ABSTRACT
The first chapter, “Does the Family Exist? Structures and Practices of Kinship”, examines ways in which anthropology has cultivated a concept of kinship that persistently appears to justify the modern construction of the nuclear family, despite its roots in colonial, Abrahamic, and capitalist categories. It attends to a wide range of anthropological work as well as texts by feminists, queer theorists, and philosophers as they critically respond to the ethnographic presuppositions haunting western metaphysics. The task is, on one hand, to critique the naturalization of specific kinship structures – as well as their imagined historical and metaphysical precedent – but also to examine the source of their authority. That is, to locate the power of kinship within the social and biological necessity of solidarity, in practices of mutual aid that respond to radical vulnerability or bodily ontology, i.e. in examining potentiality within kinship practices as formidable relations conceived outside of the nuclear dyad and the Oedipal disaster it reproduces.
