Conceiving relatedness: non-substantial relations among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea |
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Authors: | Sandra Bamford |
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Affiliation: | University of Toronto at Scarborough |
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Abstract: | This article considers the implications of imagining kinship as a non-embodied relation. In recent years, it has become commonplace to argue that relatedness is a gradually acquired state that can be built over time and by non-sexual means. In this view, relationships of consanguinity are not given at birth but are created through purposeful acts of feeding and caring. Here, I address a question that has been less commonly asked by anthropologists: need kinship always be imagined as entailing an embodied connection? Is there a way of thinking about cross-generational relationships that does not ground them in bodily connectedness, or, at the very least, one that imagines contexts in which they are not embodied as a substantial link between people? Drawing upon data collected among Kamea of Papua New Guinea, I describe a world in which the parent-child tie is conceptualized as one that is inherently non-embodied. |
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