Kinship, Fictive Kinship, and Emergent Forms of Community

ANT 4931

Fall 2001

Dr. Biglow

The Matrix of Kin

What is Real?
What is Fictive?

Western Notions of Kinship

• Biologically-based (blood)

• Limitations:

– “What you see is what you get”

– Distinctions made between biological and nonbiological parents and siblings

– (step father, step brother)

– Does not accommodate adoptions well

What is Fictive Kinship?

• Fictive Kinship

• "A relationship, such as godparenthood, modeled on relations of kinship, but created by customary convention rather than the circumstances of birth." RK:149 Examples include "blood brothers", "godparents". ES:5. Some would make a distinction between "fictive" kin and "putative" kin, the latter including adopted children.

Arguments of this week’s authors

• Fictive kinship can be just as real as biologically based Euroamerican kinship

• “Fictive” as a term is inappropriate in modern kinship studies

Kinship and New Reproductive Technologies

• In-vitro fertilization

• Sperm and egg donation

• Surrogate motherhood

• (Adoption)

Virtual Communities

• “Social aggregations that emerge from the [Internet] when enough people carry on those public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships in cyberspace”

• (Rheingold 1993:5)

Key “Virtual” Terms

• CMCs = computer mediated communications

– Listserv(er)s, chat rooms

• RL = real life

• VR = virtual (reality) life

• MUD = multi-user domain

– Themed or online social environments

Cyborgology and Cyborg Anthropology

• Cyborgology and “cyborg babies”

– There is no distinction between human and machine

• Cyborg Anthropology

– Argues that we must look not only at our own ability to create technology as a byproduct of culture, but technology’s power to shape our own culture.

Relationship of VR to RL

• What degree of participation in one or the other makes you a “family” or a “community?”

• Are online relationships as “real” as those in RL?

– Emic vs. etic distinctions

• Recent studies focus on the “degree of participation” as relevant to defining families

• Can we think of VR as a “subculture” of RL, much as we have “communities of interest” in RL?

Fernback

• Argues that “there is a collectivity of CMC users” . . . “driven by the principles of democracy and egalitarianism” (p. 46)

• Concern with “the common good” (p. 46)

– There is dissent. E.g. hackers and crackers

– “Rules of conduct” form over time

Clodius

• Argues that VC is just as “real” as RL.

• Examples:

– Rule formation and ways of dealing with those that don’t follow cultural norms

– An understanding of the “other” via tolerance

• Problems:

– Fragmentation over time

– Utopian notion of “community?”