ABSTRACT
In his account of the tribulations of self and identity under the conditions of ‘high modernity’, Giddens (1991) introduces, by way of Eriksonian psychology, the notion of ontological security. He defines ontological security as ‘a sense of continuity and order in events, including those not directly within the perceptual environment of the individual’ (Giddens, 1991:243; see Lash and Urry, 1994: 3844 for a critique of this position). In all human societies, one of the fundamental contexts in which a sense of ontological security is established is that of kinship. In its most general sense, kinship refers to the social organisation of human reproductive activity but also includes the system of values and attitudes which structure and regulate relational possibilities in society One of the key points at which kinship and ontological security cross is in the notion of time. The sense of security or insecurity generated by growing up within this or that arrangement of family and kin is not simply a spatial phenomenon, but one capable of bringing order and predictability over time: kinship systems structure relationships as they extend into the past but, more crucially, as they might extend as unrealised potentialities into the future. During a period when the apparent certainties of public life such as employment, community, environment and economy are subject to turmoil, fragmentation and unpredictability, the ability to locate oneself in an actual past and an imagined future is indeed an esteemed resource.
