Vital relations: modernity and the persistent life of kinship

Abstract

Why should kinship matter in an analysis of the ways Italian textile and clothing manufacturers outsource the production of their fashion lines to China? How might attention to kinship illuminate our understanding of the Argentine nation-state and its oil industry? What does it mean that even high-tech, scientific workplaces—like blood banks and pathology labs in Penang, Malaysia—are thoroughly domesticated by relations of kinship and marriage? Can Indian shipyard workers’ ideas about kinship, reproduction, and the divine tell us something unexpected about the presumed secular nature of productive labor in the global economy? How do Mormon understandings of kinship and adoption help us reflect on mainstream Protestant and even ostensibly secular ideas of kinship