“The African family is large, very large” mobility and the flexibility of kinship – examples from Cameroon

When I started fieldwork among the Maka in SE Cameroon in 1971 I was suprised that for them kinship was hardly about ascribing people a fixed position. In retrospect this makes me realize how deeply Talcott Parsons’ famous pattern variables – notably ‘ascription’ versus ‘achievement’ influenced our perspective. But Maka people turned out to be true masters in ‘working’-with kinship, constantly ‘discovering’ kin in unexpected contexts, making creative equations and switch-es. My subsequent research in the area (up till now) highlighted how over time this plasticity of their kinship arrangements increased with growing urbanization and even more with transcontinental migration. Cameroon’s famous ‘bush-fallers’ have developed their own ways for ‘working’ with kinship. However, this plasticity should not only be studied as stemming from new and shifting conditions. I hope to show as well that such a more dynamic view on kinship is valuable for re-evaluating classical kinship theory.

Parent of origin gene expression in the bumblebee, Bombus terrestris, supports Haig’s kinship theory for the evolution of genomic imprinting

Genomic imprinting is the differential expression of alleles in diploid individuals, with the expression being dependent upon the sex of the parent from which it was inherited. Haig’s kinship theory hypothesizes that genomic imprinting is due to an evolutionary conflict of interest between alleles from the mother and father. In social insects, it has been suggested that genomic imprinting should be widespread. One recent study identified parent-of-origin expression in honeybees and found evidence supporting the kinship theory. However, little is known about genomic imprinting in insects and multiple theoretical predictions must be tested to avoid single-study confirmation bias. We, therefore, tested for parent-of-origin expression in a primitively eusocial bee. We found equal numbers of maternally and paternally biased expressed alleles. The most highly biased alleles were maternally expressed, offering support for the kinship theory. We also found low conservation of potentially imprinted genes with the honeybee, suggesting rapid evolution of genomic imprinting in Hymenoptera.Impact summaryGenomic imprinting is the differential expression of alleles in diploid individuals, with the expression being dependent upon the sex of the parent from which it was inherited. Genomic imprinting is an evolutionary paradox. Natural selection is expected to favour expression of both alleles in order to protect against recessive mutations that render a gene ineffective. What then is the benefit of silencing one copy of a gene, making the organism functionally haploid at that locus? Several explanations for the evolution of genomic imprinting have been proposed. Haig’s kinship theory is the most developed and best supported.Haig’s theory is based on the fact that maternally (matrigene) and paternally (patrigene) inherited genes in the same organism can have different interests. For example, in a species with multiple paternity, a patrigene has a lower probability of being present in siblings that are progeny of the same mother than does a matrigene. As a result, a patrigene will be selected to value the survival of the organism it is in more highly, compared to the survival of siblings. This is not the case for a matrigene.Kinship theory is central to our evolutionary understanding of imprinting effects in human health and plant breeding. Despite this, it still lacks a robust, independent test. Colonies of social bees consist of diploid females (queens and workers) and haploid males created from unfertilised eggs. This along with their social structures allows for novel predictions of Haig’s theory.In this paper, we find parent of origin allele specific expression in the important pollinator, the buff-tailed bumblebee. We also find, as predicted by Haig’s theory, a balanced number of genes showing matrigenic or patrigenic bias with the most extreme bias been found in matrigenically biased genes.

The returns of life: ‘Making’ kinship in life and death

This article revisits Marshall Sahlins’s theory of kinship as a ‘mutuality of being’, in which two possible kinship orders are proposed: those that are ‘inherited’ at birth, and others that are ‘made’ in life. Sahlins’s theory is not exactly a reformulation of the classical consanguinity/affinity divide in kinship theory, but instead allows a place for consanguineous ‘blood’ kinship in the first of the two orders alongside a myriad of affinal situations. What then does it mean to ‘make’ kinship in life? Taking kinship and community as related problematics in anthropology and philosophy, respectively, I suggest in this article that the conditions for ‘making’ kinship in life can be established by borrowing from Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of community, in which community is the sharing of being. But being, as Nancy points out, is finite, meaning that it is curtailed by the experience of death. Joining the two discursive paradigms of Sahlins and Nancy, my argument is that if kinship can be ‘made’ in life, and life is delineated by finitude, then it is life and death (here conceptualised as biological forces) that act as frontiers for both inheriting and ‘making’ kinship.

Kinship, The Book of Mormon, and Modern Revelation

What relations do modern Americans have to dead ancestors? In the first half of the nineteenth century, this question preoccupied authors of many stripes, from ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan, to Iroquois prophet Handsome Lake. Both from rural New York, Morgan and Handsome Lake each grappled with the effects of white settlers’ occupation of indigenous homelands by turning to questions of kinship. When The Book of Mormon was published in 1830, it too turned to the deep history of human kinship forms to define how red and white Americans were bound together by vexed ties of violence and habitation of the same land. This ancient Amerindian history told a story of how personal agency and private families could transform “backward” tribes into free people. It reconnected secular doctrines of free agency with Christian theology, disclosing the theological origins of secular thought about kinship. But while this “American Bible” shared key assumptions with Morgan’s secular kinship theory, its status as modern revelation left the Mormon faithful vulnerable to being dismissed and displaced.