ABSTRACT
Until now, it has been part of most of the indigenous cultural repertories in Europe to see the domain of kinship, and what is called its biological base in procreation, as an area of relationships that provided a given baseline to human existence. Kin relations, like genetic make-up, were something one could not do anything about. More powerfully, when these relations were thought of as belonging to the domain of ‘nature’, nature also came to stand for everything that was immutable, that was intrinsic to persons or things, and as those essential qualities without which they would not be what they were. The sense that one has no choice not to consume is a version of the feeling that one has no choice not to make a choice. Choice is imagined as the only source of difference: this is the collapsing effect of the market analogy.
