A Kinship Anthropology of Politics'? Interest, The Collective Self, and Kinship in Argentine Unions

A ‘kinship anthropology
of politics’? Interest, the

collective self, and kinship
in Argentine unions
Sian Lazar University of Cambridge
In this article I argue for a kinship anthropology of politics, understood as a focus on the day-to-day
imbrications of kinship and politics in a given political space, and the implications of that for the
construction of political subjects. I describe kinship within shop-floor-level trade union delegations of
state employees in Argentina in three different ways: first, languages of kinship mobilized to describe
political allegiance and dispositions, especially inheritance; second, family connections in recruitment
and activism; and, third, practices of kinning as relatedness. The combination of these three kinship
modes creates the union as kin group, and enables it to act on the world politically in order to
transform it.
Introduction: bringing kinship back into politics

In late October 2012, around a hundred civil servants from a central Argentine ministry
gathered in the ministry’s large meeting room to pay homage to Néstor Kirchner on
the second anniversary of his death. The youth section of the union had organized the
ceremony in homage to the former President. They had prepared a video, which one
young man introduced. His voice breaking with emotion, he said that when Néstor
died, ‘you lost a political leader, the opposition lost a rival, and some lost an enemy, but
many of us, we’ve lost a father’. As the video played, several members of the audience
broke down in tears. They watched as the video depicted Néstor’s role in the repayment
of the debt to the IMF and defeat of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, at political
campaigns with his wife (then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner), and public
events with other important left-wing political figures of the region, like Hugo Chávez,
Fidel Castro, and Lula da Silva. When the video finished, the General Secretary of the
union delegation, a charismatic man in his late fifties, stood in front of the screen and
gave a speech about how the Kirchners had between them halted thirty years of decline
in his country. He said, ‘I come from a Peronist family, and I thought we would never
recover our dignity as a country’. At the end of his speech, we applauded once more
and rose to our feet to sing the marcha peronista, the Peronist anthem.1 As the song
Malinowski Memorial Lecture, 2016.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

C Royal Anthropological Institute 2018
A ‘kinshp anthropology of politics’? 257
went on, its volume increased, and our arms moved in time with the words, I at least
felt strongly the sense of togetherness and shared commitment it evoked.
Four aspects of this story are significant for my argument here. First, the gathering
was a moment of collective sociality, shared by a group of workers who identified as
Peronist. Second, although organized by a union, it wasn’t confined to members, but
was attended by some of their bosses as well, an important aspect of such gatherings
as they forge relationships based on a common political identity across employee-
employer divides. Those relations are significant because they often smooth the way for
negotiations on more overtly political matters like employment conditions. Third, the
video presentation celebrated some of the key political acts that happened in Kirchner’s
presidency, such as the achievement of independence from the IMF. Finally, not only did
the young activist express the depth of his emotional attachment to politics through his
tears, but he also called Néstor Kirchner his father; while the Secretary-General of the
union delegation framed his speech by asserting that he came ‘from a Peronist family’.
This imbrication of kinship language, political ideology, local political practice, and
collective sociability is key to the strength of unions and Peronist political groupings in
Argentina today. In this article I explore how that manifests in the day-to-day life of one
union delegation in particular. I do so through a consideration of commensality and
sociability among activists in the light of classic anthropological literature on kinship.
This analytical strategy challenges interests as the primary motivation for politics, and
focuses attention instead on the importance of the cultivation of the union delegation
as a collective self.
From Malinowski onwards, anthropologists have critiqued the nineteenth-century
notion of ‘economic man’: the person who operates only or primarily on the basis
of formal economic logics of (calculative) self-interest. This is a philosophy of
universal economic motivation that is, I would argue, still dominant today, albeit
not in anthropology. Yet, despite questioning what was gradually becoming powerful
economic orthodoxy, it is surprising that Malinowski did not turn quite the same level
of scrutiny towards what we might call ‘political man’: the political person motivated
by interest. In Crime and custom, for example, he tells us that ‘on the whole, [the
Melanesian] tries to fulfil his obligations, for he is impelled to do so partly through
enlightened self-interest, partly in obedience to his social ambitions and sentiments’
(Malinowski 1926: 30). He described the submission to the rules of civil law in a similar
way, as derived from ‘the rational appreciation of cause and effect by the natives,
combined with a number of social and personal sentiments such as ambition, vanity,
pride, desire of self-enhancement by display, and also attachment, friendship, devotion
and loyalty to the kin’ (1926: 58).
The notion of ‘enlightened self-interest’ as political motivation is a figure whose
importance extends beyond Malinowski’s work. Interest-based understandings of
politics have become fundamental to both academic political theory and popular
theories of politics, linked in particular to the rise of capitalism and related assumptions
about motivation (Hirschman 1977). We see the importance of the politics of interest
in the political science of corporatism and clientelism, for example; also in academic
and popular discussions of voting behaviour or false consciousness, or in our sense
that political parties represent (or should represent) different interest groups.2 Even
in comparative political studies of processes like clientelism that acknowledge the
importance of kin groups in political networks, there is often an underlying assumption
of utilitarian motivation (Auyero 2001; Levitsky 2003; Lomnitz 1995). Yet it has also long

