| Chapter 1: | An Introduction to Polarity, Ambiguity, and Kinship |
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complicated than that, and that it is because of the movements that scientists and research animals make relationally to one another and across the Great Divide.
Kinship
In my attention to kinship, I raise and, by recourse to ethnographic data, in some respects respond to, questions about the bounds of kinship itself. The idea of biological animal kin, for instance, may be difficult to reconcile with an essentially humanist anthropological foundation of biological relatedness, because anthropology has not yet found a way of effectively speaking to the flows across the human-animal divide—at least, not in the West. What is perhaps more difficult to think about within the current anthropological kinship parameters is another register of kinship with laboratory animals—a fleshy one that is made outside the parameters of biological relatedness, which the scientists in my study recognised. In ways that suggested that scientists themselves recognise and act upon the idea that animals cannot be excluded from kinship and that the privileging of shared biogenetic substance is not the only way to define relatedness (something I take up for investigation throughout this book), biological and nonbiological registers of kinship emerge from science to trouble the present, humanist, categories of kinship.
In anthropological circles, kinship has been recently reexamined, with interesting results and outcomes which have been applied to new contexts as well as to reflections upon what have appeared to be solid disciplinary foundations. For instance, S. Franklin and McKinnon (2001) and Carsten (2000) argued that renewed anthropological interest in kinship often begins with the figure of a superseded ‘nature.’ Strong’s (2001) reflections on Judith Butler’s contribution to reworking kinship gives a present state of play and then asks how far more elastic conceptualizations of kinship can stretch and what they might stretch to cover. Strong considered new contexts and challenges for kinship studies that present the opportunity to put terms such as ‘kinship’ and ‘nature’ under erasure (i.e., to erase the current assumptions about these terms) but he