendered) is antisocial, while the public, collective world of visible politics and exchange is the real space for making and demonstrating social value. In his account of Merina kinship, Bloch (1973) juxtaposes the ritual language and the public presence of deme male membership, which is the formal institution of kinship, to the domestic world of women. He describes watching young boys running about and kicking over their mothers’ cooking pots as a sign of disdain and rejection. From this perspective, it is the intimate domesticity of kinship, which is divisive or simply belittled, in contrast to the outside world of formalized language and ritual of metakinship. Here the deme is perhaps like the state, regulating and at times abusing or bullying the house and the usually highly feminized domestic group. Strathern (1990), discussing rubbish women and big men in Mount Hagen, describes a similar division of kin spaces. Women are rubbish because their labor is directed toward consumption and reproduction and is located within the domestic domain, while the world of sociality and value is the world of ceremonial exchange and competition, de facto the world of men. Rubbish women can become like big men by directing their efforts in support of the ceremonial exchanges of their male kin, but the domestic is always rubbish. Stewart (1997), in his accounts of Hungarian Gypsies, also describes a division between different worlds of kinship in which women negotiate the world of reproduction and handle dealings with the polluting “outside,” while men make “true” kinship/brotherhood through singing and gambling. Stewart notes, however, that when the outside world of brotherhood and male sociality gets too dangerous, when too much is drunk and knives are pulled and fights begin, men return to the world of inside kinship and stay in that intimate

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space until things calm down. A similar picture of this tension between male worlds of conviviality, which stand between the house and the state, and kin worlds that direct resources and emotions into the house can be glimpsed in Papataxiarchis’s (1991) account of male friendship in Lesbos. He argues that in this case gender and kinship are opposed—male kinship roles bind men to the interiors of the house and to the world of intimate domestic obligation, while conversely the sociality of friendship between men involves drinking coffee and raki and gambling in the coffeehouse. In all of these examples, the domestic domain, the household or the world of reproductive work and consumption, is seen as antisocial, while the outside world, encompassing the domestic in Fortesian fashion, is valorized. We get glimpses of a divided world of kinship where different kinds of sociality are expressed in different kinds of language—the banal language of the ordinary day-­to-­day inside and the more ritualized, performative languages of the outside. The latter domain links closely to concepts of men’s belonging to (and conversely women’s exclusion from) a wider kin-­based collectivity—in other words to the creation of identity, brotherhood, culture, and value—and is the stage for exchange, ritual performance, and economic dominance. I have described elsewhere how young Góral men in the Polish Podhale occupy public space, drinking until all hours in the bar or in the forest, singing, storytelling, and at times fighting with outsiders or with young men from neighboring villages. Like the Gypsy men singing of their brotherhood or Lesbos men drinking and gambling in coffeehouses, these young men are performing a kind of masculinity that is closely linked to notions of place and belonging. The violence, which as late as the early mid-­twentieth century frequently manifested in blood feuds extending over generations, is understood as a defense of boundaries, a way of keeping outsiders out, and, to some extent I think, keeping insiders (women) in. However, it is by no means uncommon for this violence to be taken back into the house and directed inward, against men’s wives and less frequently their children. This obviously destabilizes the idea of the house as the place of trust and unity and serves as a reminder that intimacy, power, and ideas of belonging are critical to the understanding of kinship, but the intimacy is not always safe and cozy, and the power is not exercised only in relation to “outsiders.” So far I have been discussing kinship sociality in relation to the inside world of marginal peoples who are situated, or attempt to situate themselves, outside the state. In a sense, for them kinship spaces are spaces from which the agents and requirements of the state can be deflected, manipulated, or

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avoided. But avoidance of the state can rarely if ever be complete, and kinship may itself take on the role of the state. Violence in the home mirrors violence of the police or the army—it is cushioned by discourses of entitlement, of gender and generation hierarchy, and of the preservation of borders and boundaries. The figures of the good mother who suffers, the strong man who protects, and the violent man from outside who attempts to steal or appropriate what is not his lurk behind many of these images of kinship and can be evoked easily as justification for both tiny acts of domestic or neighborhood violence and huge acts of war, ethnic cleansing, etc. Two images from kinship stories, from different points and places in my research in Poland, have come back to me frequently over the years. Dziadek Bigos, in whose house I lived in the late 1970s, recounted his life history to me. In the context of commenting on the affluence of the time and the communist period as a time of plenty, he recounted to me a memory from his early childhood in the late nineteenth century. It was a time of famine—a time when a massive proportion of the mountain peasant population of Galicia migrated to America “for bread.” His family was affluent in village terms. His father was the wojt (mayor). His mother had a box, with a lock, in which she kept bread. Dziadek recalled the extreme hunger he felt as a child of about three or four years old and how he threw himself on the floor in front of his mother and kissed her feet, begging her for bread. “Please, Mama, I have hunger, I need bread. Please, Mama.” His memory was that she looked at him coldly, leaned down, and knocked him away; in his other memories of her, she is kind. The second story, from Maria, a peasant/textile worker in the village near Łódź where I lived in the 1990s, takes us away from the more marginalized Górale to the industrialized worker peasant, where the domains of kinship and state, at least during socialism, were seen more as complementary or mutually constitutive than opposed. Maria talked about her adolescence during the war and the German occupation. She was working in a textile factory and one day for a bureaucratic reason had to report to Gestapo headquarters. While she was there a woman came in looking for her son, who had been apprehended. She asked for news of him and was met with blank, unsympathetic faces. She threw herself on the ground in the Gestapo office, crying out “Saint Mary, Mother of God, help me. You lost your son, your only son, you know how I feel. Help me. Help me to save my son.” These are haunting images. They represent stark and vivid memories of appeals to the mother and of the mother’s failure, or inability, to deliver what is requested. The mother in the first account is a village woman, and the

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mother in the second account is Mary, mother of God and queen of Poland, but the supplication, the expectation or desire that the request will be met and that reprieve is forthcoming and the ultimate failure of the mother, mythical or real, to achieve this is the same. These two stories were recounted to me as reflections on the limitations of kinship, or its failure to accomplish or maintain proper morality in the face of external forces. Dziadek’s story shows that in the face of poverty and famine, his mother could not nurture him or even comfort him. Maria’s story is about the terror of the outside occupying state and how its presence prevents a mother from protecting her own child, even as she appeals to the ultimate symbol of Polish motherhood, Mary. Dziadek’s story is about the limitations of kinship, or of the domestic area of trust and intimacy. The failure stems from external factors—poverty and famine. In other stories he stressed his family’s affluence, the relatively benign rule of his father as he sent him, for instance, to court a rich young widow and later to marry her. “He told me to squeeze her hand, and I did. I squeezed her hand and she chose me over the other, richer suitor.” Here Dziadek is an obedient son who understands that his father’s decisions are in his own interests and the interests of the house and facilitate the proper reproduction of the family, the house, and the kin order. This is the proper father, while the previous story provides a glimpse of the mother as the sterner, darker side of intergenerational relationships and failure to nurture. In this it is closer to the story I referred to earlier of the manor family and the failure of proper fatherhood symbolized by the sale of the daughter, who nevertheless continues to represent the enduring characteristics of women/motherhood. These stories tell their listeners that kinship contains a strong moral code of shared interest, support, and trust but also can enact the reversal of this order in its potential to withhold, to generate suffering, to prevent proper reproduction.

Kinship and Politics as Complementary Forces Whereas the implicit comparison in Dziadek’s stories is between failed and functioning kinship morality, Maria’s story is about the brutal force of the state in the destruction of proper families and proper kinship care. This story needs to be understood in the context of many other stories Maria told me, accounts of the hardship and brutality that textile workers experienced in the prewar years, the extreme violence of the fascist occupation, and the

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transformative role of the socialist state, which introduced means and legislation to protect the family, safeguard maternal health, and allow women to live at home with their children and commute to work. In these Łódź accounts, the state itself becomes inseparable from the moral order of kinship in a way it never could in the Podhale. In this section I am interested in the socialist state particularly and in the kinship discourses it appropriated. I want to consider contexts in which this appropriation appeared to be positive or successful, so I turn from marginalized, antistate peoples to industrial workers who appeared to subscribe to the ideologies of communism. I say “appeared to” because here again, once we begin to unravel we find threads of different publics and privates, and in following them it becomes clear that the outside world of the state polity and economy evoked a very different kind of sociality from that elicited inside, in the kitchen, around the table. Again we have different registers of kin speech and sociality, and they play out in different ways.

Communist States and Kinship Ideologies: The State in Your Kitchen/the State in Your Head? In the areas, primarily sites of heavy industry or successful collective farms, where the socialist state gained genuine support, we see a strong tie between kinship and state ideologies; they tend to converge rather than to oppose each other. The textile workers of Łódź with whom I worked saw their relationship with the state as one of mutual moral obligation. The socialist state had an obligation to support and provide for the women workers, the mothers of the nation, who in turn had an obligation to reproduce and support the nation. The militant rage of the textile workers was leveled against the state in the form of occupations and demonstrations when the state failed to support the mothers: rising bread prices made it impossible to feed the children, and changing shifts were incompatible with school hours. The language of female protest in socialist Łódź was the language of kinship, and it gave these workers the moral legitimacy to challenge the state (see Long 1996). For instance, in protesting against the rise in bread prices, the women’s speeches reiterated again and again the moral exchange they saw as implicit between workers and the state. Here we see a very explicit identification between kinship and politics and kinship and the state. Much along the lines discussed by Yuval-­Davis (1997; see also Goddard, this volume) and indeed in keeping with Polish discourse on nation, state, and

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kinship historically, women are seen as standing for the nation, through their motherhood, while the state is explicitly male and patriarchal. It is as mothers, and as the nation, that women take up political protest against the state, which is seen as reneging on its side of the moral contract with mothers/workers. If the textile workers of Łódź felt entitled as good socialist workers and mothers to reprimand the socialist state, in other socialist contexts the critique was aimed not at the state but instead at fellow citizens and often concerned inappropriate kinship. Kotkin (1995) reports how in the modernist new steel town built under the shadow of the Urals residents who were stalwart party members used kinship and gender discourses to chastise their coworkers. In one instance, a woman wrote publicly to the wife of a railway man who worked with her own husband. The woman chided the wife for taking advantage of private kinship and cheating the state by getting free rides on the train with her friend and traveling to collect scarce foodstuffs and other goods to resell in Magnitogorsk for a big profit. Her husband was also chastised for keeping a sloppy and untidy train and failing to meet his schedules. They were seen as failing their moral obligations to the wider (state) family by selfishly pursuing individualist family interests. The speeches were made in what Kotkin calls Bolshevik speech: “Here at Magnita, more than anywhere else,” asserted Leonid Vaisber, “the whole family takes part in and lives the life of our production.” He claimed that there were even cases when wives would not allow their husbands to spend the night at home because they had performed poorly in the shop. . . . Women took pride in their husbands’ work performance and many got directly involved. Wives’ tribunals were organized to shame men to stop drinking and to work harder, while some wives regularly visited the shop on their own, to inspect, offer encouragement, or scold. (Kotkin 1995: 218) Here the boundaries between domestic and public spaces are shown to be porous, with the political and politicized language of the Bolshevik state internalized by the workers and their families. Or perhaps, as Kotkin himself remarks, “It was not necessary to believe. It was necessary, however, to participate as if one believed” (Kotkin 1995: 220). Khlinovskaya Rockhill’s (2004) ethnography of children in care in northern Russia shows how during the late communist period people willingly placed their children in care when they felt unable to look after them at home. She

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argues that people internalized the ideology that the state and the Party were the real family and kin2 and that in a Foucauldian sense they carried the “state in their heads,” disciplining their own behavior and actions. So, the state-­run children’s home, the Internat, was seen by the parents themselves as the best place for children whose parents were failing because of problems with substance abuse, dysfunctional marriages and relationships, or lack of resources. In a recent study of a mining community in eastern Estonia, Keskula (2012) shows that acute dissatisfaction with the new postsocialist management and trades union officials is reflected in workers’ view that these postsocialist officials and agencies are failing in their obligations of and toward kinship to provide proper leisure activities, proper support, and even proper parties, not just for individual workers but also for entire families. Keskula shows that under socialism the union representatives and also, in fact, the mine managers worked with kinship practices in various ways: supporting families by providing extra resources when necessary as well as leisure activities and holidays but also hiring family members to work in the same place as their kin, reenforcing kin networks at work. By the time of Keskula’s fieldwork at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, these practices had changed. It was particularly upsetting to members of mining families that they could no longer be employed at the same workplace; new management policy actively forbade the hiring of members of the same family. For most of Keskula’s interlocutors this represented a very negative move, away from a joining up of state, work, and kin structures; their separation made life on a daily basis far more difficult. In these cases the socialist state had been internalized, incorporated into the “proper” morality of kinship responsibility and collectivity.

Conclusion In this chapter I have argued that the language of kinship is manifested in both an intimate and affective voice and a highly moral, often distanced one. Through both, proper order, behavior, and relations are all taught and reproduced. The ethnographic examples I have discussed, socialist and postsocialist but also from quite different social orders, show myriad ways that kinship and politics weave in and out of each other, sometimes referring to the same principles and rules of hierarchy, regulation, and power and sometimes evoking quite opposite and even subversive moralities and practices. They may echo and mirror or undermine or simply ignore each other. Imagining a

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clear and consistent division between kinship and the state blurs the more nuanced relationship between the two orders and disguises their ability to mimic each other and not only reproduce but also invert, distort, and undermine “proper” order in each.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the editors of this volume for inviting me to participate in the workshop in Berlin, where I presented this paper, and to act as a discussant for the panel at the subsequent European Association Social Anthropologists conference in Tallinn (both in 2014). I have benefitted greatly from the thoughtful comments of the other participants in both. The editors’ careful reading of the chapter has helped me to clarify my arguments, and I am grateful for their patience. Two anonymous readers gave generous and detailed feedback, for which I am very grateful, and I have tried to incorporate or respond to their suggestions. This chapter owes a great deal to ongoing conversations with Victoria Goddard and Julie Cruikshank. An earlier, rather different, version of this chapter was presented at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal at a panel in honor of Julie Cruikshank. Again, the comments and reflections of fellow participants were invaluable. I thank the Economic and Social Research Council for funding my research projects in the Podhale and in Lódz.

Notes 1. Which they said in the past were used against outsiders who came to try to steal village girls but now were used against outsiders/tourists. 2. The case of Pavlik Morozov, the twelve-­year-­old who in 1932 was turned into a child hero for reporting the transgressive opinions of his own parents, is probably the best-­known example.

Bibliography Bloch, Maurice. 1973. The Long Term and the Short Term: The Economic and Political Significance of the Morality of Kinship. In The Character of Kinship, ed. Jack Goody, 75–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bourgois, Philippe. 2002. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: University Press. Butler, Judith. 2000. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. Carsten, Janet. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cruikshank, Julie. 1998. The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Day, Sophie, Akis Papataxiarchis, and Michael Stewart. 1998. Lilies of the Field: Marginal People Who Live for the Moment. Boulder, CO: Westview. Edholme, F., O. Harris, and K. Young. 1978. Reconceptualising Women. Special Volume on Women, Critique of Anthropology 3(9/10): 110–30. Fortes, Meyer. 1969. Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Fortes, Meyer, and E. E. Evans-­Pritchard, eds. 1940. African Political Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gilsenan, Michael. 1996. Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society. University of California Press. Grieco, Margaret. 1987. Keeping It in the Family: Social Networks and Employment Chance. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Humphrey, Caroline. 1994. Remembering an Enemy. In Memory, History and Opposition Under State Socialism, ed. Rubie Watson. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research and Advanced Seminar Series. Keskula, Eeva. 2012. Mining Postsocialism: Work, Class and Ethnicity in an Estonian Mine. PhD diss., Goldsmiths, University of London. Khlinovskaya Rockhill, Elena. 2004. Family Discontinuity and “Social Orphanhood” in the Russian Far East: Children in Residential Care Institutions. PhD diss., Cambridge University. Kotkin, Stephen. 1995. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press. Long, Kristi. 1996. We All Fought for Freedom. Boulder, CO: Westview. Papataxiarchis, Efthymios. 1991. Friends of the Heart. In Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece, ed. Peter Loizos and Efthymios Papataxiarchis, ­156–79. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pateman, Carole. 1983. Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy. In Public and Private in Social Life, ed. S. I. Benn and G. F. Gaus, 281–303. New York: St. Martin’s. Pine, Frances T. 1996. Naming the House and Naming the Land: Kinship and Social Groups in the Polish Highlands. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(3): 443–59. ———. 2001. Retreat to the Household? In Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, ed. Chris Hann, 95–113. London: Routledge.

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———. 2002. The Village, the City and the Outside World: Integration and Exclusion in Two Regions of Rural Poland. In Post Socialist Peasants? Rural and Urban Constructions of Identity in Postsocialist Europe, East Asia and the Former Soviet Union, ed. Pamela Leonard and Deema Kaneff, 160–79. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2007. Memories of Movement and the Stillness of Place. In Ghosts of Memory: Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness, ed. Janet Carsten, 104–25. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Reiter, R., ed. 1975. Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press. Rosaldo, M. 1974. A Theatretical Overview. In Woman, Culture and Society, ed. M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere, 17–42. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sabean, David Warren. 1991. Property, Production and Family in Neckarhausen, ­1700–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stack, Carol. 1974. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Basic. Stewart, Michael. 1997. The Time of the Gypsies. Boulder, CO: Westview. Strathern, Marilyn. 1990. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press. Verdery, Katherine. 1996. What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wacquant, Loïc. 2003. Body and Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yanagisako, Sylvia. 1987. Mixed Metaphors: Native and Anthropological Models of Gender and Kinship. In Gender and Kinship: Essays Towards a Unified Analysis, ed. Jane F. Collier and Sylvia Yanagisako, 86–118. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Young, Michael, and Peter Willmott. 1957. Family and Kinship in East London. London: Penguin. Yuval-­Davis, Niral. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage.

Chapter 4

Appropriate Kinship, Legitimate Nationhood Shifting Registers of Gender and State Victoria Goddard

This chapter explores some of the tensions and possibilities that arise from historical and context-­bound relationships between gendered politics and the state. Contradictions between different spheres of action and value are understood to produce and reproduce different forms of freedom and nonfreedom, exclusion and inclusion. The chapter draws on the example of the formation of the Argentine nation-­state in the context of nineteenth century global capitalism, whereby increasingly circumscribed notions of appropriate kinship were associated with emergent parameters of legitimate nationhood, citizenship, and belonging. The process of nation building generated historically specific exclusions and invisibilities as effects of power relations and produced differentiated subjects, spanning “those who will be eligible for recognition and those who will not” (Butler 2010: 138), and thus also generated particular forms of silence and invisibility (Trouillot 1996). While recognizing the processes of non-­or mis-­recognition associated with the emergence of modern nation-­states, it is important to acknowledge those social actors who, by challenging dominant narratives, produced new spaces and new narratives that helped reverse such nonrecognitions and invisibilities and redefined the terms and relations that underpinned them. Different possibilities and tensions are explored in relation to claims against the state in what might be described as agonistic politics, where Antigone-­like defiance entails an entanglement with and a profound criticism of the state’s dominant logic and exercise of power. In the examples explored in this chapter, the parallels with Antigone’s plight are especially salient where demands



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are expressed in terms of the right of kin to claim and bury their dead as victims of state violence (AFAT and WITNESS 2002; Elshtain 1982, 1997; Butler 2000).1 The Argentine Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of Plaza de Mayo) provides a key example through their protracted struggle and critique of state violence from a position that was largely anchored in the values of kinship and solidarity, in contrast to the subjection and expropriation of land, life, and value that has characterized the Argentine state throughout its history (Goddard 2005). While a critical distance from the state was central to the group’s position of legitimate opposition, its demands for justice also entailed a struggle for recognition by the state. Through kinning the state (Thelen, Vetters, and Benda-­Beckmann 2014; Howell 2003), the political interventions of alternative actors can be understood to effect transformations of the state by imbuing it with new ethical values, generating new perspectives on kinship, politics, and the state itself. Although the distinction between state and nonstate actors and between the ethical principles and morality articulated through kinship and the state can serve to support a range of social and political claims and counterclaims, it is also the case that, as demonstrated in Pine’s chapter in this volume, such distinctions encompass a wide range of socialities and ideas about morality (Pine, this volume). The current chapter follows Pine in arguing that despite the enduring appeal of dichotomies and distinctions between state and nonstate, public and private, polity and kinship, ethnographic engagement with these categories tends to undermine their distinctiveness, pointing instead to their co-­constitution and entanglement, as discussed in detail in the introduction to this volume. This chapter complements Pine’s analysis of the hierarchies and inequalities that permeate both kinship and state ideologies and practices. Kinship can be understood as a system or a multiplicity of systems that are to do with subjectivation (Howell 2003; Faubion 2001; Thelen et al. 2014; Thelen and Alber, this volume); given the entanglements of kinship, gender, and state power, it is useful to approach the state as an assemblage of institutions, practices, and actors that effect subjectivation in relation to or in contrast with kinship. I take Howell’s and Faubion’s point that subjectivation carries a double meaning, as both the processes that make subjects of one kind or another and the processes through which individuals and groups make themselves into particular kinds of subjects (Howell 2003; Faubion 2001; see also Butler 1997). At the same time, the entanglements of power outlined by Pateman (1988) and Federici (2004; see also Rubin 1975; Butler 2000) may

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produce alternative identities and subversions of power relations, evident in the borderings between nation, state, and kin. It is therefore unhelpful to consider kinship and reproduction as entirely distinct from the political and from broader processes that pertain to the distribution of power and wealth. Furthermore, such processes are themselves imbued with meanings associated with the sphere of kinship and draw from its relationships, values, and productivity.

Entangled Domains: Public and Private, Kinship and Polity The connections between kinship and the political are summarized in Meyer Fortes’s statement that “where there is society, there is both kinship and polity, both status and contract” (Fortes 1970: 220). As Pine proposes in her contribution to this volume, Fortes’s work is notable for its sensitivity regarding the connections across public and private and across kinship and the politico-­ jural domain. Pine describes how concepts and sentiments derived from doing, making, and being in the private sphere of kinship lend themselves to broader uses, providing a compelling frame of reference for what might otherwise be ephemeral collectives and tenuous calls for solidarity, loyalty, or obedience. Although idioms of kinship, what Herzfeld (this volume) refers to as a “technology of social knowledge,” are effective boundary markers, they are also adaptable and potentially inclusive, vividly illustrated in Fortes’s discussion of identity among Tallensi migrants.2 This malleability and interconnectedness were explored by later anthropologists to show, for example, how the language of kinship can express political relationships, often in contexts where confusion and contradiction confront individuals and groups, as described by Rajković (this volume). Indeed, the synergies between kinship and politics were frequently understood as a kind of antipolitics, as when primordial relations or familial ideologies were understood to distort or impede the emergence of fully fledged political identities and actions (Herzfeld, this volume). While a number of anthropologists (see Kuper 2005: 44; Goody 1983) provided the means to explore the entanglements of kinship and gender relations in connection with competing claims and power regimes, the systematic analysis of the interactions between state and kinship, public politics and the private sphere, was developed from feminist perspectives within and beyond anthropology—as discussed in the introduction to this volume and in Pine’s chapter—making visible the processes whereby citizens are



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constituted, including their emergence as gendered subjects (Anthias and Yuval-­Davis 1989). The production of subjects and of the polity takes place within particular historical circumstances that, as Federici (2004) shows for the nation-­state, are intimately connected to the expropriation and privatization of resources that first unfolded in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a consequence of this general expropriation, women’s bodies and their labor and their children became privatized in ways that (also) reflect stratification and class. Consequently, “proletarian women became for male workers the substitute for the land lost to the enclosures, their most basic means of reproduction and a communal good anyone could appropriate and use at will” (97). The naturalization of women’s labor and of the sphere of reproduction was linked to the loss of the commons, as women became the new commons. The patriarchal arrangements underpinning the family, the economy, and the polity were profoundly implicated in the emergence and reproduction of capitalism in a muted historical process of primitive accumulation and subjugation underpinned by violence and struggle (Federici 2004; Luxemburg 1951 [1913]; Mies 1998). State structures are also inscribed with multiple relations of inequality—like capitalism, the constitution of state power is enmeshed within what Wendy Brown describes as “masculinism.” This form of dominance consists of “the power to describe and run the world and the power of access to women: it entails both a general claim to territory and claims to, about, and against specific ‘others’ ” (Brown 2006: 188). Yet state power is also ambiguous, allowing “regulated, subordinated, and disciplined state subjects” to emerge (Brown 2006: 191). While recognizing the entanglements of power across kinship relations and polity, as outlined in the work of Pateman (1988) and Federici (2004; see also Rubin 1975; Butler 2000), the language, spaces, and relations of kinship can help build alternative identities and resist or undermine structures of power. The potential for subversion is particularly evident in the tensions that can arise through the crossing of boundaries and the mixing and hybridizations that take place in everyday practices of sex, reproduction, and kinship (Stoler 1995; Martínez-­Alier 1989; Wade 2003, 2009). The examples discussed here show that Herzfeld’s “technology of social knowledge” (this volume), or kinship idioms and ideas, on the one hand can do the work of incorporation, continuity, and normalization of relations of power and on the other hand may also articulate proposals for alternative forms of intimacy, politics, and kinship.

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Domestication Through Kinship and Against Kinship In the first half of the nineteenth century, divergent understandings of belonging and territory competed for dominance in the Americas (Anderson 1983; Holt 2003; Wade 2003). In the Southern Cone, the Spanish viceroyalty was a mosaic of populations with different ties to the Crown and the Catholic Church, while much of the territory was represented as a hostile “desert,” occupied by “wandering men” (Izard 1994: 139, 150) who were characterized as vagrants and outlaws. At the same time, the ideals of the French and North American revolutions inspired anticolonial movements, providing ideological tools to build a unified community from this diverse social and cultural landscape. For example, while rooted in French kinship structures and ideologies (Todd 1985), the notion of brotherhood aimed to foster solidarities across differences of region, class, and race. Such gendered bonds effectively obscured other female genealogies that were historically central to the constitution of classes and social boundaries while marking the instances of their transgression (Wade 2003; Macpherson 2003). Though contested, there is evidence to suggest that the nineteenth century revolutionaries embraced a radical project based on fraternity and equality, envisaging coexistence across different “nations” and cultures, expressed in the following statement made during an official visit by indigenous chiefs (caciques) to the capital: The most important service that this government can carry out for its country is that of protecting, through the kindness of its administration, those who adhere to its principles. Regardless of the nation to which they belong, or to differences in language or customs, they will always be regarded as its most precious asset. If it recognizes this obligation towards all members of the earth, how much more important is it to recognize the affinity of blood that unites us. Putting aside the causes that have kept us separate until today, it is sufficient that we are children of the same stem. . . . Friends, compatriots and brothers, let us unite to constitute a single family. (Walther 1970: 122–23) While proclaiming a fundamental humanist spirit, the statement recognizes claims of belonging to an incipient and implicit collective that requires a narrative of brotherhood and blood to bring it into being. An emerging



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nationhood prioritized the rights of “children of the soil” over foreign-­born Spaniards (Anderson 1983; Holt 2003), postulating a kinning through the soil that was conceived as a visceral connection to the land as the basis for a foundational brotherhood. While this proposition envisaged horizontal connections and fraternal equality, it also rendered invisible the transmission of blood, values, and relationships by women and through women that reflect other histories, boundaries, and entanglements (Macpherson 2003).3 The land challenged the rhetoric of brotherhood, not least in relation to “the desert” and, increasingly, to incompatible uses of and relationships to the soil across different populations. A vast area beyond the farmland and the latifundio was occupied by indigenous populations whose economies combined hunting, agriculture, and crafts. In the Creole territories,4 wild cattle were hunted for their hides and tallow and later to produce jerked beef for the expanding markets of the plantation economies of Cuba and Brazil (Bethell 1993). Although extensive trade networks and shifting political and military alliances were in place, the predatory political economies pursued on both sides of the border5 meant that trade and raids underpinned the unequal accumulation of power, prestige, and wealth. Despite treaties regulating border relations, the capture of women and children and the raiding for cattle persisted as an economic and political strategy.6 In the middle of the nineteenth century the question of what kind of polities would emerge across these boundaries remained unsettled. But as Darwin (1989 [1839]) predicted during his travels in the region, by the end of the century this complex landscape of emerging identities and shifting boundaries had disappeared, as particular Creole interests were consolidated with the region’s integration into the global economy. In a process that mirrored the enclosures of Europe, military campaigns and annexations progressively restricted freedom in the name of order, and despite the rhetoric of brotherhood, deep inequalities were reproduced as the politics of alliance gave way to highly contested projects of state sovereignty.7 As the imposition of order gained greater urgency, particular configurations of kinship, gender, and sexuality were privileged such that the notion of family associated with clearly gendered public and private spheres became the legitimate means for individual and collective reproduction, marginalizing and criminalizing alternative forms of relatedness, and sexual, gendered, and ethnicized identities (Guy 1991). For women, (the right kind of) motherhood became the dominant means of fulfillment and the basis of their social and civic duties.8

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Nevertheless, other histories, albeit “hidden histories,” unfolded (Briones 2005; Valverde 2013) that frequently challenged the boundaries, institutions, and commonsense understandings of politics and the nation-­state (Bartolomé 2004).9 From these suppressed histories emerged new social actors, renewed identities, and new forms of individual and collective visibility and struggle, proposing old and new claims to recognition (Bengoa 2009; Kropff 2011).

Public Kinship and Political Motherhood From the nineteenth century defeat and annihilation of indigenous populations through to the twentieth century deployment of state violence against civilians, a largely invisible and forgotten history of violence has unfolded (Viñas 1982). For Rotker (1990), power, memory, and forgetting are connected in the parallel stories of nineteenth century captives and twentieth century victims of state repression that culminated in the disappearances perpetrated by the 1976–1983 state project of “National Reorganization.”10 Despite the rule of fear established by that regime, the disappearances provoked persistent and increasingly visible protests, largely pioneered by relatives demanding to know the whereabouts of their sons, daughters, husbands, and wives. Among the central actors in this new political phenomenon were the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who defied the military state and embarked on a “discursive struggle” (Morales 2010: 51–82), proposing new political and symbolic repertoires. Unfailingly, every Thursday afternoon the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo met and completed their circling march around the pyramid in the center of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and other cities across the country; over the years the group devised a unique range of symbols, including the white head scarf that linked the mothers to the children they had loved, nurtured, and lost (Elshtain 1982, 1997; Schirmer 1994). Recognizing that their actions in the public sphere had transformed them, the mothers embraced a reversal in the dynamics of generational transmission. In interviews and public declarations, many of the mothers reflected on what they had learned through fighting for their children—the leader of the Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo summed this up when she stated that “our children gave birth to us.”11 Although the human rights movement in Argentina was not confined to the struggle of relatives of the victims, these groups have been a fundamental



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catalyst and support for the human rights movement and for a wide range of social movements. Mothers fighting for disappeared sons and daughters, grandmothers searching for children taken along with their parents or born in captivity (Arditti 2002), the relatives of the detained/disappeared, brothers and sisters (Teubal et al. 2014), and a new generation of activists concentrated in the organization of the children of the disappeared, H.I.J.O.S. (Bonaldi 2006), have contributed their unique perspective and devised their own strategies, enriching and amplifying the language of politics and protest.12

Genes, Politics, and Appropriate Kinship Along with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo) became a morally exemplary group, as its unwavering struggle to find the children who were taken at the time of their parents’ disappearance or who were born in clandestine centers of detention and given to sympathizers of the regime revealed the extent of the militarized state’s undoing of society. Estimating the time of their grandchild’s birth, piecing together fragments gathered from the testimonies of camp survivors, the grandmothers search for children whose names and faces they can only imagine. Given the secrecy surrounding the fate of these children, these groups’ quest has been painfully difficult but was greatly enhanced by the advances of genetic science and its application to public forensics. The creation in 1984 of the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropologists (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense) and in 1987, the national database of genetic information, Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos,13 provided the means for accurate identification and therefore legal prosecution. Largely as a result of genetic testing,14 by the end of December 2014 116 grandchildren had been “recovered” out of an estimated 500 children abducted by the regime. Genetic testing, carried out according to strict scientific protocols, has provided the basis for the judiciary to define the parameters of the state’s recognition of appropriate kinship, which here privileges shared genetic material over the relations, sentiments, and loyalties derived from nurture and shared time. The latter are deemed to be suspect, flawed at their point of origin and directly or indirectly connected to a criminal act against the legitimate state (as opposed to the illegitimate militarized state) and a morally outrageous act of violence against legitimate kinship.15

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Two competing versions of kinship emerged from the struggle against state violence, simultaneously splitting and healing the rift between public and private. The separation, secrecy, and illegality that gave rise to the bonds of nurture set them in stark opposition to the kinship of genealogy and transmission through blood. While both forms of relationship entail some kind of recognized and valued generational transmission, the state, in confronting its own history, upholds the primacy of blood ties and shared genetic material. The exceptional circumstances underpinning the emergence of this form of biocitizenship may come to support new versions of normality, with unintended and enduring implications for the ways in which kinship is envisaged and experienced.16 Furthermore, the strategic role of the state in the processes of identification and restitution enhances the state’s position vis-­ à-­vis the public and private relationships of subjects to the state and to each other.17 On the other hand, while privileging cognatic kinship, the genetic focus also reveals fluid and messy connections and transmissions.18 Far from obscuring the genealogical ramifications across gender, class, and ethnicity associated with the narrative of republican brotherhood, the intervention of science makes possible the recognition of complex genealogies that have been hidden and muted through histories of power. The processes of struggle (by kin and social movements) and accommodation (by the state) reveal novel approaches to both kinship and politics through a wide range of practices and representations that open the field of kinship—and the sphere of political action—to unpredictable repertoires, reconstituted and negotiable relationships, and new kinning practices and relations that seek to establish new bonds, new loyalties, and new forms of subjectivation and recognition.

