Nurture kinship

Nurture kinship is a concept in the anthropological study of human social relationships (kinship) that highlights the extent to which such relationships are brought into being through the performance of various acts of nurture between individuals. The concept stands in contrast to the earlier anthropological concepts of human kinship relations being fundamentally based on 'blood ties', some other form of shared substance, or a proxy for these, as in fictive kinship. This conception of the ontology of social ties has become stronger in the wake of David M. Schneider's influential Critique of the Study of Kinship.

Intellectual Background
Reports of kinship ties being based of various forms of shared nurture date back at least to Robertson Smith’s (1889) compiled Lectures on 'The Religion of the Semites':

"According to antique ideas, those who eat and drink together are by this very act tied to one another by a bond of friendship and mutual obligation... The idea that kinship is not purely an affair of birth, but may be acquired, has quite fallen out of our circle of ideas. (Robertson Smith 1889, 265, 273)"

At this stage, Robertson Smith interpreted the kinship ties emerging from the sharing of food as constituting an alternative form of the sharing of substance, and contrasted it with the sharing of blood or genetic substance. Later observations however focused on the nurturing qualities of food sharing, allowing a potential distinction between the performance / shared-substance conceptualizations.

"I want to examine the human relationships of a primitive society as determined by nutritional needs, showing  how  hunger  shapes  the  sentiments  which  bind together the members of each social group. By what means is this fundamental biological  want  fulfilled  in  a  given  environment;  and  what  forms  of  human activities and social groupings are so derived? (Richards 1932, 23)"

Sometimes the line between substance and nurture is blurred through conceptualizing e.g. the food / milk given as the medium through which nurture is performed (e.g. Strathern 1973). The notion that it is the nurturing acts themselves that create the ties between people has developed most noticeably since the 1970s:

"The Navajo never mention common substance in finding or invoking kinship ties or norms. Kinship is defined in terms of the acts of giving birth and sharing sustenance. The primary bond in the Navajo kinship system is the mother-child bond, and it is in this bond that the nature and meaning of kinship become clear. In Navajo culture, kinship means intense, diffuse, and enduring solidarity, and this solidarity is  realized  in  actions  and  behavior befitting the cultural definitions of kinship solidarity. Just as a mother is one who gives life to her children through birth and sustains their life by providing them with loving care, assistance,  protection,  and  sustenance,  kinsmen  are  those  who  sustain  each other’s life by helping one another, protecting one another, and by the giving or sharing of food and other items of subsistence. Where this kind of solidarity exists, kinship exists; where it does not, there is no kinship.” (Witherspoon 1975, 21-22)"

The term 'nurture kinship' may have been first used in the present context by Watson (1983) who contrasted it with 'nature kinship' (kinship concepts built upon shared substance of some kind). Since the 1970s an increasing number of ethnographies have documented the extent to which social ties in various cultures can be understood to be built upon nurturant acts.

Ethnographic Examples
Marshall on the Truk (now known as the Chuuk) of micronesia:

"All sibling relationships – natural or created – involve the height of sharing and ttong “feelings of strong sentimental attachment.”… In Trukese kinship, actions speak louder than words; ttong must be demonstrated by nurturant acts. Trukese kinship pivots on the fulcrum of nurturance, a fact partially understood by Ruth Goodenough (1970:331) who noted the “intense concentration on problems of nurture – taking care of and being cared for by others” in GTS. Nurture is the nature of Trukese kinship. (Marshall 1977, 656)"

Gow on the Piro of Amazonia:

"As a child  begins  to  eat  real  food,  and  to  walk  and  eventually  to  talk,  its relationship to its parents changes from one in which the parents take care that their physical connection to the body of the child does not harm it, into one in which gifts of food, given out of love for the child, evoke the child’s love for its parents and other kin. Older siblings are very important here. From birth, the baby is frequently picked up and held (marcar, ‘to hold in the arms’) by its older brothers and sisters. As it learns to walk and talk, its closest physical ties are with such  siblings,  for  they  are  its  constant  companions  and  they  eat  and  sleep together. Such intimate ties with siblings replace the earlier one with parents as the child grows. (Gow, 1991, 157)"

Thomas on the Temanambondro of Madagascar:

"Yet just as  fathers  are  not  simply  made  by  birth,  neither  are  mothers,  and although  mothers  are  not  made  by  ‘custom’  they,  like  fathers,  can  make themselves  through  another  type  of  performatively  constituted  relation,  the giving of ‘nurture’. Relations of ancestry are particularly important in contexts of ritual,  inheritance  and  the  defining  of  marriageability  and  incest;  they  are  in effect  the  ‘structuring  structures’  (Bourdieu  1977)  of  social  reproduction  and intergenerational  continuity.  Father,  mother  and  children  are,  however,  also performatively related through the giving and receiving of ‘nurture’ (fitezana). Like ancestry, relations of ‘nurture’ do not always coincide with relations by birth; but unlike ancestry, ‘nurture’ is a largely ungendered relation, constituted in contexts of everyday practical existence, in the intimate, familial and familiar world of the household, and in ongoing relations of work and consumption, of feeding and farming.(Thomas 1999, 37)"

Storrie on the Hoti of Venezuelan Guiana:

