Bauer / Heise-von der Lippe / Hirschfelder Kinship and Collective Action

in Literature and Culture
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-8233-0229-2
Verlag: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 6, 291 Seiten

Reihe: Herausforderungen für die Geisteswissenschaften - Challenges for the Humanities

'Make kin, not babies!', Donna Haraway demands in an attempt to offer new and creative ways of thinking what kinship might mean in an age of ecological devastation. At the same time, the emergence of a seemingly new culture of public protest and political opinion have provoked scholars such as Judith Butler to address the contexts and dynamics of public collective action. This volume explores the dynamic relationship between structures of kinship and the (material) conditions under which collective action emerges from a literary and cultural studies perspective. How are kinship and collective action negotiated in literature, the arts, or in specific historical moments, and how does this affect the role of representation? How have conceptualizations of both concepts developed over time, and what can we infer from this for questions of kinship and collective action today?

Dr. Gero Bauer ist Literaturwissenschaftler und Geschäftsführer des Zentrums für Gender- und Diversitätsforschung, Universität Tübingen. Dr. Anya Heise-von der Lippe ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Lehrstuhl für Anglophone Literaturen an der Universität Tübingen. Dr. Nicole Hirschfelder lehrt und forscht zu amerikanischer Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft an der Universität Tübingen. Katharina Luther unterrichtet und forscht zu Beziehungen zwischen Materie, Literatur, und Kultur in der Abteilung für Amerikanistik am Englischen Seminar, Universität Tübingen.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bauer, Gero

Heise-von der Lippe, Anya

Hirschfelder, Nicole

Luther, Katharina

Leseproben

I. Interventions

Kith and Kin

Russell West-Pavlov

What does the term ‘kinship’ call to mind for the average educated user? Probably not the quotidian family relationships in which users are themselves embedded, but rather, something imagined as remote from everyday ‘modern’ realities. The term probably connotes the highly sophisticated systems developed by non-European societies to regulate social distance and proximity in the realm of conjugal relationships. (see Lévi-Strauss 1949) Of these, few traces remain in our societies except in the very schematic form of a general incest taboo (see Lévi-Strauss, 1958: 57; see Lévi-Strauss 1968: 47); kinship thus remains connoted as premodern and the primitive. Even the hypermodern three-dimensional geodetic modelling of the sophisticated kinship structures such as those that were prevalent in pre-contact Australian indigenous cultures (see Lévi-Strauss and Eribon 1991: 78–9; see Héran 2009: 87–140) does little to dispel the exotic flavour of the notion. When we rummage around in our current everyday vocabulary, however, we may come across the somewhat bookish but not uncommon cognate ‘kith and kin,’ which almost always occurs as an irreversible binomial. Today it generally translates as ‘friends and family,’ but works to give this more pragmatic denomination a reassuringly quaint charm. This slightly antiquated turn of phrase, for all its partially archaic form (‘kith’ as a single, unharnessed term disappears from usage by about 1500, see OED 1.–3.) and whiff of historical strangeness, also has something comfortably old-world and rustic, redolent of a rural homeliness very far from the New World tang of kinship. It is odd that the double-barrelled term ‘kith and kin’ is actually the one least foreign in its connotation, whereas the cool technicity of ‘kinship’ denotes social complexities our ostensibly liberal society has long since consigned to an authoritarian past. This oddly chiastic reversal perhaps points to a carefully concealed entanglement of such terms that may tell us more about the hidden realities of kinship than we care to acknowledge.

This diachronic entanglement of the modern and the archaic reflects a more disturbing entanglement of what Lévi-Strauss once called ‘the near and the far.’ (see Lévi-Strauss and Eribon 1991) A brief look at the etymology of ‘kith’ reveals its beginning as a Middle English term originating in the Old English ‘c?þþ’ or ‘c?þþu,’ meaning ‘kinship, kinsfolk, relations,’ from which it begins to differentiate itself once it becomes coupled to ‘kin,’ in the late 1300s. (OED 5.) At this juncture, ‘kith’ begins to shift its meaning to encompass ‘the persons who are known or familiar, taken collectively; one’s friends, fellow-countrymen, or neighbours; acquaintance.’ (OED 4.) The Old English in turn derives from the Old Germanic family of ‘kund-’ terms, beginning with the conglomeration of meanings around ‘sign,’ ‘mark,’ and ‘knowledge,’ then extending to ‘witness,’ at some point ‘client’ and eventually ‘customer.’ The English ‘kith’ also denotes ‘knowledge’ (with this meaning disappearing by about 1400) (OED 1.), ‘native land’ or ‘region,’ that is, the territory that is known, with this meaning also fading away by 1500, ceding simply to those who inhabit that region. (OED 3.) A derivative of this meaning can be found in ‘couth,’ referring to those who are known or renowned in the land (‘uncouth’ would refer to those whose social status is too low to allow them reputation and status).

