Enchanted Relations: On Sahlins, Kinship, and Magic

Abstract: Marshall Sahlins's understanding of kinship as cultural rather than biological has been salutary to kinship studies, but his definition of kinship as "mutuality of being" leaves untheorized those aspects of kinship relations experienced as negative, burdensome, or ambivalent. In defining witchcraft as "negative kinship," Sahlins gets at something important, but also overlooks the tradition deriving from Emile Durkheim in which kinship connection is understood as in tension with egoistic self-regard, such that amity and resentment are flip-sides of the same coin.