Public and Private Loyalties While the development of genetic identification techniques supported the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo’s project of recovery, it precipitated a schism within the movement of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. In the early days of postdictatorship democracy, the exhumation of unmarked graves was widely rejected by relatives of the disappeared because of the haphazard and careless treatment of the graves and the bodies, often in a context of disrespectful and offensive media spectacles. The subsequent introduction of scientific protocols and procedures enhanced the reliability of results and altered the terms of the debates about recovering the disappeared. For the Mothers of the Plaza de



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Mayo, the possibilities afforded by scientific methods of exhumation and DNA identification brought to a head underlying tensions and resulted in a split in 1986. One group of mothers, which came to be known as the Founders’ Line, stood by the right of mothers and families to claim and bury their dead. The other group, which became the Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, saw such particular claims as potentially divisive, rejecting Antigone’s resolution in order to embrace collective responsibility for all the disappeared. Refusing private burial and disdaining state compensation for their loss, they proposed a new “socialized” motherhood. Revolutionary commitment and action displaced the narrative of suffering, as Hebe de Bonafini, leader of the Association group, made clear: “I don’t want [people] to understand our pain, I want them to understand our struggle” (Bonafini, 1988, qtd. in Gorini 2006: 13). Despite their differences, the two groups of mothers’ persistent visibility in the public sphere has articulated radical challenges to “official” histories of nationhood while promoting alternative visions that encompass the excluded and marginalized (Burchianti 2004). After years of implacable opposition to government policies in which distance from the politics of the state guaranteed their autonomy and legitimacy (Goddard 2005), they confronted new challenges in their relationship to the state in 2003 when Néstor Kirchner assumed the presidency. In the wake of the 2001 economic and political crisis and a context of widespread mobilizations, one of Kirchner’s priorities was to recognize the human rights organizations. At his first public appearance in the Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers and Grandmothers were prominently visible on the presidential podium. Later in his inaugural address to the United Nations General Assembly, Kirchner proposed moral and political renewal for his country by claiming that “We are the children of the Mothers and the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo” (La Nación 2003). In 2004 at a ceremony commemorating the 1976 coup, his speech at the Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy (Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, ESMA) ex-­detention camp connected kinship and state to propose a new beginning: he came “no longer as a comrade and brother of so many comrades and brothers who shared those times [of the repression], but as the President of the Argentine Republic . . . to ask for forgiveness on behalf of the national State for the shame of silence during twenty years of democracy for so many atrocities” (Secretaría de la Comunicación Pública, Presidencia de la Nación 2012). In drawing on the overlapping loyalties, bonds, duties, and responsibilities of kinship, state and nation, Kirchner’s words resonate with the call to brotherhood of the republican revolutionaries. But now, not least because of

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the violent erasures carried out in the name of the nation-­state, the hidden asymmetries and genealogies of the reproduction of class, gender, and ethnicity were exposed and embodied in the active presence of mothers, grandmothers, and children in the public sphere. Kirchner’s apology was followed by more substantial interventions that included the abolition of the Due Obedience and Final Point laws, passed in the 1980s in response to pressure from the military to restrict the scope of the trials of perpetrators of crimes committed by the civil-­military dictatorship. The abolition of these laws and the annulment of the 1990 amnesty of those found guilty in the 1980s trials paved the way for the resumption of the prosecution of crimes against humanity.19 In 2004, early in his presidency, an Association Mother summed up the implications of the changed political context in simple terms: “We can work with this man [President Kirchner].” Faced with a government that supported projects such as the creation of a center for memory and education in sites of clandestine concentration camps such as the notorious ESMA and that was prepared to support the movements’ social projects, the Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, led by Hebe de Bonafini, were persuaded to work closely with Kirchner and later with his wife and successor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Many of their supporters disapproved of what they saw as a dangerous rapprochement toward what Rajković (this volume) describes as “political intimacy.” Collaboration was indeed fraught with danger. While the governments of Kirchner and Fernández have been accused of corruption, the Association has also been affected by scandal. Its ambitious social housing project Sueños Compartidos (Shared Dreams) focused on combining training and building “dignified” homes for those involved in the project. Supported by funds from the Ministry for Federal Planning, the project was managed through the Foundation of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, with Hebe de Bonafini’s son-­in-­law, Sergio Schoklender, as its manager and administrator. In 2011 Schoklender and his brother were accused—and later found guilty—of misusing public funds and embezzling from the Foundation, resulting in nonpayment of workers’ wages and nondelivery of many homes. The Foundation was mired in a complex legal process that included government intervention and the involvement of the vice president. While this crisis may be understood in terms of too much kinship as presented in Herzfeld’s chapter in this volume, it also echoes Rajković’s discussion of good and bad kinship (this volume) while reminding us of the entanglements and transgressions at the heart of Antigone’s “kinship trouble” (Butler 2000).



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The Founders’ Line group of mothers also recognized the distinctive and positive turn of state politics after 2003 but were cautious in their response to the government’s overtures, expressing concern about the degree of “politicization” or the effects of “too much politics.” Their discomfort about the Association’s implications of close entanglements with the state is exemplified in their response to a proposal by Fernández de Kirchner’s government to grant the Mothers’ white head scarves the status of national symbol, where they reaffirm the value of kinship over the priorities of the polity: The Mothers’ movement, which emerged from sorrow, is a movement of active resistance. Our circling in the Plaza de Mayo, wearing the scarf, symbolizes our unwavering commitment to memory, truth and justice. The headscarf came into being when we went in search of our sons and daughters. As part of our struggle it was, and continues to be, a symbol of our link with them and it has given us the strength to carry on. We do not feel it to be a national emblem, but rather it is a sign of love for our sons and daughters, and we therefore refuse to see it declared a national symbol. (Página/12 2014) In reclaiming the private kinship-­based value of their actions and idioms, the nationalization of their key symbol is seen as misconceived. It exposes them to the risks of appropriation of their work, sentiment, and sacrifice by a state that, while undergoing significant transformations, remains contaminated by the excess of politics and power that it concentrates. Their reaction reflects concerns about the complicities of violence underpinning the power of states and raises the problem highlighted by Butler (2010), for whom reliance on the nation-­state for solutions or protection implies exposure to the violence inherent in it, since “not all violence issues from the nation-­state, but it would be rare to find contemporary instances of violence that bear no relation to that particular form” (Butler 2010: 26). The dangers inherent in exposure to state power became clearer when thirteen years of Kirchnerite policies were swept away with the election of a new center-­right government in 2015.

The 2000th March On Thursday, August 4, 2016, the Association Mothers prepared to attend their weekly meeting in the Plaza de Mayo, repeating a ritual enacted

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over forty years. On this particular Thursday, members of the police force attempted to intercept them and arrest their leader, Hebe de Bonafini, under orders from the judge leading the Sueños Compartidos embezzlement case. A crowd rapidly gathered and surrounded the association’s distinctive white van, preventing the police from arresting Bonafini and entering the association offices. The crowd escorted the van to the Plaza de Mayo and formed a cordon around the mothers and their supporters as they completed their weekly circling around the Pyramid. Then forming a human shield, the crowd protected the mothers as they returned to their headquarters. As the afternoon advanced the crowd outside the association’s office grew, drawing supporters, trade union leaders, artists and intellectuals, and members of the outgoing government of Fernández de Kirchner. Many, even some of Bonafini’s critics, felt that the use of force against the Mothers was unacceptable, a kind of transgression. For her part, Bonafini responded to the judge through a public letter stating that “since 1977, or more precisely since 8 February of that year, I have suffered the aggression of the erroneously named justice, implemented by national judges.” (La Nación 2016; see also Buenos Aires Herald 2016). She goes on to describe her repeated attempts to obtain a response to the 168 claims she submitted to the courts when her son Jorge disappeared, again when her son Raúl disappeared, and yet again when her daughter-­in-­law María Elena was taken; she reminded him of the violent attack suffered by her surviving daughter in her own home in 2001. Explaining her defiance of the judge’s summons, Bonafini pointed out that she and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Association had already submitted sixty boxes of evidence and other material relating to the “Schoklender case.” The mothers now felt—in their own bodies (en carne propia)—“the mockery, the punishment imposed on all of us, old women of 85 to 90 years of age” (La Nación 2016). She ends her letter with a defiant commitment to continue the struggle in the name of solidarity and on behalf of the vulnerable (Madres de Plaza de Mayo 2016). The following Thursday, the Association and the Founders’ Line Mothers completed their 2000 march around the Plaza de Mayo accompanied by a large group of supporters, who were in a defiant mood. Since taking over the presidency in January 2016, the new government of Mauricio Macri, a wealthy entrepreneur and ex-­governor of the city of Buenos Aires, has shifted the direction of state policy regarding human rights. Key institutions have been starved of personnel and funding, and the questions of memory and



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justice are being reframed in yet another chapter within the “discursive struggle” (Morales 2010) initiated decades ago through the Mothers’ and Grandmothers’ efforts to be heard, seen, and understood. The mothers and grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, variously ignored or maligned, find themselves once again in a political space firmly located against the state.

Concluding Remarks Tracing the politics of the state over a period of change and contestation, the state appears as an assemblage of institutions and practices that reveal continuities in the structures of power. However, these institutions are also unstable and amenable to negotiation and change. The foundational expropriations and appropriations associated with the emergence of the nation-­ state alert us to its inherent imbalances and excesses of state power. These imbalances are acutely evident today in the ongoing struggle of indigenous groups against the state and global capital as historically entangled agents of expropriation. However, the state can also be understood as a space of process, ridden with contradictions and therefore open to challenge and change—and perhaps some forms of collaboration. In this respect it becomes clearer how subjectivation is both ongoing and contradictory and that the subjects produced through it are themselves unstable. The potential for unexpected outcomes is clear. A politics that deliberately places itself outside and even against the state (perhaps from a space of kinship) may afford great insights and possibilities for critique. However, different spaces, values, and relationships are deeply entangled across public and private spheres, and any struggle aiming to transform society is likely to engage with—and perhaps compromise with— power. Taking a position of proximity to the state from which to act and to make (kinship, society, well-­being) carries opportunities and risks, as exemplified by the Association Mothers’ efforts to enact their motto of “making revolution” through everyday practices. The chapters in the second part of this volume testify to the scope and potentialities of such engagements as well as the challenges that arise in carrying them forward. The trajectories of the Mothers and Grandmothers illustrate the entanglements of kinship and polity that anthropology, from different perspectives and with different emphases, has highlighted, from Fortes’s observations

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about the correlations between contract and kinship to work that highlights the ways in which distinctions between public and private, kinship, and state, are simultaneously contested and reaffirmed (Thelen et al. 2014). Early anthropologists and feminists have drawn attention to the ways in which these connections contain and produce relations of power and inequality and point to significant and enduring inequalities of gender, sex, and kinship inherent in the constitution of society and state. Their observations have clear implications for the kinds of politics (in relation to kinship and the state) that we might envisage in the present and for the future. The examples discussed in this chapter suggest that the entanglements of kinship, politics, and the state are productive and dangerous, normative and subversive. The return of repressed genealogies (Macpherson 2003), the stories of reproduction and the battles of the private sphere and thus new arguments expressed in the language of kinship, can and do produce new idioms of politics and of the state. For the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Association, there has been a process of learning through action “inherited” from their children, a process through which they have shifted the notion of revolution from the realm of ideas and rhetoric to the sphere of productive action: revolution “is what we do,” an Association Mother commented when she showed me the early plans for the Sueños Compartidos project. Their alliance with sympathetic governments represented a decisive step in broaching the divide between public and private, the language of kinship and of politics, while also kinning the state to bridge the gap between state rhetoric and practice (Thelen et al. 2014). Nevertheless, both state and kinship represent spaces of contestation; the question remains whether political projects based on the ethics and idioms of kinship and supported by the genealogies of Mothers and Grandmothers will endure in the face of new challenges and proposals for a reconstituted citizenship that ultimately draws from the histories of appropriation that underpinned the state of brotherhood.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber, Frances Pine, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and interesting suggestions.



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Notes 1. It is worth noting that in Butler’s analysis in particular, Antigone does not merely represent defiance toward the state. Rather, Antigone’s complex relationships with her kin, including her father Oedipus’s incestuous relationship with his/her mother, are reflected in her action and throws her kin into disarray, resulting in what Butler refers to as kinship trouble (Butler 2000). 2. Fortes’s ethnography provides many examples of such flexibility, as when one of his informants comments that those who may be enemies “at home” “are all kin” when they find themselves in Accra (Fortes 1970: 248). 3. These principles were expressed in regulations that granted indigenous populations the right to direct participation in government through delegates to the Argentine Congress. However, this measure was never implemented. Similarly, the revolutionary government’s drive to ban slavery was eroded under the pressure of plantation owners in neighboring territories and the interests of large landowners (Andrews 1980). 4. In this context “Creole” refers to those born in the Americas of predominantly or exclusive Spanish ancestry. The term is used more widely to refer to all things associated with notions of tradition and of locally developed customs and usages. 5. People and goods moved across the Andes from what is currently Chile toward Argentine Patagonia and across borders with Creole settlements on both sides of the mountain range. 6. Captive women were a source of prestige and were key to the mètissage strategies pursued by many chiefs who wanted their successors to be fluent in the Spanish language and culture. Captives, mainly women and children, were also a feature of Creole or “Christian” society, incorporated as brides for frontier soldiers, servants, and soldiers in the case of young warriors. 7. While both the Creole and the indigenous projects were likely to result in more heterogeneous and ethnically diverse forms of “brotherhood” than the centralized—and authoritarian—state that reflected the interests of large landowners, all of these projects were mired in violence and rupture. Creole society was plagued by tensions and wars with neighbors, as in the case of the wars with Brazil and Paraguay, as well as bloody civil war until 1852, principally between those pursuing regionally based strategies and those supporting unification of the regions and the establishment of a liberal national economy. 8. The rhetoric of fraternity, liberty, and equality persevered, while other ideologies came into play in the constitution of state institutions. For example, in her comparison of “national” approaches to indigenous populations in the emerging South American states, Ramos argues that in Argentina the ideas of British positivism prevailed, while Brazil was influenced by French positivism (Ramos 2012). 9. Challenges can arise from state-­led processes, as when the new Constitution of 1994 recognized the rights of original populations (pueblos originarios) to political and

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civic rights and ancestral lands. Ramos (2012) suggests that this recognition effectively annuls the achievements of the “conquest of the desert” and, as Valverde comments, thus “denying the most noted figures of the country’s republican history” (2013: 56). Ramos comments that heterogeneity rather than ethnic homogeneity supports the emergence of a “true nation” (“não é com homogeneidade étnica que se faz uma verdadera nação”) (Ramos 2012: 52). 10. Systematic kidnappings and disappearances were seen as a solution to the international outcry that followed the Chilean coup against Salvador Allende’s Popular Front government in 1973. The clandestine operations of the regime were frequently referred to as the “dirty war” (Calveiro 2005). Human rights groups argue that it is misguided to refer to war in this instance; they have been largely successful in establishing the more precise descriptor of “civilian-­military dictatorship.” 11. At an event at the Espacio Cultural Nuestros Hijos (located on the site of what was once the ESMA detention camp), Hebe de Bonafini combined notions of love, kinship, and revolution: “Our children gave their lives with infinite solidarity. They taught us that. We learned from this and hopefully we deserve the children we had, hopefully they are satisfied with what we are doing. As long as we live we will continue to fight so that the word ‘Revolution’ might be the best word, because a revolutionary loves the other and gives their life. It is the word that contains the most love” (Bonafini, April 29, 2015, madres​.org; see also Espacio Memoria 2015) 12. H.I.J.O.S. (Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio, or Children for Identity and Justice, against Forgetting and Silence) was founded in 1995 by sons and daughters of victims of the dictatorship. The original core of those “directly affected” by the state’s persecution of their parents has been extended to include young sympathizers. A disproportionate number of the disappeared were Jewish, reflecting the institutionalized anti-­Semitism of the regime (de Pozuelo and Tarín 1999). There is a Jewish human rights group (Movimiento Judío por los Derechos Humanos) and a nongovernmental organization of Jewish relatives of the disappeared (Asociación de Familiares de Desaparecidos Judíos). In recent years the Association of Relatives has participated in commemorations of the disappeared that have taken place on the premises of the AMIA Jewish community center (Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina). Under the umbrella organization Memoria Abierta (memoriaabierta​.org​.ar), a number of groups commemorate their dead and disappeared, including the workers of Mercedes Benz and the shipyards, the disappeared of European and Bolivian extraction, writers and lawyers, and students from the Nacional Buenos Aires and Carlos Pellegrini schools. 13. The genetic database was established by law in 1987; in 1989 it was brought under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice, Technology and Productive Innovation. 14. The test is considered to be scientifically valid truth and has legal status as evidence of a kinship link. But many of the personal stories also revolve around less easily measurable factors, such as physical likeness, predispositions, tastes, etc.



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15. While the regime rationalized its crimes by claiming that it was removing children from “bad” families (who were against the regime) to deliver them into the care of “good” families (who supported the regime), thirty years on the challenge has been to make a “good state,” distanced from the military state through a legal apparatus that provides the mechanisms for defining rights and duties and defining the contours of appropriate kinship in the context of the violence of child abductions. On July 5, 2012, the courts found in favor of the grandmothers and some of the recovered grandchildren to condemn perpetrators such as former general Videla of the crime of illicit capture of babies. While the majority of recovered grandchildren have come forward on their own initiative, there is also a campaign to identify possible abductees. Here too the state can play a role by enforcing the collection of genetic data from suspected victims (see Vaisman 2012). 16. The concern here is that kinship might be reduced to biological notions to the detriment of more fluid and relational approaches (see Carsten 2000). Although geneticists do not see their research as sustaining biological notions of race, the dissemination of their models can have unintended consequences, confirming biological models of race among nonexperts (Wade et al. 2014: 2). 17. Vaisman (2012) shows how the use of genetic testing in the identification of “living disappeared” and the legal changes that emerged in response to the challenges produced by the state’s abduction of children “repositioned the Argentine state so it can now shape, decide and influence its’ citizens’ identities through their own DNA” (112). 18. The search for and identification of grandchildren has entailed close collaboration with scientists, in particular geneticists, forensic anthropologists, and psychologists. In 1982, the Grandparenthood Index was developed. Today, tests focus on simple sequence repeats (SSRs), including Y chromosome SSRs, that identify patrilineal connections, and mitochondrial DNA to identify matrilineal links, combining techniques to identify connections with paternal and maternal kin, siblings, and grandparents (see Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo 2015). The new rights arising from the recovery of grandchildren were supported institutionally; the right to identity was placed under the remit of the Subsecretariat for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights of the province of Buenos Aires. 19. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance declares the forced disappearance of persons as a crime against humanity. In 1984 the government invited the Grandmothers to participate in a United Nations consultation on the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, which came into force in 1990. The Grandmothers contributed to three articles of the convention including Article 7, which states the right of the child to have a name from birth, to acquire a nationality “and, as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents” and Article 8, which determines the duty of the state to “speedily” reestablish a child’s identity where he or she has been illegally deprived of it.

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Bibliography Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. 2015. 99.99%: La Ciencia de las Abuelas. March 20, abuelas​ .org​.ar. AFAT and WITNESS. 2002. Following Antigone: Forensic Anthropology and Human Rights Investigations. Brooklyn, NY: WITNESS. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Andrews, George Reid. 1980. The Afro-­Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Anthias, Floya, and Nira Yuval-­Davis. 1989. Woman-­Nation-­State. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Arditti, Rita. 2002. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Struggle Against Impunity in Argentina. Meridian 3(1): 19–41. Bartolomé, Miguel Alberto. 2004. Movilizaciones étnicas y crítica civilizatoria: Un cuestionamiento a los proyectos estatales en América Latina. Perfiles Latinoamericanos 24: 85–105. Bengoa, José. 2009. Una nueva etapa de la Emergencia Indígena en América Latina? Cuadernos de Antropología Social 29: 7–22. Bethell, Leslie, ed. 1993. Argentina Since Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bonaldi, Pablo. 2006. Hijos de desaparecidos: Entre la construcción de la política y la construcción de la memoria. In El pasado en el Futuro: Los Movimientos Juveniles, ed. Elizabeth Jelin and Diego Sempol, 143–84. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Briones, Claudia, ed. 2005. Cartografías argentinas: Políticas indígenas y formaciones provinciales de alteridad. Buenos Aires: Antropofagia. Brown, Wendy. 2006. Finding the Man in the State. In The Anthropology of the State: A Reader, ed. Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, 187–210. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Buenos Aires Herald. 2016. Bonafini Defies Judge’s Arrest Warrant. August 5, http://​ www​.buenosairesherald​.com​/article​/219328​/bonafini​-­­defies​-­­judge​%E2​%80​%99s​ -­­arrest​-­­warrant. Burchianti, Margaret. 2004. Building Bridges of Memory: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Cultural Politics of Maternal Memories. History and Anthropology 15(2): 133–50. Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2000. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2010. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Calveiro, Pilar. 2005. Política y/o violencia: Una aproximación a la guerrilla de los años 70. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma.



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Carsten, Janet, ed. 2000. Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darwin, Charles. 1989 [1839]. Voyage of the Beagle. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. de Pozuelo, Martín, and Santiago Tarín. 1999. Los militares argentinos pedían rescate por los judíos secuestrados durante la dictadura. La Vanguardia Hemeroteca, April 24, hemeroteca​.lavanguardia​.com. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1982. Antigone’s Daughters. Democracy 2(2): 46–59. ———. 1997. The Mothers of the Disappeared: Passion and Protest in Maternal Action. In Real Politics: At the Centre of Everyday Life, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain, 284–302. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Espacio Memoria. 2015. Homenaje a las Madres de Plaza de Mayo en el ECuNHI. April 29, espaciomemoria​.ar. Faubion, James. 2001. Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of the Ethics of Kinship. In The Ethics of Kinship. Ethnographic Inquiries, ed. James Faubion, 1–28. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch. New York: Pluto and Autonomedia. Fortes, Meyer. 1970. Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Goddard, Victoria. 2005. Sociedad y estado en la lucha por la memoria: El caso Argentino. In Las políticas de la memoria en los sistemas democráticos: Poder, cultura y mercado, ed. José María Valcuende del Rio and Susana Elena Narotzky Molleda, 155–68. Sevilla: Fundación El Monte. Goody, Jack. 1983. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gorini, Ulises. 2006. La Rebelión de las Madres: Historia de las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Tomo I (1976–1983). Buenos Aires: Norma Editores. Guy, Donna J. 1991. Sex and Gender in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family and Nation in Argentina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Holt, Thomas C. 2003. Foreword: The First New Nations. In Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, vii–xiv. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Howell, Signe Lise. 2003. Kinning: The Creation of Life Trajectories in Transnational Adoptive Families. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9(3): 465–84. Izard, Miquel. 1994. Cimarrones, gauchos y cuatreros. Boletín Americanista 34: 125–52. Kropff, Laura. 2011. Los jóvenes Mapuche en Argentina entre el circuito punk y las recuperaciones de las tierras. Alteridades 21(42): 77–89. Kuper, Adam. 2005. The Re-­Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth. London: Routledge. La Nación. 2003. Somos los hijos de las Madres y las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. September 26, www​.lanacion​.com​.ar.

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———. 2016. Hebe de Bonafini le envió una carta al juez que la citó a declarar: “Sufrimos en carne propia la burla que nos castiga a todas, ancianas de 85 a 90 años.” August 4, www​.lanacion​.com​.ar. Luxemburg, Rosa. 1951 [1913]. The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Macpherson, Anne A. 2003. Imagining the Colonial Nation: Race, Gender and Middle-­ Class Politics in Belize, 1888–1898. In Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. Nancy Appelbaum, Anne Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, 108– 31. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Madres de Plaza de Mayo. 2016. Texto presentado por el abogado de Hebe de Bonafini en el juzgado de Martínez de Giorgi. www​.madres​.org. Martínez-­Alier, Verena. 1989. Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-­Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mies, Maria. 1998. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London: Zed. Morales, María Virginia. 2010. De la Cocina a la Plaza: La categoría “Madre” en el discurso de las madres de Plaza de Mayo. Villa María: Eduvim. Página/12. 2014. El pañuelo de las Madres. July 8, www​.pagina12​.com​.ar. Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ramos, Alcida. 2012. Indigenismo: Um orientalismo Americano. Anuário Antropológico, aa​.revues​.org​/268. Rotker, Susana. 1990. Cautivas: Olvidos y Memoria en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Ariel. Rubin, Gayle. 1975. The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex. In Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press. Schirmer, Jennifer G. 1994. The Claiming of Space and the Body Politic Within National-­ Security States: The Plaza de Mayo Madres and the Greenham Common Women. In Remapping Memory: The Politics of the Time Space, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 185–220. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Secretaría de la Comunicación Pública, Presidencia de la Nación. 2012. Argentina, October 26, www​.argentina​.com. Stoler, Ann. 1995. “Mixed Bloods” and the Cultural Politics of European Identity in Colonial Southeast Asia. In The Decolonization of the Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power, ed. Jan Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh, 128–48. London: Zed. Teubal, Ruth, Cristina Bettanin, Clarisa Veiga, Maria Villalba, Amalia Palacios, and Maria Rodriguez. 2014. Memorias fraternas: La experiencia de Hermanos de Desaparecidos, Tíos de Jóvenes apropiados durante la ultima dictadura militar. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires.



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Thelen, Tatjana, Larissa Vetters, and Keebet von Benda-­Beckmann. 2014. Introduction to Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice 58(3): 1–19. Todd, Emmanuel. 1985. Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems. Oxford, UK: Wiley-­Blackwell. Trouillot, Michel-­Rolph. 1996. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon. Vaisman, Noa. 2012. Identity, DNA and the State in Post-­Dictatorship Argentina. In Identity Politics and the New Genetics: Re/Creating Categories of Difference and Belonging, ed. Katharina Schramm, David Skinner, and Richard Rottenburg, 97–115. New York: Berghahn. Valverde, Sergio. 2013. De la invisibilización a la construcción como sujetos sociales: El pueblo indígena Mapuche y sus movimientos en Patagonia, Argentina. Anuário Antropológico, aa​.revues​.org​/414. Viñas, David. 1982. Indios, ejército y fronteras. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno Editores. Wade, Peter. 2003. Afterword: Race and Nation in Latin America; An Anthropological View. In Race and Nation in Modern Latin America, ed. Nancy Appelbaum, Anne Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, 263–81. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 2009. Race and Sex in Latin America. London: Pluto. Wade, Peter, Carlos López Beltrán, Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos. 2014. Introduction: Genomics, Race Mixture and Nation in Latin America. In Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation and Science in Latin America, ed. Peter Wade, Carlos López Beltrán, Eduardo Restrepo, and Ricardo Ventura Santos, 1–30. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Walther, Juan Carlos. 1970. La Conquista del desierto. Buenos Aires: Eudeba.

Chapter 5

From Familial to Familiar Corruption, Political Intimacy, and the Reshaping of Relatedness in Serbia ´ Ivan R ajkovic

In the spring of 2012, I researched a number of state-­funded education classes in the town of Kragujevac in central Serbia organized for workers that were made redundant by a local car factory. Mostly blue-­collar workers in their forties and fifties, seen as unemployable on the sparse local job market, they were often able to negotiate various evasions of rules while staying on the payment lists. They skipped class for several weeks in a row in order to do informal work or left class early. And while such behavior provoked disagreements with the organizers, both the participants and the instructors justified it through elaborate references to the bigger, and supposedly more serious, corruption of the local politicians. Commonly, the notion mobilized here was one of a family, for which both the ordinary people and the politicians had to provide. A class in information technology skills held in March of the same year is a case in point here. Just after the class began, one of the participants, a fifty-­ year-­old man, approached the instructor, Dejan,1 who was in his midtwenties, and shyly asked to be excused. “It is okay,” Dejan anxiously told him, “but what if everyone left?” Embarrassed, the man took his things and left the room. Noting his discomfort, Mira, a loud, elegant lady and a former warehouse packer, intervened: Mira: You have to understand him, Dejan. Nobody is here by choice. He’s a man, and he has to provide for his house, kids. His wife is

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likely also unemployed. This is not enough, as you know, and he has to wheel and deal elsewhere. Is your wage enough for you? One should understand others. The group started speaking about the lack of employment opportunities. Somebody mentioned the speech that Serbian president Boris Tadić had given the night before while visiting a small family enterprise. Tadić suggested that starting a family business was a great opportunity for people to take responsibility for both their families and the national economy. Protesting, Mira said that the state had not created a good framework for small private entrepreneurs, mentioning how her husband, a car mechanic, had to deal with taxes, irrespective of whether he had made a profit over any given month. “It’s easy for them to speak like that,” she said. “If I was making money by stealing, I would speak like that myself.” Continuing with this theme of false yet understandable familialism, Mira shifted her focus to the town administration. Expressing nostalgia for Tito, the late president of socialist Yugoslavia, as for a thief “who stole, but gave as well” (krao, al’ je dao), she critiqued the local mayor not so much for being corrupt but instead for being exclusionary in his corruption. Mira: We all know what thief Palma [the mayor of Jagodina, a neighboring town] is. Still, he gives to the people. But ours—he keeps everything for himself. Another participant [laughing]: Well he gives, but to his own. Mira: Yes, if you are close with him, he fixes a lot of things for you. No, thanks. I don’t want him either to help me or to work against me. I want him to leave me alone. I introduce Mira as a woman who constantly declares that she views the corrupt motives of the politicians as normal yet emphatically repeats that she is not “with” them. In the field, I was struck by the extent to which people explicitly used the notion of self-­interest to decipher politicians’ motivations. Colleagues’, friends’, neighbors’, and politicians’ avoidance of rules alike could all be understood through the familiar notion of self-­interest, which was broadly cast in the idiom of family responsibility in reference to the shared experience of having to support a family. What made the politicians seem particularly cunning was their ability to combine this universal logic of self-­ interest with the rhetoric of communal good, resulting in a more obscure and

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potentially exploitative feigning of togetherness. As a result, many Kragujevans I met opted for a curious dual position: refraining from accusing politicians of moral deficiency yet claiming that they themselves, however, were not associated with anyone. How do we understand this development? Anthropological literature on corruption can be divided into several strands. One strand describes the moral economy that underlies informal networks, favors, and connections in their situated formations (e.g., Pardo 2004). Another one sees the discourse of corruption as a key narrative through which the state is imagined and as reifying the otherwise disaggregated reality of encounters with bureaucracy (Gupta 1995). Generally, new approaches suggest a need to study “both the politics and the poetics of corruption” to grasp its complexity (Shore and Haller 2005: 7, emphasis in original). This is in line with the suggestion to approach both the practices and the representations of the state, focusing on the distinctive “relational modalities” it creates (Thelen, Vetters, and von Benda-­Beckmann 2014: 7). I am here concerned with the latter through a focus on what Michael Herzfeld has termed “cultural intimacy” (2005). Famously, Herzfeld defined the term as “the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality” (2005: 3). The stuff of both state bureaucrats’ rhetoric and citizens’ rejection of the state, cultural intimacy is a skillful play on essentialisms and stereotypes to legitimize social actions when formal and informal codes clash. Mira’s reference to politicians’ lying and stealing as something she would do herself can be seen as an instance of cultural intimacy of corruption. It also exemplifies “secular theodicy” (Herzfeld 1993: 5–7)—a pragmatic usage of fatalist explanations as to why bureaucracy fails, which saves the face of social actors. However, by dismissing the dichotomous “top” and “bottom” view altogether—for cultural intimacy and social poetics that connect them—Herzfeld’s original model proves difficult for addressing the partial involutions of social bonds. This is what my interlocutors have called sužavanje krugova (the shrinking of circles), conveying the insight that the room for maneuver around rules is being retained only for elites while others are left with the ever stricter regulations. This is where Herzfeld’s notion of corruption as a “political incest” (this volume) is more helpful: as he explains, both incest and nepotism are popularly seen as involving too much kinship from the standpoint of outsiders and are thus morally castigated for subordinating collective interests to more partial and personal concerns. If only the “big shots”

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are able to manipulate the rules while at the same time performing a disinterested legal position, accusations of hypocrisy and cynicism emerge (Ries 2002; Martin 2009) and, more important for my point here, of selective intimacy. This reveals a betrayal of both political and kinship ties, kith and kin, echoing the “dark side” of belonging—its failure to provide support (Thelen and Alber, this volume). I argue that in this context of selective market-­based involution of social bonds, progressively a trend emerges in which familiarity (as the basis of mutual recognition) is intensified, whereas familiality (as the basis of identification) is precluded. The key to this process is a shift in the idioms of kinship and nuclear family that establish a homology between politicians and “ordinary people” and their equivalency in that they are motivated by self-­ interest.2 This forms what Neringa Klumbyte has termed “political intimacy” (2011)—a space of closeness, mutuality, and coexistence between the citizens and the state representatives. But at the same time, it marks all claims of collective identity beyond nuclear family as inherently suspicious inasmuch as they saturate all relations with self-­interest. I thus suggest that familiarity is a relational modality in which collective resemblance is recognized, whereas collective identity is denied, instituting new forms of relations in the post­ socialist context that go beyond what anthropology registers as the making of a collectivity. I start by tracing the social distinctions produced over the last two decades in Serbia. The shifting usage of the idioms of good, bad, and equivalent kinship to understand politics and party corruption, I argue, illustrates a shift that separates resemblance from identification, familiarity from familiality. I trace these two aspects back to Herzfeld’s original conception of cultural intimacy, arguing for their separation. I elaborate on this by examining a dense double corruption affair from 2012 that involved the Kragujevac police, the local party, and some ambivalent spectators unrelated to both camps. Finally, I show how the shift toward familiarity changes everyday relations, complicating trust outside the nuclear family.

