1. Sociol 322: A sociology of relational life
Recreating kinship

2. Today’s readings Readings:
Mason, Jennifer Tangible affinities and the real life fascination of kinship. Sociology 42 (1):29-45.
&
Nordqvist, Petra, and Carol Smart (Not) One of Us. In Relative strangers: Family life, genes and donor conception. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

3. Purpose of Today
The purpose of this week’s session is develop familiarity with kinship as a concept and to explore its relevance for the meaning of newer forms of family connectedness, in particular those family connections based on donor gametes

4. Outline for today Kin and kinship The new anthropology of kinship
Sociology’s belated interest in kinship - Mason
New kinships – donor assisted reproduction

5. kinship refers to
‘relatives connected to one another without any supposition of what kind of social group or family they make up’
(Strathern 2005, 167 cited Mason 2008, Tangible affinities, 31)

6. … while non-Westerners (the objects of traditional anthropology) had kinship, ‘we’ (in the West) have families’
[Lawler 2008, 36]

7. David d SChneider Blood [consanguineal] ties Legal [affinal] ties
American kinship: A cultural account [1968]

8. (Schneider cited Lawler, 2000, 38).
“A blood relationship is a relationship of identity. People who are blood relatives share a common identity, they believe. This is expressed as ‘being of the same flesh and blood’. …. Children are said to look like their parents or to ‘take after’ one or another parent or grandparent; these are confirming signs of the common biological identity. A parent, particularly a mother, may speak of a child as ‘part of me’
(Schneider cited Lawler, 2000, 38).

9. Are kinship ties Natural or cultural?
‘Kin are quite simply those persons
we recognise as kin’ [Lawler 2008, 38]    
Are kinship ties Natural or cultural?

10. Kinship systems
produce
insiders & outsiders;
those who belong
& those who don’t

11. The concept of relatedness therefore takes as its starting point what matters to people and how their lives unfold in contexts and places’.
[Smart 2007, 47]
Relatedness
Janet carsten

12. FICTIVE KIN Families of Choice Kath Weston
Queer families partners, ex-partners, friends, children
Close and enduring ties
In doing family they became family

13. The dimensions of affinity
Fixed
Negotiated and creative
Ethereal
Sensory
Prince Harry & James Hewitt – Son and Father?!
Mason: it is through these dimensions that ‘kinship is defined, known, and expressed’

14. Fixed
“A person ‘belongs’ to their kin group in a way which is not true of other social groups of which they might be a member. Especially in relation to the family of origin, a kin group is the group into which a person is born, in which the membership is in no sense chosen, and where relationships still exist throughout life even if they are left dormant. (Finch & Mason 1993: 169, cited Mason, 2008, p. 33)

15. negotiated
‘Kin or family responsibilities are thus not entirely fixed, neither are they entirely chosen or freely created, but the process of ‘working out what to do’, and indeed what might be the proper thing to do under particular sets of circumstances, is highly characteristic of them’ [Mason 2008, 36-7]

16. Ethereal
Mysterious Magical Psychic Spiritual Found in In transitory moments Serendipitous similarities

17. sensory
Physical Bodily Material Sense-based Mason: A currency through which kinship is transacted and understood