In this pithy two-part essay, Marshall Sahlins reinvigorates the debates
on what constitutes kinship, building on some of the best scholarship in
the field to produce an original outlook on the deepest bond humans can
have. Covering thinkers from Aristotle and Lévy- Bruhl to Émile Durkheim
and David Schneider, and communities from the Maori and the English to
the Korowai of New Guinea, he draws on a breadth of theory and a range
of ethnographic examples to form an acute definition of kinship, what he
calls the "mutuality of being." Kinfolk are persons who are parts of one
another to the extent that what happens to one is felt by the other.
Meaningfully and emotionally, relatives live each other's lives and die
each other's deaths. In the second part of his essay, Sahlins shows that
mutuality of being is a symbolic notion of belonging, not a biological
connection by "blood." Quite apart from relations of birth, people may
become kin in ways ranging from sharing the same name or the same food
to helping each other survive the perils of the high seas. In a
groundbreaking argument, he demonstrates that even where kinship is
reckoned from births, it is because the wider kindred or the clan
ancestors are already involved in procreation, so that the notion of
birth is meaningfully dependent on kinship rather than kinship on birth.
By formulating this reversal, Sahlins identifies what kinship truly is:
not nature, but culture.