Good, Bad, and Equivalent Kinships: The Changing Relational Modalities of Serbian Politika As Victoria Goddard shows in her contribution to this volume, political mobilization often draws from and reproduces “appropriate” forms of

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kinship. She demonstrates that the shifting notions of fraternity and of private and socialized motherhood in Argentina articulate the changing forms of state organization as well as the resistance to it. Such usage of kin idioms in politics should not be understood as simply instrumental, for they have the potential of creating different “relational modalities,” distinctive patterns of social bonds that draw on the “differing normative concepts on what a state should be and how it should act” (Thelen, Vetters, and von Benda-­Beckmann, 2014: 7). Put differently, as notions of state and kin mirror each other (Thelen, Thiemann, and Roth 2014: 120), tracing the language of familialism in politics through time often elucidates the intricate changes that reshape more immediate relations. Here I explore the recent developments in kinship politics in Serbia, where various political sentiments and mobilization drives thrived not just by stressing kinship idioms but also by evaluating them as good and bad kinship.3 After former president Slobodan Milošević was ousted in the elections, essentially by a million protesters who took to the streets on October 5, 2000, the change of power in Serbia was widely perceived as a grassroots achievement, promising an egalitarian future. With their promises of restoring “normalcy” in daily life, geopolitics, and the economy, the “democratic reforms” invoked an image of the state in which the state administrators served their citizens without resuscitating what would largely be perceived as Milošević’s oligarchy. And on occasions “democracy” has been framed as inclusive kinship. The official program of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, for example, promised at the outset “to cancel all the cadre’s privileges, and stop the stepmotherly behavior of the government against its citizens” (Demokratska opozicija Srbije 2000: n.p., my emphasis). In Serbian, the pair majčinski/maćehinski (motherly/stepmotherly) refers to the difference between caring and abusive authorities so that the new state is viewed as a true and loving parent. Jessica Greenberg’s (2006) analysis of the public ritualization of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić’s death in 2003 brilliantly shows the extent to which the political bloc relied on such idioms of (in)appropriate kinship to forge belonging. Carried out by an organization called the Zemun Clan, a group that combined criminal with state and parastate security activities (under Milošević and in the new state order), Đinđić’s murder clearly revealed the enduring participation of previous forms of power and violence in the new state structures. In order to demarcate the new rule from the former “autocratic” predecessor, Serbian society was represented as being engaged in a

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Manichean battle between democratic, liberal, and “pro-­European” forces on the one hand and the nationalist, conservative, and anti-­European relic of Milošević’s rule on the other hand. This divide was construed as one between good and bad forms of relatedness: one symbolized the murdered prime minister Đinđić, with the new state and its citizens representing a “civilized” European middle-­class family in mourning, and the other was depicted as resembling extended kin in a sort of criminal “clan”: homosocial, nonreproductive, and violent (Greenberg 2006: 128–29). The distinction derived from older Balkanist divisions between modern and premodern that flourished in the anti-­Milošević civic resistance (Jansen 2005a, 2005b; Živković 2011), in line with what Thelen and Alber (this volume) suggest as differing evaluations of kinship across the premodern/modern axis. However, the reformist split between the “two Serbias” has gradually waned and given way to a new line of market-­based distinctions between “them” and “us”: the corrupt, self-­enriching elites and the honest and fair people. The economic restructuring carried out in the 2000s could not obliterate the traces of structural corruption. Privatization efforts often lacked transparency, seemed unregulated, and served only the interests of the privatizers. By the 2010s, this perception had been exacerbated by an endless stream of media revelations of politicians and high-­level public servants abusing their offices, and the phrase “opšta otimačina” (all-­encompassing plunder) was regularly used. In this context, as Spasić and Birešev (2012) have shown, the 2000s evidenced a new wave of grassroots attempts to redefine the social divisions based on morality. Social distinctions no longer relied on any clearly posited social positions (e.g., those of ethnicity, class, education, etc.); rather, an explicitly moralized vocabulary was deployed to distinguish supposedly selfish, dishonest, and immoral politicians from the amicable, normal, and moral people. This was a continuation of the widespread tendency to disassociate oneself from politika (politics) after the Yugoslav wars (Jansen 2005a, 2015; Helms 2007; Greenberg 2010), where the antipolitical stance served as a basis for the mutual recognition of the so-­ called normal and decent people (Spasić and Birešev 2012; cf. Spasić 2013). The common refrain has been “It does not matter who but, rather, what kind of person one is” (kakav je ko čovek). It is important to note here that in conjunction with this new “antipolitical” sentiment, the notion of family acquired sinister connotations: not a sign of a good or bad form of extended family relatedness (as after Đinđić’s murder) but a pared-­down notion of the nuclear family, a popular explanation

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as to why somebody is not working in the public interest. FIAT’s arrival in Kragujevac is a case in point. The decision of the Serbian state to enter into a joint venture with an Italian company in 2008 was legitimized as an investment for local youths, which the election campaigns of the Democratic Party promised would mean “the future for our children.” In the same vein, the contracts that the former Zastava Automobili workers signed for their redundancies contained a clause that guaranteed priority for employment for their children. But when this did not materialize and the local youths generally were given highly underpaid positions in comparison to foreigners, one would often hear a saying that indeed it was all for children but those of the “Italian managers.” Contrary to the use of the notion of the (middle-­class) nuclear family to symbolize unanimity and harmony in politics (Spencer 2007: 80), here it started to represent a disjuncture that reveals those social ruptures that are suppressed from the official ideology of togetherness. Many Kragujevans I met invoked such idioms of kinship infused with the vocabulary of morality to draw a line between (immoral) plunderers and (moral) victims (for a similar dynamic in Poland, see Pine, this volume). However, as we saw in the case of Mira, many of them also exhibited a more complex tendency in that they used the vocabulary of kinship to both distinguish themselves from the politicians and to stress their similarity with them. Such was the case with Milovan, a journalist in his early fifties who chronicled the political affairs of the state and the town since the late 1980s. One day in the summer of 2013 as we were drinking coffee in the local café, speaking about the 1990s in Serbia, Milovan suggested that Milošević was betrayed by his own collaborators in 2000, who estimated that they could not go on enriching themselves without the international market. Milovan added that it was a well-­known fact that pensioners and refugees—supposedly the main pillars of Milošević’s electoral support—voted him out simply because he did not fulfill their agendas anymore. With great amusement Milovan then narrated a joke, a sort of an antimyth of the foundations of the new state: On the morning of the 6th of October [2000], the 18 parties of DOS [Democratic Opposition of Serbia] met to discuss what they would do now since they were in power. The eldest of them, Mićunović, told them that eighteen parties was a lot of mouths to feed, and that they should be cautious. “Be wise, my children,” said Papa Mićunović, “be kind to your predecessors who stole, because we need to do some of that ourselves.” This is why there was no

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lustration—because it was unclear who would then stay in their positions at all and whether DOS itself would make it. Here, we are once again presented with a picture of the new state leadership as an extended family organization engaged in an act of “feeding” themselves at society’s expenses. Voicing such “politics of the belly” (Bayart 1993), Milovan deconstructed the rhetoric of discontinuity at the dawn of the new state by pointing to the fundamental reliance of the reformers on previous tactics of embezzlement and illegal redistribution. However, Milovan did not make a strict moral contrast between the people and the politicians, condemning the latter. Rather, he stressed the continuity, a shared complicity of all in the corrupt behavior of a disordered world, which he recognized in his own experience with running a household: This is nothing strange, because in Serbia, people do the same thing that politicians do, only at a lower level. Take me, for example. I don’t pay my taxes and bills regularly. Instead, I postpone them, until every six months they become so big that I have to negotiate and beg them to decrease the sum, saying that I have kids, and so on. . . . So this is what infuriates people about the politicians. It is not the fact that they stole, but what they say about it. Milovan’s words illustrate the broader shifts in the discourse of belonging that I am interested in. If the main social distinction in the 2000s was between the progressive “European” and backward “nationalist” forces and if the later shift deconstructed it, claiming a break between an immoral plundering elite and the “normal” decent people, the only meaningful difference Milovan made was between those who were pretending they were above the tactics of the corrupt state and those who were sincere about it. A critique not of corruption but of the lack of transparency in the anticorruption discourse,4 this was an important shift from righteousness to “involvement,” a moral sentiment that stresses the speaker’s awareness of his complicity in the compromising circumstances (Anderson 2013). More important, if in Greenberg’s analysis notions of extended kinship still spurred a sense of belonging (in polarized spheres) and if later developments questioned the familial rhetoric as obscuring (as they masked private interests), Milovan and Mira evoked the metaphors of family not to symbolize either the good or bad aspects of being close but, more neutrally, to express an equivalence between how “politicians”

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and “ordinary people” earned a living. We would all steal and cheat for our families, they seemed to claim; the only difference was that state officials were in a better position to do it. Representing political scheming and the coping strategies of the family breadwinner as just different ways of appropriating some communal good, motivated by one’s own self-­interest, their narratives signal a broader shift in relational modalities in the Serbian political life from familiality to familiarity.

The Familial and the Familiar: Disentangling the Layers of Cultural Intimacy In order to understand both identification and disidentification with the local politicians that Milovan and Mira were voicing simultaneously, here I want to disentangle two aspects of cultural intimacy that were originally separated in Herzfeld’s earlier writing (1993: 31, 33), which then came to be viewed in tandem with one another. These are usually known as community making and mutual recognition, or familiality and familiarity. By familiality, I mean various forms of the collectivity, togetherness, and belonging that since Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) have come to be seen as the hallmark of modern nationalism and state formation (Creed 2006). In Herzfeld’s work, familiality stands for the metaphors of kinship, territory, and body that state bureaucrats and national leaders use to present their rule as close as possible to the common experience of the people and to forge relatedness. At the same time, it is present among the citizens when they yearn for immediate togetherness in or outside of the state such as the Cretan shepherds, who “define their moral purity in opposition to institutionalized values, and engage in reciprocal relations with each other rather than with centralized authority” (Herzfeld 2005: 174; see also Pine, this volume). By familiarity, on the other hand, I mean the recognition that official representations of modern state have another side and thus are not to be taken at face value. “People recognize as familiar, everyday phenomena some of officialdom’s most formal devices, and this generates active scepticism about official claims and motives” (Herzfeld 2005: 4). At the heart of what Herzfeld called social poetics is the acknowledgment that social flaws are crucial for people’s attempts to “regularly inoculate themselves against any naive belief in state or market ideology” (Ries 2002: 277) and to create persuasive explanations for their own skillful manipulations of rules. Familiarity thus

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represents the recognition of the double-­bind nature of official norms, often by acknowledging their similarity to one’s own tacit social tactics: “it truly takes one to know one” (Herzfeld 1995: 141). For Herzfeld, familiality and familiarity overlap because it is common embarrassment that marks the insiders. To be culturally intimate means both to be related and to share the “rueful self-­recognition” (Herzfeld 2005: 6) of that relatedness. Hans Steinmüller’s recent notion of “community of complicity” (2010) as a collective of those who share the knowledge of the inconsistencies of their world as well as ethnographies of the intimate circles of svoi among the Soviet cadre (Yurchak 2006; cf. Ledeneva 2011) echoes the same point. Furthermore, familiality and familiarity come together because they both rely on the construction of what Herzfeld called “iconicity” (likeness) between people, territories, and states. These eventually “confuse resemblance with identity” (Herzfeld 2005: 102). Here I propose a case where such a pairing is unmade, namely where familiarity develops despite the exclusion from social relations. Serbian postsocialist reforms, I argue, show how the disciplining power of the new state, with its promise of egalitarian and impersonal management, coincides with the emergence of newly closed spaces of social bonds. This generates the rhetoric of egalitarianism while limiting access and pushes transparency talk but leaves the impression of ever-­growing obscurity (cf. Morris 2004). This phenomenon is especially visible in the social life of employment after 2000, when thousands were fired from state factories because their jobs were allegedly unproductive, while at the same time the public sector had added equally unproductive positions to accommodate those who had connections. As practices that mediate between the “world of people” and the “world of institutions” (Brković 2016: 111), here connections are constitutive of unequal citizenship in its embedded forms. In this context, I argue, familiarity is progressively disassociated from familiality. People recognize aspects of politicians’ practice as similar to their own while simultaneously denying identification. In using the concept of familiarity, I have in mind Niklas Luhmann’s definition of this notion as a “metalogical quality” that inevitably arises from living “in a familiar world with familiar dangers” (Luhmann 1988: 95). Close to confidence, familiarity revolves around the notions of externally conditioned danger and is thus different from the relation of trust (which assumes human agency and risk estimation). More important, I am concerned with the dialogical aspects of recognizing the similarity with the Other, which in this case happens against

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the backdrop of the experience of having to care for the family (cf. Green 2012). Both Milovan and Mira used the notion of the (nuclear) family not so much to denigrate as to stress their understanding of the motive of self-­ interest among politicians that stems from their own experiences and yet also to underscore that they were not part of the dominant networks that operated under such principles. The notion of care for a family here creates equivalence and a framework for interpreting similar interests of various actors, however, without that ever amounting to any stable notion of community. In other words, I argue that a development of kinship idioms in Serbian politics creates a new relational modality in which resemblance (familiarity) is recognized and actively asserted, while identity (familiality) is denied. To show this, I focus on a double corruption affair that erupted in Kragujevac.

Between Two Groups of Kin Yet Related to None: A Double Corruption Affair Why is there no sex in state firms? They are all related. —A post-­Yugoslav joke from the 2010s

In Kragujevac, the local party Zajedno za Šumadiju (Together for Šumadija, ZZŠ), Šumadija being the central Serbian region, came to power during the anti-­Milošević protests of 1996, when Kragujevac was one of the few cities where the Zajedno coalition had secured election victory against Milošević’s Socialist Party of Serbia. After a break (2000–2004), the ZZŠ party regained power in 2004, having greatly outnumbered the votes it had secured compared to the parties of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (which ruled on the state level). Together with the G17, the ZZŠ launched decentralization campaigns, often using the rhetoric of “togetherness” against “Belgrade.” This oppositional stance was further instituted through an ambiguous moral economy of employment. In the early 2010s the local government had been the town’s biggest employer, with the ZZŠ controlling employment in the town council offices (the biggest after Belgrade) and in public-­sector undertakings, such as water works and street cleaning services. My informants often acknowledged such clientelism as a form of caring, claiming that the ZZŠ “really wanted to help.” Mayor Veroljub Stevanović—generally directly

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involved in resolving problems that individuals faced, such as unemployment, delayed health insurance, or state benefits—was affectionately referred to as “Verko,” “Čiča,” and “Čile” (meaning “uncle,” referring both to a kin role and an elderly person), suggesting intimacy and a “good” form of paternalism. Familiar to many as the ex-­manager of the local car factory Zastava Automobili, a brave protester against Milošević in the 1990s, and a simple pigeon keeper originally from the local Worker’s Colony settlement, Stevanović seemed to be a more intimate and humane alternative to the alien “state” residing in Belgrade (for a similar dynamic in Serbian welfare services, see Thelen, Thiemann, and Roth 2014: 112). Yet for many other ordinary Kragujevans, it was precisely this embeddedness that made the town’s administration look like an estranged elite, a “sect” and a “party army.” They criticized the ZZŠ for taking over the town, depleting the town’s budget to hire party members and relatives, and selling off public spaces to privileged private investors. The mayor was rumored to have been paid a percentage on all deals with some close investors and of making lists of those who were to be employed in the new firms. This was further complicated by the existence of an apparently different interest group, the Serb migrants from Kosovo and Sandžak, who seemed to occupy another strand of public office, namely institutions under the control of the central state (such as police stations and the tax department). Many Kragujevans I met complained about how their town was being “occupied” by “peasants” who, unaccustomed to urban ways, brought their backward ways to Kragujevac and formed a “ghetto,” united in their effort to garner public-­sector employment. Since the town’s population had doubled in the 1960s during industrial expansion, the distinction between kaldrmaši (cobblestoners) and dođoši (newcomers) has been salient in pitting the urbanites, who claimed an older urban pedigree, against the more “rural” migrants. This was a major symbolic dichotomy among the republics that constituted former Yugoslavia both during the industrial migration (Simić 1973) and later during the war-­ related migration (Jansen 2005b; Stefansson 2007). But in the past five years in Kragujevac this had led to the division of two local statehoods (the town’s vs. the central state’s institutions) with two different networks and moral economies of employment. Thus, many people felt that they were caught between two estranged kinship-­like communities: one “urban,” democratic, and “progressive” party “sect” and the other a “peasant,” conservative, and backward Kosovar “clan.” For them, the differences between these two factions became irrelevant in that both could secure employment in public firms

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for their protégés, while others experienced massive unemployment. To follow the notion of too much kinship again (Herzfeld, this volume), most of the citizens of Kragujevac felt that they were caught between two “politically incestuous” communities of partisan employment and were thus unconcerned with their official lines of demarcation. A set of events from the autumn of 2012 substantiates this clash. In October, just several months after the new republican government was formed under the Srpska Napredna Stranka (Serbian Progressive Party, SNS), which won the national elections for the first time, Kragujevac was one of those rare cities with a local parliament that was not under SNS control. Initially several people from the town’s Agency for Urbanization, all closely associated with the ZZŠ, were arrested on allegations of misuse of public funds. The key ZZŠ leaders responded by informing the public that they were victims of an organized “rumour mill” (Simović 2012a). They started publishing a series of “open questions” for the local police director, Ivan Đorović, accusing him of alcoholism, drug dealing, and personal enrichment. Before any clarity could be established, it was generally believed that the police were secretly carrying out an investigation on the local statesmen’s potential corruption, while the former, in turn, accused the police of extortion. Soon afterward, it was revealed that the police had been investigating the potential misuse of funds by the ZZŠ leadership in a number of local infrastructural projects (the building of a new swimming pool and investment in a new industrial zone). But throughout these investigations, the ZZŠ was loud in depicting the police actions as illegitimate acts of insurgency against the legitimate local state representatives. Referring to the police as an institution that should serve the government and not question it, the ZZŠ framed the police investigation as a “microlocated coup d’état” (Kartalović 2012). The ZZŠ’s argument was that the SNS party, ruling on the national level, had conspired with the local police to oust the ZZŠ from the town parliament through fake corruption cases. The ZZŠ even declared that it had temporarily organized its own “party police” to fend off the seemingly illegitimate state police, claiming that such a form of self-­organization was more faithful to the idea of a legal state than the official police. In other words, competing accusations of corrupted governance and of fake anticorruption cases occurred, while the local state representative and the republic state authority fought for legitimacy. And yet instead of picking sides, most of the town inhabitants I spoke to reacted with a mixture of surprise, uncertainty, and mockery with regard to both camps. People had

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already assumed that the politicians and the police were corrupt and now tried to figure out what an open clash between the two meant. To explain these curious shifts they recalled how “Verko and Đorović used to be pals,” surmising that since the town authorities had presented an award to the police the previous year, they would probably resume their cozy relationship. Put differently, people saw the mayor and the police commander as two coexisting patrons leading two kinship-­like circles, which used to conspire but had a falling out and would inevitably reconcile at the expense of those excluded from both camps. As one reader of the Šumadijapress portal suggested: I am an ordinary citizen, unemployed for the last 2 years, I have hundreds of other existential worries, and I am not noticing that atmosphere of fear, public unrest or the bad security situation in the town. Instead I know that whatever doors I knocked on to find a job, I got the same answer—only Verko and his people can do that, try getting in with them, try getting to him somehow, become a member. . . . And similarly, I was directly suggested I should not even think of seeking employment with the police as I am not from Kosovo or Sjenica. That’s all the same, they are all the same, they only care about themselves, all while pretending to care for all of us. Horrible! (Simović 2012a) For this woman, it is precisely their informal employment strategies that made them “the same,” in comparison to her status as unemployed and unaffiliated to them. Rather than a communal aim of togetherness, or the notions of good and bad kinship that the ZZŠ was utilizing, what she saw was a picture of two equivalently closed-­off communities. Both “clans” were marked by the “disemia”—the disjuncture between their professed aim to achieve an impartial common good and the experienced reality of personal ties (Herzfeld, this volume). Radio satirist Miroslav Miletić coined the phrase “Together for Police” to stress this similarity of the two sides: [T]he police and the government are the same. . . . I mean, vlast je vlast (power is power). Dressed in a suit, or a uniform, it is all the same. You have that folk saying: you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours. One hand helps another. Or you have another one, vrana vrani oči ne vadi (a crow does not pick out another crow’s eyes—a folk proverb meaning that the patrons do not battle between one

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another). But what if a crow attacks another crow? What should then the other crows, simple ravens, sparrows on the trees, what should we small and big birds, flora and fauna, think? (Iz glave 2012) Therefore, it was not just that people were not a part of the circles but that they were excluded despite supposedly operating within the same logic of interest as the more embedded political elites. Imagining a whole hierarchy of predators and the prey embedded in the same system of power—from “crows” to “us small and big birds, flora and fauna,” Miletić enmeshed the official state rhetoric back into the society by stressing the common logic of the existential struggle for survival that politicians and ordinary people shared.

“Don’t Call Me Your Neighbor!”: Marking Resemblance Without Identification Writing about a Lithuanian satirical magazine from late Soviet socialism, Broom, Neringa Klumbytė used the term “political intimacy” to refer to the ability of political humor to blur the lines between “the state and the citizen, the public and the private, the hegemonic and the sincere, the powerful and powerless” (Klumbytė 2011: 659). As a field of power relations, political intimacy refers to the “coexistence of state authorities and other subjects in fields of social and political comfort, togetherness, and dialogue as well as in zones of shared meanings and values” (Klumbytė 2011: 659). As Miletić’s allegory of survival shows, the public affair in Kragujevac similarly blurred the line between the state and the nonstate, exposing their coexistence within the same rationale of self-­interest. However, the important difference lies in the consequences of such coexistence. To the extent that the local state authorities attempted to create a community out of the affair, the jokes of nonparty commentators expressed a complex mixture of empathy and disidentification: recognizing their similarities with politicians while denouncing any affiliation with them. A further development in the corruption affair explains this point. In December 2012 a senior ZZŠ representative, Nebojša Vasiljević, was arrested on suspicion that he had misappropriated funds from a big foreign transfer of a football player at a local club. Long before this, the local citizens had derisively given Vasiljević the nickname Komšija (meaning “Neighbor”) while adding a witty explanation: “because he has a flat in every building.” In what people understood as the police’s subtle continuation of the same joke, the

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operation of arresting Vasiljević was also given the code name “Komšija.” When this was revealed, the ZZŠ party tried to reverse the joke by calling its new campaign “We Are Your Neighbors,” attempting to mobilize the romantic image of reciprocity that the institution of komšiluk (neighborhood), although not without problems, enjoys in the region (Sorabji 2008; Henig 2012). In a series of highly dramatic appeals to the public, the ZZŠ asked the citizens “Who do you believe more, your neighbors or the alienated centers of power?” (Simović 2012b). Ultimately, this refraction of the same half-­familial, half-­mocking concept across many sides brought a rich interplay of critiques, ironies, and wordplay in people’s conversations about the events and in endless comments on the local news portals. “He is not my neighbor, and will never be,” some claimed, offended by the campaign slogan. Others saw the potential for creatively undermining the ZZŠ’s own rhetoric of togetherness. “Komšija, komšija!” my interlocutors jokingly chanted for days. After this, people will stop using the term; they will say ‘oh come on, let us not be neighbours, call me anything but komšija’,” one of them said. These forms of disidentifications, expressed in jest as mockery, powerfully deconstructed the ZZŠ’s logic of togetherness. But they also opened up ways of understanding all sorts of collective identifications as necessarily burdened with partial interests, as the double meaning of komšija did. The mayor and his people are probably guilty and should be put on trial, my interlocutors reasoned, but this is all an attempt to install the rule of a competing SNS party in the town. This was supported by the fact that the SNS party local mayoral candidate was the president’s son, another example of politics as kinship (introduction to this volume).5 Hence, the police commander was distrusted as well. Seeing the affair as just another clash between two groups and forms of relatedness, many were eager to assert that they did not belong to either. Simultaneously, they expressed their understanding of the motives and even empathy for the conditions that ordinary party members, the mayor’s clients, found themselves in. “What could they do? Everybody has a family to feed.”

Community of the Unrelated? Forming Bonds by Claiming Equivalent Self-­Interests Sarah Green’s (2012) ethnography of the presence of the “undocumented” dead bodies of immigrants that wash up on the Lesvos coast makes an

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important point on family and familiarity. Though the official treatment of these bodies is dictated by the logics of citizenship, the local inhabitants respond through an analogy to their own experience of having a family to mourn. Everybody has kin, however different from one’s own, and therefore the experience of what it means to lose someone and not even know the location of the person’s grave is imaginable. For Green, this creates an international relation of “familiarity” rather than “similarity”: Greeks maintain the national difference between themselves and migrants’ polities of origin yet create a wider homology of experience of mourning for significant others.6 Similarly, I argue that in contemporary Serbia the notion of the nuclear family comes to institutionalize not the sameness but rather the comparability of self-­interests as the ultimate explanation of social life. Here, it is common to recognize people’s responsibility to their families and their involvement in interest-­driven activities of all kinds to fulfill that responsibility. But while establishing the familiarity of politics, this notion of a self-­interested nuclear family simultaneously precludes equations. Everyone works for themselves and their own families, my respondents seem to argue, and this is basically what makes our interests comparable. But precisely because everyone works for themselves and their own families, they can never share the same interests. “You cannot have friends any more, only close family,” I was told by Mirko, an otherwise very sociable man in his forties who was attending a requalification class in carpentry. He referred to what he saw as a betrayal of his best friend from the former car factory. When FIAT privatized the factory, the friend seemed to be competing with all the others to remain on the job, humiliating them out of fear of losing his job. For Mirko, this was not because the friend’s self-­interest trumped their friendship but rather because of the friend’s inability to follow his self-­interest openly and thus in clear harmony with others’ interests. He recalled the instance when he launched a business with smuggled petrol in the 1990s; the friend had initially hesitated to join out of fear but had pressured Mirko, once the business picked up, to allow him to join it. The inability to accept that “risk creates capital,” in Mirko’s words, made his friend utterly unhappy and a traitor to others with FIAT’s arrival. Today Mirko continues to have many relations with people because, as he put it, “you cannot do anything in Serbia without people.” Still, he does not consider them his friends or community by any stretch of the imagination. In other words, the recourse to (nuclear) family developed at the expense of previously known intimate relations, such as friendships from the workplace. Tatjana Thelen (2005) has highlighted a similar dynamic in postunification

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eastern Germany where, she argued, retraditionalization of social relations was intricately connected with the redistribution of risk after postsocialist changes. Once intensive sites of multifunctional personalized exchange, workplaces suddenly became unfamiliar, redundancy pathways were individualized, and trust was revoked from workmates and transferred to family relations in an attempt to minimize the risk of getting fired. I traced a similar move to withdraw from established social relations outside of the nuclear family and create new forms of bonds that idioms of self-­interest develop. “Until we realize that we all have only personal interests, we can’t live together.” This is what another interlocutor in my field, Ana, a middle-­aged worker in a bakery, told me after a lament on the nature of interpersonal relations. She was against established forms of belonging: colleagues, neighborhood, extended family. She did not care for any of that, she said with a gesture of contempt. Yet, this did not mean that she was against every idea of a collectivity. “Helping is always one on one: help you, you help somebody else, and this is how we start associating again.” In other words, by claiming nonbelonging to any collective, people paradoxically seek to create new forms of bonds. The question is, however, what kind of social bonds can be claimed when precisely bonding and togetherness are categorically denied? Since the rhetoric of togetherness and reciprocity seemed exploitative, my interlocutors did not voice “structural nostalgia” (Herzfeld 2005: 147–53) for a time of pure relations. On the contrary, they seemed to long for a world of open individual self-­interests that would be easier to navigate than the messy reality of potentially cunning friends, kin, neighbors, and politicians. To the extent that they used this reasoning to explain social life, people reinterpreted existing social bonds in very different ways, creating new relational modality based on familiarity and equivalence of self-­interests. “It is always a stranger that helps you. If they are close to you, they fail you.” This is how Mirna, an accountant in her fifties, described the housing history she shared with her husband Brane. Back in the crisis-­ridden 1980s, Brane was not able to get credit for an apartment until he accidentally met a man, a Vlah from eastern Serbia, who worked in Germany and happened to know someone at the Ljubljanska Bank. This got Brane a loan. After that the couple and the man in question visited each other for big family celebrations, such as the weddings of their children. They did not see themselves as friends and saw each other very rarely. However, Brane and Mirna seemed to have deep respect for the person who helped him, as a person who had a

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family and therefore understood what it meant to have particular problems while not being a part of the dominant echelons, like themselves. Instead of a friendship, they seemed to cultivate an allegiance of nonrelatedness.

Conclusion: Kinship, Sideways the State In this chapter, I have argued that my interlocutors used the notion of family to demystify and expose what they saw as the cynical behavior of politicians. Politics claimed to be egalitarian yet appeared ever more embedded in informal bonds; it promised transparency yet created even murkier circumstances. Rather than simply condemning corruption, my interlocutors challenged such situations by highlighting the indiscernibility of “kinship” and “politics” in the sense that they were both based on self-­interest. But while postulating the common humanity of politicians and the “ordinary” people and thus making the state administration appear close and intimate once again, the notions of kin ultimately changed the very nature of social bonds that could be trusted beyond the nuclear family. All claims to a common identity become false and exploitative, clarified but tainted by a pervasive sense of familiarity of interest. It has been common to associate kinship in its various forms with the production of togetherness that can fuel or contest state formation—as kinship for or against the state (see Pine, this volume). While showing both of these relational modalities in Serbia, here I have argued that they assume both familiality and familiarity. Focusing on the situations in which kin idioms produce familiarity alone, I argued for another emerging register, which ultimately moves sideways, or laterally, with respect to the state: creating a space of dissent but ultimately changing social relations on the ground. Showing the continuing relevance of cultural intimacy in politics, familiarity thus represents a force that works beyond the national and, indeed, beyond what anthropology usually registers as the making of collectivity, shaping new forms of relations through ruptures that the postsocialist market economy creates. Such a reading of family notions can be linked to Margaret Thatcher’s infamous proposition: “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families” (Keay 1987: 9, my emphasis). This implied that “no government can do anything except through people, and people look to themselves first” (Keay 1987: 9). According to Herzfeld, such

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language stands for a momentous change in which “nationalism shifts from indexicality to iconicity, from social relations refracting cultural difference to a socially atomized cultural homogeneity” (Herzfeld 2005: 30). In other words, it is the state rhetoric of market individualism that enables resemblance without identification. In this process, the role of kinship notions has been underestimated. Turning our gaze to kinship idioms of familiarity as equally as to familiality, we are able to tackle the subtle transformations of relatedness that develop beyond the collectivist ethos of contemporary nation-­states.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to the editors of this volume for inviting me to participate in the workshop in Berlin where I presented this paper and for their helpful comments and great patience. I am also grateful to Dr. Stef Jansen and to Dr. Madeleine Reeves for their feedback and to all of my interlocutors in Kragujevac.

Notes 1. All interlocutors’ names in the text have been changed to protect their anonymity. 2. On shifting notions of kinship in Poland, see Pine (this volume). 3. On the shifting political use of classifications of kinship more generally, see Thelen and Alber’s introduction to this volume. 4. On the use of the notion of transparency in relation to kinship see Edwards (this volume). 5. President Nikiolić’s son indeed came to power as Kragujevac’s mayor two years later, in 2014. 6. On judging similarity and distance toward migrants in a Greek maternity ward, see Papadaki (this volume).

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Anderson, Paul. 2013. The Politics of Scorn in Syria and the Agency of Narrated Involvement. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19(3): 463–81.

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Bayart, Jean-­François. 1993. The State in Africa: the Politics of the Belly. London: Longman. Brković, Čarna. 2016. Scaling Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Actions in a Bosnian Town. Ethnos 81(1): 99–124. Creed, Gerald W., ed. 2006. The Seductions of Community: Emancipations, Oppressions, Quandaries. Santa Fe, NM: James Currey; School of American Research Press. Demokratska opozicija Srbije. 2000. Program za demokratsku Srbiju [Program for a Democratic Serbia]. www​.vreme​.com​/arhiva​_html​/502​/10​.html. Green, S. F. 2012. Απούσες Λεπτομέρειες: Οι διεθνικές ζωές των χωρίς έγγραφα ν­ εκρών σωμάτων στο Αιγαίο [Absent Details: The Transnational Lives of Undocumented Dead Bodies in the Aegean]. In Το προσφυγικό και μεταναστευτικό ζήτημα— διαβάσεις και μελέτες συνόρων [Refugees and Migration Issues: Studies of Border Crossings], ed. S. Trubeta, 133–58. Athens: Papazisi. Greenberg, Jessica. 2006. “Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”: Zoran Dindić and the New Democratic Masculinity in Serbia. East European Politics & Societies 20(1): 126–51. ———. 2010. “There’s Nothing Anyone Can Do About It”: Participation, Apathy, and “Successful” Democratic Transition in Postsocialist Serbia. Slavic Review 69(1): 41–64. Gupta, Akhil. 1995. Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State. American Ethnologist 22(2): 375–402. Helms, Elissa. 2007. “Politics Is a Whore”: Women, Morality and Victimhood in Post-­ War Bosnia and Herzegovina. In The New Bosnian Mozaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-­War Society, ed. Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Gerlachlus Duijzings, 235–53. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Henig, David. 2012. Knocking on My Neighbour’s Door: On Metamorphoses of Sociality in Rural Bosnia. Critique of Anthropology 32(1): 3–19. Herzfeld, Michael. 1993. The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1995. It Takes One to Know One: Collective Resentment and Mutual Recognition Among Greeks in Local and Global Contexts. In Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, ed. R. Fardon, 127–145. London: Routledge. ———. 2005. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-­State. New York: Routledge. Iz glave. 2012. Radio Televizija Kragujevac, aired October 15. Jansen, Stef. 2005a. Antinacionalizam: Etnografija otpora u Beogradu i Zagrebu [Antionationalism: Ethnography of Resistance in Belgrade and Serbia]. Beograd: XX vek. ———. 2005b. Who’s Afraid of White Socks? Towards a Critical Understanding of Post Yugoslav Urban Self-­Perceptions. Ethnologia Balkanica 9: 151–67. ———. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex. Oxford, UK: Berghahn. Kartalović, Branimir. 2012. Nerazumljiva metafora čelnika Kragujevca [Unclear Met.politika​ .rs​ /rubrike​ /Srbija​ aphor or Kragujevac’s Mayor]. Politika online, www​ /Nerazumljiva​-­­metafora​-­­celnika​-­­Kragujevca​.lt​.html. Keay, D. 1987. Aids, Education and the Year 2000! Woman’s Own, September 23, 8–10.

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Klumbytė, Neringa. 2011. Political Intimacy: Power, Laughter, and Coexistence in Late Soviet Lithuania. East European Politics & Societies 25(4): 658–77. Ledeneva, Alena. 2011. Open Secrets and Knowing Smiles. East European Politics & Societies 25(4): 720–36. Luhmann, Niklas. 1988. Familiarity, Confidence, Trust: Problems and Alternatives. In Trust Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, ed. Diego Gambetta, 94–107. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Martin, Keir. 2009. Custom: The Limits of Reciprocity in Village Resettlement. In Ethnographies of Moral Reasoning: Living Paradoxes of a Global Age, ed. Karen M. Sykes, 93–116. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Morris, Rosalind. 2004. Intimacy and Corruption in Thailand’s Age of Transparency. In Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture, ed. Andrew Shryock, 225–43. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pardo, Italo. 2004. Between Morality and the Law: Corruption, Anthropology and Comparative Society. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Ries, Nancy. 2002. “Honest Bandits” and “Warped People”: Russian Narratives About Money, Corruption and Moral Decay. In Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change, ed. C. J. M. Greenhouse, E. Mertz, and K. B. Warren, 276–315. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shore, Cris, and Dieter Haller. 2005. Introduction: Sharp Practice; Anthropology and the Study of Corruption. In Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Cris Shore and Dieter Haller, 1–26. London: Pluto. Simić, Andrei. 1973. The Peasant Urbanities: A Study of Rural-­Urban Mobility in Serbia. New York: Seminar Press. Simović, Ljubinka. 2012a. Bioskop u Skupštini grada [Cinema in the Town Hall]. Šumadijapress. ———. 2012b. ZZŠ: Komšije nisu krive ni za šta [Neighbours are not guilty for anything]. Šumadijapress. Sorabji, Cornelia. 2008. Bosnian Neighborhoods Revisited: Tolerance, Commitment and Komšiluk in Sarajevo. In On the Margins of Religion, ed. Frances Pine and J. de Pina-­Cabral, 97–112. New York: Berghahn. Spasić, Ivana. 2013. Kultura na delu: Društvena transformacija Srbije iz burdijeovske perspective [Culture at Work: Social Transformation of Serbia from the Bourdieusian Perspective]. Beograd: Fabrika knjiga. Spasić, Ivana, and Ana Birešev. 2012. Social Classifications in Serbia Today Between Morality and Politics. In Social and Cultural Capital in Serbia, ed. P. Cvetičanin, 139–58. Niš: Centre for Empirical Cultural Studies of South-­East Europe. Spencer, Jonathan. 2007. Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stefansson, Anders. 2007. Urban Exile: Locals, Newcomers and the Cultural Transformation of Sarajevo. In the New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-­War Society, ed. X. Bougarel, 59–77. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

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Steinmüller, Hans. 2010. Communities of Complicity: Notes on State Formation and Local Sociality in Rural China. American Ethnologist 37(3): 539–49. Thelen, Tatjana. 2005. The Loss of Trust: Changing Social Relations in the Workplace in Eastern Germany. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Papers Series. Thelen, Tatjana, Andre Thiemann, and Duška Roth. 2014. State Kinning and Kinning the State in Serbian Elder Care Program. Social Analysis 58(3): 107–23. Thelen, Tatjana, Larissa Vetters, and Keebet von Benda-­Beckmann. 2014. Introduction to Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State. Social Analysis 58(3): 1–19. Yurchak, Alexei. 2006. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More; The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Živković, Marko. 2011. Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Part II

Classifying Kinship and the Making of Citizens

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Chapter 6

The Politics of “See-­Through” Kinship Jeanette Edwards

It is not difficult to see an immediate link between assisted reproductive technology (ART), as a means of making kinship, and the “doing” of politics. Whether in the promotion or disallowance of conceptive or contraceptive technologies, states always have an interest in the reproduction (or not) of their citizens and in regulating the specific family forms in which persons are meant to flourish. Key ethnographic texts have shown the tight relationship between pronatalist policies and state support for ART, for example, as well as the ways state interests inform bioethical discussion of what is and is not permitted and for whom. ART cannot be plucked from the political milieu that makes them either possible or impossible, shapes their legitimacy or illegitimacy, and informs the moral questions and solutions they generate. A question that has been hotly debated recently in the United Kingdom concerns the issue of disclosure in donor conception. There has been a strong call for more openness and transparency in practices of donor conception and for donor-­conceived children to be told the means of their conception by their parents. The strong call for disclosure equates nondisclosure with secrecy and lies and believes that the state should step in where parents are unwilling to tell their children the means of their conception. To what extent is this specific call for openness and transparency (with regard to the doing of kinship) of a piece with broader calls for accountability and transparency in many other spheres of contemporary social, economic, and political life? And to what extent does it act to iterate not only the good parent but also the good citizen? Anthropologists have written cogently of the links between transparency and neoliberal politics (in its various forms) and also of its tyrannies and of what gets hidden with yet more transparency. This chapter will

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examine the mutual delineation of politics and kinship through the trope of transparency and the kind of family that is valued in the call for more of it. Transparency is the kind of traveling concept, identified by the editors of this volume in their introduction, that bridges political and kinship domains and acquires new qualities as it travels from one to the other (Thelen and Alber, this volume).

