Kinship as Fiction

Bringing together emerging ethnographies on kinship in South Asia, this book explores the idea of kinship as 'fiction' in intimate relationships. This volume resurrects the idea of fiction and fictive-ness to understand how intimate relationships may use these particular labels, or create an experiential understanding around relationships.

Autorentext

Anindita Majumdar is Associate Professor of Anthropology-Sociology at the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad. Her research interests include reproduction, infertility, clinical medicine, and reproductive technologies. Anindita is the author of Transnational Commercial Surrogacy and the (Un)making of Kin in India, and Surrogacy: Oxford India Short Introductions.

Yoko Taguchi is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor at Eikei University of Hiroshima, Japan. Her current research focuses on domestic work in urban India, exploring the dynamics of care work and family/kinship/social relations.

Inhalt

Introduction - Kinship as fiction: Exploring the dynamism of intimate relationships in South Asia 1. Imagined and unimagined relatedness: a child of 'one's own' in third-party reproduction in India 2. Remembering deceased kin through assisted conception in India 3. Fiction in the making of intimacy in old age: a case from Sri Lanka 4. The fiction of 'fluid nuclear units': rearticulating relations through domestic work in Mumbai 5. Reimagining familial relationships: intimate networks and kinship practices in Odisha, India 6. Kinship as a 'public fiction'. Substance and emptiness in South Indian inter-caste and inter-religious families 7. Identifying 'authorized users', identifying kin: negotiating relational worlds through Geographical Indications registration