SOCIOL 322 A SOCIOLOGY OF RELATIONAL LIFE Recreating

SOCIOL 322: A SOCIOLOGY OF RELATIONAL LIFE Recreating kinship

TODAY’S READINGS Readings: • Mason, Jennifer. 2008. Tangible affinities and the real life fascination of kinship. Sociology 42 (1): 29 -45. & • Nordqvist, Petra, and Carol Smart. 2014. (Not) One of Us. In Relative strangers: Family life, genes and donor conception. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

PURPOSE OF TODAY The purpose of this week’s session is develop familiarity with kinship as a concept and to explore its relevance for the meaning of newer forms of family connectedness, in particular those family connections based on donor gametes

OUTLINE FOR TODAY Kin and kinship • The new anthropology of kinship • Sociology’s belated interest in kinship - Mason • New kinships – donor assisted reproduction

kinship refers to ‘relatives connected to one another without any supposition of what kind of social group or family they make up’ (Strathern 2005, 167 cited Mason 2008, Tangible affinities, 31)

… while non-Westerners (the objects of traditional anthropology) had kinship, ‘we’ (in the West) have families’ [Lawler 2008, 36]

Blood [consanguineal] ties Legal [affinal] ties DAVID D SCHNEIDER AMERICAN KINSHIP: A CULTURAL ACCOUNT [1968]

“A blood relationship is a relationship of identity. People who are blood relatives share a common identity, they believe. This is expressed as ‘being of the same flesh and blood’. …. Children are said to look like their parents or to ‘take after’ one or another parent or grandparent; these are confirming signs of the common biological identity. A parent, particularly a mother, may speak of a child as ‘part of me’ (Schneider cited Lawler, 2000, 38).

‘Kin are quite simply those persons we recognise as kin’ [Lawler 2008, 38] ARE KINSHIP TIES NATURAL OR CULTURAL?

Kinship systems produce insiders & outsiders; those who belong & those who don’t

The concept of relatedness therefore takes as its starting point what matters to people and how their lives unfold in contexts and places’. [Smart 2007, 47] RELATEDNESS JANET CARSTEN

FICTIVE KIN FAMILIES OF CHOICE KATH WESTON • Queer families partners, ex-partners, friends, children • Close and enduring ties • In doing family they became family

THE DIMENSIONS OF AFFINITY 1. Fixed 2. Negotiated and creative 3. Ethereal 4. Sensory Mason: it is through these dimensions that ‘kinship is defined, known, and expressed’ Prince Harry & James Hewitt – Son and Father? !

FIXED “A person ‘belongs’ to their kin group in a way which is not true of other social groups of which they might be a member. Especially in relation to the family of origin, a kin group is the group into which a person is born, in which the membership is in no sense chosen, and where relationships still exist throughout life even if they are left dormant. (Finch & Mason 1993: 169, cited Mason, 2008, p. 33)

NEGOTIATED ‘Kin or family responsibilities are thus not entirely fixed, neither are they entirely chosen or freely created, but the process of ‘working out what to do’, and indeed what might be the proper thing to do under particular sets of circumstances, is highly characteristic of them’ [Mason 2008, 36 -7]

ETHEREAL Mysterious Magical Psychic Spiritual Found in In transitory moments Serendipitous similarities

SENSORY Physical Bodily Material Sense-based Mason: A currency through which kinship is transacted and understood