Donor Conception and Disclosure In 2012, the United Kingdom’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics commissioned a report on donor conception and disclosure.1 The council was responding to the emergence of strong lobbies from various interest groups, including donor-­conceived adults, parents of donor-­conceived children, and counseling and social service professionals, regarding “the right” of children conceived using donated gametes or embryos to be told the means of their conception.2 The council launched an extensive consultation exercise and constituted a working party to collate and consider the ethical aspects of disclosure and nondisclosure in donor conception.3 At stake was the question of whether donor-­conceived offspring should always be told the means of their conception so they can know, at some point, the identity of their donor. The strong case made for disclosure is couched in terms of individual rights and, more specifically and colloquially, “the right to know where you come from.” Frustrated with what they see as slow progress (it is estimated that in the United Kingdom less than half the parents of donor-­conceived children tell their children that they were donor conceived), the strong lobby for disclosure is calling for the government to step in not only to mandate but also, if necessary, to ensure disclosure.4 For them nondisclosure is tantamount to deception and secrecy, which they claim as morally wrong with deleterious outcomes for donor-­conceived individuals and their families. And for some, the state, in permitting nondisclosure (that is, in allowing parents not to tell their children the means of their conception), is condoning this deception and failing to protect donor-­conceived persons.5 In the United Kingdom there has been a steady trend toward more openness and transparency in fertility treatments generally and the use of donated gametes and embryos specifically. In 2005 following extensive campaigning by a group within the British Association of Social Workers and supported by the Children’s Society,6 the legislation was amended, and anonymous



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gamete and embryo donation was abolished. Persons conceived with the use of donated gametes or embryos in UK fertility clinics after 2005 are entitled to obtain identifying information about their donor when they reach the age of eighteen and to obtain nonidentifying information before that (this is usually in the form of pen portraits written by the donor at the time of donation).7 Some people who gave evidence to the Nuffield Council working party thought that this change in legislation should be made retrospective so that donor-­conceived people born after 1991, when statutory records began, and before 2005, when the law was changed, have access to the same identifying information (even though donors donated their gametes then under conditions of anonymity). As mentioned above, for those who firmly believe that disclosure is imperative, not to reveal the fact of donor conception to children is to deceive them. From this perspective, keeping secrets, along with the inherent danger that they will inadvertently be disclosed, axiomatically harms and spoils family relationships. The kind of family that is brought into relief here is of interest. It is a family that flourishes on open communication and honesty between parents and their children and one were relations of equal and individual rights rather than authority or hierarchy are preferred.8 The point that family forms and conventions differ historically, cross-­culturally, and across social classes is an obvious and banal anthropological point but nevertheless one that directs us to look more closely at the contemporary liberal and middle-­class ideal of family relatedness implicit in the UK debate on disclosure. Helle Bundgaard and Karen Fog Olwig (this volume) provide a pertinent ethnographic example from Denmark. They show how democratic and liberal values are taught through pedagogic practices in kindergarten that encourage children “to listen to each other, be considerate, take turns, and wait for one another.” They argue that a particular middle-­class vision of “harmonious, intimate Danish family life” is promoted, which in turn makes the kindergarten a key site for the production of “proper” Danish citizens (Bundgaard and Fog Olwig, this volume). Bundgaard and Fog Olwig productively unpack the mechanisms by which a sense of belonging to Danish society is fractured for those who do not share the same ideas of how intimate family relationships should be conducted or about what constitutes appropriate and good parenting. Likewise, the strong lobby for disclosure in donor conception in the United Kingdom conveys a strong sense of how intimate kin relationships should be conducted (with honesty and transparency and without secrets), which in turn will allow for the flourishing of “proper” persons.

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Strong counterarguments (to the imperative to disclose) were put to the Nuffield Council working party. Such arguments focused, for example, on the irrelevance of the donor to either the identity of the child or the conduct of proper and nurturing family relationships. It was argued that parents are clearly better judges than unconnected professionals or politicians of what is best for them, their children, and their own family relationships. From this viewpoint, family privacy is at stake. Here a certain kind of knowledge is known to belong to the family, to belong firmly to what Frances Pine (this volume) identifies as the “inside,” which in this case is not the business of the “outside.” Pine puts it this way: kinship sociality acts “both as a mask to hide behind and exclude the outside and as a powerful public tool to criticize and confront the state” (this volume). In the public debates on donor conception in the United Kingdom, it is not the case that the inside (private) and outside (public) domains of kinship map neatly onto the split between those who urge disclosure in donor conception and those for whom it is irrelevant. Instead, the same kinship ideology deployed in attempts to make the state responsible (to enforce disclosure) is also mobilized to exclude the state (to ensure family privacy). For example, there is a striking overlap in the way in which the arguments both for and against the imperative to disclose are couched. Both draw on a language of rights, autonomy, and choice. On the one hand, autonomy is linked to a collectivity (glossed as the family) that, it is argued, should have the right to make its own decisions (choices) without intervention from the state and/or its representatives. On the other hand, the individual, such as the donor-­conceived person, has a right to know the means of her or his conception and consequently where she or he “comes from.” Issues of rights, autonomy, and choice are similarly extended to donors with arguments that underscore either the right of donors to know the outcome of their donation or their right to be and remain anonymous. If we read the debate through the prism of anthropological kinship, then we might see the kind of scientific kinship that Marilyn Strathern identifies as Euro-­American: where kinship is an artifact of the organization of knowledge from different sources so that kin connections can be verified in different ways (Strathern 2005). This means that the gamete donor can be perceived as irrevocably connected to the persons conceived with their gametes, or they can also be excised as irrelevant to the fetus nurtured in its mother’s womb and shaped and molded after birth through the practices of its kin (Edwards 2000, 2014). Monica Konrad describes both the nameless and unknown relations forged into the future by the donated ovum and the work of the recipients of



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donated ova in de-­conceiving the egg and thus the egg donor as related in any way to their children (Konrad 2005). Many kinship scholars addressing such examples in Euro-­American contexts have analyzed them in ways that suggest an oscillation between biological and social aspects of kinship, while others have run their analysis through what they see as an increasing geneticization of kinship (and of social life more broadly), where genetic connection gets to be privileged over and above other ways in which kinship is forged (e.g., Finkler 2000; Franklin and McKinnon 2001; Carsten 2004; Thompson 2005; Howell 2006).9 Anthropologists have also addressed the limitations of analyses that leave unexamined the carving out of kinship into biological and social domains (see, for example, contributors to Edwards and Salazar 2009). But what happens if we read the current debate about donor conception and disclosure in the United Kingdom through the prism of politics rather than kinship? Inevitably, perhaps, it pulls us into the specific politics, variously described as late capitalism, late liberalism, or neoliberalism, and pulls us back to the large and engineered social, political, and economic changes that have gathered pace, some would say since the 1970s up to the financial crises of 2008 and beyond.10 I do not claim to be able to make a sensible contribution to the extensive literature on this well-­trodden terrain, but I run my comments that follow through four interconnected aspects that shelter under the leaky umbrella of neoliberal politics: first, through what has been understood as a flattening out, or leveling off, of decision making that has entailed an upending of “traditional” hierarchies of authority and expertise; second, through the burgeoning digital media that allow for new scales and temporalities of information and communication; third, through the kinds of personhood and dispositions that are fashioned by such a politics; and fourth, through the contemporary political value placed on transparency, with a consideration of what and whom the burgeoning mechanisms of transparency hide and with particular reference to the kind of family that gets either promoted or demoted in this politics.

The Politics of Lobbying Maren Klotz in an insightful comparison of the governance of ART in Britain and Germany coined the term “transparentisation” to describe the shift toward more transparency and the emancipatory hope it entails (Klotz 2014). More so in Britain than Germany, greater openness in the field of ART is seen

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to be emancipatory in its potential to wrest authority away from what are perceived to be distant experts and for it to lie with those who are most, and most directly, affected. She shows, however, how the call for greater transparency in Britain entails a reconfiguration rather than a diminishment of authority, in this case from “high-­handed” medical professionals to concerned individuals and groups that include parents, social workers, and counselors (Klotz 2014). Klotz provides insight into the way in which specific interest groups and their supporters are able to get closer to policy discussion and decision-­ making processes in Britain than can their counterparts in Germany. She shows how in Britain campaigning has been effectively organized around the Donor Conception Network (DCN), which consists of heterosexual, homosexual, and single-­parent families as well as their supporters (including social workers and counselors). Here, Klotz argues, group identity is articulated around the method of conception (donation) rather than, as in Germany, around the family form (single-parent or homoparental, for example). I shall return to this notion of family form below and argue that those calling for donor disclosure in the United Kingdom, which include the interest groups that Klotz describes, are also concerned with the form of families. But rather than the classification of families according to, for example, the sexuality or marital status of parents, their interest is more in the texture and quality of family relationships that, in turn, define a particular kind of valued and valuable type of family. First, however, I wish to address the forms of lobbying that Klotz so aptly analyzes by locating them more firmly within the shifting grounds and qualifications for expertise. Klotz describes how prominent members of the DCN have an “ample entry point into policy making practices” as evidence providers in various fact-­gathering and consultation exercises (Klotz 2014: 335).11 I see her ethno­ graphic insight as prefigured by the theoretical work of Michael Gibbons, Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott, and colleagues (Gibbons et al. 1994; Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001). They charted a paradigm shift in knowledge production, specifically in science, from what they called Mode 1 to Mode 2, with Mode 2—the contemporary configuration—as “socially distributed, application-­oriented, trans-­disciplinary, and subject to multiple accountabilities” (Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2003: 179). They predicted a flattening out, or perhaps even a democratization, of knowledge production (Nowotny et al. 2001).12 Of interest here is their description of the spaces of policy making and of the various interest groups, including patients, journalists, politicians, and entrepreneurs as well as clinicians and scientists, jostling for



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preeminence in what they called the agora. The aim of Nowotny and colleagues was to rethink the relationship between science and society in light of new alliances and reconfigurations in the production of scientific knowledge and the legitimation (or not) of scientific research. They reappropriate the concept of the agora to refer to the new public space in which science, society, the market, education, mass media, politics, and so on mingle and in which “elaborate negotiations, mediations, consultations and contestations” are taking place (Nowotny et al. 2001: 23). Science is no longer in a position outside society, from which it legitimated the projects of modernity, while the organizing categories of the modern world—“state, society, economy, culture (and science)—have become porous. . . . They no longer represent readily distinguishable domains” (Nowotny et al. 2001: 47). But, of course, the agora is not a flatland, and the influence of power, money, and authority is by no means diminished in the changes to the production and legitimation of knowledge that have taken place. Nevertheless, the reconfiguration of what constitutes expertise, not least with the inclusion of the experienced subject, bears further scrutiny. A demotion of certain kinds of expertise (let’s gloss them for now as scientific, but they could also be academic, medical, political, or legal) entails a reinscription of new authorities that include “the public” and more significantly the experienced public and, even more significantly, the suffering public.13 The firsthand account of the “directly involved” legitimates emergent authority with authenticity. In the case of the debate on disclosure and donor conception, the strong and compelling voice of donor-­conceived adults backed by supporters, including social workers and counselors, is powerful. It is not easy to gainsay an account of the personal experience of hurt and betrayal—put powerfully and idiomatically to the working party as a “life screwed up”—caused through not being told something that is then generalized as a deliberate conspiracy to withhold information. It is relatively easier to condone the idea that “the establishment” conspires to keep its workings hidden. But where does this leave the anthropologist? The anthropologist might argue, for example, that there are different ways in which flourishing kin relations are forged, not all of them dependent on biological connection, or that it is not axiomatic that a healthy “self-­identity” correlates with knowing one’s biological parents. It is perhaps inevitable that they should be accused of complicity: complicity in allowing a parlous state of affairs to continue. From a viewpoint that advocates openness and transparency at any cost, any note of caution is read as a betrayal. If transparency is deemed a solution to a crisis

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of governance, it is also fundamentally a politics of mistrust (Power 1999; Strathern 2000; Garsten and de Montoya 2008).14 In a critique of Nowotny’s et al. characterization of changes that have occurred in the governance of scientific research, the historian of science Dominique Pestre points to two specific aspects of contemporary society relevant to my argument here: [1] . . . the reassertion of power by big business and financial capital resulting in the reversal of many processes of social protection that have taken a century and a half to develop . . . [2] the emergence of new, influential social groups (generally composed of younger, educated people), which have developed new modes of social action. This has meant that other (“lower”) social groups and interests have lost visibility. (Pestre 2003: 251) The modes of social action that a new relatively young and educated class of denizens are turning to are of interest.15 These new modes are shaping and are shaped by digital media: not only are new kin forged through the Internet, but digital capacity and literacy enables people to circumvent national legislation and policy. Through the Internet, for example, people search for more timely and/or appropriate fertility treatments abroad or search for and identify gamete donors who were meant to be anonymous (a point to which I return below).16 While Pestre’s last point in the quotation above reminds us of the increasing invisibility of a working class that has either been unwilling or unable to access the means of upward social mobility, it also points to the invisibility of other social groups and specifically, in this context, to those who do not buy into the value of increased visibility in donor conception.17 I return below to the question of who gets invisibilized in the calls for more transparency in donor conception but first focus briefly on what Pestre identifies as the new modes of social action.

In the Digital World If the agora is not a flatland, it is most certainly, partially, a virtual land. The unprecedented means in digital media for revealing and disseminating information, making connections and breaking them, cannot be underestimated. The moves to more transparency are facilitated through the Internet



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and the burgeoning networking possibilities of social media. Self-­help and campaigning groups that mobilize around specific medical disorders and compromised biological bodies increasingly rely on and are largely effective and affective through their use of the Internet. In the words of Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, emerging biosocialities have found the World Wide Web to be “a congenial host territory” (Rose and Novas 2005: 449; see also Rose 2007). It has become clear that as well as for emerging biosocialities, the World Wide Web has become a congenial host for the self-­authoring and self-­determining individual who both flourishes in and is encouraged by the possibilities of the Internet. In addition to the plethora of databases and indexes that allow people to find ancestors, old classmates, love matches, like-­minded hobbyists, and so on, there are voluntary registries and databases to which donors and donor-­ conceived people and their parents can subscribe.18 In this context, the donor sibling has emerged as a new kin figure (Edwards 2013, 2015), and the search and discovery of donor siblings begins on the Internet. The search can be undertaken independently of formally organized registers and does not require the permission or backing of the clinic or indeed the donor whom the siblings have in common.19 I have argued elsewhere that this is a kinship that relies on the intimacies of social media where propinquity is not necessarily synonymous with proximity (Edwards 2013). The fact that many donor siblings conduct their relationships via the Internet rather than face-­to-­face does not seem to compromise the emotional charge of the relationships that they report. Affective ties of love and care are recounted not only between the siblings but also between their kin. Of interest is the way in which the Internet not only facilitates such a biosociality, in this case a kinship forged through the facts of donor conception, but also facilitates the life projects of autonomous persons: persons who act to shape their own life course and forge a kinship that matters to them. The Internet and social media have been analyzed as forms and means of resistance to neoliberal hegemony: as providing democratic hope and alternative ways of creating and forging collectivities. Daniel Miller’s analysis of Facebook fits this genre. For him, the best way to understand Facebook is with reference to anthropological studies of close-­knit societies, with their dense and intense social networks (Miller 2011). Facebook resurrects lost relations, former school friends, and neighbors who have migrated: it brings back to the homeland diasporic populations while connecting them beyond. It is also a forum for the public display of intense antipathy that is more often

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than not the flip side of the same close-­knit society. I see resonances between the transparency and openness called for in donor conception and the transparency demanded by the Internet generally and social media specifically: both push what was, and could still be, private into the public domain. Such a move (from inside to out) raises questions about whether the etiquettes, habits, and conventions of Facebook, and its successors, ever more readily accessible in the proliferation of mobile digital technologies, shape and are shaped by a particular kind of personhood. It has been argued that the Internet is both the product of and a home for the idealized autonomous and self-­contained individual. Dominic Boyer argues that this is not to say that the Internet is making us any less social, just “differently social” (Boyer 2013: 136). He calls for scrutiny of the two-­ way traffic between the experiential self and the spread and multiplication of mobile media interfaces: for him the latter are likely to make “autological discourse more experientially intuitive and epistemically compelling.” At the same time, “a broader socialization into late liberal subjectivity might encourage the popularization of media interfaces . . . that promise and to some degree confer the experience of an idealized form of autological freedom” (Boyer 2013: 135). An idealized form of autological freedom is also apparent in the British debates about disclosure in donor conception: the call for the right of donor-­conceived people to know the means of their conception chimes with the imagined autological freedom that has become second nature to the Internet. This is not to deny that the Internet facilitates affective ties of kinship as well as being the medium in which such ties are forged, maintained, and broken but merely to add that it is a kinship chosen and brought into being by the autonomous person who takes responsibility for her or his own well-­being: the kind of person who has also been identified as central to the projects of neoliberalism.

Neoliberal Personhood? Idioms of neoliberalism are mobilized in both descriptions of concrete structures of contemporary lifeworlds and the human experience of them. I am not qualified to contribute to questions of whether neoliberalism is a political ideology, an economic system, or a set of social practices, and the jury is out on whether neoliberalism is a useful polysemic concept that allows us to connect up diverse occurrences of the same phenomena across the world or



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is a distraction from insightful ethnographic understandings of specific lifeworlds.20 But I am interested in the kind of persons that neoliberalism is said to require and to shape, even while agreeing that it can be neither a stable nor “a predictable ‘package’ of policies, ideologies and political interests” (Hoffman, DeHart, and Collier 2006: 9). The autonomous person and the idea of individual responsibility are said to be embedded deep in neoliberalism as a political and economic strategy (albeit with local variants) that understands markets and finance as the motor and bedrock of social action.21 Within such a regime, a high value is placed on individual choice and on the freedom to pursue personal desires, whether they be commodities or the means of self-­improvement.22 Neoliberal personhood entails the cultivation of accountability and responsibility for the self; it promotes a self-­generated individuality and an “enterprising self.” It entails a key idea of the self that can and ought to be worked upon.23 This resonates with the “ethopolitics” of Nikolas Rose. For him, in the politics of advanced liberal democracies (not for him neoliberal), “individuals are enjoined to think of themselves as actively shaping their life course through acts of choice in the name of a better future” (Rose 2007: 26). A variant of biopolitics (which collectives and socializes), ethopolitics works at and on the ethos of self: the moral and sentimental self at the level of beliefs and values. It is concerned with the self-­techniques by which people “should judge and act upon themselves to make themselves better than they are” (Rose 2007: 27). The starting point for Rose is the “step change” in our capacity to engineer what he calls “life itself ”—the unprecedented developments and growing capacities in biomedicine and biotechnology. The starting point for many scholars of neoliberalism is the needs and excesses of capital, and it is in those needs that they recognize neoliberal dispositions, subjectivities, and agencies (e.g., Gershon 2011; Hilgers 2011). While some anthropologists insist on their local specificities (Kanna 2010), others show how the idioms of neoliberal personhood bleed into the reworking of kinship and belonging as matters of choice, freedom, and flexibility in ways that suit these specific economic regimes (Weiss 2004; Shever 2008; Ellison 2009). But there have been few studies thus far of how such selves are cultivated and reproduced within the organization of kinship and in the ideas and values entailed in “proper” parenting. Tatjana Thelen and Haldis Haukanes (2010) point to a good reason why this might be the case. They argue that in tandem with the “deprivatization” of both childhood and family life in recent decades, social anthropology has separated and carved out a significant niche for the study of children. This has

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been at the expense of studying relationships between parents and children, as researchers have tended to concentrate on either parenthood or childhood (with a greater emphasis on the latter more recently). Thelen and Haukanes outline an interesting paradox: as children are increasingly understood to be capable and competent social actors, parents are seen to be less and less capable, as lacking and in need of intervention, monitoring, support, education, and so forth (Thelen and Haukanes 2010).24 Eirini Papadaki’s telling examples from a maternity hospital in Athens (this volume) adds ethnographic ballast to their argument. Papadaki reveals how social workers, with good intentions, are constantly making judgements about what constitutes the behavior of a “proper” mother: more or less all those who cannot observe the dominant “maternal script” (in her examples, “undocumented” migrants and mentally unstable or poor women), are deemed unfit to raise their children, and thus find themselves outside the reproductive economy (Papadaki, this volume). The current insistence in the United Kingdom that parents tell their donor-­conceived children the means and methods of their conception and the imperative for those children to know the identity of their gamete donor conveys, among other things, a message of inadequacy: the inadequacy, that is, of parents who do not tell their children how they were conceived. The ideal of a responsible and emotionally articulate parent is celebrated in such formulations, as is the kind of family that is a corporate and corporeal unity held together by bonds made up of honesty, transparency, and openness. Parents who do not reveal are, from this perspective, wanting.

See-­Through Kinship The current loud and emphatic call for full disclosure in donor conception is of a piece with calls for more transparency and openness in many spheres of personal and political life in the first decades of the twenty-­first century, and not only in the United Kingdom. Wikileaks aside, much has been written about the ubiquity of transparency as a tool of governance and about what a prescriptive and burgeoning visibility hides (see, e.g., Strathern 2000; West and Sanders 2003). It is generally understood to be “part and parcel of a nexus of associated ideas that together make up the new, globalised market rationality in contemporary society” (Garsten and de Montoya 2008: 2–3) and, informed by the psychological sciences and contemporary therapeutic (particularly psychoanalytical) cultures, to be imbricated in the politics of



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neoliberalism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003). Modern society, it is said, celebrates its rationality through the example of transparency and, according to Todd Sanders, is “modernity’s moral compulsion as well as its characteristic feature, at once its motor and its message” (Sanders 2003: 149). The deployment of transparency in a project of civilizationism is of interest here: its work today in the reimagineering of a clash of civilizations is significant. In one version of what we might think of as late neoliberal politics (with security at its core), the opposition between the liberal, open, and democratic and the illiberal, closed, and traditional (for which read “Muslim”) runs through European political rhetoric of many different hues.25 In the domain of donor conception, transparency and openness are understood and conveyed as good for the health and well-­being of high-­ functioning families. Secrets and lies are debilitating. There is a moral imperative to disclose, and this is not considered to be only a private matter for families to decide. The open, liberal, and—in the UK context—middle-­class sensibility (and see Bundgaard and Fog Olwig, this volume, for a Danish example) places a high value on open communication in families, on the flattening of hierarchy, and on the upending of patriarchy. At the same time, diversity is acknowledged with an attendant liberal attitude toward homo-­ parental, adoptive, recombinant, and single-­parent families.26 The celebration of this diversity requires openness. It requires such new configurations of family to be known: not to be hidden, shameful, or stigmatized. A similar logic is expressed by and on behalf of donor-­conceived people: the more they are revealed, brought out from the shadows, and into the open, the more the likelihood of their being normalized and becoming less “special” or out of the ordinary. From this perspective, diversity is to be celebrated, and difference is to denied: all ways of reproducing a family are, or ought to be, equal—to a point: a point to which I return below. The notion of transparency when applied to organizations holds an inbuilt assumption that “publicity and visibility make for transparency of operation” (Strathern 2000: 313). Similarly, more transparency, more information, and more openness within families are imagined as enhancing and lubricating relationships: ensuring enduring solidarity. The push to more openness and transparency in donor conception is informed less by the practices that go on within actual families, which may be more or less hierarchical or more or less prone to withholding facts and hiding truths, and more by a particular politics and value in specific forms of family relationships. In such a cultural logic, the knowledge of the means of your conception axiomatically improves

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the relationships in which you are embedded: secrets and lies are debilitating. This begs the question of how not disclosing—not revealing something to somebody—is converted into a secret. A secret is nondisclosure thingified: an entity with a life of its own. It is a thing that is not necessarily under the control of its keeper. It can spoil a relationship because it is leaky. Not only are secrets hard to keep, in this cultural logic, but they also show up in the disposition of the keeper. When discovered, they constitute a betrayal—of trust. Paul Gilroy, in a searingly perceptive analysis of how racist rhetoric, outlawed in spontaneous quotidian speech, is implicit in official political commentary picks apart British prime minister David Cameron’s speech given in Munich in February 2011. Coming not long after German chancellor Angela Merkel and just before French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced the failure of multiculturalism in their respective countries, Cameron used the opportunity to declare the failure of “state multiculturalism” in the United Kingdom. It had failed, he argued, to preserve Britain’s inclusive and dynamic national identity and was to be replaced by a “muscular liberalism”:27 Frankly we need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism. A passively tolerant society says to its citizens, as long as you obey the law we will just leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. But I believe a genuinely liberal country does much more; it believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy, the rule of law, equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality. It says of its citizens, this is what defines us as a society: to belong here is to believe in these things. (Cameron, quoted in Gilroy 2012: 385) Gilroy points out that Cameron’s evocation of values is decisive: it creates a hierarchy of cultures and denies any possibility of horizontal social plurality. According to Gilroy, “State multiculturalism is to be replaced by assimilationism which has itself been recast as a process of managed integration aimed at making us all safer, more secure and more similar” (Gilroy 2012: 387). This is not new. Multiculturalism has never not been under attack.28 But I think it fair to say that currently there is a sustained, explicit, and unseemly hammering of nails in its coffin.29 The Nuffield Council working party heard evidence from both religious representatives and researchers studying understandings of ART from British



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Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu perspectives (Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2013). Participants in the fact-­finding exercises emphasized the fact that there is no one generalizable British “South Asian” view, and ideas held about donor conception by British Pakistanis, Indians, or Bangladeshis, for example, are as diverse and complex as among other communities. At the same time, however, various factors, including the involvement and response of the extended family in key kinship decisions, the stigma attached to infertility, and the significance of the patriline, were identified as shaping “British South Asian” preferences for privacy (see also Culley and Hudson 2009). Other researchers have noted the intense scrutiny, from wider family members, on newly married British Pakistani couples for signs of pregnancy and have argued that involuntary childlessness and its solutions are a relational rather than an individual matter (Hampshire, Blell, and Simpson 2012).30 The British Muslim, Sikh, and Hindu parents who seek to keep infertility private, fear disapproval or even ostracism from an extended family or wider community, or argue that openness and disclosure, in the context of donor conception, are not for them are now doubly marked as other. Their views are held up as yet another example of the illiberal and traditional: proof yet again of the superiority of liberal British values, which are white and middle class. The family that nurtures open and tolerant relationships is the family that reproduces the “proper” citizen who can be integrated unproblematically: it is the kind of family that embodies the democratic ideals needed for inclusion in the body politic (and see the introduction to this volume for the longevity and reach of ideas about “good” and “bad” kinship). Again, where does this leave the anthropologist? The move toward more openness and transparency in donor conception will not be reversed, and we would not, I suspect, wish to argue against moves that destigmatize forms of assisted conception, which include the substitution of gametes and embryos. And the inevitable and slowly increasing acceptability of telling children the means of their conception in contrast to high-­handed advice to “go home and forget all about it” is to be supported and encouraged. Dogma is, however, dogma, and we need to remain alert as to what and who gets invisibilized in what Strathern (2000), in a different context, identifies as “the tyranny of transparency.” My aim has been to unpack and pay attention to the family forms that are privileged when family secrets are denounced and that allow some rather than others to belong unproblematically to the state in which they reside. The insistence on transparency in donor conception entails, and not necessarily intentionally, opprobrium for those parents who do not tell: a moral judgment, at times explicit but more often than not implicit, not only on their

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parenting capacities but also on the kind of kin relationships that not telling implies. Such opprobrium is hidden, or perhaps disguised, by the insistence on the rights of the donor-­conceived child: an insistence, that is, on the freedom of self-­determining and self-­making individuals to fashion their own life projects.

Acknowledgments A first version of this paper was presented at the workshop “Doing Politics— Making Kinship: Toward a Future Anthropology of Social Organization and Belonging,” held at Humboldt University, Berlin. I would like to thank the organizers for their timely and productive move to bring together anthropologies and histories of politics and kinship and the other participants in the workshop for an incredibly interesting and informative discussion. I am very grateful to Erdmute Alber and Tatjana Thelen for their encouragement and helpful editorial suggestions and to two anonymous reviewers.

Notes 1. I present the terms used in the debate from now on without scare quotes, but note the ethos that idioms such as “disclosure” and “nondisclosure” convey. 2. The DCN, for example, which was established in 1993 by donor-­conceived families and their supporters, is committed to both openness and “full disclosure” and to supporting parents to ensure “that donor conceived children are told about their origins as early as possible and in the best possible way” (“DNC Mission Statement” n.d.). 3. I was an invited member of the working party, and this paper draws on that experience. I do not write here, however, as a member of the working party and only draw on data that is in the public domain. I would nevertheless like to acknowledge here my appreciation of other working party members; the Nuffield Council Secretariat, especially Katharine Wright and Kate Harvey; and the participants in the fact-­finding and consultation exercises. Both the argument of this paper and its flaws are mine. 4. See Nuffield Council on Bioethics (2013: 28). The Australian state of Victoria is often cited in this context; for examples from other countries, see Blyth and Frith (2009). In Victoria, the facts of donor conception are recorded on an appendix to birth certificates, and the Law Reform Committee has recommended retrospective disclosure of the identity of donors (and see Freeman 2014). The Australian government has thus far not agreed to allow donors, who donated under conditions of anonymity (in this case prior to 1998), to be identified without their permission, but the debate is ongoing, and Victoria acts as a beacon for UK supporters of full and retrospective disclosure.



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5. This case was put strongly to the working party by the International Donor Offspring Alliance in its written response to the call for evidence (Nuffield Council on Bioethics 2013: 29). 6. An English charity affiliated to the Church of England. 7. Of course, whatever changes are made in the United Kingdom does not extend to fertility treatment abroad, where anonymous gametes can be procured, or to the informal arrangements people make to procure semen. 8. There have been a number of perceptive studies of an increasing focus on parenting styles and parenting skills in the United Kingdom, a focus that has been partly fueled by the growing influence of developmental psychology and the emergence of the child guidance clinic (see, e.g., Rose 1989 and Burman 1994). Such studies have also alerted us to class-­specific parenting practices and to the way in which middle-­class practices are both naturalized and deemed optimal (Gillies 2006; Edwards 1995). While this is not the place to do justice to this rich literature, it is worth noting that often what is identified as middle-­class parenting preferences includes negotiation and reasoning strategies (rather than authoritatively directing or telling children what to do) and a “concerted cultivation” (Lareau 2003) of the individual. 9. Such ideas are fed, on a daily basis, by popular television programs such as Who Do You Think You Are? as well as state interventions such as those made by the Child Support Agency, which is tasked with ensuring that absent fathers are identified and demands DNA testing for verification. 10. Dominic Boyer characterizes neoliberalism as “the dominant and viral variant of late liberalism” (Boyer 2013: 134), while David Graeber (2014) dates it to the 1980s with the breaking of the trade unions, the evacuation of working-­class interests from political parties, and access to mass credit and home ownership. 11. And indeed, the DCN was an important interlocutor in the consultation and fact-­finding activities of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics working party on which this chapter draws. 12. Their thesis attracted criticism, partly because of its lack of historical nuance on what came before Mode 2 and partly because of its relative lack of attention to the end of twentieth century political and economic interests and conditions that explicitly shaped the changes they identified. 13. Adriana Petryna mobilizes the concept of biological citizenship to describe how Ukrainians after the Chernobyl nuclear explosion made claims on the state through evidence of their compromised biological bodies (Petryna 2002). In the case of donor-­ conceived adults and their families in the United Kingdom, the bodily disorder of infertility was bypassed, and one could say resolved, through donor conception. Donor-­ conceived people and their families are creating new collectivities through the Internet and through self-­help and campaigning groups, and their sociality is forged through the fact of donor conception that they share. It is through collective action that they make their claims on the state: for example, for more transparency, for changes in legislation, and for better support services. In the case of donor-­conceived people it is not their

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biological bodies that are compromised but instead the kinship they know as significant. The broken kinship link, for them, has a knock on (and an inevitable) effect on their identity—on their sense of “who they are.” 14. Pertinent here is Gemma John’s analysis of how in Scotland the Freedom of Information Act is being used to reinforce governmental accountability and to address a crisis in public trust (John 2013). 15. A decade after Pestre’s comments, the influence of this relatively younger educated class in the proliferation of administrative and auditing jobs across many of the key institutions of contemporary European society is starkly evident. A decade later, Graeber earmarks a burgeoning “professional-­managerial” class (elsewhere a “financial-­ bureaucratic” class) as responsible for administrating the deepening “bureaucratization of almost every aspect of social life” that has been, for him, a hallmark of neoliberalism (Graeber 2014: 75). 16. There is extensive literature on so-­called fertility tourism from a good variety of scholarly perspectives (see, e.g., Pennings 2002; Deech 2003; Turner 2007; Inhorn and Patrizio 2009; Unnithan 2010; Speier 2011). 17. See also Papadaki (this volume) for a poignant account of the “invisible” women who leave the maternity hospital in Athens without their babies. 18. Two such registers are the Donor Sibling Registry in the United States and the Donor Conceived Register in the United Kingdom, and both facilitate matches (also using DNA test results) between individuals conceived with gametes from the same donor (predominantly sperm donors), in some cases anonymous, helping them locate each other. 19. For example, in the United States the code attached by sperm banks to each vial of semen for anonymity has been successfully used to connect those conceived from the same batch of semen (Hertz and Mattes 2011: 1135). The New York Times headlined a report on this unpredicted possibility: “Hello, I’m Your Sister: Our Father Is Donor 150” (cited in Moore 2007). The donor siblings who do find each other report their experience in positive ways, and many seem relatively less interested in locating the donor than they are in finding their other “half siblings” (see Edwards 2015). 20. An informative debate in the pages of the journal Social Anthropology addresses these questions and more (e.g., Kalb 2012; Wacquant 2012; Hilgers 2012, 2013; Jessop 2013). And for a useful review of the key components of neoliberalisms that have been addressed by anthropologists, see Anjaria and Rao (2014). 21. The trope of individual responsibility is for Loïc Waquant (2012) the glue that sticks together his key features of (North American) neoliberal politics: commodification, penalization, and workfare. 22. Boyer argues that while neoliberalism is usually “recognized for its ontological investment in markets and commerce as the basis of all social action . . . [it] is also ruthlessly autological, seeking to suppress inter individual relatedness and reciprocal obligation under the pursuit of individual wills and desires” (Boyer 2013: 134). 23. See also Povinelli’s autological subject (Povinelli 2006; Venkatesan et al. 2011).



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24. The scrutiny of working-­class mothers from a wide range of health and social service professionals and the constant assessment of their “parenting skills,” or more precisely their lack of them, is by no means a new phenomenon (Edwards 1995). 25. On the long history of classifying family forms, see also the introduction to this volume. 26. And see Nancy Fraser (2017) for a discussion of what she calls the “progressive neoliberalism” (as the interplay between progressive social movements and the service-­ based business sector) rejected by supporters of both Brexit and Donald Trump. 27. It is clear that it is Muslims particularly who are targeted in all three of these major, public, and political challenges to multiculturalism. The terror perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway on July 22, 2011, revealed the extent of transnational racist networks supporting nationalist ideologies in which the enemies are Muslims, multiculturalism, and supporters of multiculturalism (Andersson 2012). 28. While this is not the place to enter the fraught debate on the origins and limitations of multiculturalism (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001), it is worth noting that by the end of the twentieth century, the active aspiration of “diversity” had been pretty much abandoned in the United States, Australia, and a number of European countries. Immigrants and minority groups were increasingly expected to “choose” to assimilate to the values of liberalism just at a time when state-­provided social and educational services that might help them to do so were systematically being withdrawn, franchised out, or privatized (see, e.g., Mitchell 2004). 29. We witnessed another sustained and febrile debate on “British values” in the aftermath of the election of a majority Conservative government in May 2015. Introducing a new bill to ban “extremist organizations” and to clamp down on “radicalization,” the home secretary, Theresa May, listed them as “democracy, rule of law, tolerance, understanding, acceptance of different faiths,” while former British prime minister David Cameron opined that “for too long, we have been a passively tolerant society.” See “May Asked to Define Extremism in New Counter-­Extremism Bill” (2015) and “David Cameron to Unveil New Limits on Extremists’ Activities in Queen’s Speech” (2015). “British values,” sovereignty, and “taking back control” were, even more recently, the platform on which the campaign to leave the EU was fought (and won, at least in the referendum). 30. I think it fair to say that pregnancy and infertility are always and everywhere relational matters but, of course, relational in different ways.

