Caring and Being Cared for: Displacing Marriage, Kinship, Gender and Sexuality
Author(s)
Borneman, John
Abstract
Anthropology’s quest for practices and institutions that might enable the universal translatability of culture has involved the repression of care and the privileging of forms of communal reproduction. Successive generations of anthropologists have identified human affiliation through the lens of either power, gender, kinship, marriage, or sex and they have asserted the logical or temporal priority of these terms without rigorously justifying the violent hierarchies that result from such prioritizing. Moreover, they have almost totally ignored what is foreclosed, abjected, or excluded. Instead of searching for human origins and foundations of communal reproduction, the author argues that anthropology should focus on processes of voluntary affiliation: processes of caring and being cared for. He focuses on two German legal cases — of adult adoption and inter-national marriage — where the principles of descent and affinity are evoked. In both cases, anthropological articulation appears initially as foreclosed and yet legal recognition comes about. It is suggested that the object of anthropological research is already shifting away from the institution of marriage or categories of kinship, sexual identities, gender inequality, or of power differentials generally, to a concern for the actual situations in which people experience caring and being cared for and to the political economies of the distribution of care.
