Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care

Difficult Attachments

Difficult Attachments

Anxieties of Kinship and Care

EDITED BY KATHRYN E. GOLDFARB AND SANDRA BAMFORD

Afterword by Marilyn Strathern

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey

London and Oxford

Rutgers University Press is a department of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, one of the leading public research universities in the nation. By publishing worldwide, it furthers the University’s mission of dedication to excellence in teaching, scholarship, research, and clinical care.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goldfarb, Kathryn E., 1982– editor | Bamford, Sandra C., 1962– editor.

Title: Difficult attachments : anxieties of kinship and care / edited by Kathryn E. Goldfarb and Sandra Bamford.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2025] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024003640 | ISBN 9781978841420 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781978841437 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781978841413 (pdf) | ISBN 9781978841444 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Kinship. | Kinship care.

Classification: LCC GN487.D55 2025 | DDC 649.8084/6—dc23/eng/20240531

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024003640

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This book is for my interlocutors, friends, and co-conspirators in the world of child welfare, and for every student of kinship who has not seen their own families reflected in the kinship literature.

—Kathryn E. Goldfarb

I dedicate this book to all the courageous youth whom I have met and who have aged out of the foster care system at the age of eighteen, and who are still hoping to find a forever home: a place where they can hang a hat, a place to come home to over Thanksgiving, and a place where somebody cares how they are doing.

—Sandra Bamford

Contents

Introduction: Ambivalent Affinities: Kinship beyond Mutuality

KATHRYN E. GOLDFARB AND SANDRA BAMFORD

Part I Ambiguities of Care

1 The Estranged Case of Leonard: Aging with Dementia When Kin Don’t Care

JANELLE S. TAYLOR

2 Kinship in the Carceral: Aging and Aspiration in Tokyo

JASON DANELY

3 When Choosing Does Not Stick: Limits of Queer Kinship and Community in Old Age

CELESTE PANG

4 When Forever Does Not Last a Lifetime: Adoption Disruption and the State in North America

SANDRA BAMFORD

5 Emergency Rooms: A Story about Motherhood, Medicine, Reluctance, Mystery, and Expertise

DANILYN RUTHERFORD

Part II Toxic States

6 Siblings and the Darker Sides of a (Finally) Realized Mutuality of Being

NOA VAISMAN

7 Reunification as Refusal: Kin-Making and Unmaking in the Aftermath of Indigenous Child Removal

ERIKA FINESTONE

8 Kinship under Colonial Duress: Anticolonial Nationalism Mends Ruptured Tibetan Attachments

DAWA T. LOKYITSANG

9 Schools as Kin: Shifts in Black Strategic (Teacher) Mothering in the School Choice Marketplace

RICHÉ J. DANIEL BARNES

10 Estranged: U.S. Immigration Detention and the Erasure of Family Ties

DEBORAH A. BOEHM

Part III Negative Affects

11 Strange and Burdensome Gifts: Giving and Receiving in Families Shaped by Hoarding

KATIE KILROY-MARAC

12 Not Family Care: Welcoming the Wild Things in Japanese Child Welfare

KATHRYN E. GOLDFARB

13 Looking Back at the Mirror: Reflections of and on Messy Dog Siblingship

PATRICK MCKENZIE

14 Diffuse and Enduring Disappointment: Thinking Kinship in South Africa and Beyond

BRADY G’SELL

15 Adjustment Problems: Ambivalence and Moral Imagination in North Indian Kinship

JULIA KOWALSKI

16 When an Affect Becomes an Epidemic: Exploring Loneliness and Relatedness in the Twenty-First Century

SONIA YUHUI ZHANG

17 Kinship Conceived and Lived

MICHAEL LAMBEK

Afterword: A Language for Kinship

MARILYN STRATHERN

Editors’ Acknowledgments

References

Notes on Contributors

Index

Difficult Attachments

Introduction

Ambivalent Affinities: Kinship beyond Mutuality

KATHRYN E. GOLDFARB AND SANDRA BAMFORD

I frankly prefer not to be related to them. He is a river rat and she is a hillbilly, and they have five kids to prove it (Schneider 1980, 74). So evocatively opined an interlocutor for David Schneider’s study that professed to articulate the symbolic dimensions of American kinship. According to Schneider, these all boil down to a folk concept called love.