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Klotz, Maren. 2014. [K]information: Gamete Donation and Kinship Knowledge in Germany and Britain. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Konrad, Monica. 2005. Nameless Relations: Anonymity, Melanesia, and Reproductive Gift Exchange Between British Ova Donors and Recipients. New York: Berghahn. Lareau, Annette. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. May Asked to Define Extremism in New Counter-­Extremism Bill. 2015. BBC. Miller, Danny. 2011. Tales from Facebook. Malden, MA: Polity. Mitchell, Katharyne. 2004. Geographies of Identity: Mulitculturalism Unplugged. Progress in Human Geography 28(5): 641–51. Moore, Lisa J. 2007. Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid. New York: New York University Press. Nowotny, Helga, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons. 2001. Re-­Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Polity. ———. 2003. Introduction: “Mode 2” Revisited; The New Production of Knowledge. Minerva 41(3): 179–94. Nuffield Council on Bioethics. 2013. Donor Conception: Ethical Aspects of Information Sharing. London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Pennings, Guido. 2002. Reproductive Tourism as Moral Pluralism in Motion. Journal of Medical Ethics 28(6): 337–41. Pestre, Dominique. 2003. Regimes of Knowledge Production in Society: Towards a More Political and Social Reading. Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy 41(3): 245–61. Petryna, Adriana. 2002. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2006. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Power, Michael. 1999. The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rose, Nikolas. 1989. Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge. ———. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-­ First Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rose, Nikolas, and Carlos Novas. 2005. Biological Citizenship. In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, 439–63. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Sanders, Todd. 2003. Invisible Hands and Visible Goods: Revealed and Concealed Economies in Millennial Tanzania. In Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order, ed. Harry G. West and Todd Sanders, 148–74. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shever, Elana. 2008. Neoliberal Associations: Property, Company, and Family in the Argentine Oil Fields. American Ethnologist 35(4): 701–16.



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Speier, Amy R. 2011. Brokers, Consumers and the Internet: How North American Consumers Navigate Their Infertility Journeys. Reproductive Biomedicine Online 23(5): 592–99. Strathern, Marilyn. 1999. Property, Substance and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London: Athlone. ———. 2000. The Tyranny of Transparency. British Educational Research Journal 26(3): 309–21. ———. 2005. Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives Are Always a Surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thelen, Tatjana, and Haldis Haukanes, eds. 2010. Parenting After the Century of the Child: Travelling Ideals, Institutional Negotiations and Individual Responses. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Thompson, Charis. 2005. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Turner, Leigh. 2007. “First World Health Care at Third World Prices”: Globalization, Bioethics and Medical Tourism. BioSocieties 2(3): 303–25. Unnithan, Maya. 2010. Infertility and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) in a Globalising India: Ethics, Medicalisation and Agency. Asian Bioethics Review 2(1): 3–18. Venkatesan, Soumhya, Jeanette Edwards, Rane Willerslev, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, and Perveez Mody. 2011. The Anthropological Fixation with Reciprocity Leaves No Room for Love: 2009 Meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory. Critique of Anthropology 31 (3): 210–50. Wacquant, Loïc. 2012. Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism. Social Anthropology 20 (1): 66–79. Weiss, Brad, ed. 2004. Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age. Leiden: Brill. West, Harry G., and Todd Sanders, eds. 2003. Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Chapter 7

Undoing Kinship Producing Citizenship in a Public Maternity Hospital in Athens, Greece Eirini Papadaki

This chapter investigates the process of institutional and ethical de-­kinning of birth mothers by state social workers. The material presented here was collected in one of the largest public maternity hospitals in Athens, Greece, referred to here under the pseudonym “ATHENA.”1 I focus on stories of de-­ kinning narrated by the staff of the maternity ward concerning newborn infants who, instead of leaving the hospital with their birth mothers, are sent off to a state care center and thereafter, possibly, to an adoptive family. In such cases of permanent postnatal separation, state social workers inhabit the position of gatekeepers, in that they are authorized and expected to make decisions on what constitutes “appropriate” motherhood, which is often linked to the notion of political belonging within the Greek nation-­ state. State agents become gatekeepers and bearers of the dominant ideology of motherhood and participate in defining the appropriate or ethically justifiable reproductive scenarios for the next generation of citizens and thus in defining the national body. From their position within the state apparatus in Greece, social workers in maternity wards in state hospitals are thus entrusted with the task of classifying birth mothers as “proper” or “not proper” and of determining which of them can be trusted to perform their prospective duties as mothers and which cannot, similar to the Danish kindergarten pedagogues described in the following chapter by Bundgaard and Fog Olwig. Exploring such day-­to-­day classificatory practices, as Thelen and Alber argue in the introduction to this

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volume, offers deeper insights into the mutual constituency of kinship and the state.2 Birth fathers are almost absent from this context, and they never seem to claim custody of the child. This absence of fathers is linked to the special symbolic weight that the ideal of motherhood carries in Greece in being conceptually—and almost indistinguishably—equated with parenthood as well as with the reproduction of the nation and with citizenship (Paxson 2004; Halkias 2004; Athanasiou 2006; Kantsa 2014). Within this ideological framework social workers act as gatekeepers, and their decisions encouraging “proper” and “good” Greek citizens to reproduce and rear children also entail a formal disavowal of “undesirable” types of parents and parenting. In other words, the maternity ward at state hospitals constitutes a critical site where some “parents are categorized as appropriate and inappropriate” and “some reproductive futures are valued while others are despised” (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995: 3), raising the question of who defines “the body of the nation into which the next generation is recruited” or who is considered to be “in the national body and who is out of it” (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995: 3; see also Ragoné and Twine 2000 as well as Thelen and Alber, this volume). As Claudia Fonseca points out, “little has been said about the ‘de-­kinning’ process to which birth mothers . . . are submitted” (2011: 311), and here we might ask what institutional mechanisms are in place to demand, facilitate, and enforce the separation of some newborns from their birth mothers. And, most important, how do state actors become gatekeepers in the creation or dissolution of kinship relations and thereby in regulating the conduct and safeguarding the interests of (future) citizens? According to the Greek Civil Code, a person’s kinship with her or his mother is “established from the fact of birth” (Article 1463, Greek Civil Code).3 And yet, there is state interference in the relations of the fragile category of children—most important of infants delivered at state hospitals who are considered to be “in danger,” especially if their birth mothers have been categorized by the hospital staff as “inappropriate,” which leads to their relocation from potentially “inappropriate” environments to “safer” and more “appropriate” environments. How does it become possible to interrogate and even reject the legal definition of motherhood? The context of the public maternity hospital shows the terms on which the state validates and invalidates kinship and the methods and practices of state officials to control birth mothers, to redefine the kin tie with the child, so that the eventual separation seems ethically legitimized. At first glance, social workers legitimate their work as a protective network for children and women who lead a life

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that is deemed “unsuitable” for motherhood. Notwithstanding their professional ethos, their insistence on acting “in the best interests of the child” also extends their obligation to ensuring on behalf of the state that “proper” citizens are reproduced. The social service team at public hospitals collects data on the medical and family histories of infants who are slated to be put in state custody. Most of those files concern infants whose birth mothers left as soon as they were born (in which case the district attorney classifies the baby as having “unidentified” parents and as having been left “unattended” [Article 1538, Greek Civil Code])4 and those who are to be removed from the care of the birth mother, perhaps against the wishes of the latter (in this case, a procedure for the transfer of parental custody is initiated under Articles 1532–1541 of the Greek Civil Code).5 Birth mothers at public maternity hospitals who seem not to conform to the dominant family script in how they choose or are forced by their life circumstances to lead their lives are subject to various forms of interrogation and investigation, often culminating in a de-­kinning process that severs her bond to the infant. In reference to similar cases in Ecuador, Esben Leifsen observes that the interventionist encounters of child welfare were commonly enforced in the context of “urban ethnic minorities,” who “live lives that are incompatible with the modes and norms of the educated mestizo white middle class,” as “a solution to care and, at the same time, morally acceptable” (2010: 106). According to Signe Howell (2006: 9), the de-­kinning process is “what makes adoption of abandoned children possible” and, at the same time, what also activates the kinning process for adoptive parents. In this chapter, I examine how social workers, in their daily practice as state agents, not only translate the law, thereby establishing or disestablishing relations of kinship, but also seek to produce “proper” Greek citizens. Jessaca Leinaweaver (2009) has shown how adoption workers in contemporary Peru understand and enforce the law based on their different personal life stories. In a similar way, I follow the hospital workers as state agents in situations when they reproduce and safeguard normative middle-­class understandings of family, based on the ethics and the historically imagined role of women in Greece. More specifically, I argue that in resorting to what I call the ethical economy of reproduction, state officials in Greece draw on images of familiarity and estrangement in an attempt to account for the ethicality of the decision. Defined according to dominant values and classifications, the ­ethical economy of reproduction entails configuring and categorizing the

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ways in which the conditions of birth are acceptable so as to rightfully accord to the birth mother the legal and ethical status of the parent, which in effect regulates which kinship relations must be rendered intelligible in any given instance. This economy creates the imaginary maternal scripts that are actualized in the framework of middle-­class subjectivities (on the importance of specific middle-­class norms and values for state processes of classifying and ultimately for reproducing “proper” citizens, see Edwards as well as Bundgaard and Fog Olwig, this volume).

Motherhood in Greece Early ethnographic studies have already shown the centrality of kinship for gender identity in rural Greece (Campbell 1964; Friedl 1962). Getting married and having children have signified adulthood and the modalities of self-­actualization for both women and men. For women, motherhood was a “sacred” duty, and it was only through gestation within the context of marriage that they were transformed into moral subjects (du Boulay 1974; Hirschon 1978; Dubisch 1986). The discourse on motherhood in Greece is replete with notions of sacrifice, suffering, and pain (Dubisch 1995; Seremetakis 1991; Caraveli-­Chaves 1986). “Pain,” as a cultural expression within the context of daily life and of the self-­presentation of women, offers an expressive space for demonstrating the tensions and negotiations of gendered subjects with the normative understandings of social structures (Lutz and White 1986: 421). Since the time these studies were conducted, considerable political and social changes have occurred in Greece: the restoration of democracy in 1974, integration into the European Union, and new waves of international and internal migration (Cowan 1990) as well as new discourses about modernity and progress and, last but not least, decisive changes of the family law in 1983.6 Despite these transformations, as Papataxiarchis (2013: 236) remarks, the family values and gender understandings that continue to reverberate in Greece “show an impressive resilience to changing structural conditions.” Heather Paxson’s (2004) ethnography offers another powerful analysis of motherhood, which, she argues, remains one of the basic elements of women’s subjectivity despite all other changes. She addresses the transformations that have occurred over a period of fifty years in the ethical contexts within which motherhood becomes socially acceptable.7 According to

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Paxson, during the 1990s middle-­class Athenian women perceived motherhood “as something to be worked at, achieved, and continuously demonstrated” (2004: 214), something that continues to involve sacrifice, pain, and suffering in bringing up “proper” children. Paxson, following Herzfeld (1985), notes that “achieving motherhood is part of a larger moral economy of gender and kinship in which women are concerned with being ‘good’ mothers and ‘good at being’ women” (Paxson 2006: 482). Succeeding in motherhood at the end of the 1990s depended on the “proper” choices a woman made for raising “proper” children. In examining these women’s choices in conjunction with the state’s policies, she addresses the question of how “liberal family policy measures are implemented with the aim of enabling women to fully achieve their ‘biological mission’ as women and to reproduce for the nation” (Paxson 2004: 211). These women assume the ethical position of the mother by demonstrating their ability to self-­govern and by exercising physical self-­determination as well as by limiting the number of children based on an assessment of their ability to raise them “properly.” These perceptions are still evident and continue “to inform the moral [middle-­class] assumptions of policy makers, physicians, family planning workers, mothers-­in-­law, and prospective lovers” (Paxson 2004: 139). More recent studies dealing with similar issues illustrate the normative strength of heterosexuality, the national and naturalized character of motherhood established by marriage,8 and the “scientification” of motherhood (Georges 2014), imposed as an attitude by medical and psychological discourses that are interested in producing “proper” and “responsible” mothers.9 Taking a broader view, in reproducing “neoliberal personhood” that “entails the cultivation of accountability and responsibility for the self; it promotes a self-­generated individuality and an ‘enterprising self ’ ” (Edwards, this volume).

Undoing Kinship The fourth floor of ATHENA, where the social services are located, also houses the neonatal intensive care unit and the infants’ hospitality room. The staff, such as social workers, midwives, nurses, and doctors, express middle-­ class subjectivities with which the contemporary ethnographers of Greece are quite familiar.10 Women who give birth there, and some who leave the hospital without their babies, are most often poor, drug addicts, mentally unstable,

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or undocumented immigrants. Undocumented immigrants predictably fall casualty to the provisions in the institutional framework that does not permit the hospital to give the child over to the birth mother unless she can formally identify herself with proper documentation.11 Many of these women lacking identifying documents who pass through the maternity ward at ATHENA hospital do not speak Greek and have no knowledge about the bureaucratic procedures involved at the outset. They are especially not aware that they may not rightfully claim their place as the mother of the newborn for those reasons. Thus, some of them are forced to “abandon” their newborn and lose custody in the process. Such women, who are “invisible” to the Greek state for a combination of reasons, end up not being able to assert their motherhood position under this system.

Speaking a Similar Sentimental Language Katia is a forty-­year-­old married social worker who has been working for almost fifteen years at ATHENA. Although she is childless and has not fulfilled the Greek ideal of motherhood, she expressed a very definite view of what constitutes a proper mother and how she should act, which resembles Paxson’s (2004) description of the middle-­class social world. Katia chose to become a social worker because she “always wanted to help people.” Describing her job, she emphasizes her role as striving to “resolve critical incidents,” which might otherwise put infants “in danger.” One of her responsibilities is to inform the juvenile prosecutor if she believes the birth mother should be denied custody so the child can be placed in another state institution that supervises adoptions. Katia pays particular attention to her explanatory reports to the juvenile prosecutor in order to protect herself from rumors, comments, and accusations that she is “taking people’s children away.” During the period of time I spent at the hospital, Katia had different reactions to these incidents. But several patterns became evident in how she chose to classify birth mothers.12 For example, she felt compassion for “women from Georgia”: These women are forced to leave their babies here due to an existing code of honor among them. A code just like the one Greeks used to share fifty years ago. They cannot keep a baby if they are not married, or the relatives might kill them [i.e., the women]!

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I also met the social workers’ “beloved” baby of the room, Petros, who had been born to a woman from Georgia, who will be referred to here as Tamta. The baby had been retained in the hospital for nine months, waiting to be transferred to a state care center to be adopted.13 As Katia informed me, his birth mother had been a housekeeper until her dismissal after she became pregnant by her boss. Being married to a man who still lives in Georgia with their children, it was impossible for her to have a baby with a different partner outside of marriage. The story that Tamta narrates sounds familiar to Katia. She connects it with a discourse from the past when a code of honor (timi) and shame (dropi) organized the social world of men and women in Greece.14 Her interpretation resembles what Campbell has described in his classic ethnography as the commonsense assumptions of the community: “a girl who has a premarital love affair should be killed” (1964: 187), which apparently would also apply to a married woman who has sexual relations outside her marriage. Even if sometimes the family “had not the courage to do it, or was persuaded by the girl that she was raped rather than seduced,” there was no question of the child being absorbed into the family: Where the fate of the mother may hang in the balance, that of an illegitimate child is never in doubt. It cannot be allowed to live in the community, a testimony to the dishonor of the girl’s family. . . . In this community, an individual cannot exist simply qua individual, he [sic] can only be taken account of and evaluated in relation to his [sic] family membership; and this implies membership within the group of a wedded pair and their legitimate offspring. To harbor in the family a bastard, only one of whose parents belonged to a group, would be a contradiction in terms. (Campbell 1964: 187) These (male) ideas about births out of wedlock are part of a wider context of dominant reproductive discourses of the time and shed light on the possible consequences of the “illegal” practices of reproduction.15 In their study of the “honor crimes” in Greece in the 1950s and the 1960s, Seremetakis (1991) and Avdela (2002) argue that regardless of the reasons and the motives of the people involved in the crimes in question, the dynamic of the honor code persisted even in the postwar era. Katia was raised in a small village in the Peloponnese, where the code of honor and even crimes of “honor” were part of their recent history.16 Thus,

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she understands the decision by Tamta to give her newborn up to the state for adoption against this backdrop and does not fault the mother for doing so. Throughout my research, I came upon people who would narrate stories about “abandonment” or about separation between mothers and children as a practice of “cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 2005). Among them, the elderly would narrate stories about the informal transfer of children between families in the period before the 1946 Greek Civil Code had taken effect, which governed family life and brought state visibility to births, families, and the circulation of children. These stories spoke of a world without papers and identities, of a world where the practice of census collecting by registry offices was not the rule, a world in which a woman could give birth to a child and then give it to her infertile sister and where infants born out of wedlock were very often abandoned. Tamta, in the eyes of Katia, seems to follow a cultural imperative that in such instances, the birth mother would have to entrust her baby to the care of the Greek state. During my visits to the hospital I witnessed repeated phone calls from Tamta to Katia, and based on the latter’s responses I surmised that Tamta was constantly asking about her baby and was looking forward to his adoption. Katia commented on those conversations: Tamta suffered a lot when she parted from her child, and she looks forward to her child being given to a family. She also calls me “sister.” Every time she calls me on the phone, I tell her about the love we give to her child and I reassure her that the adoption procedures have been scheduled. Our communication is difficult, since she doesn’t speak good Greek and she does not exactly understand the adoption procedures. Women such as Tamta, who succeed in presenting their story in a familiar and emotional language of separation from the babies they have borne, stand a better chance of gaining Katia’s understanding. In this instance, an ambivalent “other” is created who is familiar and bears some relation to her “own past.” Katia reports that she was obliged to take this action when Tamta confided that she wanted to keep the child but would be unable to. Even when Katia asked her if she would want to keep the child if she found her a better job or a house or an organization to support her, Tamta’s answer was always negative. Katia’s narrative implies that it was Tamta’s embeddedness in her place of origin that was crucial to her decision rather than poverty.

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This may also be the key to understanding Katia’s willingness to build a relationship with Tamta. “From the beginning,” Katia says, “Tamta felt that she had not abandoned her child, but, rather, left him ‘somewhere,’ this ‘somewhere’ being me, here, and that was the proper thing to do.” Katia presents her relationship with Tamta not as one of a faceless state agent with a client but rather as a relationship of trust, which allows Katia’s decision to sever her bond with her baby to be accepted and understood by all concerned. Thus, in the eyes of the social worker Tamta’s decision to leave her child with Katia had been ethical and bore similarity to stories she had heard in the past. In making an ethical choice, Tamta is thus seen as acting “responsibly” and claiming her rightful place in both societies she lives in. While obeying the ethical code of her homeland, proving she is a good Georgian woman, she is equally able to demonstrate that she is also a good mother for having chosen to protect herself and her child from the possible consequences of the Georgian code of honor by leaving her child with the Greek state.

“Undocumented” Immigrants Not every case affords Katia the opportunity to bond with the birth mother with the same degree of ease and accord. Other immigrants, especially those from Central Asia and Africa who had entered the European borders without formal documentation, are treated with greater suspicion. Anthropologists have noted that the attitude of the Greek society toward migrants, especially before the mass refugee movement of 2015,17 was characterized by indifference or even hostility.18 They were devalued in much the same way as they were historically devalued by European colonial fantasies. These “invisible travelers” unwittingly become “visible” for a while when they enter the maternity ward, where they suddenly confront the state and its representatives, posing an administrative and ethical dilemma to them (Papataxiarchis 2009: 68–71). Those traveling from afar, especially pregnant women and those with young children, who crossed borders at great risk incur even greater wrath. This context is clearly illustrated by Katia’s reaction to a twenty-­day-­old baby who was born to a woman from Afghanistan who, by her own account, had crossed the border in the ninth month of her pregnancy without any identification papers. In contrast to Tamta, this woman remained nameless throughout our conversation,19 a first sign that Katia refused to relate to her at some level:

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I cannot understand how a woman can risk traveling by boat to cross borders in the last month of her pregnancy, or while carrying her newborn. She is aware of the fact that she may drown, or even give birth on the boat. For them, life is not the same as it is for us; death is not tragic for them. They value life in a totally different way. . . . They do not love like we do. Motherhood does not mean the same to them. . . . I am very suspicious of all those incidents involving the migrants. How am I supposed to know that they are not considering selling baby organs, etc.? Katia presents the migration as a conscious “decision” made by the birth mother to cross the sea, which had endangered the life of her unborn baby. Sarah Green (2012), in discussing the lives of the undocumented dead in the Aegean, describes how the dangerous action of crossing borders “illegally” defines border crossers and shows that “these bodies are not person-­ citizens . . . in terms of the Greek state” (17), viewed from a bureaucratic perspective. Especially in the case of anonymous crossers of the sea, such as the anonymous mothers who enter public maternity hospitals in Greece, it seems almost inevitable that they will be classified by the social workers as unethical, “inappropriate” mothers, demonstrating the tight connection of the (modern) state with conceptualization of “proper” kinship (see Thelen and Alber, this volume). According to Katia, the woman’s understanding of motherhood, which seems so removed from any acceptable or comprehensible maternal ethic, disqualified her for motherhood. Katia even goes so far as to suspect that the woman may have given birth to make material gains (by selling the child’s organs), which again demonstrates how the border between us and them is drawn along fluid lines of kinship (on the ethical evaluation of “different” forms of kinship as signaling “otherness” in relation to the state, see Thelen and Alber, this volume). Katia told me that the persons who had accompanied the woman to the hospital were (probably) her partner and some other relatives and spoke neither English nor Greek. They did not have any documentation with them, not even the identifying documents provided by the border authorities. Therefore, Katia considered it her duty to start a legal procedure and to not hand over their child, because she didn’t know the name of the mother. Katia told me that she had explained to her in Greek that she had to arrange all the administrative procedures concerning her passport in consultation with the embassy. The mother and her partner left the hospital,

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leaving the newborn there, and Katia waited a few days, just in case they returned with their passports. The newborn stayed at the maternity ward for twenty days, during which time the birth mother did not return. Following that, Katia compiled a report for the juvenile prosecutor describing the situation and suggesting that the child be declared “unattended” and of “unidentified” parents and that a state commissary be declared the child’s custodian (according to Article 1522). A few months later, having tracked all the legal procedures, I found out that the child had been taken to a state infant center in order to be adopted.20 The cases I have presented so far outline the different reactions of state actors based on assumptions about different parenting styles as being characteristic of different social groups without citizenship. Interestingly enough in these cases, while existing kinship ties between noncitizens are broken, the children are “adopted” by the Greek state and ultimately turned into Greek citizens. Miriam Ticktin (2011) also encountered different reactions from state agents in judging and categorizing the immigrant encounter. She witnessed compassion from state actors only when the immigrants manifested “a familiar Orientalist narrative about pitiful . . . women” so that “compassion depends on circulating narratives, images, and histories—on evoking a historically located moral legitimacy—and often on maintaining this unequal power relation between nurse and patient, citizen and foreigner” (121). Similarly, “other” kinship norms needed to be invoked in the context of the maternity ward in order for this disconnection to be legitimized. In Tamta’s case, her use of the familiar sentimental language made this disconnection possible and acceptable to Katia, placing the former in the position of a woman who deserved to be a mother and had made the right decision to leave the child in the hospital. By contrast, the “invisible,” “illegal” Afghan woman did not share the same ethical or sentimental language with Katia. She was deemed “unfit” in the best interests of the child, who was to be placed in state protection until finally being put up for adoption, as the mother had not measured up to the norms of motherhood.

Maternity Lessons In both cases, the social worker had an almost unshakable belief in having made the “right” recommendation or decision. In the case of Tamta, the birth mother herself had chosen to leave the child she had borne in the hospital.

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In the case of the Afghan woman, who remained nameless and whose desires and circumstances remain unknown to us, she was prevented from taking her infant because she lacked the necessary identification documents. While these cases seemed straightforward to the hospital staff, there are cases when the “problem” is not evident from the outset, when the staff becomes concerned over how they should act and whether it is “crucial” that the prosecutor be notified. The discussions and negotiations with the birth families enlighten us about the mechanisms necessary to establish the boundaries of “good mothering” and, by extension, the production of “proper” citizens (see also the introduction to this volume).21 One incident of this kind concerned a twenty-­year-­old Greek birth mother, Calliope, whom I met in the hospitality room when her baby was three months old. Calliope was transferred to a two-­bed ward along with her newborn and accompanied by her eighteen-­ year-­old partner. During the first two days after birth the baby would not stop crying, while its parents wandered around the hospital and did not follow the midwives’ advice on how to take care of the baby. This was when Fenia, a fifty-­ year-­old social worker at the maternity hospital, was notified by the staff, and the protection mechanism was put into action. Fenia recounted how she entered the ward and found the baby all on its own, “abandoned” in its cradle, while the couple sharing the room complained that the baby’s crying had not allowed them to sleep for two days, as the parents refused to take care of the baby. When Calliope turned up at the ward, Fenia tried to show her how to cuddle the baby when it cried, but Calliope replied that she would not cuddle the baby so as not to spoil it and have it ask for cuddles all the time. Then Fenia asked her if she wanted them to take the baby to the hospitality room for a while so the pediatrician could examine it and Calliope could rest. She agreed, and Fenia left the room. A little later, however, she was informed that Calliope eventually refused to let the baby be taken to the hospitality room for fear that the pediatrician or social workers would take it away from her. Fenia returned to the ward: I entered the ward and saw the man from the next bed cuddling the baby in order to calm it down, Calliope lying back, her partner sitting in a chair and playing with his mobile phone, and another nineteen-­year-­old girl, who introduced herself as Calliope’s sister. When she gave me her identity card, which I had asked for, she told me that she had a different surname than Calliope because their father had not recognized Calliope as his daughter. She also said

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“Oh, please, don’t take the baby away, we will all take care of it.” I agreed. I gave them some more advice on how to massage the baby so that it calms down, and I left. After the weekend, when Fenia returned to the hospital, she was told by the on-­duty staff that Calliope’s behavior was annoying and that the situation had not changed throughout the weekend. Calliope’s sister, on the other hand, admitted that they could not keep the child and that it had to be taken to the hospitality room so they could rest. As a result, Fenia explained, “We filed the case histories for both Calliope and her partner so that we could officially justify the baby’s transfer to the hospitality room,” and the parents could now see the baby during visiting hours. The baby was brought to the ward, and Calliope left the hospital. Based on the case history that Fenia wrote up, Calliope herself had grown up in an institution, as her mother had been a drug addict but had never assented to Calliope being adopted. Fenia contacted the social worker of the institution where Calliope had grown up and was informed that Calliope had recently won a court case and been paid 25,000 euros in damages, which “she spent in twenty days.” In the meantime, Calliope’s mother showed up “in a horrible condition, under the influence of drugs,” and asked Fenia not to hand the child over to Calliope because she would certainly give it up for adoption. At the same time Calliope’s father, whom she had recently met and who had never claimed paternity or legally recognized her as his daughter, contacted the hospital to say that he wished to raise Calliope’s infant. Fenia also received phone calls from volunteers in Calliope’s “home” institution, where she was raised, who promised to help her with the infant. The interest expressed in Calliope’s child by so many people failed to convince Fenia that it would receive adequate care outside the state institution. Rather, in the process of evaluating and classifying the “case,” Fenia maintained that Calliope would be unable to establish control over her private space. Instead, she would have expected the young mother to show personal interest in the child and to manifest an ability to retain control over her life according to middle-­class standards. Following the dominant ideology of the nuclear family, which Fenia advocated, broader kinship relations did not constitute a stable environment for the infant, who would have to be put up for adoption in “its best interests.” To succeed in motherhood, as Paxson (2004) points out, a woman has to demonstrate that she is responsible and can make the right choices, create a

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life plan, and offer stability. Accordingly, Fenia decided that the situation was “critical” and sent a notice to the prosecutor informing him about the situation. In order to document the case “correctly,” she kept a secret attendance book under the baby’s cradle for the midwives to document how often Calliope visited the infant. During the first two months she visited the child six times, while her partner never showed up. Therefore, Fenia compiled a new report for the prosecutor asking for the “case to be closed,” documenting the social case history, and proposing that the child be taken to a state institution and later be adopted. Commenting upon her decision on the case, Fenia stated that Calliope says that she wants the child, and I do believe her, but she wants to have her own way, as she was taught in the institution where she grew up, where she got no love, so she can give no love; it’s not that she doesn’t want to, she just hasn’t learned how to give love. . . . If you want the child you need to organize yourself. What do you want? You either care or not. You’re gonna have a home, you’re gonna have a job. . . . Is this the father? What is he doing, why won’t he recognize the child? Where is he gonna take the child? One needs to set certain limits; we can’t live without limits, can we? Otherwise, the child needs to be adopted. This illustrates the ideas underlying the categorization based on which certain infants can be classified by the prosecutor as “abandoned,” “neglected” or “unattended.” Legal procedures were activated for removing the infant from its birth relatives and placing it in a care center for adoption. Fenia told me that she tried to help the young mother “set limits” (a psychological term often used by Fenia) and “take control” over her life, but Calliope had not once signaled to her that she was following the advice and the maternity lessons. Lynne Haney’s study (1997, 2002) set in the context of mature socialism in Hungary shows that the fate of mothers who applied for some financial allowance “depended on their ability to demonstrate ‘proper’ gender practices” and parenting skills (1997: 218). Similarly, in the case examined here, Fenia defines what “proper” motherly behavior and care means while also keeping a watch over Calliope by maintaining secret attendance books and inventing various practices of surveillance in order to measure Calliope’s maternal feelings.

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Although she was not aware of the “critical nature” of the situation at the beginning, Fenia had no doubt about her final decision, claiming that she had only been mistaken once, when she had been “misled” by her emotions and handed a baby over to its birth mother, only to regret it later. Fenia narrated the story of thirty-­two-­year-­old Evanthia, who had faced “psychological problems” when she gave birth to her fourth child. All the children she had borne before had been put up for adoption. When she became pregnant for the fourth time she had expressed her wish to keep the child, and the hospital staff tried to support her. The baby remained in the hospitality room for nine months, and Evanthia visited it every day while the staff tried to teach her some basic parenting skills. She showed sufficient consistency to convince the staff that she could raise the child responsibly. Similar to programs described by Leifsen (2010: 114), the fact that Evanthia had followed a specific schedule for nine months attested to her ability to be a “proper” mother in the eyes of social workers. During these months, the staff taught her how to dress the baby and take care of it, after which they considered her ready to take the baby home. Fenia recounted: We finally handed the baby to the mom, and we believed she would do fine, but it didn’t really work out. We gave her the baby because we had kept it for nine months and we could empathize with her. Everybody told me to give it, they told me to give it. Now the child is four years old and mute. This child isn’t mute due to some medical problem, but because the mother doesn’t pay it any attention, as she doesn’t know this role. She doesn’t understand that a mother has to spend time with her child in order to teach it how to talk. We shouldn’t have given the child [to her]. We considered giving her this opportunity, and it was I and several others who insisted, because we had seen her try. Even though the psychiatrist had warned me, he had said: “Fenia, I’ve got the impression she will exhibit psychotic syndromes; we shouldn’t give her the child.” But we did. As in the example of Calliope, Fenia reiterates the idea that it is solely the domain of the mother to care for the child, in this case to teach the child to speak. Fenia does not place any responsibility on other kin or on the neighborhood or the state system for having failed to provide child care. Similar to the examples of the Danish pedagogues (see Bundgaard and Fog Olwig, this volume), who evaluated the quality of parenting based on specific notions

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of appropriate care (accompanying children into the group room, preparing healthy food, reading to them), Fenia acts as the family expert and makes decisions in “the best interests of the child.” Haney (1997, 2002) has also shown the importance that “family experts” placed on mothers spending “quality” time with their children. Domesticity was not only about cooking and housing; it also involved “quality time” spent raising “proper” children. As Haney notes, “[f]or those who did not fit into prescribed models of domesticity, it led to the pathologization of their mothering practices” (1997: 221). Like in Hungary, the dominant gender ideology in Greece “associates women with domesticity” (Cowan 1990: 54). Keeping a “house” in Greece not only denotes a building to live in but is also a metonym for family, stability, and orderliness (du Boulay 1986: 141; Dubisch 1986; Dubisch 1995: 209). In contemporary Greece, domesticity also includes “proper” child rearing, something that has to be accomplished by a mother so she can raise her children properly. In the “domesticity test” that could have established whether she was an appropriate mother, Calliope had failed to demonstrate her intentions to learn from the social worker. Lynne Haney has observed some comparable techniques of control used by welfare workers to test if mothers had managed to “demonstrate ‘maternal labor’ ” (Haney 2002: 137) in order to establish whether they qualified for financial allowance. These “caseworkers employed a variety of techniques to evaluate their clients’ child-­rearing practices, the most common of which were ‘domesticity tests’ ” (Haney 1997: 217). To an extent, as Fenia told me, women who show an inability to master maternal domesticity have been “abandoned” themselves. Thus, they need to first be given care and affection in order to learn how to provide them to others. Their competence in acquiring domestic skills varies, and they cannot all pass the exams.

Conclusion In this chapter I have attempted to identify situations in which a legal category status, such as motherhood, understood as having resulted from giving birth, comes to be questioned and a de-­kinning mechanism is activated, which could lead to the loss of the maternal rights and the mother’s custody of her child. The stories above demonstrate more the normative understanding of middle-­class motherhood in Greece, as imprinted in the minds of the social workers, than the conditions under which birth mothers live. These

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stories reveal how the representatives of the state categorize or pathologize their encounters through their perception of the cultural and material differences or similarities with them, thereby creating or dissolving kinship but also reproducing a “proper” citizenry for the state (see Thelen and Alber, this volume). State representatives in the hospital activate de-­kinning procedures when a case is brought to their attention. They assess the cases and regulate the bodies of the birth mothers’ involved as well as of their offspring, reflecting the dominant middle-­class perceptions. They in effect decide which women may reproduce without posing a threat to the body politic and which have the ability and the right to raise “proper” children and future citizens. As in times when unwed mothers were not allowed to legitimately raise the children they gave birth to, those who are now forced out of the reproductive economy are “undocumented” immigrants, “mentally unstable” or poor women, and women leading “unsuitable” lives—that is, more or less all those who cannot observe the dominant maternal script. It is here that legal technologies are implemented as a consequence of a certain interpretation, which is always consistent with the ethically intelligible framework relevant for reproducing. Within this framework, the “unnatural” severance of a mother from her child is transformed into a perfectly intelligible scheme.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the hospital staff who allowed me to enter their workplace and facilitated my research. I am grateful to the editors for their extensive comments and suggestions, which helped to improve this chapter significantly, and also to the two anonymous reviewers. Special thanks go to Akis Papataxiarchis, Ourania Tsiakalou, Venetia Kantsa, Deanna Trakas, and Michi Knecht for intellectual discussion and ideas for this chapter and to Robert Parkin and Gita Rajan for language editing.

