The returns of life: ‘Making’ kinship in life and death

Abstract

This article revisits Marshall Sahlins’s theory of kinship as a ‘mutuality of being’, in which two possible kinship orders are proposed: those that are ‘inherited’ at birth, and others that are ‘made’ in life. Sahlins’s theory is not exactly a reformulation of the classical consanguinity/affinity divide in kinship theory, but instead allows a place for consanguineous ‘blood’ kinship in the first of the two orders alongside a myriad of affinal situations. What then does it mean to ‘make’ kinship in life? Taking kinship and community as related problematics in anthropology and philosophy, respectively, I suggest in this article that the conditions for ‘making’ kinship in life can be established by borrowing from Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of community, in which community is the sharing of being. But being, as Nancy points out, is finite, meaning that it is curtailed by the experience of death. Joining the two discursive paradigms of Sahlins and Nancy, my argument is that if kinship can be ‘made’ in life, and life is delineated by finitude, then it is life and death (here conceptualised as biological forces) that act as frontiers for both inheriting and ‘making’ kinship.