ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapter I described how – like many families in my research set – the children in Gobi’s family are crucial to the creation and maintenance of kinship relations. I also showed how the women in Gobi’s family are the primary actors in maintaining relationships among the extended family, and they do this partly for the purpose of ‘keeping the children together’. Through another family, this chapter explores further the central role of women in making kinship, albeit in different ways. Central to this chapter is the endurance of kinship relationships over time and space and during crises, and how obtaining life stories and kinship histories can be as essential as contemporary observation in reaching an understanding of these patterns. This chapter will again focus on one family, the extended family of Verna Morgan and her husband Ken Morgan.
