Commentary: Making Kin Beyond Kinship

Abstract This commentary returns to the initial motivation for the 2000 volume Beyond Kinship , which was to create an intersection between ethnographic approaches to kinship and archaeological ones through the overlap constituted by materiality and practice. From the vantage point of that project, the current collection of papers adds important additional material bases for exploring kinship derived from archaeogenetic investigations. It is significant that the contributors express shared commitments to non-reductive use of new genetic data, seeking to avoid static and essentializing approaches that would privilege a biological domain. Equally important is the commitment of the participants to understanding kinship as work, making kin, not simply recognizing kin. In this sense, it exemplifies the rhetorical move ‘beyond kinship’ in the 2000 volume. By adopting a perspective from queer theory, the volume’s push to recognize a ‘kinship trouble’ parallel to Judith Butler’s ‘gender trouble’ invites consideration of making kin as a process of emergence of belonging. This begins to fulfil an ethical burden that anthropology has, as the discipline that claims kinship, to understand the intimacy of the kind of knowledges we produce, and to ensure they are so critically grounded that they can no longer be used against people’s interests.