"It was my Hoti friends who, through their rejection of my expectations that I would be able to ‘collect’ genealogical information, brought me to the idea that dwelling together and particularly the notions of consumption and ingestion are, for them, fundamental to social identity. Whenever I attempted to discover if there were ideas of genealogical relatedness between kin, I was told that there is nothing that links a parent to their children, or siblings to each other, apart from the bonds of affection and sentiment that they feel for each other. In other words, there is nothing more  to ‘relatedness’  than  those  things  that link ‘all people’ together.(Storrie 2003, 420)"

Viegas on a Bahian Amerinidian Community in Brazil:

"Adults who early  in  their  lives  had  been  taken  to  become  raised  children [fostered]  state  clearly  that  the  situation  had  never  displeased  them.  They maintain that they belong to the woman who cared for or raised them, and it is to her that they want their children to become attached. Although they recognise who their pais legítimos are, it is those who have cared for a person for a longer period of their childhood that are considered mother and father. It is in this sense that  kinship  is  constituted  as  memory  of  being  related  through  caring  and feeding, along the lines developed in large part by Peter Gow and within other South Amerindian contexts.(de Matos Viegas 2003, 32)"

Link with Attachment Theory
See also: attachment theory

It can be seen from the ethnographies that several anthropologists have found that describing social ties in terms of emotional attachments is appropriate. This has prompted some to suggest that a inter-disciplinary collaboration might be useful:

"Bowlby argued that  attachment  behaviour  in  humans  and  other  animals  is instinctive, i.e. that evolutionary pressures have selected this psychological trait…. Now: might Bowlby’s realist approach – which defines these behaviours as universal and instinctive, which examines their consequences through naturalistic observation, and which stresses their central role in intensifying human relatedness – be a useful starting  point  for  anthropologists?…  Extrapolating  from  the  work  of  Myers  [on emotions],  one  could  make  the  case  that  all  anthropological  discussions  of relatedness – e.g. the accounts by Malinowsky, Mauss, and a great many others of the ways in which gift exchange and reciprocity, or commensality and the sharing of ‘substance’, help to constitute human relatedness – are also by definition, dealing with intractable problems of attachment and separation in social life.’ (Stafford 2000, 12,24 emphasis in original)"

Within the discipline of psychology, the formation of social and emotional ties are treated by attachment theory. Drawing on animal studies from the 1950s onwards, John Bowlby and colleagues described how, for all primates (including humans) the reliable provision of nurture and care leads to strong bonds of attachment between the carer and cared-for.

"Attachment theorists now suggest that infants are biologically predisposed to emit signals such as tracking visually, crying, smiling, vocalising, clinging, etc., to elicit nurturance and proximity not only to their mother, but also to their father or any other  caregiver  (Ainsworth,  Bell  &  Stayton,  1974;  Lamb,  1978b). Consistent and prompt responding to infants’ signals leads to infants’ perception of adults as concerned, predictable, and reliable, and to the formation of secure attachment.  Mothers, fathers  and  other  caregivers,  by  their  different  styles  of responding,  create  a  different  set  of  expectations  and  an  array  of  attachment relationships  of  various  qualities  and  flavours  (Bretherton,  1985;  Bridges, Connell & Belsky, 1988; Stroufe, 1988).” (Geiger 1996, 6)"

Following the nurture kinship approach thus allows a synthesis between the extensive cross-cultural data of ethnographers and the long-standing findings of psychology on the nature of human bonding and emotional ties.

Parallels with developments in evolutionary biology
See also: Darwinian anthropology

In evolutionary biology the theory treating the evolution of social cooperation emerged in a formal version in the 1960s and 1970s in the form of inclusive fitness theory, and a related theory, kin selection. The theory specifies that one criterion for the evolution of certain kinds of social traits is a statistical association of identical genes, as would exist when close genetic relatives associate with one-another. Common extensions of the theory applied to humans took as their starting position the former anthropological perspective that human kinship is fundamentally 'based on' blood-ties. However, these extensions emerged at precisely the time that anthropology was reflexively critiquing this 'blood-ties' assumption behind traditional kinship theorizing. This led some anthropologists to strongly attack the emerging biological perspectives as suffering the same ethnocentric assumptions (e.g. 'blood is thicker than water') that the anthropologists themselves had been working to overcome.

This lack of agreement led to something of a stand-off and lack of communication between the disciplines, resulting in little cooperation and progress for almost three decades. The stand-off was resolved in 2004 by the publication of a synthesis which re-visited inclusive fitness theory to draw a distinction between the evolutionary mechanisms for the emergence of social traits and the proximate mechanisms through which they are expressed. In a strict interpretation of the theory, a statistical association of related genes (as would be present in the interactions of close genetic relatives) is understood as a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for the evolutionary emergence of certain traits relating to social cooperation (see kin selection). However, this does not entail that the proximate mechanisms governing the expression of such social traits in primates and humans necessarily depends on conditions of genetic relatedness per se. For the vast majority of social mammals, including primates and humans, the formation of social bonds (and the resulting social cooperation) are based on familiarity from an early developmental stage, and the same kinds of mechanisms that attachment theorist (see above) have outlined. In short, in humans and in other primates, genetic relatedness is not necessary for the attachment bonds to develop, and it is the performance of nurture that underlies those bonds and the enduring social cooperation that typically accompanies them (see Holland (2004) for a review).

Therefore the nurture kinship perspective leads to the synthesis of evolutionary biology, psychology and socio-cultural anthropology on the topic of social bonding and cooperation.