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Kinship as Ethical Relation: A Critique of the Spiritual Kinship Paradigm

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New Directions in Spiritual Kinship

Part of the book series: Contemporary Anthropology of Religion ((CAR))

Abstract

This chapter contends that while anthropological kinship theory has historically been rooted in church institutional practices that distinguish between consanguineal, affinal, and spiritual kinship, this division has proved inadequate to analytic and comparative purposes. The idea of spiritual kinship encodes not just an anti-Jewish polemic, for example, but a deep structural opposition between spirit and flesh that simply cannot be presumed in other settings. As an alternative, I suggest that spiritual kinship is just one variation on a much broader attempt by the Abrahamic communities to reconcile genealogical and non-genealogical grounds of relatedness. Readings in contemporary ethnography as well as Aristotle and Maimonides are marshaled to support the idea of kinship as an ethical relation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Religion and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Don Seeman

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  1. Don Seeman
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Religion, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

    Todne Thomas

  2. Independent Researcher, Toronto, Canada

    Asiya Malik

  3. The Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

    Rose Wellman

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Seeman, D. (2017). Kinship as Ethical Relation: A Critique of the Spiritual Kinship Paradigm. In: Thomas, T., Malik, A., Wellman, R. (eds) New Directions in Spiritual Kinship. Contemporary Anthropology of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_4

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48422-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48423-5

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