Notes 1. The ethnographic material on which this chapter is based is a part of a wider research project conducted in Greece, mainly in Athens, for 24 months beginning in

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September 2010 for my PhD dissertation on adoption (Papadaki 2015). I carried out fieldwork in a maternity hospital, at an infants’ public hospitality center, and at an association of adoptive parents, where I became acquainted with most of my interlocutors. I followed the children’s trajectories from where they were born to where they were adopted. 2. See also Franklin and McKinnon (2001) on the notion of relative values. 3. Law no. 3089/2002 on medically assisted human reproduction expanded the legal concept of motherhood and included the legal provisions for surrogacy. 4. A child “of unidentified parents” means that the identity of the birth parents cannot be verified, while an “unattended” child was, by definition, exposed to various dangers, as specified in social service’s reports (Article 1533, Greek Civil Code). A child of “unidentified parents” abandoned by birth parents without any contact details was also deemed “exposed” to such dangers. 5. If social welfare services find that a child is “in danger,” a procedure for the disestablishment of parental custody is initiated. The social services report is sent to the district attorney, who initiates the judicial proceedings pursuant to Articles 1532–1541 of the family law. 6. The reform of the 1983 family law abolished a series of provisions. The legal concept of “paternal authority” was replaced with “parental responsibility,” motherhood was equated with fatherhood, abortion was legalized, the legal category of “bastard” was abolished, common marital ownership was institutionalized, and the institution of dowry was disestablished. 7. Paxson (2004) has studied the transition of the ethical context in which motherhood is realized from an “ethic of service” in the postwar era to an “ethic of choice” in the neoliberal era and to an “ethic of well-­being” in the era of assisted reproductive technology and the intensified institutionalization of reproductive practices. 8. Georges (2014) studies the medicalization of motherhood through pregnancy guides, which instruct Greek women on how to become good mothers using a scientific discourse. Athanasiou (2006), Halkias (2004), and Kantsa (2014) connect the dominant biopolitical reproductive discourses with the microdiscourse of their ethnographic contexts and underscore the political character of motherhood, sexuality, and marriage. 9. On the concept of responsibility, see Davis (2012). 10. See Kantsa (2013) about motherhood in modern-­day Greece. The majority of the articles in this collection are about perceptions of motherhood from a middle-­class perspective. Any studies conducted on undocumented people in Greece are subsumed under the question of immigration and have been mostly conducted from the viewpoint of the Greeks, as I also do, and the ways in which they experience instances of otherness. This is less due to elitism than to the difficulty of the researcher focusing on people constantly on the move. 11. This can be really hard in the cases in which the documents have been lost during the migrants’ journey to Greece, they cannot request copies because their country of origin is at war, or these countries do not issue such documents at all.

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12. Brouskou (2015) investigated the archival sources of a public nursery over the period of the whole of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the ways in which kinship was constructed or erased by the staff. 13. In that time, state care centers for infants were full and didn’t have room for an extra child. That is why Petros stayed for so long in the maternity ward. 14. See Herzfeld (1980) for a critique of the study of Mediterranean societies based on an analysis of their honor and shame code. For further information on how the purity of women was discussed in postwar rural Greek communities, see Herzfeld (1983). 15. In Greece, as in other European contexts, the law regulating the status of children born out of wedlock changed in 1983, when the word “bastard” (notho) was dropped. 16. See Seremetakis (1991). 17. The attitude has undergone radical transformation after the mass refugee flows of 2015 and is more positive. Future studies will discuss the impact of the immigrants and refugees and the resultant transformation of Greek society. See Papataxiarchis (2016). 18. See also Herzfeld (2011: 23). 19. I thank Michael Herzfeld for noticing this at the workshop “Doing Politics— Making Kinship: Back Towards a Future Anthropology of Social Organization and Belonging,” in which I presented the idea of this chapter. 20. First the district attorney is awarded custody, followed by the institution in which the child is to be hospitalized and ultimately by the adopting family in the event the child is adopted. 21. These cases include both migrants with identification papers and Greek citizens.

Bibliography Athanasiou, Athena. 2006. Bloodlines: Performing the Body of the “Demos,” Reckoning the Time of the “Ethnos.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 24(2): 229–56. Avdela, Efi. 2002. Dia Logous timis: Via, Synaisthimata kai Axies sti metemfyliaki Ellada [For Reasons of Honor: Violence, Emotions and Values in Post-­Civil War Greece]. Athens: Nefeli. Brouskou, Aigli. 2015. “Logo tis kriseos sas charizo to paidi mou”: I diakinisi ton paidion stin elliniki koinonia tou 20ou aiona; To paradeigma tou dimotikou vrefokomeiou Thessalonikis ‘Agios Stylianos’ [“Because of the Crisis I Give You My Child”: The Circulation of Children in Twentieth Century Greece; The Case of the Public Orphanage of Thessaloniki “Agios Stylianos”]. Athens: SyMePe. Campbell, John Kennedy. 1964. Honour, Family and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caraveli-­Chaves, Anna. 1986. The Bitter Wounding: The Lament as Social Protest in Rural Greece. In Gender and Power in Rural Greece, ed. Jill Dubisch, 169–94. Princet­on, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Cowan, Jane K. 1990. Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Davis, Elizabeth Ann. 2012. Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. du Boulay, Juliet. 1974. Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village. Oxford, UK: Clarendon. ———. 1986. Women: Images of Their Nature and Destiny in Rural Greece. In Gender and Powe in Rural Greece, ed. Jill Dubisch, 139–68. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dubisch, Jill. 1986. Introduction. In Gender and Power in Rural Greece, ed. Jill Dubisch, 3–41. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1995. In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fonseca, Claudia. 2011. The De-­Kinning of Birthmothers Reflections on Maternity and Being Human. Vibrant 8(2): 307–39. Franklin, Sarah, and Susan McKinnon. 2001. Introduction. In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, 1–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Friedl, Ernestine. 1962. Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece. New York: Holt, Rinehart. Georges, Eugenia. 2014. Odigos stin egkymosyni: Symvoules eidikon gia tin synkhroni Ellinida mitera [Pregnancy Guide: Expert Advices for the Contemporary Greek Mother]. In Politikes tis kathimerinotitas: Synoro, soma kai idiotita tou politi stin Ellada [Everyday Politics: Border, Body and Citizenship in Greece], 419–54. Athens: Alexandria. Ginsburg, Faye D., and Rayna Rapp. 1995. Introduction: Conceiving the New World Order. In Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, 1–17. Berkeley: University of California Press. Green, Sarah. 2012. Apouses leptomeries: Oi diethnikes zoes ton xoris eggrafa nekron somaton sto Aigaio [Absent Details: The Transnational Lives of Undocumented Dead Bodies in the Aegean]. In To prosfygiko kai metanasteutiko zitima: Diavaseis kai meletes synoron [The Refugee and Migrant Issue: Readings and Studies of Borders], ed. Sevasti Trubeta, 133–58. Athens: Papazisi. Halkias, Alexandra. 2004. The Empty Cradle of Democracy: Sex, Abortion, and Nationalism in Modern Greece. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haney, Lynne. 1997. “But We Are Still Mothers”: Gender and the Construction of Need in Post-­Socialist Hungary. Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society 4(2): 208–44. ———. 2002. Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Herzfeld, Michael. 1980. Honour and Shame: Problems in the Comparative Analysis of Moral Systems. Man 15(2): 339–51.

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———. 1983. Semantic Slippage and Moral Fall: The Rhetoric of Chastity in Rural Greek Society. Journal of Modern Greek Studies 1(1): 161–72. ———. 1985. The Poetics of Manhood: Contest and Identity in a Cretan Mountain Village. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2005. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-­State. London: Routledge. ———. 2011. Crisis Attack: Impromptu Ethnography in the Greek Maelstrom. AnthropologyToday 27: 22–26. Hirschon, Renée. 1978. Open Body/Closed Space: The Transformation of Female Sexuality. In Defining Females: The Nature of Women in Society, ed. Shirley Ardener, 66–88. New York: Wiley. Howell, Signe. 2006. The Kinning of Foreigners: Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective. New York: Berghahn. Kantsa, Venetia, ed. 2013. I mitrotita sto proskinio: Sinkhrones erevnes stin elliniki ethnografia [Motherhood in Forefront: Contemporary Research in Greek Ethnography]. Athens: Alexandria. ———. 2014. The Price of Marriage: Same-­Sex Sexualities and Citizenship in Greece. Sexualities 17(7): 818–36. Leifsen, Esben. 2010. Child Welfare, Biopower and Mestizo Relatedness in Quito, Ecuador. In Parenting After the Century of the Child: Travelling Ideals, Institutional Negotiations and Individual Responses, ed. Tatjana Thelen and Haldis Haukanes, 103–21. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Leinaweaver, Jessaca B. 2009. Kinship into the Peruvian Adoption Office: Reproducing Families, Producing the State. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 14(1): 44–67. Lutz, Catherine, and Geoffrey M. White. 1986. The Anthropology of Emotions. Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 405–36. Papadaki, Eirini. 2015. The Politics of Kinning: Adoption and the Ethical Economy of Reproduction in Modern Greece. PhD diss., University of the Aegean. Papataxiarchis, Efthymios. 2009. Stin akri tou vlemmatos: I krisi tis ‘filoksenias’ tin epochi ton diaperaton sinoron [At the Edge of the Gaze: The ‘Crisis’ of Hospitality in the Age of Porous Borders]. Sinkhrona Themata 107: 67–74. ———. 2013. Shaping Modern Times in the Greek Family: A Comparative View of Gender and Kinship Transformations After 1974. In State, Society and Economy, ed. Ada Dialla and Niki Maroniti, 217–44. Athens: Metaixmio. ———. 2016. Being “There”: At the Front Line of the “European Refugee Crisis”; Part 1. Anthropology Today 32(2): 5–9. Paxson, Heather. 2004. Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2006. Reproduction as Spiritual Kin Work: Orthodoxy, IVF and the Moral Economy of Motherhood in Greece. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 30: ­ 481–505.

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Ragoné, Heléna, and France Winddance Twine, eds. 2000. Ideologies and Technologies of Motherhood: Race, Class, Sexuality, Nationalism. New York: Routledge. Seremetakis, Nadia. 1991. The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ticktin, Miriam I. 2011. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chapter 8

Producing “Good” Families and Citizens in Danish Child Care Institutions Helle Bundgaard and K aren Fog Olwig

In 1882, a small book titled Børnehaven (The Kindergarten) was published in Denmark. It presented a number of images, music scores, lyrics, and texts that introduced educational activities for children according to the principles of the German educator Friedrich Fröbel (1782–1852),1 who regarded play as essential to children’s personal, spiritual, and intellectual development. The book was published in celebration of the centenary of Fröbel’s birth, with illustrations depicting well-­dressed and well-­mannered children eager to learn through play under the guidance of motherly, attentive, and elegant women. These images portraying the learning-­through-­play activities were set against the backdrop of either homes, displaying the best Biedermeier interior decor (see below), or a kindergarten classroom or garden. The idea of a preschool educational institution for children was conceived by Fröbel, who in 1840 established the first kindergarten (meaning “children’s garden”), where children could be nurtured as new members of society with the same tenderness with which the gardener cares for the budding sprouts in a garden (Stybe 1982: n.p.). When the Fröbel memorial book was published in Denmark in 1882, kindergartens were mainly for children from privileged homes. A century later, however, when the book was republished, there were kindergartens throughout the country (as in many other countries) attended by children from all segments of society. Indeed, kindergartens have become an integral part of Danish childhood, and most of them even today closely follow Fröbel’s principles. In this chapter, we will discuss what kind of citizenry these institutions

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seek to produce. We argue that the kindergartens operate according to norms rooted in the nineteenth century privileged bourgeoisie, which today has become identified with the relatively well-­educated majority of the Danish population, commonly and loosely termed the “middle class.” This prominence of Danish “middle-­class” norms in the kindergarten, we further argue, may have important implications for the self-­understanding and sense of belonging of those children whose families do not subscribe to or are unable to comply with the institution’s understanding of learning through free play or its emphasis on particular underpinning codes of conduct (cf. Edwards, this volume). Inspired by anthropological theory emphasizing the significance of care practices for developing notions of relatedness and belonging (Carsten 2000), we explore the kinning processes (Howell 2003) that take place as kindergarten children learn to relate to others and, by extension, to Danish society in general. Kinning among the vast majority of Danish children today occurs in a field of social interrelations involving two categories of caregivers: parents who care for the children in the home, on the one hand, and kindergarten teachers2 who are tasked with caregiving responsibilities for children at the public kindergartens, on the other hand. We show that through their interaction with parents and kindergarten teachers, the children become conscious of the particular relatedness they share with their parents as opposed to the kindergarten teacher. As we further demonstrate, the children also become aware that their parents, and by implication they themselves, will be highly regarded by the kindergarten teachers if their parents and the kindergarten teachers share the same ideas of “proper” child rearing and family relations. They will be held in lower esteem, however, if this is not the case. To that extent, kindergarten teachers play a central role in the reproduction of a proper citizenry, similar to the social workers studied by Eirini Papadaki (this volume) at a Greek maternity hospital. Their daily interactions with children and parents often also form the basis for evaluating them in a more or less overt manner. In the first section of the chapter, we briefly outline how the kindergarten, and related institutions, became an important force during the latter part of the nineteenth century in creating an educated core of Danish citizens. These citizens formed a social foundation for the transformation of Denmark into a democratic society, which then gradually evolved into a welfare society in the twentieth century. In the following two sections we examine first the Danish kindergarten as a site of the production of new citizens who adhere

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to Danish “middle-­class” norms and then the problems that this may generate for children from families who cannot or do not adhere to these norms. Finally, we discuss the implications of the conflicting norms for children’s feeling of belonging in Danish society. This chapter is based on ethnographic research on the kindergarten undertaken during the 2000s. In 2002–2003 Helle Bundgaard, collaborating with Eva Gulløv, carried out fieldwork in two preschools and their intake area. The area, a suburb of Copenhagen, was socially and culturally diverse and characterized by both social housing and single-­family houses (see Bundgaard and Gulløv 2008).3 Observations of interactions between children, parents, and staff were used as a point of departure for informal conversations and more formal interviews concerning perceptions of caring practices. In 2006, Karen Fog Olwig conducted life-­story interviews with sixteen teenagers primarily from well-­educated families living in the Copenhagen area. The interviews focused on their experiences of growing up in different public institutions, ranging from kindergarten to secondary school.4 Apart from ethnographic fieldwork, the paper also draws on participant observation, as anthropologist-­parents, of the close interaction between parents and staff in day care institutions situated in the middle-­income suburban and mixed-­ income inner-­city areas.

The Development of Day Care Institutions in Denmark Danish preschool institutions date back to 1828, when asylums that were characterized by strict or even severe disciplining methods began to offer day care services for the children of working-­class parents (de Coninck-­Smith 1995: 10–11). Almost half a century later, in 1871, the first kindergarten was opened for the children of wealthy families (Gulløv 2012: 92). An altogether different institution, it was inspired by the German educator Friedrich Fröbel, who developed the idea of the kindergarten as a preschool institution where children could be educated through creative activities and play (Sigsgaard 1978: 33; Tønsberg 1980: 24; Gulløv 2012: 92). In the early 1900s Fröbel’s ideas were introduced into the asylums, while folkebørnehaver (kindergartens for the people), also based on Fröbel’s ideas, burgeoned around the same time. In 1919, a law was enacted granting public funding to day care institutions, and since then the Danish state has increasingly been engaged in the care of children. From 1949 onward, the number of day care institutions

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grew (Palludan 2008 [2005]: 65), but the increase was more significant during the 1960s, when women began to enter the labor market in large numbers (Gulløv 2012: 95). Kindergartens came to play a progressively central role in the organization of Danish welfare society during the second part of the twentieth century, and the upbringing of children in Denmark thus became increasingly professionalized (see Gulløv 2012). In 2014, 97 percent of the children between ages three and five were cared for in børnehaver (Danish for kindergartens), while 41 percent of children below three years of age attended vuggestuer (crèches/nurseries) or age-­integrated day care facilities, and 23 percent were enrolled in private day care homes where, typically, an adult cares for three to five children (Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik 2015). Most of the remaining children were cared for in their own homes by a parent on maternity or paternity leave, which is state supported until the child is one year of age (Statistisk Årbog 2011: 137).5 Long before children begin to attend elementary school at the age of six, they are thus familiar with the social life of public institutions, where they spend between five and eleven hours a day five days a week (Winther 1999). The significance of Fröbel’s approach, which Danish day care institutions generally adopt, can be seen within the historical context of the nineteenth century effort to develop a democratic society based on an educated and cultured citizenry. This was of particular urgency in countries such as Germany and Denmark (which was heavily influenced by Germany), where an enlightened national citizenry was regarded as being foundational to the establishment of a modern nation-­state (Elias 2000 [1939]). In Denmark, an educated segment of the population engaged in civil service had gained considerable power during the late eighteenth century under the influence of the Enlightenment values of the absolute monarchy and played a central role in the country’s peaceful transition to a democratic society. This class was oriented toward a German culture of the home, later known as the “Biedermeier culture.” This culture of the home blossomed in Denmark as a form of high art that celebrated the harmonious, intimate family setting while remaining skeptical to things that were foreign or overtly grandiose. It sought to cultivate—and itself was cultivated within the context of—the emergent national culture of literature, music, and the arts in the nineteenth century. This notion of family life furthermore broadly served to popularize the image of a national family, with the king as the father figure (Lunding 1968; Den Store Danske Encyklopædi 2014).

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The Fröbel-­inspired kindergarten became an established Danish state institution during the course of the twentieth century and occupied the key position of mediator between the family home and the nation-­state, as it sought to simulate a homelike environment and engaged kindergarten teachers trained at state institutions specializing in preschool education. Fröbel, according to Robert Davis (2010: 291), saw the kindergarten as “a natural extension of the home and a protected site, where otherwise undervalued female capacities (whether learned or innate) could be exercised and women teachers cast confidently in the role of substitute mothers to very small children.” Fröbel’s idea of the kindergarten as a homelike environment for children was very much based on the notion of the middle-­class home. Thus, he found that the kindergarten had an important responsibility toward working-­ class children to “rebuild by example the moral fabric of family life and to repair the spiritual damage inflicted on infants by the deprivations of industrial living” (292). This ideological goal of giving children a good upbringing through the kindergarten was prominent in the Danish folkebørnehaver that emerged in the early twentieth century. During the 1930s and 1940s, folkebørnehaver grew in number and influence with the support of charities that were mainly affiliated with the church or political parties. The educational approach adopted by these kindergartens thus emphasized a form of control (Henriksen 2010: 6) that was very much in line with Fröbel’s view that children’s play needed to be guided by an educator to ensure that it promoted their “proper” development (Tønsberg 1980: 28). The pedagogical principles of the kindergarten changed somewhat during the 1970s, when a broader international movement of progressive education6 emphasizing free play, emancipation, and self-­determination began to have an impact on Danish child care practices in educational settings as well as at home. This resulted in the more authoritarian practices, giving way to what has become known as fri opdragelse (free upbringing). During the first decade of the new millennium, the increasing prominence of the neoliberal discourse spurred the adoption of new policies for preschool education (Gulløv 2012), defining particular learning objectives guiding the content of day care activities.7 Despite the introduction of a more structured curriculum in recent years, many elements of the progressive pedagogy are still highly valued in Danish day care institutions, and the activities continue to focus to a great extent on increasing social awareness among children. While the kindergarten teachers may introduce various activities during the day, the concept of free play is considered vital in that it

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allows children to decide for themselves how they want to spend their time. The primary role of the kindergarten teachers is to offer a safe, creative, and caring environment where the children can develop their social skills, human qualities, and personality rather than teachers imparting particular skills and knowledge to train the children for primary and secondary education (Gulløv 2012: 95). Danish preschools thereby present a striking contrast to many day care facilities abroad (Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa 2009; Connolly 1998), where structured curricula organize the main part of the day. Nevertheless, as we show, promoting free play in the Danish kindergartens, thought to aid the inculcation of social skills and personality development, has remained closely circumscribed within the overt, but more often implicit, cultural values and social norms associated with the notion of the Danish middle class. These middle-­class norms find a parallel in the emphasis on free choice that Jeanette Edwards has identified in British middle-­class perceptions of donor-­conceived children’s entitlement to obtain knowledge about their biological parents, if they so choose (Edwards, this volume). This focus, as Edwards shows, reflects a dominant societal ideology celebrating “the autonomous person and the idea of individual responsibility” rather than an openness toward different forms of agency in the families concerned. The Danish kindergarten’s lack of authoritarian methods, in other words, does not represent an interest in exploring different kinds of pedagogy and instead pursues a particular approach to producing “proper” members of society.

Kinning in Danish Public Day Care Institutions Caring for children in kindergarten involves a wider field of social interrelations that extends between the public institution and the private home. The character of these relations therefore has important consequences for the “successful” rearing of the children. This is borne out in interviews with Danish teenagers from middle-­income families. They primarily associated the kindergarten with positive experiences, where they learned to distinguish between their family relations at home and their play relations at the kindergarten yet found that these relations supported and complemented each other. In this way they developed a positive sense of self, both as individuals within the family setting and as accepted members of a wider community of relations outside the home.

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In their recollections, these youths distinguished clearly between the caregivers in the kindergarten and the parents, who were associated with the home (cf. Carsten 2004: 35–38). One boy described the kindergarten teacher as “a kind of friend” who was fun to be with and willing to play most of the time, in contrast to his parents, who rarely had the time to play but were loving and ensured a well-­functioning home. Parental love was different in that the children did not have to share their parents with a large group of other children, and at most had to share parents with other siblings, and as another boy explained, the kindergarten had produced a stronger sense of intimacy and relatedness in relation to the parents: “this is my mother, this is my father, while the kindergarten teachers were there for everyone; all were equal in relation to them.” At the same time, learning to interact in the larger public setting of the kindergarten was important. A girl explained that “The kindergarten was not a family, but another kind of community. You behaved in a different way than you did when you were at home.” The kindergarten thus was not so much an extension of the home but a representation of society at large. In the everyday kindergarten routine, the main role of the parents was to drop off and pick up the children. Some still recalled the pain of parting with their parents when they first began to attend the kindergarten: When I began attending the kindergarten I cried a lot, when my father left. [Do you know why?] I don’t know, I just think it was this feeling that he was not there, and that I was going to be with some people I didn’t know. But, in fact, I did know many of those I was going to be with [from the day nursery]. But then my father used to stay a little, perhaps leave for a few hours and then come again. And some had memories of the difficulty of letting go of their parents, especially when they (the children) were upset: Me and my father bicycled to the kindergarten and I fell and hurt my arm, and I was simply so upset that I wouldn’t let him go. . . . I remember him talking about having to go to the university, but I wouldn’t allow it. It ended when I played catch, but I remember keeping him back for an awfully long time.

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If children at times did not want their parents to leave when they dropped them off, they were also not always keen to leave the kindergarten when it came time for the parents to pick them up, especially if they were playing with other children. One teenager, for example, remembered that it was a favored sport to hide from parents when they came to pick them up—but usually at the same place, making it rather easy for the parents to find them. Through their daily experience of parting with parents, having occasional bouts of missing them during the day, looking forward to being reunited toward the end of the day, and playfully hiding when they came, the children developed a special sense of relatedness to their parents. This sense thus was not only based on statements and practices revolving around care relations associated with the home but also on regular periods of separation, much in line with Matei Candea’s (2010) suggestion that absence can be a key aspect of social relations. The significance of the daily separation and reunification of children with their parents is reflected in their almost ritualistic pattern. The teenagers described in detail how one of their parents would accompany them in the morning to their kindergarten locker in the entrance hall, where they would take off their shoes and put on their kindergarten slippers. Then the parents would bring them to their room to leave them with their group of children and the associated kindergarten teachers, exchange a few words with the teachers, and then bid goodbye for the day. In the afternoon, as the children recalled, the parents would sometimes spend a little time in the kindergarten, learning about the special events of the day, admiring any artwork the children had produced, and chatting with the kindergarten teachers and other parents. In this way, they showed not just parental concern with the well-­being of their child but also an interest in the kindergarten. The teenagers had fond memories of this parental presence in the kindergarten: My parents always knew what took place in the kindergarten, and they have always had a good relationship with the other parents. I remember many times, while I was putting on my clothes, my parents would be standing there talking with other parents, and, most likely, also to the kindergarten teachers. . . . One boy who also went there’s mother, Susanne, I remember my mother used to talk with her. I think he was one year older than me. I just have this image of them standing there and talking. It was quite cozy [hyggeligt].

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On special occasions, the parents would play a more active role in the kindergarten by, for example, bringing in treats or a cake for birthday celebrations, participating in parent meetings, and helping at special events. In the kindergarten, the children not only developed an understanding of their specific relationship toward their parents but also learned that this relatedness influenced their social identity. One of the teenagers who had attended the same kindergarten as her older sister recalled that “The kindergarten teachers, I think they liked us, but then they were rather fond of our family.” Her younger brother similarly reported that There was one [kindergarten teacher] we called Yellow Kirsten [after the yellow room where she had her group of children] and I think that she liked me, which meant that I also liked her, so we had a good friendship. And then my older siblings had also attended the kindergarten, so she kind of knew my mother. The children’s experiences at the kindergarten thus were shaped by how their family was perceived in general and the social identity that this bestowed on them well before they entered the institution. Once a family had been classified as “good,” the kindergarten staff seems to have been quite forgiving when problems arose. The same girl who noted that the kindergarten teachers liked her family thus recalled that her father failed to pick her up after he had attended a Christmas lunch, thinking that it was his wife’s turn. One of the kindergarten teachers took the girl along for Christmas shopping until she managed to make contact with the family. The father made amends by giving some bottles of wine to the kindergarten, and the family’s good relations with the staff were not disturbed. While these teenagers described how they, as young kindergarten children, developed a strong sense that they came from nice and likable families, children of non-­Danish or lower-­income background had a much less secure position in the kindergarten due to their particular family background. This is exemplified by an informal conversation with the head of a suburban kindergarten who recalled the fear and trepidation with which she had received two boys from what she called “problem families,” one of Danish origin and the other of Palestinian origin: I just knew it would be difficult. To be quite honest, I think we are all a bit frightened of the father of Mohammed. So it was with dread

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that we received the youngest son of the family. Mohammed has turned out to be just as much trouble as we feared. He and Dennis [the boy from the Danish “problem family”] are two of a kind. Whereas some children were categorized as hailing from “problem families” before they even arrived at the kindergarten, others quickly fell into this category because their parents were unfamiliar with the kindergarten’s codes of good parenting. One such child was Amina, who had a very difficult start in a suburban kindergarten.8 Amina’s father was a Palestinian refugee who after some years in Denmark decided to marry a young woman from his native country. Unlike most Danish children Amina had not attended the crèche before she entered the kindergarten, and she therefore was not used to being away from her mother. Furthermore, her mother, Kirdan, did not know how she was expected to behave as a parent in the kindergarten and did not act as expected by the kindergarten teachers. Rather than proceeding to the room of her daughter’s group in order to drop her off, she stayed every day in the entrance hall with her crying child, who wouldn’t let go of her mother. Kirdan’s behavior caused great frustration among the kindergarten teachers, who did not know how to handle the shy and uncommunicative mother. As time went by, their interactions with Kirdan became increasingly colored by their annoyance. One problem was Kirdan’s inability to speak Danish. Another more serious issue, however, was her “behavior,” because by remaining at the entrance hall rather than accompanying her child to her playroom, she gave no indication of attempting to adjust to the institutional norms and values. Kirdan’s behavior affected not only Amina’s introduction to the kindergarten but also her position in the institution. Staff began to refer to Amina as bilingual (tosproget), which in a Danish context does not refer to the ability to speak two languages but instead is a euphemism for a person belonging to an immigrant family with little or no education. This was not a neutral observation but rather a categorization and as such one that already projected her in a bad light and influenced how her social identity was formed at the kindergarten. The kindergarten teachers’ tendency to identify the children in terms of their families thus had important repercussions for the children’s acceptance in the kindergarten community. For the children associated with middle-­class families, it meant acceptance and inclusion. For the children from lower-­income families or those with a combination of a non-­Danish and low-­income background, it often meant rejection and exclusion, as the

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kindergarten teachers, like the Greek social workers in Papadaki’s study (this volume), assessed certain forms of parenthood as unsuitable for producing “proper” citizens. As noted by Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon (2001: 15), family and kinship can be “mobilized to signify not only specific kinds of connection and inclusion but also specific kinds of disconnection and exclusion” (for a discussion of exclusion through categorization of kinship, see also Thelen and Alber’s introduction to this volume).

Danish Day Care Institutions as Sites of the Production of “Proper” Citizens The preschools not only offer professional care for children but also, as noted, seek to shape the future citizenry by teaching them the skills they regard as important to master in order to be part of Danish society. This molding of new citizens is informed by Danish middle-­class values that are generally taken for granted by staff and rarely questioned by parents either because they share these values or because they are not in a position to question them. A central organizing activity in the kindergarten reflecting these values is the meal at noon, when the children are taught how to interact. During a typical day at a Danish kindergarten, children and kindergarten teachers share a number of meals. Only the early starters eat breakfast in the institution, whereas all children participate in an early lunch followed by a snack in the afternoon. In a period when the disappearance of the traditional family meal is subject to public debate (Mestdag 2005), Danish kindergartens can be seen as strongholds for defending the meal as a meaningful social event (Lupton 1994) founded on good middle-­class values (Frykman and Löfgren 2003 [1979]: 116; Olwig 2011). Food should not be eaten alone, hurriedly, whenever hungry. Meals must be carefully prepared and shared. The social significance of the meal at the kindergarten is signaled by the many rituals framing it. All the children are expected to wash their hands before the meal, and the table must be nicely laid, with plates, glasses, and cutlery arranged appropriately. Children are not permitted to eat before everybody is seated, and it is considered impolite to speak with the mouth full of food and to chew and drink at the same time: “chew, swallow and then drink,” the children are admonished. Conversing is allowed as long as it does not hinder eating, but negative comments on the food of others are not permitted. Outbursts such as “Ugh, I do not like that!” or “Yuck, you eat pig!” are

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not acceptable and are reprimanded by staff. Occasionally a member of the staff might comment positively on a particularly inviting and healthy looking sandwich: “That looks really nice!” or “Look, I also have an apple!” In order for children to acquire broader social skills, deemed necessary to become a well-­functioning member of society, kindergartens also train social interaction outside mealtimes. Key among these skills is the ability to interact with other children and grownups in accordance with accepted Danish middle-­class values. Physical outbursts are discouraged, and children are trained to verbalize their feelings instead (Bundgaard and Gulløv 2003). The teaching program “Step by Step” was developed with this particular goal in mind. While children are typically gathered in a circle, a kindergarten teacher might show a sketch of a face expressing a particular emotion, such as sorrow or anger, and then ask the children how they think the person feels and why the person might feel like that: “Why do you think he is looking so sad?” and “What will you do if you see somebody look like that?” Circle time is a common form of organized sociality and emphasizes teaching children to listen to each other, be considerate, take turns, and wait for one another. Middle-­class values are also reflected in other activities that are thought to be of great importance in the upbringing of the child: drawing, creating art, and listening to a story. Children are commonly encouraged to draw or engage in other creative work while sitting in groups, often with a kindergarten teacher. These activities are meant to enhance the fine motor skills. Listening to a story and being able to sit quietly while a grownup reads out aloud are also highly valued in kindergartens as an activity that strengthens vocabulary as well as imagination. In one of the kindergartens observed in a middle-­income area, it was common for a parent to read to a group of children in the morning. The institution encouraged this practice and invested in a big armchair, where parents could sit when reading aloud to the children. The kindergarten also organized weekly visits of a retired schoolteacher who would read to the children. She would arrive, armed with a selection of books from the local library, and the children would come running to join her. They were all familiar with reading as a cozy and intimate activity. In this particular kindergarten, the head of the kindergarten had initiated an increase in activities related to books. Being familiar with the intake area, she knew that parents would be only too happy to support an initiative related to reading. Ensuring that the children were familiar with and appreciated books was generally high on the priority list of caring practices among this group of parents, who considered books to be an important aspect of upbringing, caring, and

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kinning (see Heath 2000 [1986]). In this area, where it was common for both parents to work full-­time and commute considerable distances to work, some families, however, might not practice as much reading with their children as they would ideally like. At a kindergarten parents’ meeting, the parents discussed how television easily took up time that could otherwise have been used for reading. For them, the book initiative therefore was most welcome because it eased their bad conscience.

Breaking the “Negative Social Heritage” The formative role of the kindergartens is most explicit for children from low-­income families, who do not necessarily share the middle-­class values propagated by the kindergarten (cf. Ehn 1983), and this role is even more apparent if these families also happen to be of immigrant background. All parents are expected to bring their children to day care whether they have the time to take care of the children themselves or not. More or less permanently unemployed parents who are on social welfare thus will often get free day care for their children. The intention is to ensure that the children are socially stimulated, which is thought to increase their chance of breaking with what is commonly referred to as their “negative social heritage.” Immigrant parents are also encouraged to enroll their children in day care facilities. Nurses, who make regular visits to all mothers with newborn babies, generally advise immigrant mothers to sign up their babies for day care in order to ensure that the children can begin to attend from as young an age as possible and thus learn the Danish language and be introduced to Danish social norms and values. As demonstrated in the previous section, daily activities in preschools reflect the bourgeois culture from which the institution of the kindergarten emerged. It is founded on assumptions of a shared set of values, of which a joint meal, particular hygienic practices, and reading are some examples. Participant observation in kindergartens revealed, however, that the kindergarten teachers often were frustrated in their attempts to teach Danish middle-­class values and social norms to the children of lower-­income immigrant families. One kindergarten teacher from a kindergarten located in an ethnically and socially mixed neighborhood compared her experiences in this institution unfavorably with her former experience of working in a middle-­ income area with “nice families.” Despite the social significance of the meal,

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kindergartens at the time of our fieldwork only rarely served lunch.9 Instead, children brought sandwiches from home. Like the children themselves, lunch boxes thus crossed between the families and the kindergarten, blurring the boundaries between family and state. The exchange of a packed lunch was a social act laden with meaning. The content of a lunch box, prepared by the parents, was decoded by staff as “signs of care” (Thorne 2001: 368) and affected a child’s position in the kindergarten. Despite a common ban on negative comments on other children’s food, the sandwiches in a child’s lunch box occasionally triggered a quiet exchange between staff members: “Jam on white bread again, I just don’t get it” (for a similar analysis, see Larsen 2011). At times the staff would take the issue up with the child’s parents, explaining to them that the lunch was inadequate and might ruin the child’s teeth. Thus, not only the children but also their parents were taught appropriate caregiving practices if the staff had reason to doubt the quality of the child’s upbringing. Although the children were too young to understand precisely what was going on during these exchanges, they nevertheless realized that there might be something lacking on the home and family front. This was in strong contrast to the experiences of children from “good” families. Their parents often made a special effort to show their competence as caregivers through the lunch box (for a parallel case, see Allison 1997). One example is an Iranian girl who brought an egg on which her mother had drawn a smiley face on one side and written “jeg elsker dig” (I love you) on the other side, despite the fact that the girl could not yet read. Another example is a girl of Danish origin whose mother often decorated a homemade pancake with a chocolate smiley. Interestingly, this sweet did not trigger negative comments by staff. Another way in which the kindergarten staff found some families lacking was in the area of personal hygiene (for a discussion on conceptions of cleanliness across time and social groups, see Frykman and Löfgren 2003 [1979]). The degree to which cleanliness plays a role in the sociability at Danish kindergartens came to the fore in the close interactions between children and adults as well as in the discussions and actions of staff when confronted with what they considered dirty and smelly children. The strength of the hygienic norms became apparent during a conversation with the head of a kindergarten in a suburban mixed neighborhood. She recounted how it had been necessary to instruct a member of the staff to give a little girl (of Danish origin) a regular bath, deeming her alcoholic mother “too far gone” to care about what the head of the kindergarten considered vital “signs of care” (Thorne 2001). The kindergarten could not force the mother to live up to the dominant

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notions concerning proper care in terms of hygiene and gave the daughter a bath. While the regular baths most likely meant that the girl developed close relations with staff, the intervention simultaneously questioned the caregiving practices at home and thus her mother’s parenting abilities. The kindergarten’s attempts to create a love for reading also proved difficult when it came to certain children. One kindergarten teacher was at her wit’s end because several children in her group refused to sit quietly and pay attention when she tried to read to them. In her opinion, their parents were at fault for not having “brought up their children properly.” Reading sessions were supposedly interactive; the preschool teacher would read a passage out aloud and ask the children about the content. The children from well-­ educated families easily entered into a dialogue about the text. They were familiar with children’s stories and how to relate them to different life experiences, and they were therefore able to derive meaning from the text. The children from low-­income families, however, often did not know what to make of the text. Having grown up in public housing areas with little exposure to books and places and forms of living outside of their local neighborhood, they found it difficult to relate to the daily activities of a farmer, for example, and lacked the relevant vocabulary to participate in the conversation. After only a few minutes these children, as a rule, would begin to shift uneasily, talk among themselves, or interrupt the reading. The result was invariably that they were told to be quiet, and if (when) they continued to disturb, they were told to go to the playground or the tumlerum (romping room, a room with pillows and mattresses where children can engage in rough play). When the kindergarten teacher took her group to the local library, she ended up in tears because some children, unfamiliar with the code of conduct at a library, made a racket and caused mayhem. She did not invite these children back to the library again. Having been dismissed from these group activities, the children would engage in some of the other available activities that they had mastered, such as driving a moon car or having a pillow fight in the romping room. Already at an early age, they had thus learned that books and activities related to books were highly valued at the kindergarten and were closely linked to its organized social activities but that these activities were not for them. It is difficult to know the extent to which the children, whose families did not share the institutional ideas of proper child rearing, realized that their families’ practices were likely to be called into question. Observations at kindergartens suggest, however, that children as young as three years of age were

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indeed aware of the conflicting values between their home and the kindergarten and took care to hide their specific preferences from the kindergarten teachers. It took several months of fieldwork to realize that Palestinian boys played a particular game when they were on their own and at a safe distance from kindergarten teachers. Rather than “Cowboys and Indians” or “Police and Thieves,” they would play “Jews and Palestinians.” In this game evil Jews would invariably shoot Palestinians, but a hero, Osama bin Laden, would come to the rescue of the Palestinians. One of the children explained that he had seen a Jew shooting a Palestinian boy close up. He was probably referring to an incident, broadcast by Al Jazeera, in which an Israeli soldier shot and killed a twelve-­year-­old boy despite his father’s futile attempt to save his son. It is not surprising that the children would play this particular game only with other Palestinian children, who were familiar with the implicit references (Bundgaard and Gulløv 2008). None of the other children at the kindergarten at the time (2002–2003) knew of bin Laden, nor did they have any notion of what “Jew” might mean. It is noteworthy, however, that the children somehow knew that this game was unlikely to be well received among the kindergarten teachers. Thus, we never heard the children mention bin Laden, or Jews for that matter, within the hearing range of the staff.

