ABSTRACT
Kinship does not consist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals, it exists in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representation.
(Lévi-Strauss cited in Blackwood 1986)
In December 1992 the news finally broke that Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales and future king and queen of England, were to separate. The Daily Mirror announced the ‘end of a fairytale’ and ran a twelve-page ‘royal souvenir’. The tabloids poured forth on every conceivable angle, from the upset of the Queen and the fate of the ‘little princes’ to the astrologer who had predicted the separation in his charts. The royal family, iconic and nuclear, was evidently no different from many other families in Britain in the 1990s, the site of profound and deeply distressing contradictions between ideals and expectations on the one hand and actual experiences on the other.