258 Sian Lazar
been acknowledged, certainly among anthropologists, that the instrumental aspects of

politics are actually only a fairly limited part of any story, and that interest-based
understandings will only go so far. It is the ‘social and personal sentiments’ that have
proven most attractive to anthropologists, at least, from earlier concerns about kinship
to later turns within political anthropology to affect, subjectivity, and so on.
In this article, I want to focus on the relation between kinship and politics. In
recent work, kinship has been brought into the anthropology of politics through
analytical tactics such as the examination of the role of cultural languages of kinship
for understandings of nationalism (Alonso 1994; Eriksen 2010; Herzfeld 2007; Wade,
Garcı́a Deister, Kent, Olarte Sierra & Dı́az del Castillo Hernández 2014) or divine
kingship (Forbess & Michelutti 2013); or how colonial governments operated through
the regulation of intimacy (Bear 2007; Stoler 2002). An important edited volume has
also recently explored the relation between kinship and ‘modern’ domains of politics
and economy (McKinnon & Cannell 2013a). Here I want to draw inspiration from
a problematic that featured in earlier discussions of kinship, and that Malinowski
claimed to be the ‘real subject-matter of the study of kinship’, namely ‘the processes of
the extension of kinship from its extremely simple beginnings in plain parenthood, to
its manifold ramifications and complexities in adult membership of the tribe, clan and
local group’ (Malinowski 1930: 25).
This of course relied on a distinction between kinship within the family, and the
extension of that kinship outwards. The distinction was a necessary part of Malinowski’s
agenda to debunk previous evolutionist approaches to kinship, particularly in the
context of debates at the time about classificatory kinship systems, and the extension
of kinship terms from the parent-child unit outwards to other genealogical relatives.3
Yet, in order to see ethnographic examples of a Malinowskian programme of study
of the extension of kinship, we must turn to his students; and here the scholarship
of Meyer Fortes and Edward Evans-Pritchard plays an important role.4 Both also
separated out ‘interpersonal kinship’ from the ‘politico-jural’ realm, and all assumed
that ‘interpersonal kinship’ remained broadly universal across all kinds of societies.5
The key distinction for them lay between ‘modern’ societies, where the ‘political-jural
domain’ was governed by the state, and more ‘primitive’ societies, where it was organized
by means of kinship: specifically the lineage system (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940; see
also discussion in McKinnon & Cannell 2013b.
By now, anthropologists have thoroughly debunked the assumption that
‘interpersonal kinship’ is universally the same. From early on, legal anthropologists
also explored the blurring of the boundaries between interpersonal kinship, the lineage
system, and jural relations (e.g. Gluckman 1965). Feminist work from the 1970s and 1980s
disputed the gendered nature of the distinction between interpersonal and politico-
jural domains, and its anchoring in differences assumed to be natural (Collier 1987;
MacCormack & Strathern 1982; Rosaldo & Lamphere 1974). Sylvia Yanagisako and
Jane Fishburne Collier argued forcefully that it is crucial to transcend this particular
dichotomy, for the ‘oppositions assume the difference we should be trying to explain’
(1987: 29), and that far more pertinent is the investigation of the means through which
those domains come to seem self-evident, and self-evidently gendered. More recently,
Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell have argued that this domaining is associated
with ideas of modernity, with the assumption that ‘modern societies are marked by a
separation between the domains of kinship, economics, politics and religion, and that
these domains are distinguished by fundamentally different forms of social relations’

(2013b: 15). They argue that in anthropological studies at least, if not in everyday life,
there is a kind of ‘taboo on reading across these domains’ (2013b: 15), or an expectation
of ideal-type separateness. As such, institutional acts (such as the law, but also academic
study) separate out domains that are in fact constantly experienced and held together
in other bureaucratic and everyday practices.
The collection McKinnon and Cannell edited is an example of some of the most
productive recent ethnographic work which has drawn precisely on boundary-crossings
and blurrings between domains to open up our understanding of how kinship influences
other parts of life and vice versa. The contributors show how kinship relations shape
economic practices such as textile manufacture in Italy and China (Yanagisako 2013),
drilling for oil in Patagonia (Shever 2013), or boat-building in Kolkata (Bear 2013). In
particular, Yanagisako’s contribution critiques the Weberian notion of economic action
in modern capitalism as constituted through a ‘secular logic of rational calculation’ of
interest (2013: 77). This builds on her earlier work, which shows how kinship sentiments
are an important ‘force of production’ for the transnational silk firms in both Italy
and China with which she worked (Yanagisako 2002). Other contributors to the Vital
relations collection show how state regulation shapes kinship strategies of marriage,
birthing, and adoption in the Americas (Bodenhorn 2013; Lambek 2013). The latter is,
it seems to me, an excellent example of the political anthropology of kinship.
To complement this approach, I want to look further at how kinship connections
are crucial in the organization of politics: that is to say, I want to examine the flow from
kinship to politics rather than from politics to kinship. In doing so, I do not wish to
reinstate a clear distinction between domains, but I do find the domaining itself helpful
as a heuristic device to describe the phenomenon that interests me here. Thus, and to
return to the older language, my aim in this article is to explore some of the overlaps
between ‘interpersonal kinship’ and the ‘politico’ part of the politico-jural realm in
contemporary life. To do this, I focus specifically on the intensely political realm of the
public sector trade union, and I suggest that the overlapping creates or indicates a form
of politics that cannot merely be explained through a language of interest. We should
instead seek alternative languages, which we can find in a related set of terms from
kinship studies: amity, consubstantiality, and mutuality of being.
In Kinship and the social order (1969), Fortes suggested that kin were the group of
people among whom notions of ‘prescriptive altruism’ ought to apply. He described
this as a sense of ‘amity’, which is based upon an ‘ethic of generosity’. It is a notion
that kinsfolk ‘are expected to be loving, just, and generous to one another and not to
demand strictly equivalent returns of one another’ (1969: 237). This expectation can lead
to situations where kinsfolk expect much from their kin without return, such as support
from salaried government employees among Ashanti in the 1940s, who preferred, Fortes
tells us, to be stationed far from their natal villages in order to escape those kinds of
demands. The ethic of generosity could also apply – indeed, might be even stronger –
between other, kin-like relations, of which Fortes points to blood brotherhood,
neighbourliness, and voluntary associations of immigrants in urban centres. In a later
commentary on that essay, Julian Pitt-Rivers picked out the significance of the word
‘amity’ as one that unsettles the distinction between kinship and friendship,6 suggesting
that ‘non-kin amity loves to masquerade as kinship’. He argued that both amity and
kinship are derived from a sense of consubstantiality (being of the same substance), and
that ‘consubstantiality can be established by other ways than by breeding’, also using
the example of blood brotherhood, among others (Pitt-Rivers 1973: 93).

