ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some background material which explores the larger designation and how existing scholarly records, literary and historical, dealt with this phenomenon. The subject of the research project was kinship and particularly suckling kinship. Milk kinship is a widely used designation for a far-reaching phenomenon covered in the literature exploring the subject. It became evident that the designation subsumed a number of apparently similar practices, such as fosterage, wet-nursing, adoption, and other similar practices in the wider region of the Middle East and the Balkans at different historical periods. Two assumptions about milk kinship are being challenged: first, that the many practices subsumed within the designation constitute phenomena to be characterized as kinship and, second, that milk kinship is an Islamic phenomenon. Ethnographically exploring suckling practices thus sheds new light on the category of kinship, contributing insights leading to an analytic revisiting of core notions within kinship study.