Conclusion This chapter has shown that the day care institutions founded on the so-­ called Danish middle-­class norms, rooted in the nineteenth century, play an important role in creating awareness among the children of the particular nature of their family relations and the place of belonging this gives them in the community of the kindergarten and, by extension, in Danish society as a whole. The children of ethnically Danish middle-­income, well-­educated families will generally experience that expectations concerning “proper” behavior and “correct” manners correspond closely in the kindergarten and the home. It will therefore be relatively simple for them to negotiate the two sites of socialization and to become part of the community of the kindergarten that, gradually, will lead into membership of the wider Danish society. Furthermore, they will experience that their parents—and their home—are viewed as a positive source of identification in Danish society. The children whose parents do not comply with or share the ideas and practices of child rearing promoted by the institutions, on the other hand,

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may experience difficulty adapting to the kindergarten. They will not be so familiar with the unspoken mores governing proper social interaction and the acceptable forms of free play that are rooted in tacit assumptions. They may therefore play “incorrectly.” When they do become aware of the difference in norms, they are faced with the complicated task of negotiating the social and cultural differences between the norms of their home and those of the kindergarten. Furthermore, they may be subjected to negative precategorization as children who need to break their “negative” social or cultural heritage, which, as has been seen, affects not only their reception at the kindergarten but also the kindergarten teachers’ reading of their behavior when they begin preschool. A verbal outburst (which is frowned upon in Danish middle-­class culture), for example, is likely to be seen as a confirmation of the presumed problems that are associated with these children and will be dealt with accordingly. The action of a child precategorized as a potential troublemaker is thus unlikely to be met with the benefit of doubt that would be offered a child showing proper, respectable Danish middle-­class norms. Whereas children growing up in what is regarded as well-­functioning homes benefit from associating with their parents in public, children growing up in “problem families” have a poorer chance of acquiring a positive position at the preschool. Not unlike McDermott’s (1993) discussion of the potential effects of a category, such as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), “problem family” is a category ready to be activated. It offers itself as a potential explanation whenever a child’s behavior falls outside the standard norm. These children may therefore find that their notions of relatedness toward their family and their place of belonging in Danish society are seriously called into question. As children of non-­middle-­class or non-­Danish parents who do not conform to the proper conventions of Danish middle-­class behavior, they will be “doubly marked as other” (Edwards, this volume). We have argued that the Danish kindergarten emerged as an institution celebrating the virtues of harmonious, intimate Danish family life, where children could express their creativity and learn the art of interacting in appropriate ways. This family life was viewed as the basis of the democratic nation-­state that became established during the nineteenth century and developed into the contemporary welfare society. The kindergarten, with its focus on proper social interaction and free play, has attempted to socialize the children to become good, responsible citizens who can be included in this national community but with somewhat mixed results. But one child’s natural free play may be another child’s forced, constrained, and unnatural

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activity. For some, a more explicit structured social and educational agenda may thus establish a framework of interaction that will be more inclusive than the seemingly open system, based on play that is supposedly free yet based on implicit Danish middle-­class social norms. What these issues therefore suggest is that even at the level of the kindergarten, the role of kinning in the welfare state is important and potentially fraught with conflict.

Notes 1. Børnehaven is believed to be a Danish translation of a German book published at the same time (Stybe 1982: n.p.). 2. The Danish term for the kindergarten teacher is pædagog. 3. The fieldwork was part of the research project “Bilingual Children in Danish Kindergartens,” conducted by Eva Gulløv and Helle Bundgaard and funded by the Danish Research Council of the Humanities. 4. The fieldwork was part of a larger research project, “Civilizing Institutions in a Modern Welfare State,” and was funded by the Danish Research Council of the Social Sciences. 5. Only 15 percent of the children between six and twelve months of age are cared for outside their home. 6. For a detailed analysis of the development of progressive education in Denmark, see Hermann (2007). 7. For a discussion of the development in pedagogy in Denmark, see Sigsgaard (1978, 2001); Vejleskov (1997). 8. For a further discussion of this case, see Bundgaard (2011). 9. In 2010 the Danish government attempted to introduce mandatory lunch in kindergartens. This was quickly changed into “flexible” lunch, which meant that all kindergarten children must be offered a healthy lunch every day but that the parents have the right to influence the quality of the food.

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Bundgaard, Helle, and Eva Gulløv. 2003. Sprog-­lighed og ulighed: Sociale forskelle i en flerkulturel sammenhæng [Language Equality and Inequality in a Multicultural Context]. Magasinet Humaniora 2: 16–22. ———. 2008. Forskel og fællesskab: Minoritetsbørn i daginstitution [Diversity and Community: Minority Children in Day Care Institution]. København: Hans Reitzel. Candea, Matei. 2010. “I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat”: Engagement and Detachment in Human-­Animal Relations. American Ethnologist 37(2): 241–58. Carsten, Janet. 2000. Introduction: Cultures of Relatedness. In Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, ed. Janet Carsten, 1–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Connolly, Paul. 1998. Racism, Gender Identities, and Young Children: Social Relations in a Multi-­Ethnic, Inner-­City Primary School. London: Routledge. Davis, Robert. 2010. Government Intervention in Child Rearing: Governing Infancy. Educational Theory 60(3): 285–98. de Coninck-­Smith, Ning. 1995. Byggeri for børn: Daginstitutionsbyggeri før, under og efter 2. verdenskrig. Architectura 17: 7–30. Den Store Danske Encyklopædi. 2014. Gyldendals Åbne encyklopædi. www​ .denstoredanske​.dk​/Historien​_om​_b​%C3​%B8rnelitteratur​/​%E2​%80​%9EBarnlighed​ _er​_et​_Talent​%E2​%80​%9D​_​-­­​_b​%C3​%B8rnelitteraturen​_1820–1880. Ehn, Billy. 1983. Ska vi leka tiger? Daghemsliv ur kulturell synvinkel. Stockholm: Lieber. Elias, Norbert. 2000 [1939]. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Franklin, Sarah, and Susan McKinnon. 2001. Introduction: Relative Values; Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. In Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon, 1–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Frykman, Jonas, and Orvar Löfgren. 2003 [1979]. Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle-­Class Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Gulløv, Eva. 2012. Kindergartens in Denmark: Reflections on Continuity and Change. In The Modern Child and the Flexible Labour Market: Early Childhood Education and Care, ed. Anne Trine Kjørholt and Jens Qvortrup, 90–107. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Heath, Shirley Brice. 2000 [1986]. What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School. In Schooling the Symbolic Animal: Social and Cultural Dimensions of Education, ed. Bradley A. U. Levinson et al., 169–89. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Henriksen, Carsten. 2010. Børn har altid skullet lære noget i børnehaven. Forskning, Juni, 4–7, www​.bupl​.dk. Hermann, Stefan. 2007. Magt og Oplysning: Folkeskolen, 1950–2006. Copenhagen: Unge pædagoger. Howell, Signe. 2003. Kinning: The Creation of Life Trajectories in Transnational Adoptive Families. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9(3): 465–84.

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Larsen, Birgitte Romme. 2011. Becoming Part of Welfare Scandinavia: Integration Through the Spatial Dispersal of Newly Arrived Refugees in Denmark. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 37(2): 333–50. Lunding, Erik. 1968. Biedermeier og romantismen. Kritik 7: 32–67. Lupton, Deborah. 1994. Food, Memory and Meaning: The Symbolic and Social Nature of Food Events. Sociological Review 42(4): 664–85. McDermott, Ray. 1993. The Acquisition of a Child by a Learning Disability. In Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, ed. Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, 269–305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mestdag, Inge. 2005. Disappearance of the Traditional Meal: Temporal, Social and Spatial Deconstruction. Appetite 45(1): 62–74. Nyt fra Danmarks Statistik. 2015. Færre børn i dagsinstitutionerne efter skolereformen. April 1, no. 162, http://​www​.dst​.dk​/da​/Statistik​/nyt​/NytHtml​?cid​=​19245. Olwig, Karen Fog. 2011. Children’s Sociality: The Civilizing Project in the Danish Kindergarten. Social Analysis 55(2): 121–41. Palludan, Charlotte. 2008 [2005]. Børnehaven gør en forskel. Copenhagen: Danish University of Education Press. Sigsgaard, Erik. 2001. Børn og institutioner. Copenhagen: Tiderne skifter. Sigsgaard, Jens. 1978. Folkebørnehaver og social pædagogik: Træk af asylets og Børnehavens historie. Copenhagen: Forlaget Børn og Unge. Statistisk Årbog. 2011. Copenhagen: Statistics Denmark. Stybe, Vibeke. 1982. Efterskrift. In Børnehaven: Fest-­Gave til Børnene ved Frederik Fröbels 100 aarige Fødselsdag i 1882, n.p. København: Nyt Nordisk Forlag. Thorne, Barrie. 2001. Pick-­up Time at Oakdale Elementary School: Work and Family from the Vantage Points of Children. In Working Families: The Transformation of the American Home, ed. Rosanna Hertz and Nancy L. Marshall, 354–82. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tobin, Joseph Jay, Yeh Hsueh, and Mayumi Karasawa. 2009. Preschool in Three Cultures Revisited: China, Japan, and the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tønsberg, Viggo. 1980. Indledning. In Friedrich Fröbel, Småbørnspædagogik, 11–32. Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck. Vejleskov, Hans. 1997. Den danske børnehave: Studier om myter, meninger og muligheder. Vejle: Krogs Forlag. Winther, Ida Wentzel 1999. Småbørnsliv i Danmark—Anno 2000. Copenhagen: Danmarks Pædagogiske Institut.

Chapter 9

After Citizenship The Process of Kinship in a Setting of Civic Inequality Apostolos Andrikopoulos

From the very beginning of my research on the Ghanaian and Nigerian communities in Greece and the Netherlands,1 I have been struck by the central role of kinship, and of kinship vocabulary, in the lives of legally precarious migrants. Relations they cast in kinship terminology are typically those that have been crucial to realizing their aspirations and ensuring that the requisite resources become available at the right time for their daily survival. They may thus have borrowed from “family” in order to be able to migrate, traveled with the passport of a look-­alike “brother” or “sister,” found jobs in Amsterdam using the identity documents of their “brothers” and “sisters,” worked closely with other “brothers” as street vendors in Thessaloniki, and cooperated to protect their otherwise vulnerable economic niche. The anthropology of kinship has over decades focused on societies with no or weak state organization, assuming that kinship loses its significance in modern state-­organized societies. Although the social relations of West African migrants in Thessaloniki and Amsterdam, which they unequivocally describe in kinship terminology, are informed by understandings of kinship roles in their home communities, these relations are largely formed in Europe and are of utmost importance to them, especially in dealing with state violence, which they anticipate and experience on a daily basis. How does the unequal access to citizenship (civic inequality) contribute to the proliferation of these social relations commonly expressed in kinship terminology by West African migrants in Amsterdam and Thessaloniki? This chapter delineates why this



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might be and why kinship terms, especially denoting siblinghood, are used to describe these newly formed relations in the context of migration. A second observation relates to the striking disparity between the discourse of siblinghood and siblinghood as a set of practices in everyday life, between the way West African migrants in the Netherlands as well as in Greece talked about their “brothers” as opposed to what actually transpires in those daily interactions, in other words, to what kinship entails. In my interviews with the migrants in these two countries, kinship, especially brotherhood, was framed rather positively and was associated with solidarity, love, care, and support: “A brother is there to help, a brother is there to care for you, a brother would worry about you” and “[A relative is] somebody who wants your progress, who is always there for you emotionally.” In everyday practice, however, relations with their brothers and other kinsmen were complex and also involved mistrust, disappointment, envy, threats, and witchcraft accusations, and they often seemed exploitative to me. Why do kinship discourses, describing the newly forged social relations, differ so considerably from kinship practices? This chapter examines the formation of kinship relations among migrants in two contexts of civic inequality. More specifically, it examines how legally precarious West African migrants mobilize and create kinship networks in particular contexts of civic inequality in Greece and the Netherlands. I suggest that exploring the relationship between kinship and inequality, such as unequal access to citizenship and to other state institutions, is analytically and theoretically useful for at least two reasons. First, it enables us to study kinship from a perspective in which hierarchy, conflict, betrayal, and feelings such as jealousy and fear are part and parcel of kinship (see also Pine, this volume). Although recent conceptualizations of kinship as a “mutuality of being,” “relatedness,” and “intersubjective participation” open up new possibilities for the study of kinship, they have often neglected the darker side of kinship relations. Second, showing how state-­generated inequality structurally facilitates the development of kinship relations contributes to the long-­ standing effort to reconceptualize the dyadic opposition between traditional and modern societies and the presupposition that kinship organizes social, political, and economic life only in so-­called traditional societies, while in allegedly modern societies kinship concerns can be separated from political and economic activities (for an elaboration of these classification practices, see also Thelen and Alber’s introduction to this volume).

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Inequality and New Approaches to the Study of Kinship Taking Schneider’s (1980 [1986], 1984) critique of the anthropology of kinship as a point of departure, a new generation of anthropologists (Carsten 2000, 2004; Franklin and McKinnon 2001; see also Strathern 1992; Sahlins 2013) have contributed to the de-­linking of biology from the study of kinship and showed how kinship evolves out of socially contingent contexts rather than referring to a set of biological relations. Moving away from the distinction between physical and social kinship, Carsten used “relatedness” as an inclusive concept to cross-­culturally study “indigenous idioms of being related” (2000: 4). Similarly, Sahlins suggested conceptualizing kinship as a “mutuality of being” in which “relatives” refer to those “who belong to one another, who are parts of one another, who are co-­present in each other, whose lives are joined and interdependent” (2013: 21). “Relatedness” and “mutuality of being” prioritize local understandings of how people see themselves as related and include all the different ways of constituting intersubjective participation in the study of kinship. Nonetheless, the way “relatedness” and “mutuality of being” have been conceptualized and applied in ethnographic studies tends to ascribe a prominent role to sharing as a mechanism of kinship. Although studies (Carsten 1997; Pauli 2013; Thelen, Coe, and Alber 2013) have convincingly shown the key role of sharing in the process of kinship, the importance attached to the theorization of kinship as a “mutuality of being” or “relatedness” obscures the complexities, tensions, and inequalities that exist within kinship relations. Sharing and commonality imply closeness, mutuality, and often also equality. This conceptualization of kinship bears the risk of locating practices such as violence, treachery, jealousy, fights, and tensions outside the realm of kinship. As other ethnographic studies have shown (e.g., Geschiere 2013; Delaney 2001; Piot 1996; Lambek 2011; Dobash and Dobash 1979; Pine, this volume), these unpleasant practices and emotions are part and parcel of kinship relations. Marxist and feminist scholars have already pointed out the extent to which ideologies of kinship naturalize patriarchy and power dynamics within the family and mask hierarchical relations of production (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995; Collier 1988; Siskind 1978; Goody 1990; White 2004). Taking inequality as an entry point for studying kinship makes us more careful about idealizing kinship relations and enables us to see beyond the positive discourse on kinship in which our informants engage.



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Politics, State, Kinship In classic anthropological and sociological accounts, kinship has been conceptualized as the organizing structure of primitive/traditional societies, inseparable from other domains of society, such as economy, political organization, and religion.2 This bipolar model claimed that kinship was irrelevant to and disentangled from other social domains in so-­called modern societies, in part due to the presence of a centralized state authority, which granted to its citizens equal rights and obligations (citizenship), and also in part also due to the capitalist market, which had transformed socially embedded economic relations into impersonal transactions. According to this narrative, the presence of the state and the capitalist market also caused a transformation in the conceptions of personhood: from persons-­relatives, whose social existence was firmly embedded in the web of kinship in traditional societies, to autonomous, rights-­bearing, and rational persons-­citizens in modern societies.3 Many anthropologists have been critical of the modern-­ traditional dichotomy and the place of kinship as a differentiating marker. Kuper (1988) noted that European anthropologists constructed the “myth” of a kinship-­ based primitive society as a way to contrast and portray their own societies as democratic and economically rational. From an empirical perspective, Carsten (2004) argued that the conceptualization of the modern society as composed of equal and autonomous individuals, in contrast to kinship-­based traditional societies where interdependence formed the core basis of coexistence, is mainly based on philosophical, legal, and religious sources rather than on the study of everyday practices. In the last few decades, a stream of anthropologists in Europe and the United States have begun studying kinship in their own societies. However, their concerns about “families of choice” and their urging to reconsider the place of nature as a given in kinship, especially in studies on new reproductive technologies, gay kinship, and adoption, have turned their attention away from questioning whether kinship is intertwined with politics and economy. Nevertheless, these ethnographic studies persuasively demonstrate that kinship is also salient in the West and that the boundary between modern/Western and traditional/non-­Western cannot be sustained through kinship as the marker of difference. This chapter both builds on the valuable contributions of the new generation of kinship scholars and calls for a closer examination of the role of the state and citizenship in the process of constructing kinship in contemporary settings. Given that civic inequality is also an aspect of state-­organized

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societies, this chapter examines how exclusion from citizenship and other forms of state membership (residence permits, visas, etc.) can reinforce the formation of kinship relations. Examining how kinship, especially brotherhood, is constituted in two different contexts of inequality, this chapter shows that civic inequality can become a fertile ground for the proliferation and maintenance of kinship relations. The findings of this research provide evidence of the “persistent life of kinship” (McKinnon and Cannell 2013) in state-­organized societies with capitalist economies and challenge the simplistic dichotomous distinction in social theory between traditional and modern societies. To be sure, this study does not argue that there were no transformations in the way people related to each other due to the presence of the state and the capitalist market. Nevertheless, it directs our attention to the exclusionary mechanisms of state institutions4 and their impact on social relations among those who live at the margins of the state. Such emphasis on the consequences of the intrinsically exclusionary character of citizenship is more necessary than ever in an era of increased transnational mobility and globalization.

Kinship and Migration: Sociological Perspectives One of the first attempts to study the interplay between kinship, state politics, and the market in the West comes from a number of postwar sociological studies on the migration process. Litwak (1960a, 1960b) questioned the validity of Parson’s modernization hypothesis that extended family relations would lose their importance due to the occupational and geographic mobility that characterized industrialized societies. His findings showed not only that there was no decline in the cohesion of extended family but also that, on the contrary, the new conditions of industrialism sustained this cohesiveness by assigning new roles to its members. Litwak also noted that the extended family, having survived geographic dispersal, also facilitated the migration of its members. In times of economic and political hardship, individuals could rely on their relatives for financial and psychological help to migrate. Those who migrated established open lines of communication with their family members and transmitted information that assisted the migration of other family members (Litwak 1960b: 386). Some sociologists later called this phenomenon “chain migration” (MacDonald and MacDonald 1964; Choldin 1973).



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Kinship plays an important role in the way chain migration operates. Networks of kinship span beyond legally closed borders and connect sending and receiving communities. Kinship provides a pool of resources for potential migrants that are necessary for them to be able to circumvent legal restrictions and that ultimately allow them to migrate. Upon their arrival, new migrants rely on their kinfolk for accommodation, assistance in finding a job, and important information about beginning a new life in an unfamiliar place. Tilly and Brown (1968: 142–43) stressed that “migration under the auspices of kinship seems to be most common among groups which have the least skill in dealing with impersonal urban institutions like markets, bureaucracies, and communication systems, or the most uncertain relationships to those institutions. The support and protection of their kinfolk balance their weakness in these other respects.” Although this body of sociological literature emphasized the vital role of kinship in migration, it lacked an analytical theory of kinship and relied on the folk ethnocentric understanding of kinship as a blood relation. Soon sociologists realized that the social relations that were important for migrants were not identical to what sociologists comprehended as kinship relations. They gradually started using the term “fictive kinship” (Li 1977; Ebaugh and Curry 2000; Kim 2009) to frame the relations of migrants that resembled what they implicitly understood as real kinship. But not even fictive kinship could capture the diverse relations of migrants that played a pivotal role in their lives, and sociologists shifted to more general concepts, such as community, ethnicity, social networks, and social capital. Building on the contribution of previous studies on the phenomenon of chain migration, Massey and his colleagues developed what came to be known as the migrant network model, which remains one of the most popular approaches to the migration process. For Massey and colleagues (1987, 1994), the migrant network is the set of social ties connecting nonmigrants and migrants between the sending and receiving communities. The members of the network “carry reciprocal obligations for assistance based on shared understandings of kinship, friendship, and common community origin” (Massey, Goldring, and Durand 1994: 1499). Massey and colleagues (1987: 140) suggested that these reciprocal obligations are stronger among kinsmen, especially between fathers and sons who have “the strongest relationships” in the network. The existence of migrant networks decreases the costs and risks of migration and thus facilitates the migration of well-­connected aspiring migrants. According to this model, when migrant networks reach a certain

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threshold, migration becomes a self-­perpetuating phenomenon and cannot be curtailed by structural factors, such as restrictive immigration policies and labor demand. All the above sociological approaches and numerous empirical studies showed the significance of kinship in the context of migration and how migrants rely on their social relations to overcome barriers and respond to opportunities created by the state and the capitalist market. However, these approaches, lacking an analytical understanding of kinship, also considered kinship only as a source of support and assistance with a positive impact on the life of migrants. The migrant network model and the chain migration literature, in a striking similarity to Sahlins’s (1972) concentric circles model, considered kinship a greater source of support and of generalized reciprocity than other social relations and thus implied that the degree of assistance depended on social distance. The two ethnographic cases that follow show that kinship is indeed important to migrants to help them secure resources that are difficult to access. At the same time, these cases demonstrate that kinship is not simply a safe haven and an ultimate source of support. Inequality and fear are intrinsic parts of social relations framed in a language of kinship by West African migrants in Amsterdam and Thessaloniki. The two ethnographic cases show that new forms of state-­generated inequality can in fact fuel the reproduction of kinship and provide the justification for its survival in a state-­organized society with a capitalist economy. The first case examines how a similar unequal position, in terms of citizenship status and the exclusion from the formal labor market, facilitates the formation of brotherhood relations among West Africans in Thessaloniki. The case shows that the emotionally strong solidarity relations between African brothers are also grounded in existential fear, shame, and a common economic interest.

Kinship and the Organization of the Unauthorized Trade of CDs in Thessaloniki, Greece It was early evening in late August 2007 in Thessaloniki. As usual, the numerous cafés along the coastline were packed with people. Still, something seemed different around Thessaloniki’s cafés in this otherwise typical evening: there was not a single street vendor selling compact discs (CDs). Customers in cafés were usually approached, almost harassed, by street vendors multiple times



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while having their drinks. But no one was around that evening. The absence of the CD street vendors was conspicuous, not least because all of them were black sub-­Saharan African migrants, the only numerically significant colored minority in the city. Thessaloniki, a city of about 800,000 residents, had thousands of migrants from the Balkans and the former Soviet Union and only a few hundred African migrants, mostly men, a majority of whom had worked at least for a brief period as street vendors of pirated CDs and DVDs. I made a phone call to Paul and asked whether something had happened. Paul was originally from Nigeria, the only child from his family to have made it to Greece, and with the money he earned from the trade of CDs, he supported his parents and siblings, as did many other African migrants in Thessaloniki. He responded to my question with anger: “They killed our brother! Our brother is dead.” The day before, Tony, a young Nigerian CD street vendor, had been killed when he jumped from the balcony of a café trying to escape two people who had been chasing him. Tony’s brother explained to the newspapers: My brother was arrested by policemen four days before he was killed. They beat him and took his bag with all the CDs. It was not the first time he had been chased. He was earning his living in fear of being arrested, as many other young Africans do in Thessaloniki and other Greek cities. (Ta Nea, August 8, 2007) The tragic death of Tony outraged the African street vendors, who stopped work for the day and went to protest outside the police department. About 200 young African men holding pictures of Tony protested and demanded justice. For all those who found themselves in a similar situation of legal precarity, it was easy to see themselves in Tony’s position. In the conversations I had with Nigerians and Ghanaians in Thessaloniki right after that deadly event, they all referred to Tony as their brother, no matter how well they knew him. The idiom of brotherhood was, in any case, widely used among African street vendors in Thessaloniki. During one of the many times I was approached by a street vendor, this time while I was having coffee in a café, I asked the young Nigerian man whether he had the albums of a particular artist. “Wait, I am going to get some from my brother,” he said and left. Another African vendor, who had not noticed my interaction with him, approached me and also tried to sell me CDs. The first vendor returned with the CDs I had requested, and he nodded

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to the other vendor, signaling that I was already his customer (“Brother, please!”). They shook hands, and the second vendor left. “You have many brothers,” I said to the first one. “Every black man in Thessaloniki is my brother,” he replied. The unauthorized trade of CDs by street vendors emerged in the mid-­ 1990s in Thessaloniki and Athens and later expanded to other Greek cities as well. From its beginning until its disappearance in the years since 2010, this unauthorized trade was monopolized by young male migrants from African countries. At the time of my fieldwork, the majority of African migrants in the city were Nigerian men in their twenties and thirties who worked as street vendors for at least a couple of months. Only a few of them already had family members in Greece prior to their arrival, and the majority of them were convinced that their stay in Greece was merely a stopgap in their journey to a West European country. Some of them had entered Greece with tourist visas, which they overstayed, and some others clandestinely crossed the Greek-­Turkish borders. Seeking asylum was a way to secure a foothold and obtain the so-­called pink card, which allowed them to stay on in Greece for years until the decision on their asylum status was issued. In Presidential Decree 189 of 1998, the employment rights of asylum seekers in Greece were limited only to those professions that could not be filled by Greek and European Union (EU) citizens or by ethnic Greeks who were non-­EU citizens. The restricted labor rights led African migrants to organize their trade and earn their living through it. The trade in CDs was by definition illegal, since they had no authorization to reproduce and sell copyrighted material. African street vendors in Thessaloniki needed to cooperate with one another to protect their very vulnerable economic position and keep themselves safe from police checks. The appeal to kinship was made, especially in the idiom of brotherhood, not only because they faced the same challenges but also because kinship regulated the organization of their unauthorized trade, which required a high level of trust and solidarity. Fear and shame were two central emotions that structured the common experiences of all African men who worked as street vendors. First, their precarious legal status filled them with fears about being deported from Greece. Getting arrested for trading in copyrighted material would authorize the police to issue a deportation order. This fear of deportation was a daily reality that had led to the death of Tony. Their work, which demanded hours of walking around the city, exposed them to high risk and heightened their everyday anxiety and fear.



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Second, the profession of street vendor was a matter of shame to these African men, who originated from families that enjoyed relatively good socioeconomic status (Andrikopoulos 2013). These men, who had gained respect within their home communities as migrants to Europe, were afraid that their respectability would be tarnished if relatives in Africa learned that they worked as street vendors, a job performed only by the very poor in Nigeria. This status paradox (Nieswand 2011) of migration forced street vendors to keep their job in Greece secret from their intimate relations in Nigeria. Although Joshua had stopped working as a CD street vendor in Thessaloniki and relocated to Amsterdam, he had desisted from talking about his past work in Greece to his relatives in Nigeria and especially to his father, a chief and a successful businessman: “I can’t go to Nigeria and when a person asks me what I’m doing, I tell him that I sell CDs. . . . They will look at you somehow. . . . My father never learned that I was selling CDs.” There were also instrumental reasons for reinforcing the appeal to brotherhood among the African street vendors of Thessaloniki. It was quite important for those who participated in the unauthorized trade of CDs to keep the secrets of the trade known only to insiders. Thus, information about suppliers and producers of the pirated CDs was disclosed only to brothers who did the same job. Furthermore, street vendors had agreed that no one was allowed to sell a CD for less than five euros: Apostolos: Can you sell [the CDs] for four euros, so you can offer the best price? Jonathan: No! A: Why can’t you do that? J: We can’t do that. You are betraying the others and you get the price of the market down. . . . Nobody is gonna buy it for five euros again. You lose at the end and your people, your brothers, lose also. The violation of the unwritten price rule was considered a brotherly betrayal that would harm the others and eventually those who broke the price rule. According to Jonathan and other African street vendors I talked with, if a street vendor started selling at a lower price than others who respected the price agreement, he would become competitive and increase his sales. Gradually the information about vendors selling at a cheaper rate would spread to the customers, and they would demand lower prices from all other street vendors. Under the pressure of bargaining, the other street vendors would have

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to decrease their prices as well. In other words, the one who started selling at a lower rate may have a temporary increase in his income, but eventually this would decrease the income of everyone, including his own, in the future. Using the language of brotherhood in this trade setting invoked a sense of unity and supported the reason street vendors needed to collaborate. Apart from the agreement on the price of CDs, collaboration among street vendors was necessary for many other reasons. For example, there were some meeting points in the city where street vendors went to exchange the CDs of which they had too many copies with other CDs that they lacked. In this way, they could always have a large variety of CDs and avoid the risk of losing customers. Additionally, street vendors trusted one another with their bags of CDs when they wanted to take a break, and they also informed one another about police checkups. All the above parameters of the organization of the CD trade demonstrate that brotherhood among African street vendors was not simply a term to refer to their shared experiences and emotions but instead was also instrumental in organizing the economic activity from which they earned their living. This ethnographic case from Greece shows that the situation of extreme inequality in which legally precarious African migrants found themselves produced strong shared experiences and emotions, namely of fear and shame, as well as the need to cooperate and fight in solidarity for their survival. Brothers in Thessaloniki shared the same unequal position in society and for that reason shared more or less an equal status within the community. The ethnographic case that follows further examines the interrelation of inequality with kinship but in a setting in which inequality exists within kinship relations and in which brothers have different civic status.

Kinship and the Circulation of Identity Documents “Where is Joshua?,” I asked my Greek friend, Eleni, about her Nigerian husband almost one hour after I arrived at their place in Amsterdam. Eleni had met Joshua in Greece in 2003. A few years later, they got married and moved together to Amsterdam. “He’s talking on the phone with his friend Chidi,” she replied, and she explained to me that these days he talked with Chidi on the phone for hours. Chidi and Joshua had met in Greece and worked together as street vendors. From there Chidi went to Italy and later on to the United States, where he married an African American woman. The main topic of



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the long phone conversations between Chidi and Joshua were the attempts of Chidi’s brother, Victor, to enter Europe. Victor, with his own passport, had only managed to travel from Nigeria to the Republic of Georgia, where he was currently stranded. Joshua was trying to find documents for Victor or, more precisely, was looking for someone willing to lend his passport to Victor to allow him entry into the Netherlands. Eleni was aware of this plan and was not at all surprised at this strategy. It was not the first time she had heard about the circulation of identity documents among West African migrants. About ten years ago while cleaning the apartment of her boyfriend “Walter,” she found another passport bearing his real name, Joshua, whereupon she left him to temporarily return to her family home until Joshua begged her to hear him out. “He said that the only way he could get a visa, and he paid for this and did other things, was to do it with the papers of someone else because he couldn’t do it under his own name,” Eleni recalled. She forgave him and helped him to get legalized by marrying him. A bit later, Joshua finished his phone call and joined us in the living room. “How is your wife?,” Eleni asked, teasing him about the close relationship he had recently developed with Chidi. Joshua apologized for being away and briefly explained that Chidi had asked him to help his brother Victor travel from Georgia to the Netherlands, which he intended to do. I interrupted, asking Joshua directly, “With someone else’s documents?” He looked down at the floor, smiled, and said, “Ooh Apostolos! You know too much!” Questions about the borrowing and loaning of identity documents from an outsider such as me often left my migrant interlocutors feeling uncomfortable, afraid, or embarrassed, although they frequently talked and laughed about it among themselves. Similar to what Herzfeld (2016) has described as “cultural intimacy” in reference to the more disreputable aspects of national identity that contribute to the reproduction of shared national sentiments among citizens but are excluded from official national narratives, the feelings of embarrassment and fear associated with the exchange of identity documents reinforced an awareness of commonality among those involved in this practice. Eleni encouraged Joshua to update us on the latest developments. Joshua said that he found Ugo, “a brother from the Bijlmer,”5 who was a Nigerian with a Dutch residence permit and “very much a lookalike” of Victor. For a reward of 2,500 euros, Ugo agreed to travel with his wife to Tbilisi and give his passport to Victor, who would then use it to travel to Amsterdam together with Ugo’s wife. After Ugo’s wife and Victor arrived in Amsterdam, Ugo would declare to the Dutch embassy that his passport had been lost and

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would request the issuance of new travel documents. “Why do you need Ugo’s wife in this story?,” I asked. Joshua said that Ugo’s wife would be necessary for showing Victor what to do and how to behave at Schiphol Airport as a holder of a Dutch permit, especially in case someone addressed him in Dutch. Her role would become more important if the immigration officers began to doubt whether the passport belonged to him. She could provide them with a marriage certificate and claim that Victor was indeed her husband, Ugo. Everything was set, with only the approval of the African American wife of Chidi pending. Once she allowed Chidi to pay this sum of money, Joshua could initiate the process. In the meantime, Victor would have to wait in Georgia. Victor’s journey to the Netherlands depended on being financed by his brother in the United States. Since Victor did not meet the qualifications for legal entry into the EU, he had to follow other strategies to realize his aspiration to migrate to Europe. Victor’s project not only required a significant amount of money but also involved the time and effort of many other individuals to coordinate and realize this plan (see also Gaibazzi 2014; Piot 2015). The relations between all of these individuals were expressed in the language of kinship (“brother”) and unity (“us,” “we”). Although each of them had a different reason to participate, they all worked together for the success of this project. For Victor, the departure from Nigeria and the passage through the international borders had marked his entrance into a new web of relations and the beginning of a life in which he could access various resources only by relying on others and by impersonating someone else. But this brought Victor closer to other migrants with similar experiences or to those who could help him gain access to resources. For example, one of the reasons why Joshua was motivated to help Victor was that he had experienced similar difficulties in the past, including using someone else’s identity. On the other hand, Victor and Ugo also bonded because of their unequal civic status. In the process of his migration to Europe, Victor became closer to people such as Joshua, with whom he shared similar experiences, and others, such as Ugo, who held a relatively more privileged position. In the second case, Victor not only had to cooperate with Ugo but also had to learn about him and impersonate him, at least during the time he was crossing the border. The use of someone else’s documents was a common strategy for unauthorized migrants in the Netherlands, as the story of Victor illustrates, not only to cross international borders but also to obtain work and earn a living. Legally precarious African migrants in Greece could survive with the money they earned through the unauthorized trade of pirated CDs. However, the



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strict controls since the late 1990s against informal economic activities in the Netherlands left limited space for unauthorized migrants to work in unregistered jobs. A relatively safer possibility for them was to work “in camouflage” in the formal economy. Unauthorized migrants from West Africa and others borrowed the work permits of their “brothers” and “sisters” with proper documentation to find employment in the formal labor market. Mostly, they found jobs through temporary staff agencies (uitzendbureau). They preferred working for a temporary staff agency because the location of their employer (the agency) was different from the place where they worked (e.g., cleaning offices and restaurants), and this made being controlled by authorities more difficult. Unauthorized migrants worked and paid taxes under the name of those whose work permit they used (see also Garces-­Mascarenas and Doomernik 2007). The monthly salary was also deposited into the bank account of the actual work permit holder, not a bank account of the migrant worker. Each month the work permit user had to collect his or her salary from the work permit owner. According to the pact between the work permit user and the brother or sister, part of the salary would be retained by the work permit owner, which could be usually a third of the salary. Again, the idiom of siblinghood was used among themselves to frame their relationship. The lending and borrowing of identity documents between authorized and unauthorized migrants has been observed elsewhere in other migrant communities,6 where kinship relations also play an important role in regulating the exchange of documents. The appeal to kinship in the exchange of identity documents provided the owners and the users of the documents with some sort of security that both parties would adhere to their side of the agreement. The exchange of identity documents entailed a risk both for those who borrowed and those who lent them. Many stories circulated about document providers, who kept a bigger percentage of the salary than agreed, holiday money, or the entire final salary. Migrants also spoke of document recipients who used the loaned documents in pursuit of criminal activities. Parallel to these stories, there were rumors about unauthorized migrants who practiced witchcraft against those who had loaned them their identity documents either because they were dissatisfied with the agreement they had made or because the document owners kept more than had been agreed upon. Through the language of kinship, authorized and unauthorized migrants in Amsterdam attempted to control all the above risks associated with the lending of identity documents.