260 Sian Lazar
Both sets of discussions acknowledge an ambiguity in who counts as kin and

how you tell; in Fortes’ essay alone we move from kin as member of a common
lineage towards a broader notion of kin as the people among whom an ‘ethic of
generosity’ works and circulates. This is quite a significant modification of the kind
of kinship extension that Malinowski proposed in his interventions in the debates
about classificatory kinship, since those older discussions did not cover the extension
of classificatory kinship terms to those not related genealogically. They both also made
possible later discussion of kinship that developed the idea that kin can be made,
through processes of – often – commensality (shared eating or, perhaps more precisely,
shared feeding). Pitt-Rivers hints at this with his discussion of how consubstantiality
comes into being; and the theme of substance in kinship has been taken forward most
significantly by Janet Carsten (2000; 2004; 2013), who has shown how the circulation
and sharing of substance – food, but also blood – makes people into kin, alongside
procreative ties.
We can trace a link between the axiom of amity, consubstantiality, and Marshall
Sahlins’ recent formulation of kinship as ‘mutuality of being’ (2013), which bears
its own relation to other similar anthropological descriptions of kinship, such as
Schneider’s notion of love as ‘enduring, diffuse, solidarity’ (1980), or Rupert Stasch’s
‘intersubjective belonging’ (2009). Sahlins argues that kin are ‘people who are intrinsic
to one another’s existence’ (2013: 2), and that, ‘generally considered, kinsmen are persons
who belong to one another, who are parts of one another, who are co-present in each
other, whose lives are joined and interdependent’ (2013: 21). For him, this joining of
lives need not occur merely through biological relationality (‘procreation, filiation, or
descent’), but can be made ‘performatively by culturally appropriate action’; and he
says ‘a catalogue of commonplace post-natal means of kinship formation would thus
include: commensality, sharing food, reincarnation, co-residence, shared memories,
working together, adoption, friendship, shared suffering, and so on’ (2013: 5).
Sahlins’ description of ‘mutuality of being’ would also describe rather well the
very close relationships between union activists that I saw in my research. Indeed,
I hope to show that the political community of the local shop-floor delegation is
a common project of self-cultivation that often also combines with actual family
relationships; or the making of family-like relationships (‘intersubjective participations’
or ‘mutual being’) as people share time, food, political action, commitment, hardship,
care, laughter, and so on. It is important to point out at this stage that in this context
‘mutuality of being’ should not be equated to sameness or equality of being, and to note
that these relationships, although close, are also very hierarchical, often exclusionary,
and require considerable work to bring into being.
In a series of commentaries on Sahlins’ work in Hau, commentators pointed out that
we can, and often do, feel ‘mutuality of being’ with people whom we do not consider to
be kin (e.g. Robbins 2013). Perhaps, then, the labour union is merely an instance of the
development of mutuality of being or amity among non-kin but in a kin-like way that
can be analysed and studied as if we were studying the formation of kinship. That might
in fact be enough for my argument here: that is to say, a weaker proposition would be that
the analytical languages provided by the anthropology of kinship help us to understand
other kinds of social groupings. However, a stronger formulation of this argument
would propose a kinship among the union grouping. In this article I suggest that this
results from the combination of three distinct but interrelated manifestations of kinship:
languages of kinship that are mobilized to understand connectedness and agency; family

connections understood as such; and the making of kin through experiences of sociality,
including commensality and care.
Languages of kinship: Peronism rooted in family

Since 2009, I have been conducting field research with the two major unions of state
employees in Argentina: ATE (Asociación de Trabajadores del Estado, Association of
State Workers) and UPCN (Unión del Personal Civil de la Nación, Union of National
Civil Servants). Over the course of nine months in 2009, and shorter follow-up trips
in subsequent years, I conducted extensive interviews with unionists from ATE and
UPCN in both their workplace and the union offices. I attended plenaries, assemblies,
and other meetings; courses for new and experienced delegates run by both unions; and
demonstrations, press conferences, and other public events. In 2012, I also spent two
months accompanying a UPCN delegation at their place of work, an important ministry
located in the centre of Buenos Aires. My main informants were union leaders, from
union delegates at the level of the administrative unit (e.g. government department) to
those with positions in the central offices of the union that oversee members in the city
of Buenos Aires. The ‘delegation’, then, refers to the group of union representatives at
the local shop-floor level – that is to say, the ministry or administrative institution.
Both unions represent workers employed by the state, at varying levels of public
administration, not just civil servants but also researchers, health workers, even stage-
hands, actors, and musicians in state-run theatres. Informants from both unions told me
that UPCN has a stronger presence among civil servants in administrative departments,
while ATE’s main strength lay in state-owned industries before privatization, but is now
in the health sector (especially amongst nurses, porters, and other auxiliary staff in
hospitals). In this article I focus mainly on UPCN, in part because for a number of
reasons I ended up developing closer relationships with members of UPCN; but also
because UPCN is self-consciously a Peronist union, one which sees itself as negotiating
with the employer (who is of course the state), rather than positioning itself as an
antagonist. This became a more complicated position to take after the change to a
non-Peronist government in late 2015, as fissures have opened up between those who
want to support the previous regime – now in opposition – and those who think they
should negotiate on employment conditions with whichever government is in power.
Activists in both ATE and UPCN considered themselves to be Peronists; but UPCN
delegates were usually much more fervent in how they expressed that identity. Peronism
is the political movement founded by Juan Domingo Perón in the 1940s when he became
Minister for Labour in 1943 and then President in 1946. In 1955, he was deposed by
military coup, and his supporters entered a period of clandestine resistance, demanding
his return from exile, which was eventually allowed in 1973. Shortly after, he became
President again, but he died a year later as the country slid into sectarian violence
between left-wing and right-wing forces. His third wife and Vice-President, Isabela,
took over the presidency but was deposed in 1976 by one of the most brutal military
regimes in the region, which stayed in power for seven years.7 Until the 1990s, the
main strength of the Peronist movement lay in the unions, which were known as
the ‘spinal column’ of the movement. During the 1990s, as President Carlos Menem
enacted sweeping structural adjustment policies, the centre of power within Peronism
shifted from the unions towards neighbourhood-based clientelistic political groupings,
especially in the province of Buenos Aires (Auyero 2001; Levitsky 2003). Then, under the
Kirchner regimes of 2003-15, the traditional unions recovered influence, but not to the

