Introduction

The opening chapter introduces the distinction between “the family” understood as the politically sanctioned form of intimacy, and kinship practices that form a resilient and active set of associations that provide a fecund site of social and political resistance. Here, some of the recent critical literature on the family is reviewed with the intention of distinguishing the task of this book from previous critiques of kinship but also from the sentimentalist nostalgia that laments the loss of the traditional family ties. Instead, the task here is to examine practices of kinship that persist outside of the formalization of the family.