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Various identity documents (e.g., passports, work permits) that proved civic membership became objects of exchange between citizens and legally precarious migrants. The exclusion of many West African migrants from civic membership in the Netherlands made citizenship a scarce and desirable status. At the same time, the inalienability of citizenship intensified the unequal quality of this exchange. Proofs of citizenship (documents) could be exchanged, but the recipients could only use them temporarily as theirs. The inalienability of things, according to Mauss (2002), is a key characteristic of the gift economy that makes it different from the commodity economy where people have alienable rights over their private property. In gift exchange, there is an “indissoluble bond of a thing with its original owner”; thus, “it is wrong to speak here of alienation, for these things are loaned rather than sold and ceded” (Mauss 2002: 42). Similarly, citizenship could not be sold, and the ownership rights of documents cannot be transferred. In fact, citizens who lent their identity documents to noncitizens did not ever lose their civic status. This paradox of “keeping-­while-­giving” (Weiner 1992) not only reproduced the unequal relation between citizens and noncitizens but, in fact, strengthened the superior status of citizens who could expect reciprocation from noncitizens for their acts of giving without forfeiting their civic status. These two features of citizenship—scarcity and inalienability—prescribed the conditions that made the exchange of identity documents necessary and determined the social outcome of this exchange. The highly asymmetrical exchange relations between document owners and document recipients were framed in kinship terms without, however, kinship diminishing their inequality.

Regulating Inequality: Discourses and Practices of Kinship After several interviews with Patrick, a Ghanaian who had lived as an unauthorized migrant in many countries and had found himself in situations very similar to the two ethnographic cases presented here, I asked him what the word “brother” meant to him. In our interviews, Patrick had used the term “brother” to refer to other black migrants who lent him their identity documents that enabled him to either work or travel, to fellow Ghanaians who worked with him as street vendors in South Africa, and to African colleagues in Malaysia, who all worked with falsified documents for construction companies. Patrick answered my question as follows:



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For me, I consider the word “brother” [as] somebody I can count on in times of difficulty. When I’m in trouble, the person that will be next to me, he is the one I consider a brother. Somebody who cheers me up and says “Look, guy, you can do it” or somebody who can help [me] out of my problem. I consider him more brother than my own siblings or my half brothers, or my extended family brothers. Patrick’s definition of brotherhood papered over all the negative and unpleasant experiences he had passed through and framed brotherhood in a positive way. Such positive conceptualization was very common among these migrants when they talked about kinship and, most important, about siblinghood. Nevertheless, this did not imply that Patrick and other West African migrants suffered no negative experiences and emotions in these relationships. While the positive framing of brotherhood could make unequal relations more bearable, in practice they could turn abusive and be filled with negativity. Discourses of kinship may not directly reflect practices of kinship, but they still have a performative effect on those practices. A positive conceptualization of brotherhood had an impact on how unequal relations between brothers were experienced and negotiated in everyday life. As described earlier, for instance, the exchange of identity documents entailed a high level of risk both for the borrowers and the lenders of the documents. Those who participated in these exchanges framed their interdependency as brotherhood, projecting their expectations for caring, loving, and altruistic behavior that corresponded with the accepted norms of siblinghood, of how brothers should behave toward each other. By appealing to the code of brotherhood, borrowers and lenders of documents attempted to minimize the risks and dangers associated with the exchange of identity documents. The newly formed kinship relations among West African migrants in Thessaloniki and Amsterdam, apart from being framed positively, required a necessary degree of force and inflexibility to fulfill their scope. Just after Patrick had offered his definition of brotherhood, I asked him whether he had many brothers. Almost annoyed with my question, he pulled from my folder the paper on which I had drawn his genealogy diagram, pointed to it with his finger, and said, “I’ve already told you.” Certainly, the idiom of brotherhood used among African migrants under precarious circumstances in Europe is associated with conceptions of brotherhood deriving from shared parenthood. Such an association does not mean that the term “brother” is used metaphorically. A kinship metaphor requires the existence of two separate

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and clearly defined domains of social relations in which the one, perceived as real kinship, lends its vocabulary to the other. However, these migrants make no sharp distinction. As is evident from the interaction with Patrick, the two meanings of brotherhood, one a strong bond of social relations and the other a product of shared parentage, are intertwined and used interchangeably. Moreover, the distinction between real and metaphoric kinship would automatically disqualify the reason African migrants used kinship terminology to describe highly important relations for their survival in Europe. The analysis of the two ethnographic cases here shows that the relations that regulate access to scarce resources in highly ambivalent and unequal settings require a stabilizing force. The appeal to brotherhood and not to other forms of social relationship (e.g., friendship) among street vendors in Thessaloniki and the document providers and users in Amsterdam denotes a sense of obligation that is more difficult to renounce (see also Baumann 1995). To make these relations fulfill the function that they are expected to perform, on the one hand they need to be framed positively in a language of support and solidarity, and on the other hand they require such a degree of inflexibility that the obligations stemming from these relations cannot be easily dismissed.

Conclusion This chapter analyzes the process of kinship in two different contexts of civic inequality and shows that Strathern’s (1990) notion of “dividual” (in contrast to the nonpartible Western “individual”), which has become an “icon of the pre-­modern subject” (Sahlins 2013: 27), could also be produced in response to the exclusionary dimensions of state policies and institutions. The kinship relations analyzed in this chapter did not appear in the absence of the state and the market, as the proponents of the modernity-­versus-­tradition divide would predict. On the contrary, they were heavily influenced by the state and the market. The ethnographic cases presented in this chapter show that citizenship, state borders, documentation, and the state-­regulated labor market have not eliminated or diminished the role of kinship but instead have reconfigured it and in some cases rendered it stronger. Citizenship and market capitalism, despite their claims for offering equal opportunities, have generated new forms of inequality. Citizenship is internally inclusive and at the same time is externally exclusive because it applies to a limited number of people according to a series of criteria that exclude others (Brubaker 1992; Bosniak



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2008). Those who are excluded from citizenship cannot enjoy a number of benefits available to citizens as rights. These new forms of inequality that are associated with state institutions offer kinship a fertile ground to proliferate and regulate unequal relations as well as to facilitate the distribution of resources that state politics makes scarce.

Acknowledgments I wish to thank Janet Carsten, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Peter Geschiere, Aihwa Ong, Frances Pine, and the two editors of this book for their helpful comments and feedback.

Notes 1. This chapter is based on material I gathered in the context of various research projects on Nigerian and Ghanaian migration to Europe. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in Greece (2004–2005, 2006), the Netherlands (2008, 2011–2012), and Ghana (2011–2012). 2. For a critical review of this perspective, see McKinnon and Cannell (2013); ­McKinnon (2013); Kuper (1988); Thelen and Alber (this volume). 3. In neoliberal conceptions of personhood, as Edwards (this volume) explains, autonomy, individuality, and freedom of choice are brought together with accountability and personal responsibility. 4. Even for many of those who are formally included in the civic community, hierarchies of race (Stack 1974), gender (Pateman 1988), and class (White 2004; Bundgaard and Fog Olwig, this volume) make them dependent on other citizens/kinsmen. 5. The Bijlmer, officially Zuidoost, is the district of Amsterdam where most African migrants live. 6. For Mexicans in California, see Horton (2015). For Kyrgyzstanis in Russia, see Reeves (2013). For Indian Sikhs in France, see Moliner (2011). For Salvadorans in New York, Mahler (1995: 170). For various immigrants in the United Kingdom, see Vasta (2011).

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Lambek, Michael. 2011. Kinship as Gift and Theft: Acts of Succession in Mayotte and Israel. American Ethnologist 38(1): 2–16. Li, Peter S. 1977. Fictive Kinship, Conjugal Tie and Kinship Chain Among Chinese Immigrants in the United States. Journal of Comparative Family Studies 8(1): 47–63. Litwak, Eugene. 1960a. Occupational Mobility and Extended Family Cohesion. American Sociological Review 25(1): 9–21. ———. 1960b. Geographic Mobility and Extended Family Cohesion. American Sociological Review 25(3): 385–94. MacDonald, John S., and Leatrice D. MacDonald. 1964. Chain Migration, Ethnic Neighborhood Formation and Social Networks. Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 42(1): 82–97. Mahler, Sarah. 1995. American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Massey, Douglas S., Rafael Alarcon, Jorge Durand, and Humberto Gonzalez. 1987. Return to Aztlan: The Social Process of International Migration from Western Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press. Massey, Douglas S., Luin Goldring, and Jorge Durand. 1994. Continuities in Transnational Migration: An Analysis of Nineteen Mexican Communities. American Journal of Sociology 99(6): 1492–533. Mauss, Marcel. 2002 [1924]. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge. McKinnon, Susan. 2013. Kinship Within and Beyond the “Movement of Progressive Societies.” In Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of kinship, ed. Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell, 39–62. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press. McKinnon, Susan, and Fenella Cannell. 2013. The Difference Kinship Makes. In Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship, ed. Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell, 3–38. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press. Moliner, Christine. 2011. “Did You Get Papers?” Sikh Migrants in France. In Sikhs in Europe: Migration, Identities and Representations, ed. Kunt Jacobsen and Kristina Myrvold, 163–77. Surrey, UK: Ashgate. Nieswand, Boris. 2011. Theorising Transnational Migration: The Status Paradox of Migration. New York: Routledge. Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Redwood, CA: Stanford University Press. Pauli, Julia. 2013. “Sharing Made Us Sisters”: Sisterhood, Migration and Household Dynamics in Mexico and Namibia. In The Anthropology of Sibling Relations: Shared Parentage, Experience, and Exchange, ed. Erdmute Alber, Cati Coe, and Tatjana Thelen, 29–50. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Piot, Charles. 1996. Of Slaves and the Gift: Kabre Sale of Kin During the Era of the Slave Trade. Journal of African History 37(1): 31–49. ———. 2015. Kinship by Other Means. In Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology, ed. Orin Starn, 189–203. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Contributors

Erdmute Alber, professor of social anthropology at the University of Bayreuth (Germany), is working on the interrelatedness of kinship, politics, care and the life course. Regionally she is focusing on West Africa. Apostolos Andrikopoulos, PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, teaches sociology and anthropology of migration and currently is completing his dissertation on the ambiguous role of kinship in the lives of legally precarious West African migrants. Helle Bundgaard, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen (Denmark), has conducted research in India and Denmark on childhood, material culture, and issues related to learning in and outside of institutional settings. Her current work focuses on how anthropology is taught in higher education. Jeanette Edwards, professor of social anthropology at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom, works on assisted reproductive technologies, kinship, and social class. She is currently chairing the working party on the body, beauty, and cosmetic procedures of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Karen Fog Olwig, professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, focuses on family and kinship especially within the context of migration processes. Her fieldwork has taken place in the Caribbean, Britain, and Denmark. Victoria Goddard, professor and national teaching fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London, has carried out research on gender and politics, work, households, and industry, with a focus on southern Italy and Argentina.

242 Contributors

Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, has published extensively on his research in Greece, Italy, and Thailand. His current interests include nationalism and regional identity, artisanship and its transmission, political dynamics, the impact of performance on social templates and norms, and the consequences of gentrification. Eirini Papadaki is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bremen (Germany). She has researched adoption, kinship, ethics, and family making in Greece. Frances Pine, reader in anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, has been conducting research in Poland since the late 1970s and is the author of many articles and several edited volumes on kinship and gender, landscape and memory, households, economies, and work. Ivan Rajković, Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London (UK), is a social anthropologist of work, unemployment, and the welfare state with a particular focus on the countries of former Yugoslavia. His work builds on anthropological theories of value, morality and performativity. Tatjana Thelen, professor in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria, has conducted research in Hungary, Romania, Serbia, and Germany. Her research and publications focus on relational theory in the areas of property relations, care, kinship, and the state. Thomas Zitelmann, associated senior lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Free University Berlin (Germany), has a regional focus on Northeast Africa, the Middle East, and Cambodia. He is interested in conflict studies, ethnohistory, and the history of anthropology.

Inde x

adoption, 12–13, 19, 180, 183, 185, 188, 190–92, 195, 223 agnatic ties, 5, 41–42, 47, 65 alliance, 5, 15, 40, 43, 70, 113, 122, 161, 171 Anderson, Benedict, 40, 57, 112–13, 126, 137–38, 149 ARTs. See reproductive technologies authority, 7, 12, 73, 87, 94, 138, 142, 157, 159, 160–61, 195, 223 belonging, 4, 13–14, 18, 22, 24, 29n, 93–97, 99, 108, 133–34, 137–38, 147, 157, 165, 201–2, 209, 215–16; ideas of, 12, 87, 112, 201; national, 15–16; political, 12, 19, 178 biologism, 11, 15, 19, 42, 66, 88, 94, 125n, 159, 161, 163, 171n, 172n, 182, 205, 222 birth, 114–15, 125, 158, 170n, 181–82, 184–85, 187, 189, 191–94, 208 birthmother / birthfather, 21, 24, 178–81, 183–89, 192–94, 195n blood, 5, 10, 15, 43, 51, 66, 70, 88, 93, 99, 112–13, 116, 123n, 225 body politic, 24, 43, 169, 194 borders, 13, 15, 17, 45, 56n, 89, 100, 110, 113, 123n, 186–87, 225, 228, 232, 236 boundaries, 1–3, 10, 13, 17, 19, 23, 28n, 87, 90, 99–100, 103, 110–14, 189, 213, 223, 245 Bourdieu, Pierre, 27, 30, 77, 151, 173–74 brother, 47, 89, 112, 115, 117–18, 208, 220–21, 226–35 brotherhood, 15, 19, 22, 98–99, 112–13, 116–17, 122, 123n, 221, 224, 226–30, 235–36 bureaucracy, 1, 6, 26n, 132, 233, 180 Butler, Judith, 92–93, 106, 108–11, 118–19, 123, 126

Campbell, John Kennedy, 44–46, 56, 58, 181, 184, 196 Candea, Matei, 10, 30, 207, 218 capitalism, 92, 94, 108, 111, 159, 236 care, 6, 12, 19, 24, 26n, 44, 101, 103, 125n, 143, 163, 180, 182, 185, 189–93, 210, 221; caregiving, 201, 205, 213–14; childcare / daycare, 20–22, 192, 200, 202–3, 205, 212, 215 ; practices, 16, 201, 204; state care, 178, 184, 196n Carsten, Janet, 10–12, 30, 96, 106–7, 125, 127, 159, 174, 201, 206, 218, 222–23, 237–38 childhood, 100, 165–66, 200 citizenship 4, 13–16, 21, 24–25, 28n, 108, 139, 146, 179, 188, 220–21, 223–24, 226, 234, 236; bio-, 11, 171n; rights, 15, 20, 28n, 223, 237 clan, 8–9, 23, 27n, 41, 50–51, 53, 65, 67, 74–75, 134–35, 141, 143 class, 19, 27n, 111–12, 116, 118, 135, 157, 162, 171n, 173n, 202–4, 237n classification: of citizens, 12, 20, 155, 157, 169–170, 180–181, 189, 210; of kinship, 3–4, 6, 12, 18, 20–21, 24, 94, 100–101, 103, 108, 115, 118, 125n, 133–35, 143, 155, 158, 166, 169, 178–79, 183, 187, 191–93, 208–9, 216; practices, 12, 62, 87–88, 90–91, 103, 178–79, 210, 216, 235 clientelism, 56n, 140 collaboration, 118, 121, 125n, 230 collectivity, 40, 95, 99, 104, 133, 138, 147–48, 158 common good, 55, 111, 131, 138, 143 communism, 45, 68, 102 complicity, 53, 56, 137, 139, 161 corruption, 3, 6, 18, 20–21, 24, 26n, 39, 41–56, 57n

244 Index cultural: difference, 149, 194, 216; identity, 40, 132; intimacy, 46–47, 56n, 57n, 132–33, 138–39, 185, 231 de-kinning, 21, 178–80, 193–94 Delaney, Carol, 39, 58, 222, 238, 240 democracy, 45, 52, 75, 116–17, 134, 168, 173n, 181 descent, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 12–13, 15–16, 39, 65 dichotomies, 1–8, 10, 12–13, 15–20, 22–23, 26n, 27n, 28n, 49, 62–66, 69–70, 72, 78–79, 88, 93–96, 98, 102–3, 109–10, 113, 116, 121–22, 135, 144, 220–21, 223–24, 236 DNA testing. See genetic testing domestic domain, 19, 94–95, 98–99 domesticity, 93, 98, 193 education, 17, 57n, 73, 118, 130, 135, 161, 166, 173n, 200, 204–5, 209, 217 embeddedness, 4, 6, 13–14, 141, 178, 185, 208–9 entitlement, 15, 25, 51, 87–88, 93, 100, 205 equality / inequality, 19, 22, 44, 87, 96–97, 111–13, 122, 123n, 168, 220–24, 226, 230, 232, 234, 236–37 ethics, 122, 180. See also values ethnicity, 16, 19, 116, 118, 135, 225 Evans-Pritchard, Edward E., 7, 18–19, 27, 31–33, 39–40, 45, 56, 58, 63, 65, 67–68, 73, 81, 106 evolution, 4–6, 18, 22–23, 27n, 67–69, 78, 96 exchange, 44–45, 49–51, 66–67, 90–91, 98–99, 102, 147, 207, 213, 230–31, 233–35 exclusion, 4, 10, 14–15, 19, 21, 24–25, 50, 87, 92–93, 99, 108, 131, 139, 209–10, 224, 226, 234, 236 Falge, Christiane, 27, 31, 65–67, 81, 86 familiarity, 20, 133, 138–140, 146–149, 180 family: notion of, 113, 135, 148, 180, 203; nuclear, 4–5, 10, 19, 25, 94–95, 133, 135–36, 140, 146–48, 190; relations, 63, 72, 157–58, 160, 201, 208, 215 father, 41, 51–52, 54, 97, 100–1, 123n, 171n, 172n, 179, 189–91, 203, 206, 208–9, 215, 225, 229 feminism, 5, 11, 15, 94–95, 110, 122, 222 fraternity. See brotherhood

friendship, 99, 146, 148, 208, 225, 236 Fortes, Meyer, 7, 11, 31, 33, 94–95, 99, 106, 110, 121–23, 127 Franklin, Sarah, 159, 174, 195, 197, 209–10, 218, 222, 238 gender, 2–3, 11, 19, 64, 67, 73, 76, 93–95, 97–100, 103, 108–13, 116, 118, 122, 181–82, 191, 193 genealogy, 40, 56n, 116, 235 generation(s), 2, 42, 52–54, 57n, 64, 72–73, 97–101, 115–16, 178–79 genetic testing, 15, 29n, 116n, 117, 125n, 171n, 172n Geschiere, Peter, 26–27, 31, 222, 237–38 Gilsenan, Michael, 70, 81, 87–88, 106 globalization, 4, 224 Gluckman, Max, 8, 14, 27–28, 31, 50, 58, 67, 73, 81 Goody, Jack, 66, 81, 105, 110–11, 127, 222, 238 Green, Sarah, 139–40, 145–46, 150, 187, 197 Gupta, Akhil, 5, 9, 31, 126, 132, 150 heritage, 15, 39, 88, 212, 216 hierarchy, 14, 56n, 57n, 65, 87–88, 97, 100, 104, 144, 157, 167–68, 221 home, 4, 45, 74, 77, 95, 100, 102–4, 118, 120, 123n, 164, 169, 173n, 190–92, 200– 1, 203–7, 213–16, 217n, 220, 229, 231 household, 11, 94, 96, 99, 137 Howell, Signe, 11–12, 31, 109, 127, 159, 175, 180, 198, 201, 218 Hutchinson, Sharon E., 8–9, 30, 31, 39–40, 59, 65–66, 82 identity, 24, 40, 46, 53–55, 75, 90–91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 110–11, 113–14, 125n, 132–33, 139–40, 148, 156, 158, 160–61, 166, 172, 181, 185, 195n, 208–9; documents, 22, 189, 220, 231–35; national, 10, 56n, 168 incest, 3, 18, 21, 24, 26, 39, 41–43, 47, 50–52, 54–55, 132 indigenous groups, 15, 121 individualism, 68, 74, 94, 149 inequality. See equality inheritance, 2, 12, 16, 24, 26n, 97 integration, 5, 22, 24, 113, 168, 181

Index 245 intimacy, 39, 66, 96–97, 99, 101, 111, 118, 133, 141, 144, 206 invisibility. See visibility justice, 51, 109, 119–21, 227 Kahn, Susan, 12, 31, 54, 59 kinning, 10, 12, 17, 109, 113, 116, 122, 201, 212, 217 kinship: categories, 9, 20; and inequality, 98, 99, 221, 230; language of, 9, 15, 19, 22, 25, 88, 93–94, 102, 104, 110–11, 122, 133–34, 136, 140, 148, 149, 220–21, 232–33, 236; links, 12, 21, 65, 77, 96, 133, 188; metaphors, 41, 47, 88, 136, 235–36; moral order of, 87, 101–134, 136, 140, 148, 149, 220–21, 232–33, 236; norms, 14, 22, 24; relations, 5, 14, 18, 21, 25, 62, 65, 77–79, 96, 111, 180–81, 190, 221–24, 230, 233, 235–36; and reproduction, 110–11; role of, 2, 63, 96, 220, 225, 236; structures, 64, 66, 75–76, 112; studies, 2–3, 10–14, 16, 23, 26n, 28n, 39, 66, 70, 158, 220–23; understanding of, 17, 20, 22, 99, 220, 225–26 Klotz, Maren, 12, 32, 159–60, 176 Kuper, Adam, 5, 7, 15, 26, 28, 32, 110–11, 127, 223, 237–38 law, 2, 12, 16, 20, 48, 51–52, 118, 157, 168, 180–82, 202 Leach, Edmund R., 7, 27, 32, 43, 59 Leinaweaver, Jessaca B., 11, 32, 180, 198 lineage, 8–9, 27n, 41, 65, 67, 73–74, 77, 80n, 95; 125n mafia, 45, 48, 66 marriage, 9, 11–12, 15, 23, 26n, 27, 64, 69, 72, 90–91, 97, 104, 181–82, 184, 195, 232 masculinity, 53, 72, 74, 94, 98–99, 184 McKinnon, Susan, 7, 26–27, 32, 56, 59, 79, 83, 159, 174, 195, 197, 209–10, 218, 223–24, 232, 237–39 memory, 54–55, 88–89, 100, 114, 118–20, 206–207 middle class, 21, 135–36, 155–57, 162, 167, 169, 171n, 172n, 180–83, 190, 193–94, 195n, 200–1, 204–5, 209–12, 215–17

migrants, 15, 21–22, 24, 72, 110, 141, 145–46, 166, 173, 183, 186–88, 194–96, 209, 212, 220–21, 224–37 military, 18, 24, 42, 62–67, 70–80, 113–14, 118, 124–25 modernity, 2, 6, 42, 47, 54, 56, 79, 161, 167, 181, 236 modernization, 5, 22–23, 26, 73, 79, 224 Morris, Rosalind, 46, 59, 139, 151 mother(s), 21, 97–98, 100–3, 109, 114–25, 158, 173, 178–96, 204, 207–9, 212–14 motherhood, 19, 21, 93, 113–14, 134, 178–96 mutuality, 22, 46, 48, 56, 102, 133, 135, 138, 221–22 nation, 41, 57, 88, 93, 97, 102–3, 108, 110, 112, 117, 178–79, 182, 231 nation-state, 9–10, 13, 28, 40–41, 48–49, 51–52, 57, 108, 111, 114, 118–19, 121, 149, 178, 203–4, 216 national identity. See identity, national nationalism, 2, 16, 39–41, 45–47, 93, 135, 137–38, 149, 173 nationhood, 19, 108, 113, 117 neighborhood, 90–91, 131, 144–45, 147, 163, 192 neo-evolutionism, 27, 67–68, 78 neoliberalism, 20, 50, 155, 159, 163–65, 167–68, 171–73, 182, 195 norms, 4, 14, 21–24, 44, 76–77, 139, 180–81, 188, 201–2, 205, 209, 212–13, 215–17, 235 nostalgia, 51, 131, 147 Nuer, 7, 9, 27, 39, 63, 65–68, 70 nurture, 11, 87, 101, 114–16, 158, 169, 200 order, 1, 6, 19, 26, 44, 52, 65, 67, 88, 94–95, 101–2, 104–05, 113 organization: political, 1, 4–8, 16–20, 41, 134, 223; social 1, 3–9, 17, 27, 66, 69, 74 Papataxiarchis, Efthymios, 96, 99, 106, 181, 186, 194, 196 parenthood, 3, 12, 15, 21–22, 157, 165–66, 170–71, 173, 179, 188, 191–92, 209–10, 214, 235 Pateman, Carole, 14–15, 33, 95, 106, 109–11, 128, 237, 239

246 Index patriarchy, 5, 26n, 76, 94–96, 103, 111, 167, 222 patrilineal, 5, 41, 45, 47, 53–54, 125, 169 patron-client relations, 44, 52, 72, 78 patronage, 20, 44–45, 48–49, 51, 53–55,78 personhood, 20, 159, 164–65, 182, 223 policy making, 6, 13–14, 25, 160, 182 political: anthropology, 2, 3, 7–8, 10, 12–13, 16–18, 20, 23, 27n, 28n; claims, 15, 87–88, 108, 110–11, 114, 117, 171n; incest, 18, 24, 55, 132; relationships, 5, 40, 110; structure, 39, 45, 87; system, 12, 55, 65; rhetoric, 39, 45–47, 49, 52, 55, 113,115, 122, 123n, 131–32, 137, 139–40, 144–45, 147, 149, 168 politico-jural domain, 11, 94–95, 110 polity, 41, 63, 102, 109–11, 119, 121 pollution, 18, 41–43, 51, 54 postsocialism, 18, 26n, 87, 92, 104, 133, 139, 147–48 power relations, 10–14, 19, 27n, 28n, 53, 56n, 72, 74, 87–89, 94–97, 99, 104, 108–11, 113–14, 116, 119, 121–22, 139, 144, 161–62, 188, 203, 222 property, 2, 43, 95, 97, 234 public domain, 95, 158, 164, 170n reciprocity, 22, 43–44, 50–51, 56n, 69, 72, 138, 145, 147, 172n, 225–26, 234 Reeves, Madeleine, 9, 33, 149, 237, 240 relatedness, 12–13, 16, 22, 113, 135, 138–39, 145, 148–49, 157, 172n, 201, 206–8, 216, 221–22 religion, 12, 26n, 51, 54, 57, 69, 72–73, 90–92, 223 reproduction, 2–3, 11–12, 88, 93–95, 98–99, 101, 110–11, 113, 118, 122, 135, 155, 166, 178–80, 184, 194, 195n, 201, 223, 226 reproductive technologies, 2–3, 12, 155, 159, 168; 181n, 223 resistance, 6, 19, 26n, 62, 66, 75, 91, 111, 119, 134–35, 163 resources, 6, 9, 18, 43–44, 51, 53, 61, 66, 87, 97, 99, 104, 111, 220, 225–26, 232, 236 responsibility, 21, 41, 94, 104, 117, 131, 146, 158, 164–66, 172, 182–83, 186, 190, 192, 195n, 201, 204–5, 216, 237n rights, 12, 15, 20–21, 26, 28, 51, 97, 109, 113–115, 117, 120, 123n, 124n, 125n,

156–58, 164, 168, 170, 193–94, 217n, 223, 228, 234, 237 ritual, 11, 88, 92, 94–95, 98–99, 119, 134, 207, 210 Sahlins, Marshall, 68, 78–79, 84, 222, 226, 236, 240 scale(s), 2–5, 13, 15–20, 22–23, 25, 27n, 39, 54, 68, 89, 159 Scott, James C., 6, 26, 34, 52, 59, 66, 84, 88, 91–92 secrecy, 88, 91, 94, 96–98, 155–57, 167–69, 191, 229 segmentary: lineages, 8, 65; organization, 7, 18, 27n; 40–41, 63–65, 67–70 self-interest, 18, 41, 43, 47–48, 131, 133, 138, 140, 144–48 sexuality, 5, 11, 42, 51, 93, 113, 160, 168, 182, 184, 195 Shore, Cris, 49, 60, 132, 151 sibling, 22, 97, 125n, 163, 172n, 206,208, 221, 227, 233, 235 social: knowledge, 39, 67, 110–11; movements, 13, 115–16, 173n; work, 12, 21, 29n, 67, 156, 160–61, 166, 178–80, 182–84, 186–90, 192–93, 201, 210 socialism, 53, 87, 89–90, 92, 94, 98, 100, 102–4, 131–32, 144, 191 sociality, 51, 88, 92, 95, 97–99, 102, 109, 158, 163, 171n, 211 solidarity, 54, 109–10, 112, 120, 124n, 221, 226, 228, 230, 236 sovereignty, 28n, 113, 173n space, 3–5, 7–8, 13, 17, 22–23, 46, 87, 90, 92–94, 97–99, 103, 108, 111, 121–22, 133, 139, 141, 148, 160–61, 181, 190 Stack, Carol, 96, 107, 237, 240 state: actors, 10, 14–15, 21, 24, 88–90, 92, 100, 109, 120, 132–33, 138, 141–45, 179–80, 186, 188, 227–28; and capital interests, 9, 27n, 108, 111, 121, 172n, 223, 226; anti-, 26n, 93, 102–3, 108, 116, 121, 245; colonial, 4,8, 14, 23, 27n, 56n, 65, 89, 112, 186; formation, 2, 3, 9, 14, 16, 23, 27n, 40, 64, 93, 138, 140; images, 5, 9, 14, 88, 132, 138; institution, 3, 21–22, 41, 46, 70, 75, 91, 94, 109, 114, 120–21, 123n, 125n, 141–42, 179, 183, 190–91, 196n, 200–217, 221, 224–25, 236–37; legitimacy, 11, 19, 94, 108, 115,

Index 247 117, 141; postcolonial, 8, 23; practice, 3, 9, 14, 19, 24–25, 26n, 40, 52, 57n, 121–22, 132, 160, 180, 183, 185, 191, 211; regulation, 2, 3, 11–12, 26n, 55, 104, 123n, 132, 195n Strathern, Marilyn, 11–12, 16, 30, 34, 98, 107, 158, 161–62, 166–67, 169, 177, 222, 236, 240 structural-functionalism / functionalism, 18, 50, 67, 70–71, 73, 77, 95 succession, 11–12, 16, 24, 64, 123n suffering, narrative of, 100–1, 117, 120, 161, 181–82, 185 temporality, 1–7, 18–19, 22–25, 28n, 41, 46, 52–55, 100, 115, 159, 184 terrorism, 4, 40, 64–67, 74, 76–79, 101, 173n Ticktin, Miriam, 12, 15, 29, 34, 188, 199 ties, 12, 21, 65, 72, 77, 96, 133, 188, 225 traditional 1, 3, 5–8, 12, 18, 20, 22–25, 28n, 50, 73–74, 76, 147, 159, 167, 169, 210, 221, 223–24 transmission, 87, 113–14, 116, 224 transparency 3, 20–22, 46, 135, 137, 139, 148, 149n, 155–57, 159, 160–67, 169, 171 traveling concepts, 3, 13, 17, 23, 65–67, 156

tribal, 40–41, 63–64, 68–70, 72–73, 76–77, 80n trust, 41, 51, 54, 66, 68, 77, 90, 92, 96–97, 99, 101, 133, 139, 145, 147–48, 162, 168, 172n, 186, 228, 230 unemployment, 130–31, 141–43, 212 Vaisman, Noa, 29, 35, 125, 129 values, 21, 25, 48, 54, 68–69, 76, 109–10, 113, 121, 138, 144, 157, 165, 168–69, 173n, 180–81, 203, 205, 209, 210–12, 215 violence, 8, 19, 23, 40, 44, 70, 75, 88, 96–97, 99–101, 109, 111, 114–16, 118–20, 123, 125, 134–35, 220, 222 visibility/invisibility 19, 51, 55, 74–75, 94, 108, 110, 113–14, 117, 162, 166–67, 169, 172n, 183, 185–86, 188 Wacquant, Loïc, 96, 107, 172–74, 177 war, 4, 9, 15, 40, 45, 62–64, 67–78, 79n, 80n, 92–93, 96–101, 123n, 124n, 135, 141, 184, 195n, 196n welfare, 44, 75, 141, 180, 193, 195n, 201, 203, 212, 216–17 Yanagisako, Sylvia, 58, 97, 107, 222, 240

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Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a long-­standing exchange between the two editors. It started years ago when we noticed remarkable similarities in how we reflected on state and kinship within our respective and quite different research fields in West Africa and Eastern Europe. This led to a series of panels and workshops, starting with the workshop “Doing Politics—Making Kinship: Back Towards a Future Anthropology of Social Organisation and Belonging,” which we organized at the International Center for Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History (re:work) in Berlin, Germany, in February 2014. This workshop was followed by two other workshops, namely “Kinning the state—state kinning” at the thirteenth biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Tallinn, Estonia, in July 2014 and “Kinship in, of, and against State Institutions: Conflictive Intersections and Boundary Work” at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C., in November 2014. Some contributors to this volume also presented at these workshops. We wish to thank all the participants and discussants of the three workshops. Their contributions were invaluable and helped tremendously to make our book what it has become so far as well as with the development of the research group on “Kinship and Politics: Rethinking a Conceptual Split and Its Epistemic Implications in the Social Sciences” at the Center of Interdisciplinary Research in Bielefeld, Germany. Our time in Bielefeld gave us an opportunity to continue the debate with our fellows while finalizing the book. Thus, we hope it is only a start for an continuing conversation. Our thanks go as well to re:work for hosting our first workshop; to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), which financed parts of it; to the University of Bayreuth and the University of Vienna for generously financing parts of the editing process; to Nadja Bscherer, Nina Haberland, Talea Schütte, and Lukas Milo Strauss for their

250 Acknowledgments

useful help in the process of formatting and indexing; to Gita Rajan and Jennifer Rasell for language editing; and to all our relatives, friends, and colleagues with whom we again and again discuss the entanglements of politics and kinship.