262 Sian Lazar
same extent as before. They now share that influence with the territorial organizations
and the youth group La Cámpora (Etchemendy 2013; Etchemendy & Collier 2007;
Manzano 2013). Perón himself had attracted followers from an extremely wide political
spectrum, from leftist Marxist guerrillas to anti-communist death squads; and that
capaciousness is one of the characteristics of Peronism today as well.
Nowadays, Peronism is much more than a political orientation, and is regularly
spoken of in Argentina as an identity and way of life. Peronist activists do very often
hold a strong ideological commitment to the movement, but tend to articulate those
ideas through languages of the non-rational, the affective, and kinship. For example,
one of the common phrases I heard was that a Peronist ‘se nace no se hace’ – is born and
not made. Of course, people I knew had come to Peronism via multiple trajectories,
and many of them had indeed ‘made’ themselves and continued to do so. However, the
phrase points to the importance of understandings and practices of Peronist militancy
that stress its grounding in family.
Indeed, my informants often explained their Peronism to me through metaphors of
blood, inheritance, and family experience. I was frequently told that one is a ‘peronista
de corazon’ (Peronist of the heart); ‘uno nace peronista’ (you are born Peronist); ‘lo
llevas en la sangre’ (you carry it in your blood). Once in a workshop in the UPCN
school for new delegates, I accidentally said that I had been impressed by how Peronism
was ‘sanguinario’, meaning bloodthirsty. I was quickly corrected, as I should have said
‘sanguineo’, that is ‘of the blood’. My mistake caused much amusement, but also general
agreement that once I had picked the correct word I had understood how people felt.
In addition to metaphors of blood, other common metaphors referred to early
infancy. You might be a Peronist ‘de cuna’ (from the cradle), or, very often, ‘uno lo
mama’, meaning that you absorb it from a very young age. It may ‘just be a word’,
as an Argentine friend said to me, but it is at the very least striking that mamar is
also the verb that means to feed at the breast (baby bottles are called mamaderas). A
Secretary-General of one of the largest UPCN delegations in his mid-thirties combined
these various tropes when he said,
One is a Peronist from the cradle. My father was general secretary of the Leatherworkers’ Union, of
the Argentine Federation of Leatherworkers, and, well, you carry that. I always say, I played the drums
in a union before I said mamá [mummy]! You carry it in your blood . . . I think you absorb it from
the home (Creo que lo mama desde la casa).
So Peronism can be transmitted, or taken on, through experiences in the home

when very young, and even perhaps through breast milk; it seems to be incorporated
into the person from an early stage in their life. This can happen either physically or
by association with key aspects of political activism, such as the drums in this case,
or by accompanying parents on union business, like demonstrations or meetings or
graffiti-writing.
Aside from physical or experiential incorporation, the cradle and breast-feeding
were often linked to story-telling, and one of the most important mechanisms of
transmission appeared to be the stories that parents and grandparents told babies and
very young children: stories which often involved Eva Perón; a common one is that Evita
gifted a family member their first sewing machine, freezer, or toy. This represented for
many the golden era of 1946-55, when Perón delivered for the ‘gente humilde’ (humble
people). In this way, people combined spiritual and affective stories of allegiance to
individual exemplary figures with a discourse about the material and political benefits

Peronism brought to the country and to their class. So, their principled adherence
to Peronism was spoken of as and through a particular understanding of Argentine
history and their place in it (as a class), as well as through languages of inheritance,
biology, and affective connection.
More broadly, many people, both Peronist and not, also felt that they had inherited a
general disposition towards political activism from their parents, or in some cases from
an uncle or aunt. That kind of disposition was described to me as, variously, a vocation
for service, a tendency to rage at injustice or to turn to action rather than simply talk, or
even a virus or addiction. It might have been as simple as the impulse to join the union
when starting a job just because that was what one did; or a set of values transmitted
in daily small acts of charity, or political discussions around the Sunday dinner table.
It was a mix of natural character and experience within the family while growing up.
As I show in more detail elsewhere (Lazar 2017), these explanations describe processes
of ethical-political subjectivation, as people understand themselves as constituted by a
set of virtues that are both inherent in their character and amenable to cultivation in
pedagogical, social, and political contexts. These virtues are thought of as the outcome
of family experience, understood as directly inherited from older generations and also
cultivated by children accompanying their parents in political action. The familial ideal
operating here is an inclusive one, instantiated in weekend meals with grandparents,
aunts, uncles, and cousins, where adult siblings argue and debate politics and culture
with each other while their children play together.
Family as a means of organizing employment and political activism

A discursive emphasis on family may not have been quite so acute or sentimental among
those unionists who did not consider themselves to be passionate Peronists, but it was
not unusual either. And beyond discourse, family also mattered very practically, not
least because of how state employment is organized in many institutions.
From time to time, people working for the state told me that their institution was ‘like
a family’, and when they did so, they often meant it in both a figurative and literal sense.
In one institution that I visited, where over 90 per cent of its workers were affiliated to
UPCN, the delegates described themselves, their institution, and the union itself as a
family in order to stress how smooth and well-functioning they considered their group
to be. But the role of family in state employment also goes beyond languages of kinship,
as family networks are a broadly used means of recruitment to work for the state in
Argentina. This has a long history, especially in state-run industries, as Elana Shever
(2012) has shown for oil workers, and Sandra Wolanski (2015) for telecoms workers. In
the past, jobs used to pass from father to son; and, indeed, Wolanski shows that this
was seen as a right by the telecoms workers, one that they had lost on privatization
and recovered afterwards. Returning to my civil servant informants, the nature of
family recruitment to jobs seems to vary across institutions. For example, there was
one department that a leader described to me as ‘like a religious fraternity’ (‘como una
cofradı́a’). He said ‘we pile up all the relatives there’ (‘amontamos todos los familiares ahi’).
Although the overlap between kin and job recruitment networks was quite a delicate
question,8 many unionists were open about the fact that most people had got their
job through some kind of family or political connection. One ATE delegate said in an
interview:
Well, nobody goes to work for the state by presenting their CV at the reception window; people get
work for the state because they are someone’s family member, through the unions or through the

264 Sian Lazar
functionary [i.e. the politically appointed top civil servant] . . . An 18-year-old kid doesn’t get in on
his own merits, he gets in because he is someone’s family.
Few of my interviewees were as frank with me on record as this person, but the
role of union networks in getting jobs for family members was not especially hidden in
day-to-day interactions, especially as I got to know my informants better. In informal
conversations, my friends discussed where they might find a state job for their adult
children, for instance; and when I asked activists about their family histories, many of
the stories they told me included how they had got a place for a family member. The
phrase is ‘hacer entrar’ (to make [someone] enter), and it is used in an active sense –
so, ‘hice entrar mi madre, sobrino, hijo, etc.’ means ‘I got a job for my mother, nephew,
son, etc.’ One delegate told me how his mother had been widowed when he was very
young, and had worked as a domestic worker paid by the hour, in order to support
him through school. Once he was in the union delegation, he got her a job as a cook in
a nursery, which he said, with great pride, was ‘the most dignified job she had had in
her life’.9
Kin-based recruitment shaped the union as a political entity in several ways. First,
the practice of getting jobs for relatives actualized the overlapping of kin and friendship
networks in the state institutions and, as a consequence, union delegations: put crudely,
those who got their job via a family connection with the union might then often be
expected to collaborate with the union delegation as activists themselves (cf. Wolanski
2015). Second, the control of recruitment was often thought to grant considerable
political power, in terms of what the union could do for its members, and how it could
negotiate with the employer. Third, it affected sociality, the subject of the following
section.
Sociality and care: relations of kinning