How did Schneider conceptually move from data like these, in which one can prefer not to be related to a kinsperson, to the notion that kinship is about diffuse, enduring solidarity (50, 53)—positive sociality par excellence? Schneider explicitly notes that he was not interested in depicting kinship as it was actually practiced. Rather, he was interested in American kinship as a cultural system, embodied by middle-class white Chicagoans whose whiteness and supposed cultural normativity could be understood—Schneider problematically argued—to represent American values writ large (13).

As he writes in his conclusion to American Kinship, responding to his own question about what the facts of sexual intercourse symbolize:

They symbolize diffuse, enduring solidarity. They symbolize those kinds of interpersonal relations which human beings as biological beings must have if they are to be born and grow up. They symbolize trust, but a special kind of trust which is not contingent and which does not depend on reciprocity. They stand for the fact that birth survives death, and that solidarity is enduring.… In just the same way that reproduction is a set of biological facts that is prerequisite to the continuity of a society as a body of people, so too, diffuse, enduring solidarity is a social and psychobiological prerequisite to the continuity of both the society and its culture. (1980, 116)

This is a curious but familiar set of claims. We all (presumably) know that being born and growing up do not actually depend on specific types of interpersonal relations, like trust or noncontingent care. But anthropologists have long been interested in theorizing social and cultural reproduction and have done so by studying kinship as the site for heteronormative biological procreation.

Schneider’s focus on the symbolic was an apropos orientation for a scholar at the University of Chicago, where decades after his book was published, the campus bookstore sells merchandise with the tongue-in-cheek slogan, That’s all well and good in practice, but how does it work in theory? Yet Schneider’s early work has surprising durability. Despite his deeply flawed methodologies and their underlying assumptions (see Franklin 2019), Schneider’s baseline presuppositions tend to be upheld in scholarly definitions of kinship in North America and beyond. Definitionally, as an ideal-type, kinship in the abstract tends to be portrayed as helping humans hang together. It is understood as being about the good things that come from relationships—no matter how unrecognizable or alienating that perspective may feel to any one of us.¹ This volume sits at that point of slippage between theory and practice, the symbolic (ultimately arbitrary social conventions) and the reality-as-lived (the ways people break these conventions all the time in daily life).²

Anthropologists have come some distance from Schneider’s depictions, specifically decentering biogenetic understandings of kinship as produced from heterosexual reproduction, and portraying kinship in a more nuanced, complicated light (Peletz 2001). This analytical move came at least partially in response to Schneider’s own (1984) self-critical claim that American kinship ideologies rest on the Euro-American ethnoepistemology that blood is thicker than water, and that anthropologists themselves have internalized this view and imposed it on their analysis of non-Euro-American peoples. More recent kinship scholarship has done much to query and destabilize understandings of blood ties as constituting family, focusing instead on chosen kin (Weston 1991) or questioning what is meant by the notion of blood itself (Carsten 2013, 2019a).

However, in rejecting the ethnoepistemology that blood is thicker than water, anthropologists tend to maintain what we argue is the ethnoepistemology that kinship is defined normatively by positive sociality. For instance, as a point of comparison, Carole Stack, a contemporary of Schneider, portrays kinship in a poor midwestern Black community during the 1960s, arguing that, for her interlocutors, kinship is meeting the expectations of others (1974). Stack’s richly ethnographic study is an appealing salvo to Schneider’s experience-distant idealization of relationality. And yet Stack’s depiction also ultimately centers kinship as positive sociality: kinship is when relationships work. But what about when they do not? Is that also kinship?

Even though feminist scholarship has highlighted how kinship systems are often hierarchical and potentially violent relational structures with political and ideological import, kinship and relatedness are still often depicted as definitionally positive. Yet even chosen and creative relational practices might entail unwelcome obligations, frictions, and conflicts. Anthropologists often struggle to thread the analytical needle between kinship as ideal (Schneider’s [1980] diffuse, enduring solidarity or what Marshall Sahlins [2011a, 2011b, 2013] more recently called mutuality of being) and kinship as often experienced in practice (not necessarily enduring, not necessarily solidary, and not necessarily mutual). An empirical and ethnographically rich focus on daily life—the things people do together—highlights the often profound mismatches between what people think kinship should be like, or perhaps is, although maybe not here, maybe just over there next door or beyond the horizon (Goldfarb 2024). As Schneider (1980) showed us, people understand kinship as an ideology and strategically mobilize that ideology to do things in the world—while simultaneously experiencing the disjunctures between idealized expectations about relationality and the moments of betrayal, anger, violence, disconnection, and distrust that also are part of human experiences with each other. Diffuse, enduring solidarity? Or diffuse, enduring disappointment?³

