January 22, 2024

Kinship as action

This is part two of two posts of me thinking through some stuff. None of it is entirely new, per se, but consider this me fleshing out some of my own thinking based on interdisciplinary material so I have a foundation to get where I want to get with the archaeology...

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Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman",¹ meaning that there is not an innate womanhood, but that the identity and embodiment of woman is created in the experience of living and growing up in a social milieu with specific ideas of gender. Judith Butler built outwards from this, drawing on literary theory to make a similar (if broader) argument a few decades later, arguing that gender is performative.² In this case, they didn't mean the more colloquial usage of the term as indicating a disingenuous display, but in a linguistic and literary sense: some words do actions in the world (e.g. making a promise or a judge announcing their verdict), so in doing the gendered things, gender is instantiated, maintained, created, manipulated, etc. To put it more briefly, gender in this approach is not a noun but a verb - through doing we gender (ourselves, our world, etc).

By contrast, when we think of family structure - and in the social sciences when we map out genealogies with trees of relations - we often implicitly imagine that the relationships we are discussing are innate and unchanging. This person is always COUSIN to that one, always BROTHER to that other. This is an essentialising approach and a rigid one - it tends to gloss over or diminish relations that aren't formed through blood and descent or permanent/contractual affiliation. It also takes as read that cousin, brother, mother, father, etc are categories with universally shared meanings such that the nuance of what a cousin is to you or to another person, for example, are not always spelled out.

In recent years (well... recent decades...) feminist and queer scholarship (like de Beauvoir's and Butler's) have reinvigorated kinship studies by shifting the approach to encompass fluidity, changeability and action. Kin are not innate they are made and relations are not inborn they are created, maintained, fed, starved, broken, and manipulated. Kinship then might be best understood as a verb as well - acts of kinning, kin-making, affiliation and disconnection create the patterns that crystallise into genealogical trees.³ This is the approach, by the way, that my brilliant colleague Caroline Schuster and I took in the paper we presented last year at EAA and AAA (and which I promise we will work up for publication!).

The question facing archaeologists is, of course, how we might divine these fluid and complex, manipulated and active relations in and among our data. Robert Johnston has suggested that acts of monument building and the maintenance of field systems over generations in the British Bronze Age might be just the sort of actions that create and maintain kin ties.⁴ Interestingly, this opens us up to to talking about other-than-human relations within our kin-making framework - kinship that encompasses fields, stones, monuments, animals, the dead, etc. is particularly opaque without interlocutors.

Personally, I think that the domestic sphere - food production, small-scale craft-working, house building and maintenance - might furnish powerful data for this sort of conversation. I'm hoping that I can get at some of this through ceramic analysis - both looking at technique and at usage (i.e., cooking practices). But even then, it's a blurred snapshot - the joys of archaeology!