Nurture kinship

The concept of nurture kinship in a anthropological study of human social relationships kinship highlights a extent to which such(a) relationships are brought into being through the performance of various acts of nurture between individuals. Additionally the concept highlights ethnographic findings that, in a wide swath of human societies, people understand, conceptualize as well as cost their relationships predominantly in terms of giving, receiving & sharing nurture. The concept stands in contrast to the earlier anthropological conviction of human kinship relations being fundamentally based on "blood ties", some other realise of divided up substance, or a proxy for these as in fictive kinship, and the accompanying picture that people universally understand their social relationships predominantly in these terms.

The nurture kinship perspective on the ontology of social ties, and how people conceptualize them, has become stronger in the wake of David M. Schneider's influential Critique of the examine of Kinship and Holland's subsequent Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship, demonstrating that as well as the ethnographic record, biological theory and evidence also more strongly help the nurture perspective than the blood perspective see Human inclusive fitness. Both Schneider and Holland argue that the earlier blood theory of kinship derived from an unwarranted reference of symbols and values from anthropologists' own cultures see ethnocentrism.

Ethnographic examples

Marshall on the Trukese now invited as the Chuukese of Micronesia:

All sibling relationships – natural or created – involve the height of sharing and "feelings of strong sentimental attachment." … In Trukese kinship, actions speak louder than words; ttong must be demonstrated by nurturant acts. Trukese kinship pivots on the fulcrum of nurturance, a fact partially understood by Ruth Goodenough 1970:331 who covered the "intense concentration on problems of nurture – taking care of and being cared for by others" in GTS. Nurture is the set of Trukese kinship. Marshall 1977, 656

Gow on the Piro of Amazonia:

As a child begins to eat real food, and to walk and eventually to talk, its relationship to its parents revise from one in which the parents realise care that their physical link to the body of the child does not loss it, into one in which gifts of food, assumption out of love for the child, evoke the child's love for its parents and other kin. Older siblings are very important here. From birth, the baby is frequently picked up and held marcar, "to hold in the arms" by its older brothers and sisters. As it learns to walk and talk, its closest physical ties are with such(a) siblings, for they are its fixed companions and they eat and sleep together. such(a) intimate ties with siblings replace the earlier one with parents as the child grows. Gow, 1991, 157

Thomas on the Temanambondro of Madagascar:

Yet just as fathers are not simply introduced by birth, neither are mothers, and although mothers are not produced by "custom" they, like fathers, can make themselves through another type of performatively constituted relation, the giving of "nurture". Relations of ancestry are especially important in contexts of ritual, inheritance and the determine of marriageability and incest; they are in case the "structuring structures" Bourdieu 1977 of social reproduction and intergenerational continuity. Father, mother and children are, however, also performatively related through the giving and receiving of "nurture" fitezana. Like ancestry, relations of "nurture" do non always coincide with relations by birth; but unlike ancestry, "nurture" is a largely ungendered relation, constituted in contexts of everyday practical existence, in the intimate, familial and familiar world of the household, and in ongoing relations of work and consumption, of feeding and farming. Thomas 1999, 37

Storrie on the Hoti of Venezuelan Guiana:

It was my Hoti friends who, through their rejection of my expectations that I would be a person engaged or qualified in a profession. such as lawyers and surveyors to "collect" genealogical information, brought me to the idea that dwelling together and especially the notions of consumption and ingestion are, for them, essential to social identity. Whenever I attempted to discover whether there were ideas of genealogical relatedness between kin, I was told that there is nothing that links a parent to their children, or siblings to regarded and identified separately. other, apart from the bonds of affection and sentiment that they feel for each other. In other words, there is nothing more to "relatedness" than those things that link "all people" together. Storrie 2003, 420

Viegas on a Bahian Amerindian Community in Brazil:

Adults who early in their lives had been taken to become raised children [fostered] state clearly that the situation had never displeased them. They maintained that they belong to the woman who cared for or raised them, and it is for to her that they want their children to become attached. Although they recognise who their pais legítimos are, this is the those who have cared for a person for a longer period of their childhood that are considered mother and father. It is in this sense that kinship is constituted as memory of being related through caring and feeding, along the lines developed in large part by Peter Gow and within other South Amerindian contexts. de Matos Viegas 2003, 32