By Tatjana Thelen and Christof Lammer.

Published in 2021, in New York – Oxford : Berghahn.

Abstract :

While questions about what kinship is are often debated, the procedures that measure kinship have received less systematic attention. A focus on measuring kinship in relation to negotiations of belonging reveals its generative and structuring force. Different bodies of literature have touched on several aspects of these processes. Most explicitly, work in science and technology studies has focused on biomedical measurements of kinship as genetic similarity that are intended to assess health risks and diagnose diseases. These demonstrate the social embeddedness of technologies that often reproduce racial categorization (Featherstone et al. 2006; Finkler 2001; Latimer 2013; Rose 2007). Exploring reproductive technologies and adoptions, kinship studies have hinted at measurements when documenting how different materialities, substances, and performances of lived closeness produce families (Carsten 2004; Goldfarb 2016; Howell and Marre 2006; Kahn 2000). Legal anthropology and political anthropology have also pointed to kinship measurements in court proceedings and police raids, which rely on various procedures such as interviews and legal documentation, as well as DNA sampling (D’Aoust 2018; Friedman 2010; Heinemann and Lemke 2012). Finally, economic anthropologists have recently (re)discovered how kinship enters into calculations in the realm of finance that depend on evidence of closeness (Kar 2017). These discussions have often been isolated, leaving the general importance of kinship measurements undertheorized.