Sumptuary Kinship

The essay pursues three ends. Two are theoretical. The first of these seeks to clarify and elaborate the consequences of approaching kinship as a distinctive system of subjectivation that yields an equally distinctive ethical domain. The second pursues the characterization of such a system as autopoietic or self-producing. The third end is diagnostic. It seeks to illuminate the modulations of the autopoetic economy of kinship in a global market that establishes consumption as its fulcrum. Treating the wedding and the funeral industries, the controversies surrounding same-sex marriage and the kinning of DNA, it reveals the systematic accentuation of the sumptuary and the demotion of keeping while giving in favor of acquiring while spending. Yet it also reveals an ethics of kinship that, if permitting the intrumentalization of the inconsumable, often does so for distinctly anti-aquisitive and anti-sumptuary ends.