ANTC09H3 Lecture 4: Week 4 Readings
Document Summary
Carsten the substance of kinship and the heat of the hearth: feeding, personhood, and relatedness among malays in pulau langkawi . For malays, kinship itself is a process of becoming. The term relatedness is used to indicate indigenous ways of acting out and conceptualizing relations between people, as distinct from notions derived from anthropological theory. Ways of living and thinking about relatedness in langkawi lead me to stress a processual view of personhood and kinship. Houses in langkawi are strongly associated with women. Houses are also strongly associated with children. The modeling of marriage on siblingship means that affinity has a special status as it is always in the process of being transformed into consanguinity. Feeding is said to begin in the womb. Milk feeding also defines the prime category of incestuous relations: kin who have drunk milk from the breast of the same woman may not marry. Shared blood is shared female substance; it is never paternal blood.