What is striking about this potted history of a ‘fossilized’ term such as ‘kith,’ once it is shackled to ‘kin,’ is the gradual narrowing of its meaning, and its slow infusion by a median social distance, as opposed to ‘kin,’ which denotes the most intimate social relationships. It is as if the term ‘kith,’ at the moment it comes into a kinship relationship with ‘kin,’ must be differentiated from its new neighbour in a process whereby ‘kin’ jealously stakes out its home territory and wards off potential interlopers – a process of “domestication” of kinship. (Haraway 2016: 2) The cognitive, spatial, even geographical connotations of ‘kith’ are shed as its semantic range shrinks, and its almost tautological relationship to ‘kin’ is sundered into inner and outer circles. A systems theorist would trace in the historical semantics of the term symptoms of a rising degree of social complexity necessitating the progress of successive stages of (in English inadequately rendered by ‘differentiation’; see Luhmann 1982), that is, the establishment of increasingly specialized systems and subsystems to manage complexity. In this manner, ‘kinship’ and ‘kithship’ (if one may be permitted such a neologism) peel away from each other to denote precisely the respective domains of social ‘proximity’ and ‘distality’ that were the binaries underlying kinship structures. At this point ‘kinship’ emerges as an entity in itself, differentiated from its identical but disavowed twin. Yet that terminological self-containment never eradicates a residual pairedness that lurks in the shadows like a secret shame.

Kinship as a concept per se, we must suspect, is a contradiction in terms because kinship in fact is a relationship and not a single entity. This is perhaps why, barely hatched into conceptual autarky, it nonetheless immediately shacks up with ‘kith’ and multiplies itself in common speech into the archaic but frequent binomial ‘kith and kin.’ The antiquated flavour of ‘kith’ is an aftertaste of the history of ‘kinship.’ ‘Kith’s anachronism declares ‘kin’’s affinity to a larger community than that of the family (whether nuclear or extended – but there we are already beginning to blur the boundaries and slide dangerously back towards ‘kith’). The olde worlde ring of ‘kith’ preserves something that is fundamental and foundational about human society, and perhaps even beyond.

In fact, then, there is nothing ‘fossilized’ about the term ‘kith.’ On the contrary, it reveals the historical process whereby relationality, however often it may attempt to ‘immunize’ itself against the incursions of otherness into the protected and propertied sphere of the self (Esposito 2004; 2011), remains irresistibly fluid and contagious, constantly seeping across always porous borders to embrace what is not known to itself. Semantics follows in its wake, so that words ‘slip, slide, […] / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still’ (Eliot 1969: 175), constantly drawn into the orbit of other words to which they are akin (in other words: their kin). However much ‘kith and kin’ claims to differentiate ‘family and friends,’ they stubbornly continue to shackle the one to the other, suggesting that friends also belong to family and thereby triggering a chain reaction of rolling ‘kinship’ that may be impossible to rein in.

As we head towards absolute biological transparency (see Han 2015), we believe we have an ever tighter grip upon the true nature of kinship. DNA tests allow us to determine with pin-point accuracy the exact genetic relationships between parents and children, between siblings and their kin. Yet the recent development of mitochondrial DNA tracking (Reich 2018) has revealed that human populations have developed their cultures and technologies since the dawn of time by virtue of migration, mobility and cultural exchange. At the interface of genetic technologies and archaeology, it becomes increasingly clear that

through our evolution and, even more important, our history, populations have continually mixed with each other. Tiny pockets of persistent endogamy apart, we are blends of past populations, which were themselves blends of those who went before. And that trend continues today with the great 20th- and 21st-century migrations. (Mithen 2018: 6)

Intermarriage, traceable via genetic pattern-matching from deep history, is the motor of progressively rising cultural complexity. The populations of the globe are irreducibly related to one another and that interrelatedness, that vast kinship, has been the driver of cultural history. The biological mapping of kinship does not curtail its scope at all, but on the contrary, generalizes it to global dimensions.

Indeed, this may mean that at some point, biological kinship might even spill over to encompass the entirety of the life-world, 99 % of which is biomass. (see Nealon 2016) What of the baobob in Véronique Tadjo’s (2017), that watches over its West African village as it succumbs to the predations of the Ebola epidemic? It is undeniably kin to the villagers, providing the locus for law-making and storytelling, not to mention other forms of kinship-creation within the micro-society whose umbilicus it forms, as the central role of trees in African oral culture attests. (Calame-Griaule, ed. 1969) Conversely, in...