© Columbia University Press
Kissing Cousins: A New Kinship Bestiary
September, 2008
Cloth, 224 pages, 5 illus.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14452-0
$27.50
/ £19.00
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Chapter 14: Of Love and Law
This is a book about who counts. And who cares. Who is cared for by whom? Who are the members of the group that count for each other? And what are their caring obligations? In first being cared for by our kin, we become fluent in the ways of caring. Fluency is always acquired through trial and error. Who decides, for example, when the infant we hold must be let go so that she or he may learn to walk? And what is the affective and cognitive medium of this apprenticeship?
Recent writings in conflict resolution lead us to contemplate some of the links between law and love. Some have suggested that the prototypical scenario in which we play out conflict and reconciliation is the case of weaning. Surely this is a site where kinship relations and their obligations are unmistakable. Mothers must calibrate and ultimately titrate the bond necessitated by a prolonged infancy. In these ongoing deliberations of everyday life, relations of intimacy grow—relations involving the inevitable conflict that the laws of change enforce and the love of those nearest resolve in the courts of kinship. In “Law, Love, and Reconciliation,” Douglas H. Yarn notes that “law is not designed to end conflict and is best categorized as conflict management rather than conflict resolution”. In early European courts “lovedays (jours d’amour) were an established institution for reconciliation”
We humans do take our arbitrations of kinship to the law—and we anguish in hope and fear that the law will produce the justice of love. The mother who is weaning her infant must relinquish her love to the laws of separation and autonomy. Her law and her love are constituted in those very laws, and in them rests her and her child’s autonomy.
Those who count, and for whom we care, we designate as kin. These days we reach for language capacious enough to represent some of the folks with whom we have become kin. Our naming capacities are tested. Our fluency finds us reduced to less than native speakers. Mothers. Fathers. Sisters. Brothers. We know the elasticity we have had to acquire in this vocabulary. Numerous debates and developments show us that we risk illiteracy if we don’t arrive at more fluid ways of designating our nearest kin.
The phrase “kissing cousins” allows for some free play in the ways of naming intimates, those who care for us and those we enlist in our care. I have tried to show the extent to which the currency of kinship is no longer blood. Nor is it simply a matter of genes. The medium in and by which we figure our familiars is in flux. As is the language. To achieve a greater fluency in these matters, I have turned to narratives drawn from contemporary fables, fictions, films, and what the French call fait divers—stories found in the news of the day, sometimes “ripped from the headlines”—where so many of our adjudications of kinship come to light. Some of the most striking instances of the kinds of stories of kinship that stretch our minds can be found on the front pages.
In the middle of the front page of the New York Times on April 4, 2002, surrounded by traumas in the Middle East, was an article that declared “Few Risks Seen to the Children of First Cousins.” I am always trolling for material in the public culture, but this was more than passing strange. The question of cousins—worthy to place in the midst of Israeli guards beating their compatriot peace activists and Palestinian kin crying over their flesh and blood, side by side? Just who had been worrying about whether first cousins might incur genetic risks, I wondered, reading on. A color-coded map accompanying this story indicated the legal status of first-cousin marriage across the United States. Juxtaposed as this news event was with visible suffering, I could not help but read its place as one that marked a way of drawing in the boundaries, shutting out difference, some atavistic cautionary tale of why we might do better to “stick to our own kind.” Perhaps this was a perverse reading, but surely it was one that tallies with the wish to keep segregated those minimal differences that are tolerable—the kind that enforce endogamy while insisting simultaneously on some degree of exogamy.
This was front-page news? In 2002? That first cousins may intermarry and reproduce without much increased risk of birth or genetic defects? What is it about this scientifically approved long-established practice that needs experts to be quoted and laws to be cited? There, again, we are recalled to the agility, not fragility, of kissing those who are near and already dear. There is a discourse of mixing here that presents as acceptable risk levels what I imagine would be found unacceptable if it were a matter of new research and practices. The map showing states where cousin marriage is legal seemed to beg for cultural analysis, positioned as it was next to the grief of Palestinians (in the week after suicide bombings on Passover and in a Haifa café) that the world was and still is watching.
