New Directions in Spiritual Kinship

CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION
New Directions
in Spiritual Kinship
Sacred Ties across the Abrahamic Religions
EDITED BY TODNE THOMAS,

ASIYA MALIK, ROSE WELLMAN
Contemporary Anthropology of Religion
Series Editors
DonSeeman
Department of Religion
Emory University, Atlanta,Georgia, USA
TulasiSrinivas
Department of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College, Boston,Massachusetts,USA
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Todne ThomasAsiya MalikRose Wellman
Editors
New Directions in
Spiritual Kinship
Sacred Ties across the Abrahamic Religions
Editors
Todne Thomas Asiya Malik
Department of Religion Independent Researcher
University of Vermont Toronto, Canada
Burlington, Vermont, USA
Rose Wellman
The Sharmin and Bijan
Mossavar-Rahmani Center
for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey, USA
Contemporary Anthropology of Religion

ISBN 978-3-319-48422-8ISBN 978-3-319-48423-5(eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5
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To communitas and to Edie
To our dear mentor Susie
To sisterhoods of spirit
And to the nourishing presence
of our children
Preface
New Directions in Spiritual Kinship is a groundbreaking work. It is the

first volume specifically dedicated to the comparative study of spiritual
or sacred kinshipthe first volume to explore ethnographically the
richly diverse manifestations of sacred kinship and to articulate theoreti-
cally the significance of these manifestations for our understanding of the
architecture of human societies. And it is the first volume to bring recent
advances in the anthropological study of kinship to bear on the study of
religion to produce a highly innovative and exceptionally fruitful investi-
gation of the dimensions and dynamics of an array of possible intersections
between kinship and the sacred.
From the perspective of anthropological studies of kinship, New
Directions in Spiritual Kinship brings to light the critical importance of
the sacred as a fundamental building block of kinship formations in its
own right. Given that the theoretical framing of kinship as a domain of
inquiry in anthropology was originally delimited by reference to biological
relations and described in mostly secular terms (Schneider 1984; Cannell
2013), serious attention to the ways in which kinship can be created
through processes of making spiritual and sacred relations is a significant
advancement in kinship studies. Aside from Fustel de Coulangeswho,
in The Ancient City (1980 [1874]), conceptualized kinship first and fore-
most as a relation of shared worship and sacrifice regardless of biologi-
cal relatednessmost anthropological theorists of kinship up until the
1980s understood biological relations to undergird the differing social
manifestations of what counted as real kinship. The religious, sacred,
or spiritual aspects of kinship were conceptualized in one of two main
vii
viii PREFACE
ways. On the one hand, in such forms as ancestor worship, they were seen
as cultural epiphenomena meant to reflect and reinforce the structure of
the given social forms of otherwise biologically based kinship (e.g., Fortes
and Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fortes 1969). On the other hand, relations
of sacred or spiritual kinship that were conceived outside or alongside
of real biological kinship relations were deemed to be fictiveless
than really real and hardly capable of forming the infrastructural base
of social relations. Either way, relations of sacred or spiritual kinship were
understood as somehow derivative of and secondary to biological rela-
tions, and they were rarely explored as fundamentally constitutive or
primary.
With the work that followed upon Schneiders (1984) critique of
Western presuppositions about the biological foundations of kinship as an
analytic domain, scholars shifted their attention in two interrelated direc-
tions. One led them to consider the ways in which kinship relations could
be formed through other substances besides biological onessuch as shared
food, land, hearths, and houses; the other led them to consider kinship as
a process of doingunfolding in the everyday practices such as care, nur-
turance, feeding, exchange, labor, and choice (e.g., Carsten 1995, 1997;
A. Strathern 1973; McKinnon 1991, in press; Schneider 1984; Weston
1991). It is significant that, while this theoretical shift allowed anthropol-
ogists to consider a much wider range of what might count as kinship and
how such kinship might be brought into being, the theoretical location of
spiritual or sacred kinship as fictive remained largely unexamined. It is
not that scholars of kinship studies did not integrate the sacred and spiri-
tual aspects of kin-making into their accounts; rather it was that the status
of the relation with the divineas one of the possible grounds for kinship
formationswas not fully repositioned and theorized. This is precisely
what this volume seeks to accomplish.
From the perspective of anthropological studies of religion, this vol-
ume illuminates the critical importance of kinship to the formation of
religious communities. It does so in several different ways. It explores
how understandings about gendered contributions to life and identity
inform conceptions of both cosmological creation and the human procre-
ation. It examines how the lines of kinship and marriagetraced through
bodily substances and human actions such as feedingcan become the
pathways that link humans to the divine and divine blessing. And it inves-
tigates how these divinely infused relations of kinship come to form the
architecture that structures communities at and between various levels of
PREFACE ix
rganization, from domestic families to congregations, nations, and trans-