The fact that a given ministry is often staffed by people connected to each other as kin
or friends helps to maintain an easy sociability, which is in turn generally considered
to be an indicator of a well-functioning workplace, for UPCN delegates at least. When
I asked for permission to accompany a delegation, I was explicitly directed to one that
the higher leadership of UPCN considered to be a good model. That meant that I was
prevented from gathering detailed material on conflictual delegations, although I knew
of some problematic ones. The cohesiveness of this particular delegation hinged on the
charisma of the leading personalities involved, their willingness to work at creating the
kind of sociability I discuss in this section, and at times their ability to shout down
opposing positions in the name of jocular debate. When I first arrived, everything
seemed to work smoothly, as two leading delegates took me around a few of the offices,
greeting the workers with a kiss on the cheek, introducing me, explaining to me who
everyone was and how they were connected to each other (cousins, nieces, etc.), joking
with them, and so on. Of course, a number of the workers kept their heads down at
their computers; but the Secretary-General who escorted me around was at pains to
show me how well he and the other leaders know their affiliates personally.
The friendly sociability was one of the most distinctive and appealing aspects of
my research when I accompanied the Ministry delegation in 2012. I found it to be
important both in the day to day and on special occasions, such as birthday lunches,
excursions to places of interest, or cultural events and meetings run by the union central
office. On a day-to-day basis, I spent much time sitting in the delegation office with the

activists: chatting, smoking, debating, drinking mate, coffee, soda; eating pizza, biscuits,
cakes, sandwiches; playing cards, watching TV, examining people’s holiday photos,
recent purchases, or medical test results; discussing newspaper stories; gossiping about
functionaries, about tensions elsewhere in the Ministry, poring over leaflets produced
by rival groups, telling jokes, and so on. The gatherings took place throughout the day,
but became less orientated to business matters as the day went on. Since most of the
delegates in leadership positions are men, the sociability of the gatherings often took
on a masculine gender: the TV would show football matches, the jokes that circulated
might be sexist, some of the men would stay until well past the time that parents needed
to get back home to see to their children, even if they had young children of their own,
and so on.
Few women stayed until the end, most leaving to care for their children at home, and
conforming to a hegemonic notion of the responsibility of women for family matters in
the domestic sphere while the men occupied the work space. The kind of atmosphere
that developed in this latter space was more akin to the gatherings of adult siblings
at the parental home at the weekends than it was to the organization of the household
of the nuclear family. Both are ideal-type models for Argentine families, but in practice
the activists I knew best had a broad range of family arrangements. For example, I knew
a divorced father with a grown-up son; a father on his third marriage and second set of
children; a single mother with a teenage daughter; a single mother with adult sons; a
single mother who lived with her own mother and her 19- and 10-year old children; a
young widow with daughters and grandchildren; a married father with adult children;
a lesbian woman with nieces and nephews; and several married fathers of pre-school
or school-age children. The reader will no doubt note the absence in this list of the
married mother of pre-school or school-age children.
One substance that often circulated at the moments of sociability at the end of the
day is especially associated with unionists and public sector employees. Mate is a herbal
infusion prepared in a round cup: one person packs the cup with the yerba mate leaves
and pours boiling water on from a thermos flask. They then hand it to another person
in the group, who sips from a metal straw until they have consumed all the liquid, and
passes the cup and straw back to the person with the flask, who pours more water on and
then passes the drink to the next person, and so on. Although people do also drink mate
on their own, the conventions of sharing make it into a very social endeavour; a form
of commensality that makes people into kin, or some other kind of close social group,
through the circulation of the mate gourd. It is so associated with a particular attitude
of sociability that from the outside it has come to represent a lack of commitment to
the job, as when people make comments about public servants just drinking mate all
day instead of working. But it is also considered to be the national drink, a rite that
affirms Argentinianness as much as the barbeque (asado) does. Mate consumption in
itself does not automatically create kin in a restrictive sense, and it is not especially
associated with family consumption (in the way that the asado is, for example). Mate
is used in many group contexts without automatically creating them as kin. Rather, it
creates a slightly more diffuse sense of group belonging; and in the case of the union
delegation, it is one among many circulated substances that creates that delegation as a
close group, at the very least a kin-like group.
Ministry delegates usually prepared mate when we came together to discuss the issues
of the day. Discussions might cover topics internal to the Ministry and the delegation’s
work, or current affairs, or debates about interpretations of Argentine history. The

266 Sian Lazar
latter may have been often prompted by my presence, and it is true that the topics
of conversation became less intellectual as my stay went on. However, it was clearly
not uncommon for people to talk about weighty matters, and they evidently enjoyed
debating nearly as much as they enjoyed joking and teasing each other. So, substance
(mate or other foodstuffs) circulated, but also so did jokes, political viewpoints, gossip,
understandings of history and what it is to be Argentine, and so on. It is through this
kind of circulation as well as through job recruitment that the union actualizes existing
social and kin networks, and brings new people to those networks.
As well as including people through the circulation of ideas and substance, the group
dynamic also shut down people with opposing views, unless they had the confidence
to stand out as the resident non-Peronist. Several did, and there were usually one or
two people around the table who did not agree with the dominant political position.
But those who did not enjoy the atmosphere tended not to come for the social events,
preferring to approach the leadership earlier in the day on an individual basis to discuss
any problems. Or they enacted their political activism in other spaces, such as the rival
union, ATE, or within party politics. It was not possible to be a leader of the delegation
without participating in its sociability, but that did not completely exclude people from
being affiliates or from going to leaders for help. That said, at times leaders did grumble
that some people would only come to them when they had problems they needed to
be solved, and certainly they made more effort on behalf of the people they were most
connected to, and who had in their eyes contributed to the delegation.
If inheritance, sharing actual kin links, and sharing mate and other substances
are key ways of creating the union delegation as a kin or kin-like group, care is a
fourth way of doing this. Members of the union delegation care for each other and
for ordinary affiliates in multiple ways – through sociability, but also through more
structured practices like the provision of childcare for the summer months of January
and February, and, very importantly, the union health insurance. Administering both
these schemes forms a large chunk of the delegation’s activities during the year, and,
especially in the case of the health insurance, they are one of the main attractions of the
union for ordinary members.
To take the latter, delegations often administer the union discount scheme on
prescription medication; they may also advise affiliates on precisely which kind of
health insurance to take out, arrange to receive test results, or organize emergency
medical transport, compassionate leave to care for a sick child, and so on. Delegations
also sometimes organize health check-ups at the workplace, and educational events
about preventive health. These activities are especially gendered, as it is in these areas
where women are most likely to be found in positions of leadership: in charge of
‘Acción Social’ (Social Action), which includes the organization of childcare, the health
insurance scheme, health outreach activities, and charity collections. Both unions also
have recreational areas that members can use; they also provide gifts and discounted
goods at particular life-cycle moments like marriage and bereavement. Thus care
stretches beyond employment conditions into life itself; into the realm of interpersonal
kinship, where it is the responsibility primarily of women, again mirroring the ideal-type
division of labour within Argentine families.
All these are in some sense ‘practices of kinning’, to use Signe Howell’s term (2006).
They combine to create a sense of mutuality of being within the delegation, and to an
extent between the delegation and ordinary affiliates, although that relationship is less
intense. That mutuality of being is hierarchical, reliant very much upon some being