And what is the dialogue between this demographic in the face of struggles of prophetic proportion between the distant cousins of the sons of Abraham? To me the map suggested, in a matter I found chilling, that we are likely to see a tightening of the circle of cousinship because it is both law and legend in the discourse of “sticking to your own kind.” What is news, exactly, in this picture of our world today? Semitic neighbors insist they are not kin but mortal enemies. We know the world is off its axis when the future is murdered—girls and boys killing themselves for a cause. Yes, women, too, will die for an idea, not simply for their children. Again, it is the currency and medium of kinship calculations that intrigues me, calls me to attention.
Kissing cousins: a liminal relationship where we decide how to embrace and contain the others in our care. We choose how we will shield those who are entrusted into our care. How do we come to name our familiars? How do they become family members: a group or body to which we belong and which also exceeds the self?
Kissing cousins: the threshold of destiny and desire. The phrase names a space of permeability. Kinship is the storehouse of cultural narratives of who counts and who cares. Narratives of how care is calculated. In what medium. In what currency.
We speak of getting “under someone’s skin.” And when we do, we may draw blood. This substance nurtured by sentiment is where I have been drawn to understand some of the world around me. There are countless narratives that make most of us sit up and take notice—stories that reread our pasts and rewrite our futures. I have been moved to ask especially about the narratives that emerge from the struggle between the mixing and the shedding of blood.
Permeability allows us to cross borders. To cross identities. To cross species. Permeability raises questions of intimacy—what passes across membranes may result from the mixing or the shedding of blood. Other mediums are available for the reckoning of kinship, but it is very much the case that blood continues to count when we contemplate who deserves our care and whom we exclude from the regime of the familiar, the familial. These are crucial sites of conflict and reconciliation in the making of social life. “Blood has no nationality” (Gattaca).
Janet Carsten, an anthropologist, clarifies the “combination of sentiment, substance, and nurturance” (Cultures of Relatedness, 22) that undergirds relatedness or kinship. The substance is the material I have been designating as blood, metaphorically and literally. The sentiment is the affect collected under the sign of care. And nurturance is the labor that an earlier generation of feminist anthropologists called kinwork. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, with Mother Nature, has written the masterwork that ought to make it impossible to ever return to an overidealized discourse of maternal love and instinct. Hrdy teaches her readers to look more closely than we might wish at the trade-offs mothers of all species have always made so that the stew of substance, sentiment, and nurturance continues to sustain life as we know it.
Here are two disparate tales of parental “care” to contemplate: (1) a Kurdish father in Sweden murdered his daughter who threatened to bring shame to the family by becoming involved with a Swedish man, and (2) a mother in the United States murdered two of her three sons in a family with Huntington’s chorea. The liquid currency of kinship runs through both these stories. It is a boggy landscape—and dangerous. The dangers to a child who set out to cross new borderlines of care are obvious in the first story; in the second a mother’s love adjudicates genetic law. I’d speculate that where blood has been mixed, we dare to learn more about our possible futures. And where blood continues to be shed, there, I believe, we learn more than we wish about our pasts. But the converse is also true, for from the mixing of blood in this genomic age, we are learning about past permeabilities, and in the shedding of blood, we are also losing potential futures.
Bodily fluids: what we spill, carry, pass on to the future. And I have been aiming to figure out some of the oldest and newest ways to reckon whom we care for—and some of the newer ways that genealogies are scripted require humans willing to risk their survival by relinquishing earlier modes of kinship formation. Surely another model is on display in a story from the autumn of 2001, as the United States pursued its new war in Afghanistan.A young couple in Fremont, California, one Pashtun and one Tajik, decided to marry in the midst of our war in their native land, since living in our country allowed them to celebrate a joining of genealogies, enabling them to tell new tales of kissing kin and cousins.
