The Matter of Kinship

Alongside natural matter, the ‘matter of kinship’ was a channel through which to negotiate divine power in the cosmos. Objects were integral to constituting kinship and forming devotional communities before God. Gifts exchanged between kith and kin on the occasion of baptism, marriage, and death reveal the dynamic nexus of objects and kinship within the cosmos, to which love was central. Gifts, bequests, trades, transfers, and exchanges of all kinds acted to create and sustain kinship bonds as an important part of devotion. Such objects were not only important during the moment of their initial production and use, but also as they were embedded in the daily life of the family and became constant reminders of the Christian lifecycle. Over time such items were woven more deeply into the fabric of daily family life by being given, used, or inherited down the generations.

In the Shadow of Death

This article posits that the myriad socio-ecological crises that mark the Anthropocene have generated a novel form of green utopianism or ‘ecotopianism’ in the form of contemporary radical environmental activists (REAs). Drawing on posthuman and green utopian theoretical tributaries, the article seeks to critically assess how the intrusion of crisis into the present influences REAs’ modality of ecotopianism, in particular their relations to central utopian concepts of ‘hope’ and ‘futurity’. REAs are embroiled in a fervent refusal of the ‘present’ of climate and ecological decline, frequently emphasizing the need to create micro-exemplars within the ‘here and now’ and evincing scepticism towards closure around particular notions of ‘the better’. REAs’ singular mode of ‘hopeless activism’ is not devoid of hope but rather disavows hope in its abstract and future-oriented modality, instead emphasizing a ‘critical modality’ of hope. The latter, stemming from REAs’ post-anthropocentric worldviews and deep kinship bonds with the nonhuman world, is fuelled by grief over the extant widespread loss of cherished Earth kin and moulded by a desire to create a ‘not-yet’ devoid of the widespread absence of Earth others. The article concludes with reflections on the nature of hope, loss of life and the utopian imaginary amid times pervaded by crisis, and on the potential for co-constructing more liveable worlds with Earth others.

Liberating the family: Debt, education and racial capitalism in South Africa

This article provides an analysis of South Africa’s #FeesMustFall protests focusing on young people’s concerns around debt, family obligations and social mobility. While the protests have popularly been understood as a generational revolt, there has been insufficient attention paid to the role of debt in young people’s lives and how this affects aspirations towards collective social mobility. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with students from a black working-class township, this article suggests that education reconfigures kinship bonds, generating expectations to support family members by paying a so-called ‘black tax’. Drawing on the concept of ‘debt ecologies’, I highlight how debt articulates with other forms of social inequality, racialized poverty in particular, and can also act as a source of politicization. Finally, I call for greater attention to the role of debt in young people’s lives and how it impacts their economic agency, their role in care and familial networks and ability to imagine the future.

The smell of Shōwa: Time, materiality and regimes of value in Japan’s second-hand kimono industry

This article maps the way second-hand kimono pass between different regimes of value as they move out of people’s homes and into second-hand shops. Joining recent calls for a greater anthropological focus on the processes of divestment and disposal, the author highlights how kimono move from the inalienable space of the domestic sphere and into the alienable domain of retail, and considers how their materiality – worn fabrics, dated aesthetics and musty smell – is an active agent in the transformation of value. When initially purchased, the symbolic and economic values of kimono are congruent. But with the passage of time and the deterioration of materials and fraying of kinship bonds, the value of kimono as treasured family possessions is diminished. Yet the very materiality that caused their loss of economic and symbolic value, their undesirable smells, colours and designs can cause them to enter a new regime of value as vintage fashion supported by fashion magazines. By rethinking Arjun Appadurai’s regimes of value with a greater focus on material properties and qualities, this article aims to link cycles of divestment and consumption practices with the generation, loss and re-creation of value.

Writing self and kin: diasporic mourning in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

This chapter considers how queer diaspora may be generated via mourning. Jackie Kay’s novel shows how mourning makes visible and performatively constructs kinship bonds, and that it is also an active process which rewrites the lives of the dead and living. This process of mourning and the constitution of self and kin in the novel takes place in the ‘diaspora space’ of contemporary Britain. Mourning is a force which creates queer diasporic bonds, affirming connections with the dead and transforming the living, enfolding the past into the future. It becomes clear that mourning and kinship are not only individually determined, but also influenced by a shared Black Atlantic history of loss, displacement and racialization. The novel suggests that two modes of kinship – one state-recognized, governed by genealogy or legal recognition, the other mobile, performative and created by shared experience and aesthetic creation – coexist in the context of late twentieth-century Britain, and that these latter, queerly diasporic notions of kinship have shaped contemporary Britain in numerous ways.