prepared to lead while others follow. Leadership is often based upon an avuncular kind
of personal charisma as well as an ability to negotiate and strategize on behalf of the
collectivity. The collective justifies hierarchy through philosophies of organization that
stress ‘organicity’, by which unionists mean discipline and vertical hierarchy, with a
strong sense that there is one group of people that decides upon strategies and another
that carries out those strategies (see Lazar 2015 for a more detailed discussion). UPCN
unionists are very proud of this, and make a clear contrast between themselves and their
overly democratic rival, ATE, which, they say, cannot as a result be nearly as effective as
they are.
This might be a ‘non-kin’ kind of mutuality of being; and unionists would rarely
claim that the union delegation is a family as such. However, I would argue that the
combination of all these different kinship modalities and practices makes the union into
something at the very least close to a kin group. Although the kin group is never exactly
consonant with family, it often overlaps because of the nature of job recruitment and
recruitment to the union. And the most cohesive delegations have relationships that
are sufficiently close and enduring to mean that they consider themselves as all but kin.
That blending of kinship modalities and practices of kinning with more
straightforwardly recognizable family networks in recruitment might not be as
problematic as it might initially seem for a political anthropology of kinship – or,
better put, a kinship anthropology of politics – if we return to Fortes and Pitt-
Rivers’ ideas of ‘amity’. For there is in practice not a terribly clear distinction between
a realm of amity within which the ‘ethic of generosity’ applies, on the one hand,
and the ‘politico-jural domain’, on the other, whether the latter is thought of as the
lineage system, the state, or even just a politics of interest. The personal elements of
amity include both kinship and political allegiance (where the latter is understood as
passionate conviction that is partially reliant upon family), and they absolutely influence
more conventionally ‘politico-jural’ spaces such as collective bargaining. This is partly
because, when negotiating politically on behalf of its members, the union relies upon
shows of collective power at ritual events, street protests, and the like; but also, as one
would expect, much of a delegation’s effectiveness in negotiation lies in the abilities
of its leaders to create relationships with bosses, which draw on friendship networks,
sometimes on family relations, and on some of the ‘practices of kinning’ through
sociality described above, which are opened up to non-delegation members. These can
include ritual celebrations of important Peronist dates, to which the bosses are invited,
as in the example with which I opened this article. The delegation works to build an ethic
of generosity and a sentiment of amity within itself and between it and ‘the employer’,
for its own sake and in order to achieve political ends such as a good salary settlement
or the protection of jobs. And so kinship and politics blend into each other.
Cultivation of the collective self

Although Pitt-Rivers continued to maintain a kind of barrier between kin and non-kin
within a broad set of ‘amiable relations’, his work brought in the question of self in an
especially helpful development of Fortes’ notion of amity. Pitt-Rivers suggested that
A system of thought that takes the individual as its starting-point and assumes that he is motivated by
self-interest faces a difficulty in confronting the examples of behaviour that is not so motivated . . .
[Yet] the majority of the world’s cultures do not share the individualism of the modern West and
have no need to explain what appears to them evident: that the self is not the individual self alone,
but includes, according to circumstances, those with whom the self is conceived as solidary, in the

268 Sian Lazar
first place, his kin. Alter then means not ‘all other individuals’ but ‘all who are opposed to self, the
non-amiable’ (Pitt-Rivers 1973: 90).
Pitt-Rivers, then, proposed an intensely collective self, and I too wish to make this
suggestion, even if I am applying it to a group of people whom he would have probably
considered to be very much of ‘the modern West’. I want to do so by way of bringing in
an insight from contemporary anthropology of ethics that selves can be cultivated; and
propose that the kinds of kinning practices and discourses described above could be
understood also as forms of ethical subjectivation in the Foucauldian sense (Foucault
1990). They are technologies of cultivation of collective ethical subjects or selves that
are, first, partly understood to derive from kinship, as in the inheritance of a particular
political identity and ethical disposition towards action for others. But, second, they
operate through kinship modalities: especially commensality, care, and circulation of
substance and values.
This might seem an abrupt shift, from Pitt-Rivers and Fortes straight to Foucauldian
anthropology of ethics. Yet anthropologists have developed significant debates about
the relations between kinship and ethics that turn on the nature of relations between
(and within) persons, and ethics as living with others (Carsten 2004; Das 2015; Lambek
2010). Robert McKinley suggests that this in fact constitutes kinship itself, which he
views as a ‘philosophy about how a person can feel categorically obligated to a series of
other persons’ (2001: 143). Similarly, Veena Das (2015) views ethics as coming into being
in everyday interactions between related persons, often kin. However, my argument here
approaches the question of ethics and collectivity from a slightly different direction,
that of the building of political subjects who are at the same time ethical subjects, and
even in some sense selves. As such, I draw on the Foucauldian ideas of subjectivation
and cultivation of the self to describe the making of these kinds of ethical-political
subjects.
Although I use this framework, I depart from Foucault in two main ways: first, by
giving a highly kinship-inflected story of these processes. As McKinnon and Cannell
(2013b) tell us, Foucault tended to relegate kinship to the ‘traditional’ order, considering
that it had been replaced by biopower in modern constitutions. Second, Foucault’s
original discussion of ethical subjectivation and care of the self took an individual
or dialogical perspective: for him, the self under cultivation was on the whole an
individual, albeit perhaps in dialogue with the confessor or some other figure, including
even potentially the same person later on in their life. Anthropologists’ tendency to
discover collective or relational selves, including in Western societies (Carsten 2004),
has recently combined with anthropology of ethics to draw analytical attention to the
possibility of a collective ethical subject, as in the example of Webb Keane’s discussion of
revolution in Vietnam (2016).10 As I describe in detail elsewhere (Lazar 2017), unionists
create themselves as particular kinds of activists both individually and collectively.
Individually, they cultivate virtues of commitment, vocation, and passion that they
considered to be part of their character. These are understood as building ‘militancia’, a
word which means activism but which refers at the same time to activism as a pathway
through political life and to the collective of activists in a given political group. In
training sessions for new delegates those same values are elicited more collectively
and in more structured ways, articulated by both facilitators and trainees. In ritual and
social moments the delegation encompasses activists in a process they call ‘containment’,
giving them a social and political context for their activist self (see also Lazar 2013).