Recall Pilar Cruz and Sam Deeds in Lone Star, holding hands and sitting on the hood of his car as the film ends; or recall Leticia and Hank, the black and white romantic couple of Monster’s Ball—a film that is a study of generations of racism—as they sit close, eating chocolate ice cream together on the back stoop, looking up at the night sky. To survive, kinship narratives require younger generations purged of hatred. They may be without the comforts of conventional kin formations—defathered, unmothered, widowed—but all are survivors of the spasm of murders committed in the name of the law. Laws that name whose blood may not mix risk assuring that it will be shed instead.
Cousins are a capacious category of kin. We may know them or not. We may speak to them or not. We may love them or not. We may visit with them or not. We may count them—as in first, second, third—and calculate their proximity through once or twice removed discourse in our terms. But whatever our connection, we claim them as our kind, as worthy of recognition, as tied to us by some web of alliance and affinity. Everywhere I turned as I worked on this book during a decade that happened also to span a century’s turning, I saw scientists, both natural and social, claiming the category of cousin for other primates as well as so-called more distant species.And in Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale we are all global citizens, some kind of cousin at countless genetic genealogical removes. And Jennifer Ackerman’s Chance in the House of Fate reminds us of our cousinship with yeast, fruit flies, cephalopods even.
And like embryo adoption, a much more recent form of newly made kin, kinship emerges from the ways we have of calculating whom we are likely to consider our own and who is kept outside the circle of empathy. There is a horror of mixing that is reflected in the laws against miscegenation, which, while they may have all been struck down along with other forms of racial segregation, live on in practices and ideologies that coexist beside and outside the laws. First-cousin marriage is invited back into the (news) fold while talk of same-sex marriage has some of the villagers ready to relight their torches, as it were.
Current infertility treatment can lead to the birth of children carrying genes from three individuals. Medical miracle? Teratology for the twenty-first century? Some people will do anything to achieve reproductive success. Let’s see if the ark for the new millennium will take more than two of each kind. What difference does it make if that third individual is not accounted for in the rearing of these children? How does this differ from the third (and implicitly fourth) required for adoption to occur? Or the thirds required in lesbian and gay parenting?
For all the critiques of periodization, we leave marks, like Hansel and Gretel, in hopes of recalling where we have come from should we wish to return to our origins. But didn’t all of postmodernism instruct us in the problematics of originary tales? But to move into futures of our own making—for those being made for us will also prevail—don’t we need to know who or what is going to come along for the ride? Isn’t that the folly of time capsules? Isn’t that the richly possible moment represented by a new year, decade, century? For we are as knowledgeable as we will ever be, bearing our memories and histories, about that twentieth century—so brilliant and so beastly. And those of us, some the same, but most not, are as avaricious, avid, and voracious for the new knowledges we know are being made around us. It’s this passing of the intellectual batons, this handing down and over what we have gathered in this cycle of passing through here on terra firma and cognita.
Consider the following apothegms:
At the narrow passage there is no brother and there
is no friend.
A friend advises in his interests not yours.
Know each other as if you were brothers; negotiate
deals as if you were strangers.