We may recognize that the ideal of kinship-as-belonging includes its own failure (Stasch 2009, 136), and that this failure includes its own ideal (Sahlins 2013, 24). Yet here we push the argument further, suggesting that these qualities of human relationships—which we gloss broadly in the volume’s title as difficult attachments—are, rather than failures of an ideal, constitutive qualities of kinship as it should be defined in the anthropological scholarship. We take the stance that anthropologists should substantively align our conceptual definitions with both the ideals and the practices of the humans whose experiences and stories form the basis for our theory production.

Centering Ethnographic Outliers

While the ethnographic literature has painted a picture of kinship as entailing mostly amicable relations, there have been glimmers to suggest that things may not be quite as rosy as the dominant portrait would have us believe. What new perspectives on kinship might we gain by centering these outliers? In what follows, we offer a handful of ethnographic vignettes to illustrate our point, focusing first on selected earlier literature in Melanesia as an exemplar. This is not to suggest that kinship in this region is less harmonious and cordial than it is in other parts of the world. (Similarly disruptive exemplars could be drawn from any region.) Rather, we hope to show that, despite extensive ethnographic exploration and empirical documentation, the definitional view of kinship in anthropology has remained overarchingly the same.

Beginning in the 1950s and gaining momentum throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, scholars working in the highlands of Papua New Guinea began to write extensively about what they saw as being the extremely fraught—and often hostile—relationship between men and women (Read 1951, 1952; Langness 1967; Meigs 1976; Herdt 1980, 1981; Herdt and Poole 1982; Brown and Buchbinder 1976). These conversations eventually coalesced under the broader anthropological rubric of sexual antagonism. Here, marital relationships were anything but copacetic. This apparently was owing largely to the allegedly lethal qualities of female reproductive substances that could negatively impact a man’s health and overall well-being. Gilbert Herdt, writing about the Sambia people, notes male/female sexual relationships are generally antagonistic, and many marital histories reveal arguments, fights, jealousies, sorcery fears, some wife beating and even suicide attempts. Wives (much more than female kin) are stigmatized as inferior, polluting and depleting to men, because of their menstrual and vaginal fluids. Sexual intercourse is supposed to be spaced to avoid depletion and premature aging or death (1984, 171).

Raymond’s Kelly’s work with the neighboring Etoro peoples likewise pointed to overall inimical relations between husbands and wives. In his celebrated essay Witchcraft and Sexual Relations: An Exploration in the Social and Semantic Implications of the Structure of Belief (1976), Kelly argued that among the Etoro, there was a metaphorical equivalence between witchcraft and sexual relations. In both cases, these relations were grounded within an encompassing cosmological framework, wherein life-force is continually transmitted from one human being to another, with the corollary that one always gains at another’s expense. It follows that marital relations are every bit as much debilitating as those founded on witchcraft insomuch as they both entailed the loss of one’s vital energies.⁴

Jean Van Baal’s highly acclaimed Dema: Description and Analysis of Marind-Anim Culture (South New Guinea) (1966) moves us from a consideration of conjugal relations to those based on descent. Drawing upon research carried out in the 1940s and 1950s, the book describes the Marind-Anim people of southern Papua, Indonesia. At the time when Van Baal conducted his fieldwork, the Marind-Anim had been in a longstanding period of population decline, owing at least in part to the introduction of venereal disease during Dutch colonization. The Marind-Anim were aware of their declining numbers. Prior to colonial subjugation, they responded by launching head-hunting raids against neighboring groups, during which they stole as many infant children as they could and adopted them to be raised as natural children (Van Baal 1984, 37), who if possible, were kept ignorant of their foreign origin.