In contrast to what might be expected from a purist Foucauldian perspective, these

processes serve to cultivate not just multiple individual selves, but also a collective
self, the self that stands in contrast to ‘[a]lter . . . [that which is] opposed to self, the
non-amiable’, in Pitt-Rivers’ words. For the unionists, the ‘alter’ varies according to
the political context: it could be the rival union, or their employer in the abstract, or
the right-wing President elected in late 2015; it could be an annoying or incompetent
functionary, ‘neoliberalism’, or a general public that stigmatizes unionists as corrupt
and co-opted.
These are, then, both ethical and kinning processes, which create a difference between
self and alter, and thereby create the collective self (to be more precise, multiple
collective selves). That is when they ‘work’ properly, which may not always be the
case, as delegations do become dysfunctional all the time. But even when they do work
well, they do not create a singular kind of collective self that is necessarily egalitarian or
inclusive, morally virtuous, or that always operates smoothly. Often quite the opposite,
as – just as within families – they also produce exclusion and hierarchy, stifle debate, or
develop into factionalism and favouritism. The amount of effort that goes into these
practices indicates the extent of the work that they involve, and the task that must be
done to construct a collective self. Yet, somehow, collective identities and selves do come
into being: the delegation itself, the delegation as part of the union, or an overlapping
sense of Peronist militancy. By eating together, drinking mate together, engaging in
everyday practices of sociality and care, and in the spectacular and occasional moments
of ritual events, the union pulls people together, and thereby makes itself into a powerful
political actor. The collective selves are cultivated through experiences of togetherness
and consubstantiality, as well as through the circulation of substance.
Conclusion
To conclude, the making of kin and the collective self in this way is part of how politics
is organized and understood in Argentina as elsewhere. A kinship anthropology of
politics would of course look different in different parts of the world, but kinship
would rarely be completely absent from politics. Considering the relationship between
the two might well enable us to think anew about various problems in contemporary
politics. One example might be using a kinship anthropology of politics to think about
inequality, especially gendered and generational inequality, a feature of all kinship
systems and most anthropological approaches to kinship. Another is the construction
of powerful political subjects, which uphold or contest the asymmetrical distribution
of resources and enactment of power over others. In the specific case of the Argentine
labour movement, the approach I have advocated shows that it does not make sense to
describe membership of a political entity such as the trade union as (just) an outcome of
an individualized ‘enlightened self-interest’. This is not least because in the past, union
activism could get you killed, while today it can lead to stigmatization in the public eye
by association with corruption and a delegitimized political system. Union activism can
also be hard work, taking its toll on intimate relationships and personal health. From
a self-interested perspective, it probably does not make much sense to undertake that
kind of commitment; we need to look elsewhere for an answer to the question of why
people devote so much of their lives to this cause. The building of a group sense which
generates a sentiment of amity and ethic of generosity helps to keep people going in
the face of stigma and when ‘success’ – defined as the fulfilment of their (rationally
calculated) self-interest – seems very distant.

270 Sian Lazar
Second, and beyond just presenting a claim that motivations for political action lie
beyond mere interest, I want to argue that the processes of making collective selves are
the source of the unions’ strength. This is true across the region, but in particular in
Argentina, where that strength is being sorely tested under the new presidential regime,
especially in the public sector. In the three months after Mauricio Macri assumed
the Presidency on 10 December 2015, possibly around 25,000 public sector workers were
fired from their jobs – or their temporary contracts were not renewed, which for the
unions amounts to the same thing. The reasons given were associated with the overlap
between social networks and recruitment to public sector jobs: specifically, those fired
were accused of being political appointees, even parachuted in at the last minute by
the outgoing regime. However, at the end of 2016, many of my informants pointed
to estimates which suggested that the overall number of public employees had not
changed a great deal. The implication is that the restructuring of 2016 was not so much
a cost-cutting exercise as a clearing of space in order to implant new networks and
thus meet the imperatives of a new political collective, which is just as infused with kin
networks as the previous one.
Third, the unions are organizing their defence against the loss of jobs and asserting
themselves against a relatively weak executive through modes underpinned by the
processes of collectivity and kinship described here. ATE is taking to the streets; and
while UPCN also takes to the streets from time to time, it is in addition working behind
the scenes to defend the jobs of its affiliates, and negotiate the best salary settlements
possible. Both tactics require a strong sense of collectivity in order even to take place,
let alone be successful. In the case of behind the scenes negotiation, they also require
the ability to forge relationships with the bosses, which often works on the basis of
common kin identity or identity as Peronist, and so on.
Thus we could suggest that kinship is a force of production for politics in Argentina
today, to use language inspired by Yanagisako’s analysis (2002). This is because kinship
produces particular kinds of collective subjects and thus shapes politics in very
important ways. To evoke Malinowski once more, the ‘social and personal sentiments’
described in this article are consequential; they are not merely colour to add to the
‘real’ stuff of politics that could be found in calculation of interest, whether group or
individual. To be clear, it is not that interest is unimportant, or that the unionists do
not act as an interest group. Instead, my analytical claim is that describing interest as
the primordial explanatory factor only reveals part of the picture, at best, and at worst
might even be misleading: as, for example, when we can only come up with theories
of false consciousness when we see people acting against their interest. The key is
to examine how particular political groups come into being, whether their subsequent
action can then be understood through a language of interest or an alternative language.
For that alternative I am proposing a kinship anthropology of politics. I suggest that
this analytical strategy illustrates how practices of making kin build collective subjects
that can take action on the world in order to transform the world.
NOTES
My thanks go to Julieta Gaztañaga, James Laidlaw, and Joel Robbins for comments on earlier drafts of this
article; and to Laura Bear, Perveez Mody, and Rupert Stasch for clarifications about various kinship matters.
I am also very grateful to the LSE Department of Anthropology for inviting me to give this as the Malinowski
Lecture of 2016; to colleagues at the research seminars in Oxford, Bergen, and Edinburgh for their challenging
and insightful comments; and to the anonymous readers of this article for JRAI.
1 The marcha peronista is sung at most collective Peronist events. See Buch (2016) for a historical discussion.