Breaking Up From What?

This study, which provides close readings of short stories written by 朱文 (1967-), Han Dong 韩东 (1961-) and Dong Xi (1966-), major exponents of a Nanjing-based group of writers called Duanlie 断裂 (Rupture), suggests that for these writers the body is represented in terms of human capital (suzhi 素质) in a way that resonates well with what the political scientist Crawford Brough Macpherson has defined as «possessive individualism». In fact, their characters’ individual private body is for them the most important capital as well as the primary object of self-investment; they owe nothing to society; they regard personal relations as market relations breaking free from traditional kinship bonds and, finally, they regard themselves as «proprietor of themselves». What these middle-class intellectuals introduce in their writings is the newly-born middle-class consumer willing to celebrate, as Paterson says, «carnivalesque consuming bodies celebrating popular pleasures, not of the mind, but of the body» (2005, 105).

Power and Discipline: The Role of Accounting in the Monte di Pietà of Ravenna between 18th and 19th Centuries

This paper aims to fill a gap in the scant literature on accounting practices in non-Anglo-Saxon countries in under- researched periods by exploring the Monte di Pietà of Ravenna, an Italian non-profit institution. The research draws upon original 18th and 19th century documents found in the Monte di Pietà of Ravenna and offers an internal perspective of the development of accounting technology before and after an ‘intacco’ episode, thus attempting to shed light on the significance of accounting in that context. The originality of the Ravenna episode, compared to other similar ones experienced by Monti, consists in its extension over time and in its recurrence by three generations of administrators linked by kinship bonds, who systematically damaged the Monte between 1797 and 1837. The new form of control of the Monte’s activities after the “intacco” based on accounting technologies, and realised a new relation between power and knowledge in which accounting was the tool to exercise disciplinary power, thus making people more governable. Accounting technologies relied upon a more articulated financial statement that included the institute’s transactions and events.

Women and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

This chapter analyzes the lives of enslaved women in the nineteenth-century United States and the Caribbean, an era characterized by the massive expansion of the institution of chattel slavery. Framing the discussion through the themes of labor, commodification, sexuality, and resistance, this chapter highlights the wide range of lived experiences of enslaved women in the Atlantic World. Enslaved women’s productive and reproductive labor fueled the global machinery of capitalism and the market economy. Although enslaved women endured the constant exploitation and commodification of their bodies, many actively resisted their enslavement and carved out supportive and sustaining familial, marital, and kinship bonds. In addition, this essay explains how white, native, and black women could be complicit in the perpetuation of chattel slavery as enslavers and slave traders. Considering women in their roles as the oppressed and the oppressors contributes and expands historical understandings of gender and sexuality in relation to slavery.

Expiating Apostasy: Baal Peor, Moses, and Intermarriage with a Midianite Woman

Numbers 25.1–18 tells the story of Baal Peor, a moment lifted up as an example of apostasy and warning for life in the land in Psalm 106, Joshua 22, and Hos. 9.10. The violation central to the story of Baal Peor is intermarriage, for intermarriage is more than sexual relations or idolatry. Intermarriage affirms or forms kinship bonds. Numbers 25.1–18 joins the account of Baal Peor with the story of intermarriage with a Midianite (25.6–18). In this event Moses is confronted for his role in permitting the apostasy and his failure to oversee the people. Furthermore, he is implicated for his own marriage with a Midianite, Zipporah. This article argues that Moses too had yoked himself to the people of Midian. Moses's hybrid and intermarried past is reinterpreted in a new light where Moses's past, synecdochic of Israel's, must be confronted and atoned for, so that a sense of cultural identity can be (re)claimed.

Empathy as a driver of prosocial behaviour: highly conserved neurobehavioural mechanisms across species

Empathy reflects the natural ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others, coupled with a motivation to care for their well-being. It has evolved in the context of parental care for offspring, as well as within kinship bonds, to help facilitate group living. In this paper, we integrate the perspectives of evolution, animal behaviour, developmental psychology, and social and clinical neuroscience to elucidate our understanding of the proximate mechanisms underlying empathy. We focus, in particular, on processing of signals of distress and need, and their relation to prosocial behaviour. The ability to empathize, both in animals and humans, mediates prosocial behaviour when sensitivity to others' distress is paired with a drive towards their welfare. Disruption or atypical development of the neural circuits that process distress cues and integrate them with decision value leads to callous disregard for others, as is the case in psychopathy. The realization that basic forms of empathy exist in non-human animals is crucial for gaining new insights into the underlying neurobiological and genetic mechanisms of empathy, enabling translation towards therapeutic and pharmacological interventions.