In 1980 Dorothy Ayers Counts provided yet another glimpse into a world in which kin ties were often characterized by violence and conflict. Based on fieldwork conducted with the Kaliai of New Britain (Papua New Guinea), Counts takes up the theme of revenge suicide: a phenomenon that has been documented in many parts of the world (Jeffreys 1952; Fluehr-Lobban 1977; Marshall 1979; Ullrich 1977). This type of suicide entails the taking of one’s own life as part of an effort to redress past wrongs and exact some measure of vengeance against those who caused the suicide victim pain and suffering in the first place. Counts introduces us to Agnes—a young sixteen-year-old girl who was found hanging from a tree along a well-traveled footpath close to the main village. In the months leading up to her death, Agnes had been repeatedly shamed and humiliated by persons she considered her affines. More specifically, she was charged with immoral and promiscuous behavior for moving in with a young man named Victor before being officially wed. Agnes knew that her suicide would bring in its wake a series of predictable consequences; her kinspeople were likely to avenge her death and demand compensation from Victor’s parents. In addition, Victor and his parents would realize how deeply she had been shamed and would come to regret their poor treatment of her. Foreshadowing the argument that was to appear five years later in James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985), Counts argues: [In societies] where power is not equally distributed and where women are not accorded the same rights as men, suicide provides a realistic alternative for those who are shamed, abused and powerless. It permits them to shift the burden of shame from themselves to their kin and tormenters and to enjoy some measure of revenge against those who drove them to act (1980, 346). The topic of revenge suicide helps to highlight how the less-amicable side of kinship may be tied to power inequalities.

Kinship is often embedded within overlapping systems of hierarchy that engender conflict and violence, an observation certainly not limited to the societies of Melanesia. For instance, in her 1995 article American Kinship/American Incest: Asymmetries in Scientific Discourse, Susan McKinnon documents how medical practitioners’ understanding of father-daughter incest is shaped by taken-for-granted assumptions concerning Euro-American gender roles and male sexual behavior. McKinnon argues that when men commit incest with their daughters, their actions tend to be normalized in scientific accounts and presented in a sympathetic light. These men are often portrayed as being indistinguishable from any other man in American culture; their actions, while inappropriate, are an understandable response to loneliness and emotional neglect—a by-product of not being adequately cared for by their marital partner. If men are given something of a get out of jail free card, it is women who are blamed for father-daughter incest. According to McKinnon, in some analyses the daughter is presented as a sexual aggressor, the father but a hapless victim of urges he is unable to contain. Even more commonly, it is said that the mother shoulders the blame for the father’s incestuous actions. By withdrawing from her sexual role in the marriage and ignoring the relationship developing between father and daughter, the mother supposedly precipitated the incestuous act. McKinnon’s article reveals that violence and conflict can occur within families at multiple levels: first, through the act of incest itself, and, second, through the way such actions are interpreted by professionals.

McKinnon’s interpretation of American incest represented but one contribution to a growing body of work by feminist scholars that began to appear in the 1980s, which documented how kinship theory recapitulated social power dynamics, reified gender norms, and erased violence (see Franklin 2019). In their 1982 essay, Is There a Family? New Anthropological Views?, Jane Collier, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Sylvia Yanagisako argued that anthropologists have naively taken for granted the notion of The Family as a universal human institution unified by love and a broad range of caregiving acts (1997, 73). They argued for a recognition of the irony that in our society the place where nurturance and noncontingent affection are supposed to be located is simultaneously the place where violence is most tolerated (78). If family is, by definition, about nurturance and caregiving, then how do we understand kinship when it is not?

Perhaps kinship is about diffuse enduring solidarity (Schneider 1980) when it is seen from a privileged perspective (white, upper-class, heterosexual, and male), but when it is seen through the eyes of a marginalized subject, it may look very different. Janet Dolgin’s essay Family Law and the Facts of the Family (1995) drew attention to ways women consistently lose custody battles for children unless they can demonstrate a recognized biological link to them. Social motherhood is not given the same legal recognition in the courts as is social fatherhood and is used as a basis upon which to strip women of their rights. Micaela Di Leonardo’s essay The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families and the work of Kinship (1992) documented the unequal division of labor that takes place in most North American households. In addition to doing the bulk of the domestic chores (cooking, cleaning, shopping, childcare, and the like), women are tasked with the enormous labor of maintaining kinship ties and marking them as being both significant and different from other kinds of social relationships. This entails writing letters, making telephone calls, booking doctor’s appointments, arranging for elder care, buying birthday cards, coordinating extra-curricular activities, organizing holiday gatherings, and so on. The degree to which the work of kinship is gendered will appear as a theme in many of the chapters that follow (so too will the blame that gets heaped on women when the families we inhabit do not meet stereotypes of what family life should look like). Anna Tsing’s paper Monster Stories: Women Charged with Perinatal Endangerment (1990) documents how race and class problematically intersect with family dynamics. Tsing explores how the crime of perinatal endangerment (along with its attendant stereotype of being a bad mother), reinforced gender and class inequalities as it disproportionately impacted poor and marginalized women who may be unable to access adequate healthcare and social support.