2 For example, in theories of corporatism and pluralism (e.g. Malloy 1977; Schmitter 1974; Wiarda 2005).
On interests and democracy more broadly, see Christiano (2015); Korab-Karpowicz (2017); Schmitter (2006).
3 In the 1930 article, Malinowski was especially polemical in his attack, calling these debates a ‘speculative
mist’ reliant upon a ‘bastard algebra’ of interlocking kinship terms. The debates surrounded the question
of classificatory kinship, with theorists proposing that kinship terms would be extended outwards from the
nuclear family according to a classificatory system, which makes sense as a theory of society – in Lewis
Henry Morgan’s sense – if societies hold within them a history of group marriage. Malinowski was describing
the extension of kinship outwards from the parent-child relation and not just the rather arcane question of
extension of particular kinship terms. But his version was equally a theory of society, working (analytically)
outwards from immediate needs to construct the social system. This was of course his version of functionalism.
Another functionalist, Radcliffe-Brown, began, according to Service (1985), from the broader social system,
not the parent-child relation, in order to find how kinship terms elucidated societal structure. Malinowski’s
understanding of kinship accords well with the kinds of approaches we take today, with the important
exception that his psychologism was universal. He thought that interpersonal kinship was experienced in
exactly the same way everywhere; this would not be a dominant position in anthropology of kinship now. I
am grateful to Rupert Stasch for guidance on this debate.
4 Fortes trained with Seligman and also Malinowski at the LSE. Evans-Pritchard trained with Marett at
Oxford, but went to Malinowski’s seminars in London (Kuper 2015).

5 Janet Carsten points this out in her introduction to the collection Cultures of relatedness (2000). See
also McKinnon & Cannell (2013b). Carsten also notes that if Fortes had truly kept to his injunction to leave
interpersonal kinship to more psychological study, we would miss some of the incredibly rich interpersonal
material he actually provides us with in The web of kinship among the Tallensi (1949).
6 Discussed by Marilyn Strathern (2015).
7 After the return to democracy in 1982, the next Peronist regime was that of Carlos Menem, in 1989-99;
followed after the 2001 economic crisis by the Kirchner regimes of 2003-15. This very brief description of
Peronism does not give a sense of its complexities for many adherents as an identity and way of life, not just a
political orientation. In my book (Lazar 2017), I explore that complex picture for one group of Peronists (the
UPCN unionists); but there are many studies of Peronism across different periods of its history. For some of
the best, see Auyero (2001); Elena (2011); Halperin Donghi (2012 [1994]); James (1988); Levitsky (2003); Torre
(1998; 2012).
8 Wolanski (2015) suggests that this is because it is a matter from the private realm, and that talking about
it was somehow washing dirty linen in public. For my part, I suspect that people thought I would disapprove;
and so it was a topic discussed in the realm of the sideways glance. It is an open matter that sits alongside
a genuine commitment to Weberian ideals of bureaucratic action, which include recruitment based on
merit.
9 Of course, the allocation of jobs according to particular social networks is a feature of public sector
employment across the world, including in the supposedly more Weberian bureaucracies of the North
Atlantic region. Probably in no part of the world does a civil service fully conform to what was after all
an ideal type even for Weber (1968 [1922]). For example, in the United States, significant parts of the civil
service are explicitly political appointments; in the United Kingdom, connections to particular schools and
universities are extremely important in civil service recruitment; in France, civil servants can explicitly only
be recruited from a few elite institutions. As Bourdieu’s work reminds us (e.g. Bourdieu & Passeron 1977), a
person’s ability to enter and subsequently succeed in those institutions (schools, universities, grandes écoles)
is heavily influenced by family and class background.
10 See also Laidlaw (2014), who raises the possibility of a collective ethical subject at some points but does
not discuss it in depth; Faubion (2011) discusses a composite ethical subject, but I would argue that his
non-individual ethical subjects might more properly be considered to be compound (the anthropologist and
the informant) rather than collective.
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Une « anthropologie de la parenté en politique » ? Intérêt, Moi collectif et

parenté dans les syndicats argentins
Résumé
Le présent article plaide pour une anthropologie de la parenté en politique, autrement dit l’examen des
imbrications au quotidien des liens de parenté et de la politique dans un espace politique donné et de leurs
implications pour la construction des sujets politiques. Il décrit les liens de parenté dans les délégations
syndicales de fonctionnaires argentins de la base en adoptant trois approches différentes : d’une part, les
langages de la parenté mobilisés pour décrire les allégeances et dispositions politiques, et en particulier
l’héritage, d’autre part les liens familiaux dans le recrutement et l’activisme, et enfin les pratiques de
création de parentés servant à établir des liens. La combinaison de ces trois modes de parenté fait du
syndicat un groupe de parenté et lui permet d’agir politiquement dans le monde pour transformer celui-ci.
Sian Lazar is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent books
are The social life of politics: ethics, kinship, and union activism in Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2017)
and, as editor, Where are the unions? Workers and social movements in Latin America, the Middle East and
Europe (Zed Books, 2017).
Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, UK.
[email protected]


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A ‘kinship anthropology

of politics’? Interest, the

Introduction: bringing kinship back into politics

Malinowski Memorial Lecture, 2016.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

been acknowledged, certainly among anthropologists, that the instrumental aspects of

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Both sets of discussions acknowledge an ambiguity in who counts as kin and

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Languages of kinship: Peronism rooted in family

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

So Peronism can be transmitted, or taken on, through experiences in the home

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Family as a means of organizing employment and political activism

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Sociality and care: relations of kinning

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Cultivation of the collective self

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

In contrast to what might be expected from a purist Foucauldian perspective, these

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Oxford, but went to Malinowski’s seminars in London (Kuper 2015).

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

Une « anthropologie de la parenté en politique » ? Intérêt, Moi collectif et

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 24, 256-274

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