New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties across the Abrahamic Religions

285 Pages·2017·2.72 MB·English

by  Todne Thomas

CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION
New Directions
in Spiritual Kinship
Sacred Ties across the Abrahamic Religions
EDITED BY TODNE THOMAS,
ASIYA MALIK, ROSE WELLMAN
Contemporary Anthropology of Religion
Series Editors
Don Seeman
Department of Religion
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Tulasi Srinivas
Department of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Contemporary Anthropology of Religion is the official book series of
the Society for the Anthropology of Religion, a section of the American
Anthropological Association. Books in the series explore a variety of
issues relating to current theoretical or comparative issues in the study
of religion. These include the relation between religion and the body,
social memory, gender, ethnoreligious violence, globalization, modernity,
and multiculturalism, among others. Recent historical events have sug-
gested that religion plays a central role in the contemporary world, and
Contemporary Anthropology of Religion provides a crucial forum for the
expansion of our understanding of religion globally.
More information about this series at
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Todne Thomas • Asiya Malik • Rose Wellman
Editors
New Directions in
Spiritual Kinship
Sacred Ties across the Abrahamic Religions
Editors
Todne Thomas Asiya Malik
Department of Religion Independent Researcher
University of Vermont Toronto, Canada
Burlington, Vermont, USA
Rose Wellman
The Sharmin and Bijan
Mossavar- Rahmani Center
for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Contemporary Anthropology of Religion
ISBN 978-3-319-48422-8 ISBN 978-3-319-48423-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963221
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To communitas and to Edie
To our dear mentor Susie
To sisterhoods of spirit
And to the nourishing presence
of our children
P
reface
New Directions in Spiritual Kinship is a groundbreaking work. It is the
first volume specifically dedicated to the comparative study of “spiritual”
or “sacred” kinship—the first volume to explore ethnographically the
richly diverse manifestations of sacred kinship and to articulate theoreti-
cally the significance of these manifestations for our understanding of the
architecture of human societies. And it is the first volume to bring recent
advances in the anthropological study of kinship to bear on the study of
religion to produce a highly innovative and exceptionally fruitful investi-
gation of the dimensions and dynamics of an array of possible intersections
between kinship and the sacred.
From the perspective of anthropological studies of kinship, New
Directions in Spiritual Kinship brings to light the critical importance of
the sacred as a fundamental building block of kinship formations in its
own right. Given that the theoretical framing of kinship as a domain of
inquiry in anthropology was originally delimited by reference to biological
relations and described in mostly secular terms (Schneider 1984; Cannell
2013), serious attention to the ways in which kinship can be created
through processes of making spiritual and sacred relations is a significant
advancement in kinship studies. Aside from Fustel de Coulanges—who,
in The Ancient City (1980 [1874]), conceptualized kinship first and fore-
most as a relation of shared worship and sacrifice regardless of biologi-
cal relatedness—most anthropological theorists of kinship up until the
1980s understood biological relations to undergird the differing social
manifestations of what counted as “real” kinship. The religious, sacred,
or spiritual aspects of kinship were conceptualized in one of two main
vii
viii PREFACE
ways. On the one hand, in such forms as ancestor worship, they were seen
as cultural epiphenomena meant to reflect and reinforce the structure of
the given social forms of otherwise biologically based kinship (e.g., Fortes
and Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fortes 1969). On the other hand, relations
of sacred or spiritual kinship that were conceived outside or alongside
of “real” biological kinship relations were deemed to be “fictive”—less
than “really real” and hardly capable of forming the infrastructural base
of social relations. Either way, relations of sacred or spiritual kinship were
understood as somehow derivative of and secondary to biological rela-
tions, and they were rarely explored as fundamentally constitutive or
primary.
With the work that followed upon Schneider’s (1984) critique of
Western presuppositions about the biological foundations of kinship as an
analytic domain, scholars shifted their attention in two interrelated direc-
tions. One led them to consider the ways in which kinship relations could
be formed through other substances besides biological ones—such as shared
food, land, hearths, and houses; the other led them to consider kinship as
a process of doing—unfolding in the everyday practices such as care, nur-
turance, feeding, exchange, labor, and choice (e.g., Carsten 1995, 1997;
A. Strathern 1973; McKinnon 1991, in press; Schneider 1984; Weston
1991). It is significant that, while this theoretical shift allowed anthropol-
ogists to consider a much wider range of what might count as kinship and
how such kinship might be brought into being, the theoretical location of
spiritual or sacred kinship as “fictive” remained largely unexamined. It is
not that scholars of kinship studies did not integrate the sacred and spiri-
tual aspects of kin-making into their accounts; rather it was that the status
of the relation with the divine—as one of the possible grounds for kinship
formations—was not fully repositioned and theorized. This is precisely
