彩民宝典

Skip to main content

Kinship may not mean what you think it does

Kinship may not mean what you think it does

Top photo: iStock

彩民宝典 anthropologist Kathryn Goldfarb spearheads new book that examines the difficult aspects of family connection.


Historically, anthropologists defining kinship tended to begin with who people are related to by birth and by marriage. Family was often considered a bedrock of society.

Over time, the idea of what constitutes kinship has evolved, but a key underlying assumption has remained largely unchanged when it comes to the idea of families being a source of caregiving support, says Kathryn Goldfarb, an associate professor in the 彩民宝典 Department of Anthropology, whose research focuses on social relationships, including kinship.

鈥淭he literature in anthropological scholarship on families often still supports this notion that, definitionally, family is what keeps us together,鈥 she says. 鈥淭here is a perception that kinship is where social solidarity lies, how social continuity works, how society hangs together.鈥

headshot of Kathryn Goldfarb

Kathryn Goldfarb, an associate professor in the 彩民宝典 Department of Anthropology, researches social relationships, including kinship.

The problem with that idea, Goldfarb says, is that empirical data, including Goldfarb鈥檚 own fieldwork in Japan connected to the child-welfare system, often contradicts that idealistic portrayal. That, in turn, posed a problem when assigning readings to her students.

鈥淎s I鈥檝e taught kinship over the years, I had this increasing sense that many of my students don鈥檛 see themselves reflected in the literature,鈥 she says. 鈥淲e often talk about diversifying our syllabi, making sure that the authors come from diverse backgrounds and have diverse perspectives. That was really lacking in the materials that I had available to assign to students, because a lot of the reading doesn鈥檛 take serious the fact that some people鈥檚 lives with their families are really problematic and really hard.鈥

Goldfarb鈥檚 solution was to spearhead the book , which was recently published by Rutgers University Press. Goldfarb led the conceptualization of the book鈥檚 theme, served as co-editor and co-author of the introduction, and wrote one of the chapters.

As Goldfarb and her co-author, Sandra Bamford, note in the book鈥檚 introduction, 鈥淚f family is, by definition, about nurturing and caregiving, then how do we understand kinship when it is not?鈥 The authors do not attempt to redefine kinship, but instead seek to expand the types of scholarship that can be considered central to the field.

Recently, Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine spoke with Goldfarb about the book. Her responses were lightly edited for style and condensed.

Question: What is kinship, exactly? And how has the idea of kinship changed over time?

Goldfarb: The term 鈥榢inship鈥 is fairly academic and is taken to mean the systematic level of family relationships. In the old anthropology literature, it was about trying to discern what sort of kinship system each society had, allowing researchers to produce a systematic understanding of how people reckoned their social ties.

One of the reasons anthropologists cared about this was that they believed 鈥榩rimitive鈥 societies didn鈥檛 have politics; they just had kinship. Anthropologists were often tasked by colonial governments to determine these key social structures so colonizers could more effectively govern. 鈥

From my perspective, now when we talk about kinship and anthropology, it is about how we think about relatedness more broadly鈥攂eyond just heterosexual reproduction and marriage. For example, if I ask my students to depict their own kinship networks, they may draw a genealogy, but when you actually find out what their real relationships are like, those may not be reflected in either their genealogies or legal documents. 鈥

If you are just basing things on genealogy, you鈥檙e not seeing the foster child who is part of a family; depending on the local legal regime, you may not be seeing the same-sex couple; you鈥檙e not seeing the ghost of the grandmother who is still a part of a family鈥檚 daily life. These are all aspects of human life that you wouldn鈥檛 actually see if you are just looking at relationships that map onto a normative genealogy. So, definitionally, we need to be more open-minded about the ways that we categorize social relationships in order to analyze them.

Question: And the book specifically grapples with the idea that familial kinship doesn鈥檛 always carry the positives that many people tend to associate with it, correct?

Goldfarb: A very stubborn assumption continues to exist in both the academic literature and the popular imagination that kin ties are鈥攐r should be鈥攍oving, forever, unconditional and nurturing, and that the obligation to care should exist in perpetuity. The chapters presented in this collection paint a different picture.

book cover of Difficult Attachments

In Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, authors seek to expand the types of scholarship that can be considered central to studying kinship.

