Kinning and De-kinning

Abstract

‘Kinning and De-kinning’ introduces a special issue that considers how houses, heirlooms and other owned items reproduce kinship and family in diverse societies. It revisits death and inheritance in kinship studies, with a focus on processes of ‘passing on’ and the materiality of things as well as bodies. Incorporating temporalities and materialities in the changing expression of deeply felt emotions that extend between people and between people and things, we echo classic concerns in kinship studies around the incorporation of strangers via affinity, while mobilising the notion of house societies, bringing classic anthropological insight on intergenerational transfer of wealth to bear on questions of identity and belonging. Showing how processes of kinning are always selective and negotiated, the articles in this special issue argue that they also carry with them the potential for kinning's shadow: just as property can enable kin relations to be re/produced, they can also be used to release people from kinship through what we term ‘de-kinning’: instances of failed appropriation and disrupted kin relations. The article outlines an approach to kinship that takes seriously the enduring qualities of material and property, while maintaining the argument that kinship is achieved (or negated) through the active performance of acknowledged relations.