Reynolds_Marcus

Reynolds paper suggests some important directions in the study of family, household, and health—her emphasis on the need to recognize diverse forms of relatedness that models of “biological citizenship” tend to overlook is particularly salutary.

I am always interested in contemporary studies of “classic” ethnographic groups, as with the Zulu here, not simply as an update on “how they live now,” but more importantly at the possibility for current anthropologists to utilize and reanimate older accounts, categories, and analyses –studies that are often written-off as stale, overdetermined, and irrelevant (as can be the unfortunate case with work on kinship) can in fact be deeply significant for understanding the contemporary reconfigurations of social life.

Reynolds’s example of the boy who could name 49 kin members by the exact kinship terminology described in classic studies of the Zulu illustrates this point well. I would be very interested to extend Reynolds analysis even further, to account not only for the maintenance of kinship terminology for particular relatives, but also how certain of those categories are extended and take on additional meanings for new kinds of caregivers previously of peripheral or unmarked importance, such as extended kin or non-kin. For instance, if a young orphan’s brother’s wife who becomes the primary caregiver continues to be referred to as “new wife,” and never takes on a term of perhaps closer denotation (“mother” or “sister,” let’s say), what does that mean about the relative importance of lineal/”biological” reckonings of kinship versus the affinal/processural? Flux or stasis of terminological markers can inform our understandings of how the substance of kinship responds to and is shaped by the economic and epidemiological upheavals at hand.

Her point that non-resident kin are not necessarily absent from and inactive within kinship and household dynamics is an important one which we have repeatedly encountered in this course, not least in the context of Census presuppositions of who counts as part of the household. It reminds me of a case I brought up earlier in the semester of Filipino migrant workers to the UK who carry on life-long “remote parenting” relationships with their children via skype. You can read more about this here: http://blogs.nyu.edu/projects/materialworld/2009/02/parenting_by_phone_and_interne.html#comments