Social Analysis

Widespread procedures to measure what is taken to be kinship condition negotiations of various forms of belonging (family, ethnicity, nation, race, and even humanity). Kinship measurements require indicators, evidence, and persuasive display to become institutionalized. This introduction shows these measurements’ generative force, which enables their translation into differentiated access to resources. Kinship measurements pull together different and sometimes contrasting ideas, practices, and materialities. Different measurements can add up, mutually reinforcing each other, and reach thresholds for inclusion or exclusion. Yet most often they remain contested, produce gradual results, and do not achieve closure. Grouping them together as assessments of closeness or similarity, we explore the productivity of kinship measurements in diverse settings, such as medicine, bureaucracy, and ritual, to demonstrate how they shape inequalities and marginalizations.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, American researchers at the Eugenics Record Office utilized a theoretical framework that combined humoral and Mendelian principles of inheritance to measure, trace, and predict the intergenerational transmission of an expansive net of morally charged heritable traits. Their reductive understanding of Mendelian principles—guided by class- and race-based prejudices—allowed them to paint a portrait of a nation that was bifurcated by ‘good’ and ‘bad’ strains of the population and threatened by the presence of ‘degenerate families’. This article examines the theoretical and methodological strategies and the technologies of display and ‘scientific’ legitimization that brought into being the category of ‘degenerate families’ and provided the justification for social policies that controlled marriage, limited immigration, and sterilized tens of thousands of Americans.

From the early 2000s onward, scientists, politicians, and intellectuals have presented the South African gene pool as a new archive for the new nation, suggesting a non-racial unity in diversity through common human origins. In this discourse, population genomics and genetic ancestry allude to metaphors of shared kinship to overcome the legacies of race. However, a focus on the underlying practices of measuring and classification reveals how the genomic archive is implicated in the history of apartheid and its racialized subjectivities. Similarly, individual interpretations of genetic ancestry show that race is constantly brought forth in this archival process. The genomic archive interweaves measuring practices in the sciences with the politics of social and biographical experience—a relationship that is at the heart of genetic genealogies.

Immediately after the independence of South Sudan in 2011, a nationality law was passed that defined citizenship by membership to clearly defined and bounded ethnic groups. To acquire citizenship, the testimony of a ‘next of kin’, taken to be an ‘older blood relative from the father's line’, was supposed to verify ethnicity and, thus, belonging to the new nation. Citizenship offices were tasked with checking names and assessing life histories. In so doing, they combined the logic of patrilineal names with estimations of lived closeness, creating a complex system of measuring kinship. Based on colonial legacies and methods acquired during the Sudanese civil war, kinship measurements produced new relations, but also fueled ethnic tensions and cemented social inequalities.

The moral imperatives of kinship in Italy today articulate state law and market in measurements of closeness for access to resources and care. The negotiations of insurance payouts for road crash victims offer a privileged vantage point to study this articulation and, specifically, how laws and welfare policies are reproduced through financial products. In these negotiations, insurance companies, state agencies, lawyers, and families employ different measurements of kinship as closeness. The notion of ‘kin enough’ indicates thresholds of belonging reached when degrees of closeness measured through different indicators add up. Two case studies show how concrete negotiations of measurement reinforce inequalities of gender, class, and age, and help to moralize kinship according to ideals of middle-class propriety.

Genetic counselors in the US assess disease risks by drawing on family histories, genetic tests, and patients’ racial, ethnic, national, or religious self-identifications. The bodily risks of kinship articulated by family histories can be defused by genetic tests that highlight the contingency of biological inheritance and decouple kinship from genetics. However, such tests, as well as self-identifying patients, also entwine genetic risk with older indicators of kinship: biologically understood race and ethnicity. Across these scales, counselors calculate relative risks to the future health of individuals, in the process measuring kinship as genealogical closeness, genetic dis/similarity, and biocultural race and ethnicity. As counselors personalize the universal promises of genomics at a biomedical nexus of risk and prophylaxis, they tap into anxieties about the changed natures of American kinship.

Struggles between current tenants and the heirs of former owners over property rights in post-socialist housing restitution in Romania often unfold through kinship measurements. I use the notion of ‘boundary kin’—relatives who in different situations may be considered as either near or distant—to capture the role that kinship measurements play in these conflicts. Expanding ties to the past, a large number of persons are seeking restitution. In this ‘inheritance bubble’, the importance of the material basis of measurements in documenting and certifying kinship increases. In an effort to limit restitution, tenants question the genealogical, geographical, and temporal proximity between potential heirs and original owners, embedding kinship measurements instead in care, past suffering, and material engagements with, and knowledge of, the restitution object.

Kinship among Khmu villagers of northern Laos is usually presented in anthropology as patrilineal. However, the ritual of a ‘small marriage’ can confirm a child's belonging to the mothers’ house. The affirmation of the child's maternal belonging is simultaneously about separation and exclusion from paternal ties and requires for its success careful measurements of kinship. During the ritual, quantities of food, gifts, and money become indicators of belonging. Human measurements are accompanied by spirit measurements that are unknowable but can have fatal consequences. Even though rituals are meant to achieve closure and establish belonging, ambiguities remain as a result of diverging measurements of kinship.