September 25, 2023

On kin-making technologies

Right now kinship and relationality are having a moment in the social sciences. Our friends the anthropologists are developing non-anthropocentric research practices and exploring multi-species relationality. I'm perhaps old fashioned enough that I'm not always comfortable with some of these approaches - maybe I'll write more about this at some time in the future - but I fully accept that kinship is composed, complex, and fluid and, moreover, can encompass more than humans.

Non-human kin are another thing archaeologists really struggle to grasp. Rachel Crellin and Oliver Harris (among many others others) have written some thought-provoking papers about relationality and how relations can extend beyond people.¹ But I'm still left asking if this is really kinship.

One paper I've found really valuable is a piece in Feminist Anthropology from 2020 by cultural anthropologist Matthew Wolf-Meyer (who probably wonders occasionally who the heck that Australian archaeologist is that keeps citing him) titled "Recomposing Kinship".²

In this article, Wolf-Meyer draws on disability studies and feminist theory to explore the ways technologies can be implicated in, create, or shape kin relations. He develops a useful classification of relations with technology, that I feel speaks really well to archaeological data and approaches to material culture:

"technological forms of kinship fall into two kinds of expression: technology-as-kin, wherein the object is treated as if it is a person, although that personhood may be limited, and technology-as-conduit, serving as a mechanism to bind individuals through the compositional mediation that technology provides, thereby founding a relationship of caring about another individual or group as kin."³

Kinship in his formulation is an active thing - a conduit for care that may be embodied in a person, experienced through technology, or encompassing other non-humans. The article is rich and meaty with quite a lot of material relevant to archaeological interpretations, but what I particularly wanted to flag in the context of this project is his excellent synthesis of research on genomic data as a kin-making technology.

He argues that genetic data themselves can 'create' kin from otherwise unrelated individuals, acting as a conduit that renders bodies more alike and creating notional bridges to cross divides of experience, identity, ethnicity, language, etc.⁴ Indeed, in his framework, even the kinship diagram itself is an active kin-making agent:

"Over time, I have begun to wonder how the technology of the kinship chart,how its representational logic and technological mediation, have come not to represent already-existing forms of kinship but to make new forms of kinship possible and exclude others through their composition. As a conduit, the kinship chart makes connections between people, seeking to demonstrate their 'mutuality of being' through a simple narration reduced to its graphic representation of a line connecting persons. Rather than demonstrating a connection, the technology of the kinship chart composes a connection between bodies, across spaces and times.... In the context of seeking to represent only those kin bound by biology or law, the kinship chart fails to represent all of the organic and inorganic connections of dependency that exceed the normative expectations built into the kinship chart’s narrative technology. This obfuscation of the connections that individuals depend upon to be full persons—as someone who cares about others and is cared about in turn—implicitly ratifies the individual as an autonomous actor."⁵

In other words, being a kin-making technology, kinship charts - just the sort of thing we make and use in our archaeogenetic studies - also create a distinctly delimited kin framework that excludes mutual care, dependency, and complex engagements with non-humans. Again, there's a lot going on in this paper that is worth your time; but, in the context of the KINnect project, I really appreciate how this framework has made me take a step back and ask not just what are the strengths and limitations of biological data for understanding relations and relatedness, but what other sorts of kin-making technologies are covertly shaping our interpretations.