It is significant that some of the most recent representations of kinship that complicate the dominant paradigm are autoethnographic accounts (like Danilyn Rutherford’s chapter in this volume, in addition to her forthcoming work The Other Side of Signs: The Making of My Daughter’s Social World). Clara Han’s (2021) Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War powerfully connects war and the domestic, producing a layered account of geopolitical and personal trauma that undergirds what Han calls the knot of care (139), the ways we are often bound to kin no matter—or perhaps because of—how much they hurt us. Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2021) graphic memoir, The Inheritance, intimately explores generational traumas and myths of belonging, identity, and care that may look and feel like violence. Through the power of their first-person narrative style, these works provide us with a glimpse into how kinship may be experienced, valued, and conceptualized, when there is a mismatch between the reality of our day-to-day experiences and general expectations of what family life should look like.

The ethnographic literature is rife with so-called outliers, wherein kin relations are presented in less-than-idyllic terms. These cases have been treated as aberrations and anomalies that could be and should be ignored: for example, Sahlins has argued that witchcraft represents a breakdown of kin relations: kin relations fail when they are invaded by malevolent intentions (2011b, 237). While acknowledging that conflict and violence may be at the heart of kinship, the idea that these sentiments represent a failure of kin bonds shores up the idea that kin ties should be warm, loving, and supportive in nature. Indeed, Sahlins felt comfortable making the claim that kinship entails a mutuality of being. Both experientially and emotionally, relatives live each other’s lives, and die each others’ deaths (2011a, 2). The very stubborn assumption continues to exist in both the academic literature and the popular imagination that kin ties are (or should be) loving, forever, unconditional, nurturing, and that the obligation to care should exist in perpetuity.

The chapters presented in this collection paint a different picture. It is a picture wherein kin ties are frequently fraught and difficult, and the obligation to care cannot and should not be taken as a given, neither by actors in the world nor by ethnographers. The fact that kin ties persevere (when they do) should be seen as a remarkable achievement, rather than taken for granted. In the three interlinked sections of this volume, authors intervene into depictions of kinship as being about solidarity and care by exploring how kinship is about not only connection and inclusion but also disconnection, exclusion, neglect, and violence (Franklin and McKinnon 2002; Lambek 2011, 2013; Goldfarb and Schuster 2016; Carsten 2019b; Vaisman 2019). Kinship relationships that feel positive and good take a lot of social work; there is nothing natural about kinship ties being caring or based on positive sociality. In these conversations, we take seriously the contingency of kinship relationships (Stasch 2009), the moments when kinship breaks down or is a source of suffering. In guiding the contributors’ writing, we asked them: What irritates you about the ways kinship is discussed or theorized, and how might you shift the narrative? What sideways views of kinship might bring greater depth of understanding and more complexity to these topics? How might you read and write against the grain of common depictions and theorizations of kinship? If, for North Americans, kinship seems to boil down to love, this edited volume asks the reader to consider the treacly ingredients of this potent emotional mix in practice. When kinship boils down, what is left at the bottom of the pan? Kinship may be about solidarity—until it is not. Where, and with what social stakes, are these fracture points, and how are they navigated (or not)?

This volume’s cover image is apropos. Depicted there are pressed leaves and stems of the Oxalis triangularis plant, otherwise known as the false shamrock or love plant. Edible by humans, the plant may cause discomfort when consumed in excess, and all parts of the plant have toxic potential. Indeed, the plant is poisonous for cats, dogs, and horses, animals that humans so often consider kin. Poor care will force the plant into dormancy, but it can repair in better conditions.⁵ Often used as a decorative houseplant, this herbaceous perennial prefigures this volume’s central themes. Assurances (sometimes false) of luck or love, resilient and abiding but with toxic capacities, causing discomfort in excess … what better embodiment of kin?