what this volume seeks to accomplish.
From the perspective of anthropological studies of religion, this vol-
ume illuminates the critical importance of kinship to the formation of
religious communities. It does so in several different ways. It explores
how understandings about gendered contributions to life and identity
inform conceptions of both cosmological creation and the human procre-
ation. It examines how the lines of kinship and marriage—traced through
bodily substances and human actions such as feeding—can become the
pathways that link humans to the divine and divine blessing. And it inves-
tigates how these divinely infused relations of kinship come to form the
architecture that structures communities at and between various levels of
PREFACE ix
organization, from domestic families to congregations, nations, and trans-
national communities.
In exploring the intersections between kinship and the sacred, the
chapters in New Directions in Spiritual Kinship consider a number of
crosscutting themes; and they also reveal a tremendous diversity of ideas
and practices within and across the three religions—Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam—that are the focus of this volume. Although the comparative
scope of the volume is limited to the Abrahamic religions, one neverthe-
less suspects that many of the themes explored in this comparative context
would also be relevant to a wider investigation of sacred kinship in other
religions around the world.
One of the primary comparative themes that became immediately evi-
dent in the Wenner-Gren workshop from which this volume emanates
is the distinction between the embodied as opposed to the transcendent
nature of the relationships between kinship and spiritual/sacred connec-
tions to the divine. Yet, even at the most embodied and transcendent ends
of the spectrum, the material and spiritual are almost always complexly
entangled with and capable of transforming one another. Whatever is per-
ceived as given, divinely ordained, or natural is capable of being trans-
formed—of being subject to the effects of both human and divine action,
intention, and agency.
Another significant theme revealed by the authors in this volume is the
tension between the aspirational ideal of a universal, expansive, and inclu-
sive sacred community, on the one hand, and the ways in which such ideals
are contradicted by more exclusive and differentiated affiliations, on the
other. While the former becomes manifest in more globally shared rituals,
texts, and practices (such as those of the Muslim umma or the catholic
church), the latter become evident through sectarian, ethnic, racial, and
regional distinctions, as well as through transnational migrations, colonial
legacies, and the trust borne of genealogical knowledge and/or shared life
experiences. The chapters in this volume detail the ways in which people
engage these complex histories, practices, and knowledges in their strug-
gles to open up and/or delimit what they understand to be the space of
religious sociality.
Closely linked to this tension between the universal and the particular
is the capacity of kinship (however defined) as a vehicle for both inclu-
sion and exclusion, integration and disintegration, hierarchy and equality.
Perhaps precisely due to its dynamic shifting significations of material and
spiritual relatedness, kinship has the capacity to link and integrate sacred
x PREFACE
communities at various levels of organization: domestic, congregational,
national, regional, and global. Yet if sacred kinship can form integrative
structures that link different levels of organization, it can also form the
scaffolding of inclusions and exclusions that define both internal and
external social hierarchies (and equalities). Internally, it is the gendered
aspects of sacred kinship that is perhaps the most notable line of hier-
archical differentiation. Externally, both material and sacred genealogies
demarcate the limits of community exclusion and inclusion.
Finally, this volume also speaks to the enduring relevance of both kin-
ship and religion in so-called modern societies. In narratives of social evo-
lution and development, the assumption has long been that modernity
is marked by increasing secularization as well as by the restriction of kin-
ship to the domestic domain (McKinnon and Cannell 2013). But in these
essays we see the vitality of sacred kinship not only for domestic life but
also for the larger political and economic relations of modern nations and
transnational formations. These should not be rendered as “backward”
social formations marked by the failure of development, but rather as
explicit challenges to the secular, individualistic, and capitalist values that
have come to dominate what is considered “modern” in the contempo-
rary global order.
This volume arose from the work of three graduates from the
Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia—Todne
Thomas, Asiya Malik, and Rose Wellman—whose research focused on
quite different aspects of the intersection between kinship and the sacred.
Through the depth of their enthusiasm, curiosity, and intellectual engage-
ment with spiritual kinship, they not only came to define an exciting new
terrain for intellectual inquiry but also, in the process, became really real
sister-kin. This is the very best of what we hope for in our lives as both
intellectual beings and kindred spirits.
BiBliograPhy
Cannell, Fenella. 2013. The Re-enchantment of Kinship. In Vital Relations:
Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship, ed. Susan McKinnon and Fenella
Cannell, 217–240. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
Carsten, Janet. 1995. The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth:
Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness Among Malays in Pulau Langkawi.
American Ethnologist 22(2):223–241.