ABSTRACT

This special issue brings together emerging studies on kinship in South Asia and explores the idea of kinship as ‘fiction’ through ethnographic analysis of intimate relationships. Anthropology had long considered kinship as ‘natural’ or ‘biological’, thereby rendering other relations as ‘real’ or ‘fictive’. However, the recent ever-expanding scope of the ‘new kinship studies’, through the mapping of socio-technological changes, including the development of new reproductive technologies, the expansion of a diverse marriage system, and the global reconfiguration of care work, has brought a new dynamism to the discipline. Drawing both on traditional South Asian kinship studies and on more recent theories in anthropology, care work, medicine and science and technology studies, Kinship as Fiction offers insights on how ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are related, translated, and regenerate each other by changing their meanings and forms. Fiction plays an important role in shaping reality, by making emerging worlds comprehensible, and helping us to imagine relations differently. This special issue investigates how particular ‘fictions’ are narrated and enacted within the constraints of reality, and how reality is, in turn, generated by fiction in the context of kin and other intimate relationships.

摘要

本期专刊汇集了南亚有关血缘关系的新兴研究，并通过对亲密关系的人种学分析来探讨血缘关系的概念是“虚构的”。人类学长期以来一直将亲属视为“自然的”或“生物的”，从而使其他关系成为“真实的”或“假想的”。但是，最近的“新亲属关系研究”范围不断扩大，通过绘制社会技术变化的图谱，包括开发新的生殖技术，扩展多样化的婚姻制度以及全球对护理工作的重新配置，给这个学科带来了新的活力。传统的南亚亲属关系研究和最近的理论，人类学，保健工作，医学和科学技术的研究，绘制两个亲属如小说通过改变它们的含义和形式，提供有关“自然”和“文化”如何相互关联，翻译和重新生成的见解。通过使新兴世界易于理解，并帮助我们以不同的方式想象关系，小说在塑造现实中起着重要作用。本期专刊探讨在现实的约束下如何叙述和制定特定的“小说”，以及在亲属和其他亲密关系的背景下，小说又是如何产生现实的。