Consciousness & Spirituality, Story-Telling & Narrative

Kinship & Community - an Anthropological Perspective

KINSHIP: An Online Course Talk with Tim Ingold

All kinship depends upon the passage of generations. But what is a generation, and how should we understand the relations between them? Western bioscience has tended to separate lifelines from lines of genealogical succession, confining the former within generations while drawing the latter between them. Kinship, then is reckoned in terms of a calculus of genealogical relatedness, which specifies individuals in their basic constitution independently and in advance of their lifelong involvement in relationships with one another. We argue, to the contrary, that the process of begetting and being begotten that brings generations into being, and defines their interrelations, is itself a life-process. Generational lifespans do not succeed one another so much as proceed in parallel, overlapping for at least part of their length. For begetting is a labour of love, through which parents produce their offspring, and the latter theirs, in the everyday work of nurturance and care. Herein lies the essence of kinship.