Aunting: Cultural Practices That Sustain Family and Community Life

Conclusion: Aunting in the 21st Century

169 conclusion Aunting in the 21st Century I feel aunting helps fill in many of the cracks and fissures that inevitably occur in everybody’s lives. When standard relationships defined by Western family norms and marital situations crumble, it’s aunting that often supplies healing love and connectedness. For me, aunting also helps remind us to stretch our love and caring, our time and financial contributions to not just those immediately genetically linked to us, but to stretch forth to the family of humankind. Sometimes families, communities, religious or political units, and nations are too self-contained and self-serving. Aunting is embracing and, writ large, may well be a model for healing our damaged world at all levels. (Muriel, Finnish Canadian) Muriel’s testament to the power of aunting offers a perfect coda to our analysis of aunting. As family communication researchers, we tell stories about what families are like and how aunting relationships are lived. The story we have told about aunting is both a representation of our participants’ characterizations and memories and a construction of possibility. We encourage a more expansive appreciation for the significance of aunting practices and their adoption for enacting all sorts of relationships. As a story about doing kinship, our rendition of aunting offers an alternative model to those grounded exclusively on 170 AUNTING the nuclear family—for example, stepmothering is fraught with uncertainties and tensions; enacting this often difficult relationship as an aunting relationship offers an alternative that recognizes new kin connections even as it honors a stepchild’s prior familial loyalties. Because our story about aunting emphasizes multiple, flexible, and adaptive relational connections, we see aunting as a powerful response to the need for ongoing but nonnuclear kinships in contemporary social life, where careerism, social narcissism, and individualism make it increasingly difficult to move beyond superficial relationships.1 E-mail and social networking sites such as Facebook give us the appearance that we are all connected these days, sharing our intimate secrets with strangers and living out our relationships as serial encounters. However , the longing for meaningful connections persists. As we have shown, aunting resists idealized versions of family solidarity and shared identities; instead, aunts, nieces, and nephews expect differences, discontinuities, and connections that change over time and periodically require renewal. Aunting, we maintain, is a story that meets the challenges of contemporary social and familial life. Our hope is that this book will call attention to the multiple ways that aunts contribute to family well-being and persistence. Most importantly, we hope we have made a convincing case for the mode of relational work we call “aunting” drawn on the aunt/niece/nephew relationship. Aunting is both a flexible and responsive relational dynamic and a repertoire of relational identities, skills, resources, and possibilities that can be mobilized to meet family crises and opportunities. Aunting in this sense is a verb, a relational practice that most of us experience firsthand in small but crucial ways as we reach out to others and as we accept the material and emotional support of those around us. As a relational practice responsive within and to changing contexts , aunting allows for considerable choice. Compared with other family roles like mother, father, child, or even grandparent, aunting is loosely scripted. That is, our cultural stories don’t “fill in” what aunts should be like or what makes a good or bad aunt quite as clearly as the stories about what makes, for example, a good or bad mother. One must choose how to enact the aunt role because there is no normative definition. As our participants described, the aunting relationship is CONCLUSION: AUNTING IN THE 21ST CENTURY 171 what we make of it. While some people make this a very intimate and closely connected relationship, others find little contact or intimacy to be just as acceptable. Perhaps the element of choice is most evident in the practice of chosen aunts. Aunting as invitational and voluntary and the created kin relations that extend family networks and reconfigure family relationships demonstrate the power of choice in contemporary family life. Aunting experiences and practices offer creative possibilities for changing social patterns and configurations of family. By focusing on aunting rather than nuclear family figures, we have offered an alternative story of family life that encompasses chosen families, caring communities, dispersed families, and the changing demographics of familial networks and generational legacies. We also called attention to the...