Embracing both the pleasurable and the deleterious, the chapters that follow take kinship as characterized by both thick and thin relations, ideals and relational utopias, and the gritty realities that many of us find in our relationships. Kinship, here, is both support for and threat to survival; it is characterized by both proximity (sometimes uncomfortable) and distance (sometimes supportive). Kinship is often haunted by alternative histories, lives, stories, and ways of being. In these chapters, we linger on moments that as scholars we may have pushed aside as too difficult to contain by theory, too hard to put into conversation with our core themes, too irrelevant, too non-ethnographic, too opaque, too much about ourselves, or too dubiously about kinship in the end.

The Chapters

This volume evolved out of a remote workshop in September and October 2021, a virtual three-part podcast for the American Anthropological Association annual conference in November 2022, and small group workshops leading up to the final submission of essays for publication. The cross-fertilization between chapters is a result of these ongoing and collaborative conversations, with participants ranging from early-year graduate students to emeritus professors. The chapters are grouped into sections that highlight significant themes and are ordered to maximize conceptual resonances.

In part I, Ambiguities of Care, authors take up the concept of care in sometimes problematic tension with kinship, drawing into relief the cultural, political, and historical elements that contribute to variable definitions of care in different contexts. How might care be bureaucratized? What are the long-term consequences of the absence of care? What does it mean when care is assigned to nonfamilial others? How do estrangement, abandonment, or suffering contribute to kinship sensibilities? The chapters in this section are each situated within institutional spaces, tracing the dimensions of a nexus that we might understand as a social safety net—though a net with kin-shaped holes (Danely, chapter 2). At the intersection of the medical or medical-institutional (Taylor, Pang, Rutherford), the carceral (Danely), and the state child welfare system (Bamford), we are offered glimpses into lived realities that invert normative expectations about care.

The first three chapters share a common focus on aging in a context where kin—biological or chosen—are present only in their traces: off-hand mentions documented in medical records; letters exchanged with kin who cannot be counted on and from whom no more can be asked; photographs, artwork, and trinkets in shared long-term care rooms. Janelle Taylor’s chapter lingers on the people invisible from both residential care contexts and from social science treatments of aging: those without insurance, personal wealth, and/or bulldoggish advocates who make older adults with dementia legible to the world and to the documentary capacities of ethnography. And yet medical records—scrappy, polyvocal snapshots of interactions between dementia patients living alone, and doctors and nurses on call—offer poignant (and indeed ethnographic) glimpses of people, in all their irritating and poetic specificity. These documented interactions illuminate care offered not by kin but through seemingly tangential relationships that were, nonetheless, crucial sources of care, support, and connection (Taylor, chapter 1; Edmiston 2021).

If strangers may be more caring than biological kin, a carceral institution may end up being more homely than home. Jason Danely examines recidivism among older adults in Japan, for whom prison offers more comfort than life outside, where custody [has] become a space to ‘breathe’ (Danely, chapter 2). Danely shows how repeated incarceration for small infractions offers a kind of agency for older women to choose a place to temporarily escape, reset, or defer dehumanizing welfare assistance, on the one hand, and entanglement in kinship constraints, on the other. Celeste Pang’s chapter problematizes the celebration of choice underlying the discussion of chosen kin in queer community- and family-making. What happens, Pang queries, when choosing does not stick? (Pang, chapter 3). Pang’s study of queer and trans older adults in Canadian institutional and community-based care settings explores an often-lonely reality for aging people with substantial care needs. Chosen kinship ties and biogenetic familial bonds emerge as equally contingent.

