Sharing Surnames: Children, Family and Kinship

Abstract

This article presents children’s perspectives on contemporary (sur)naming practices. It critically examines naming as a family practice and as a way of ‘displaying’ family and kinship. Drawing on a study of children’s constructions of family and close relationships, it explores whether and how children consider surname as a way of feeling and being visibly connected to others. It suggests that sociological understanding of naming and its significance for kinship would be illuminated by theorizing surnames as an example of fixed and/or negotiated and creative affinities, and as manifestations of experiential and imagined kinship. Showing surname to be personally meaningful to children, I illuminate how children appeal to and reshape assumptions about the family, exposing their engagement with and reinvention of the cultural family imaginary. The article documents shifting forms of contemporary family and kinship relations from the perspectives of children.