These can be found on Web sites devoted to Arab proverbs. Yet another demonstration of the plasticity of the cousin category is an Arab proverb of which a version goes like this: “Me and my cousin against the stranger; me and my brother against the cousin.” Perhaps it is wise here to recall the dark humor of Cave 73, for this is merely dark. I am drawn to explore such a proverb for all that it lays bare of just how opportunistic and transitory our allegiances can be to those we consider members of our tribe. As I mentioned earlier: when one of the key points of my work here can be summed up proverbially or comically, I fear my aim may be superfluous. Yet I am reassured of the need to look closely at the fact that kinship is established through conflict and connection. Notice in this proverb that the stranger is from the outset configured as a source of threat and danger. Notice also that it is the job of men (brothers) to band together first with and then against others of their own kind (cousins), and once having rid themselves of the threat of the outsider, the stranger, to turn on each other, leaving intact only the smallest unit of kin, and we can assume only as long as “he” (the imaginary brother) presents no further threat. In Fear of Small Numbers, Arjun Appadurai speaks of the figure of the suicide bomber as sharpening our gaze at the very microscopic level in our understanding of the global; he also notes the anthem as a document of the small number that coheres an identity. But proverbs, like anthems, have cultural specificities. From the German context and history, Kwame Anthony Appiah recovers the following saying as a demonstration of the spirit he calls countercosmopolitan: “If you don’t want to be my brother, / Then I’ll smash your skull in” (Cosmopolitanism, 145). Or a French variant that Frans de Waal brings to our attention from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the nineteenth century: “If everyone is my brother, I have no brothers” (Primates and Philosophers, 163). Consider gated communities as the new form taken by the ancient cave, with its barring of the opening to others. When walls go up in the “holy land,” or on the southern border of Texas or California, we cannot afford to ignore the question of who we may kiss and who we may kill. For borders and walls may make some feel secure, but their presence speaks to our sense of threat and danger. I am not suggesting that danger is nonexistent or that rituals of entrance and egress have no purpose or place, but we have seen in the past few years how putting a sense of danger and need for security first has done serious damage to our sense of who is more or less free to move about the world. The precipitous decline of the United States as a place of imagination, where some are drawn to make a “better” life, signals a shift that will be with us for some time to come, making unpredictable futures—as always.
The end of the twentieth century gave way to the growing pains of the twenty-first. Time requests a place in the cast of characters that make up the stories I have been summoning. The new century insists that we keep learning new languages as they construct themselves in the face of new knowledges that require new ethical negotiations. In the slow, heavy pendulum vacillating between differences and samenesses, others and selves, this newer time shifts our attention from politics to ethics so as to more effectively and affectively return us to politics, where empathy and the good rarely are the starting points, and only fitfully the end points, of the kinwork that would keep us all alive. It all seemed so auspicious—the times in which this project first began to accumulate and gather its cellular materials from the convergence of futurities that we welcomed, though not without cautionary voices whispering. Then it seemed an enterprise that asked difficult questions but from a perspective that assumed not progress and amelioration but a momentum of encircling the others with whom we share our time and place.
Processes were under way that engaged deep and difficult questions of who would make commonality with whom. Two decades later, those seem halcyon days. They weren’t. Consider a case that names a moment: the 1987 surrogacy suit against Mary Beth Whitehead by the couple whose child she carried in a contract with the husband. This was a family triangle and legalistic vortex we had never entered and where we learned a great deal about children as property in our time.
We’ve grown into these debates such that as I write, in 2007, an article may casually refer to surrogates as “professional childbearers” and readers somehow accommodate the idea that there are women for whom carrying a child does not “instinctively” equate with the desire to raise that child. What began with the obvious fact of anonymous donor insemination and its remapping the issue of paternity has over recent decades run parallel with forms of destabilizing maternity in ways that are still being struggled over and integrated into our systems of new forms of kinship. Earlier practices of adoption and fostering of children now intersect with technologically ever more refined practices of producing children whose genetic parentage may be completely distinct from that of their social families.
This question of possible futures (mixing) must fully face the past (tribalism) that lives within and among us when we are driven by fear in our very present (the stand-off).As I have reiterated,this is a book in praise of mixing. It is only in mixing with and among our strangers that a future even begins to look possible. And it is the multiplicity produced by mixing among strangers that speaks back against the parochialism and provincialism and, yes, tribalism of those who would shun this world of ours in which any metropolitan neighborhood reveals just how possible and already visible is the culture that allows strangers to be something other than threats or dangers. The children of (im)migrants across the world where massive population shifts have occurred can tell stories of how mixing defies an old world order even while the new is in its birth throes.
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