In the 鈥楢mbiguities of Care鈥 section, we were thinking about situations where normative frameworks of caregiving were destabilized in some way, which often meant that care was delegated to nonfamilial others鈥攕o, either the carceral, the child welfare system, long-term care facilities or medical systems. 鈥

For example, one essay looked at recidivism rates for older adults in Japan, where people tend to commit petty crimes so they can be re-arrested and incarcerated, as prison offers more comfort than life 鈥榦utside鈥 if their family is not able to care for them. In those cases, they find being incarcerated more 鈥榟omey鈥 than being at home.

The section 鈥楾oxic States鈥 is about the ways state formations shape the types of relationships that are possible, or that people produce in spite of these state formations. So, for example, one of the essays is about people who have been incarcerated after being caught at the U.S. border, and how American border policies impact kinship relationships and possibilities for connection and disconnection.

And the third section is 鈥楴egative Affects.鈥 The main idea in that section is that types of affect or emotion that are often considered negative, like anger or envy or favoritism, are actually constitutive aspects of how we understand ourselves in relation with others. 鈥

My own essay, in that last section, talks about how in child-welfare contexts, the idea may be that family is a dangerous place; when children have been removed from their homes, it may be because their family of origin is not safe for them. From my fieldwork in Japan with child welfare institutions, I observed that one of the goals of those spaces was to produce what I call 鈥榮anitized relationality鈥欌攕omething that was not family, that was safe, not contaminated by arguments or worry and everyone was equal and was treated the same.

The argument I make in the essay is that that type of relationship is not the sort that helps people understand in adulthood how to maintain social ties. If you are going to continue to have a relationship with someone, you have to work through difficult things; you can鈥檛 just prohibit those things and you can鈥檛 have a substantive relationship that can be sanitized of all those things. So, it鈥檚 hard to grow up in a situation like that and know how to have relationships. To be able to argue with someone and still continue that relationship is a type of privilege.

Question: By extension, it seems that when kinship works like people envision it鈥檚 supposed to, it should be recognized and maybe respected because it鈥檚 not automatically the norm?

Goldfarb: Exactly. At least, the recognition that kinship relationships that feel positive and good take a lot of work; there is nothing natural or automatic about kinship ties being caring or based upon positive sociality.

Question: How did the idea for this book come together?

Goldfarb: We had proposed a session for the 2020 American Anthropological Association conference, which ended up being canceled because of COVID. 鈥 When the conference was cancelled, we decided to do two online workshops instead. For that, we had people send in drafts, and we grouped the participants in thematic groups. 鈥

"If you are going to continue to have a relationship with someone, you have to work through difficult things; you can鈥檛 just prohibit those things and you can鈥檛 have a substantive relationship that can be sanitized of all those things."

We asked the authors to think about: What irritates you about the way kinship has been talked about in the literature? How can you think against the grain of typical arguments? 鈥

For the volume as a whole, I wanted something that would be accessible to undergrads and good materials for graduate students; something that would be ethnographically rich and also theoretically exciting. We wanted these to be short, delicious essays of between 4,300 and 6,000 words, which is quite short for academic articles. 鈥

And one thing that I love about the book is that there鈥檚 such diversity in the contributors. Some of them are junior grad students and others are emeritus professors.

Question: Who is the intended audience for this book? And, have there been any reactions to it thus far?

Goldfarb: As an academic press, it鈥檚 probably academics in general who are the audience. So, undergrad students, graduate students and faculty. But I also feel the essays are quite accessible, so I really hope that people beyond academia read it.

I taught portions of the book this fall in my undergraduate Kinship seminar, and the students have reacted really positively to it; some of them said they found it very validating of their own experiences.

We did a book launch on Oct. 24, where the first half was a cabaret performance by Ronan Viard, who is French actor and singer who lives in Boulder. His story is exactly what the book is about. It was about him being abducted by his father and brought from France to the United States when he was a child. The story is about his experiences with that, but it鈥檚 also about his relationship to the United States, where he lives now, and his relationship with his father after all these years, and his children鈥檚 relationship with his father.

It was a powerful performance, and it brought up all these questions that were at the center of the book, like: How do you grapple with the types of family inheritances, including inherited trauma, that are perhaps unwelcome but hard to escape?

Ronan鈥檚 cabaret also raises questions about belonging that are very anthropological: How do we theorize belonging? How do we think about belonging to a nation or to a family or a community or to a language?

Kathryn Goldfarb鈥檚 solo-authored ethnography, , is forthcoming from Cornell University Press.


Did you enjoy this article?  Passionate about anthropology? Show your support.