Sandra Bamford’s chapter examines the phenomenon of rehoming, also known as adoption disruption in the child welfare literature. Here, adoptive parents seek to find a new home for a child (often a child adopted from overseas) by advertising on Craigslist or Kijiji, rather than going through state-based agencies. As Bamford demonstrates, this practice says much about several assumptions that undergird dominant Euro-American kinship configurations: namely, that love should conquer all and that kinship should persevere, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles (Bamford, chapter 4). Yet if foster and adoptive parenthood is complicated, so are biogenetic parent-child relationships. Mother [supposedly] knows best: unless she does not. Danilyn Rutherford’s chapter brings us to the search for care and answers from medical professionals who are all too aware of the limits of their own knowledge. Rutherford invites us in to the diagnostic triangle, the enigmatic triad composed of Rutherford, her child Millie, and Millie’s doctors, exploring the contours of a space in which clarity is overrated, where time spent in Millie’s orbit is the pleasure of embracing the inexplicable (Rutherford, chapter 5).

In part II, Toxic States, authors place violent state formations at the center of kinship practices: the Argentine terrorist state apparatus, the Canadian settler-colonial state, the Chinese occupation of Tibet, U.S. educational policies in the face of institutionalized racism, and the U.S. immigration detention system. These chapters together broaden our understanding of the darker side of kinship by foregrounding structural forces that shape and constrain processes of care, that lead to the severing of family ties, and that illuminate how relatedness may appear in times of duress. How do violence and loss intervene into or contribute toward constituting the fabric of family life, and what is the role of the state, regimes of settler-colonialism, and institutionalized inequity in shaping kinship experiences? How might kinship practices themselves contest and transgress efforts of state power?

Noa Vaisman’s chapter runs against the grain of typical representations of successful familial reunification in the face of the violent fragmentation of families split apart by the Argentinian terrorist state, by whose hand around five hundred babies disappeared and were placed in the families of criminal state actors. The consequences are profound for individuals searching for disappeared siblings, driven by a sibling fantasy that is rarely born out in the jagged reality of (re)connection (Vaisman, chapter 6). Erika Finestone further problematizes familial reunification in the context of Canadian state policies of Indigenous child removal, as both repair and the pain of disconnection shape the articulations of biogenetic and social relation with individuals, land, and community. There is no unmitigated success in the reconnections between parents and the children taken away through the settler state’s violent assimilation policies, even as reconnections produce generative and nonlinear relationships that actively challenge colonial erasure (Finestone, chapter 7).

Inventive kinship practices can themselves be anticolonial, antiracist endeavors: Dawa Lokyitsang and Riché Barnes illustrate how, in vastly different contexts, schools can offer opportunities for sanctuary, created kinship, and a community praxis of care. The Chinese invasion and continued occupation of Tibet violently ruptured relationships within families and attachments to land; the Dalai Lama’s creation of a residential school system in exile was itself an anticolonial response to this violence (Lokyitsang, chapter 8). Yet the structural conditions of exile have shaped Tibetans’ sensibilities about kinship, attenuating connections between generations, producing the conditions for creative peer group kinship networks, and enforcing a sense of mutuality and national sentiment engendered by shared loss.

In Black communities in the United States, Black female teachers have long filled othermother roles in nurturing the children at their schools. Yet as Riché Barnes shows, histories of institutionalized racism undergirding U.S. education, housing, and transportation policies—including progressive reform efforts— have produced the conditions for school closures in historically Black communities in the United States, undercutting historical strategies for survival. State-sponsored integration fragmented protective relationships between Black teachers and children, producing school choice as a neoliberal double-bind for Black Strategic Mothering (Barnes, chapter 9). While Barnes’s chapter is an account of complicated and strategic agency, Deborah Boehm’s discussion of U.S. immigration detention conveys the experiences of migrants in undocumented or mixed-status families taken by force from their kin and communities in the United States. Despite rhetoric regarding the importance of family in the United States, the U.S. government holds family migration as a direct threat to the nation (Boehm, chapter 10). Boehm shows how the connections people maintain with detained kin persist against the odds and in the face of state-orchestrated estrangement.

Part III, Negative Affects, compels us to query why both academic and lay conceptions of kinship hew so predominantly toward positive definitions. What happens when we consider elements of sociality often understood as negative—like favoritism, envy, dislike, disinterest—as constituent aspects of kinship? Relations of giving and receiving may be both socially obligatory and constitute long-term ties (Mauss 1990), but they are not always welcome. Katie Kilroy-Marac explores how adult children of hoarders experience the stuff in their families—including gifts of stuff—as occupying an unpleasant center of the psychic and physical kinship landscape. While we may imagine dense social ties as constituting the most tangible of positive familial bonds, Kilroy-Marac shows us that