ABSTRACT
Reciprocity is a process which helps considerably in understanding why and how people become committed to giving help to relatives, but it does not tell us the whole story. This was the argument of the previous chapter. In this chapter we will explore our data through a different set of analytical perspectives, in which the central concept is negotiation. We have been using the concept of negotiation as if it were unproblematic until now, but here we want to unravel what it really means in practice. It is a concept which is central to our analysis and to our argument that responsibilities between kin are not the straightforward products of rules of obligation. They are, we shall argue, the products of negotiation.
