The Ethics of Kinship: Ethnographic Inquiries (review)

This is a book about the ethics of affect as manifested in kinship relations. James Faubion asked a number of one-time doctoral students of anthropology at Rice University (Texas) and two like-minded colleagues to write essays about their own personal experiences of kinship. The resulting collection is very welcome as it not only constitutes an interesting read in its own right but is also a contribution for the present renewal of debates in the anthropology of kinship. Each of the contributors chose to focus on some aspect of their own kinship history which they somehow problematized. The result is a number of fascinating essays dealing with what one might call the margins of kinship:¹ forgotten' relatives, manipulations of the law of kinship, clandestine "adoptions," love and hate, class and kinship, sibling cooperation and rivalry, sexual preference and legal family, etc., all accumulate to bring out a marvellously varied picture of middle-class kinship in the United States.

Indeed, although a number of contributors expound interestingly on their family histories in diverse places of origin around the world (Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Trinidad), what they tell us are stories of kinship as "lived in America." As a matter of fact, whilst writing their accounts, most of the contributors not born in the United States were undertaking a move to permanent residence there—to use Nityanand Deckha's words, they were becoming "new citizens of the West" (153).

The book resonates with this sense of America as the land of success and liberation which merges with the authors' own pride in their individual success within academia as doctoral students. Karim, for example, tells us of her "diasporic urge to remake myself into a subject who transcended kinship ties and was not bound by local and national habits and prejudices—a cosmopolitan subject." (118) Reddy, Deckha and Youngblood all make similar statements. Nevertheless, their location is decidedly in North America, which belies their "cosmopolitanism." Indeed, not all venues and not all classes can grant the aura of cosmopolitan subjecthood. Cosmopolitanism is a paradoxically local privilege that only some can exercise when they are accepted by certain countries and belong to certain classes. As Susan Ossman puts it elsewhere, "The abstract, far-sighted nature of this cosmopolitan vision can easily lead us to ignore the actual movements of people" (2006: 561).

In the essays, the logic of marginality² is put to work wonderfully to reveal both the relation between kinship and other aspects of social life and the relation between people's discursive practices and those aspects of their lives which they "know and share" but which they "normally" have no means to speak of. Clearly, judging from the emotional depth of the accounts, for every single one of the contributors, the exercise came to have a self-revelatory, exutorial function. Thus, the book is both a good read and a comment on how anthropological examination can break through convention.

Denise Youngblood (presently editor at CountryWatch, Houston) writes an essay about her family background in Trinidad, dealing mostly with the issue of marriage across race and its relation to ethnicity, nation, and color. She shows us how "the ideology of cosmopolitanism in Trinidad relates to the production of both the family and the nation" (48). She turns interestingly to Bourdieu's notion of "symbolic capital" to show how marital and extra-marital sexual relations were used to produce family in a context where, due to the "dramatic boom and bust cycles" which characterize Trinidad's economic history, wealth was seen as rather transient. According to her account, "intermarriage"³ is actually encouraged in Trinidad, as it produces a "hybrid" identity which furthers the nation's sense of itself as "cosmopolitan." She, then, goes on to explore the gaps in her own genealogical memory to show how "violent hierarchies" nevertheless function within this hybrid family, echoing with other domains of differentiation (ethnicity, class, culture, nation).

Jamila Bargach (presently teaching at the...