o
national communities.
In exploring the intersections between kinship and the sacred, the
chapters in New Directions in Spiritual Kinship consider a number of
crosscutting themes; and they also reveal a tremendous diversity of ideas
and practices within and across the three religionsJudaism, Christianity,
and Islamthat are the focus of this volume. Although the comparative
scope of the volume is limited to the Abrahamic religions, one neverthe-
less suspects that many of the themes explored in this comparative context
would also be relevant to a wider investigation of sacred kinship in other
religions around the world.
One of the primary comparative themes that became immediately evi-
dent in the Wenner-Gren workshop from which this volume emanates
is the distinction between the embodied as opposed to the transcendent
nature of the relationships between kinship and spiritual/sacred connec-
tions to the divine. Yet, even at the most embodied and transcendent ends
of the spectrum, the material and spiritual are almost always complexly
entangled with and capable of transforming one another. Whatever is per-
ceived as given, divinely ordained, or natural is capable of being trans-
formedof being subject to the effects of both human and divine action,
intention, and agency.
Another significant theme revealed by the authors in this volume is the
tension between the aspirational ideal of a universal, expansive, and inclu-
sive sacred community, on the one hand, and the ways in which such ideals
are contradicted by more exclusive and differentiated affiliations, on the
other. While the former becomes manifest in more globally shared rituals,
texts, and practices (such as those of the Muslim umma or the catholic
church), the latter become evident through sectarian, ethnic, racial, and
regional distinctions, as well as through transnational migrations, colonial
legacies, and the trust borne of genealogical knowledge and/or shared life
experiences. The chapters in this volume detail the ways in which people
engage these complex histories, practices, and knowledges in their strug-
gles to open up and/or delimit what they understand to be the space of
religious sociality.
Closely linked to this tension between the universal and the particular
is the capacity of kinship (however defined) as a vehicle for both inclu-
sion and exclusion, integration and disintegration, hierarchy and equality.
Perhaps precisely due to its dynamic shifting significations of material and
spiritual relatedness, kinship has the capacity to link and integrate sacred
x PREFACE
c ommunities at various levels of organization: domestic, congregational,

national, regional, and global. Yet if sacred kinship can form integrative
structures that link different levels of organization, it can also form the
scaffolding of inclusions and exclusions that define both internal and
external social hierarchies (and equalities). Internally, it is the gendered
aspects of sacred kinship that is perhaps the most notable line of hier-
archical differentiation. Externally, both material and sacred genealogies
demarcate the limits of community exclusion and inclusion.
Finally, this volume also speaks to the enduring relevance of both kin-
ship and religion in so-called modern societies. In narratives of social evo-
lution and development, the assumption has long been that modernity
is marked by increasing secularization as well as by the restriction of kin-
ship to the domestic domain (McKinnon and Cannell 2013). But in these
essays we see the vitality of sacred kinship not only for domestic life but
also for the larger political and economic relations of modern nations and
transnational formations. These should not be rendered as backward
social formations marked by the failure of development, but rather as
explicit challenges to the secular, individualistic, and capitalist values that
have come to dominate what is considered modern in the contempo-
rary global order.
This volume arose from the work of three graduates from the
Department of Anthropology at the University of VirginiaTodne
Thomas, Asiya Malik, and Rose Wellmanwhose research focused on
quite different aspects of the intersection between kinship and the sacred.
Through the depth of their enthusiasm, curiosity, and intellectual engage-
ment with spiritual kinship, they not only came to define an exciting new
terrain for intellectual inquiry but also, in the process, became really real
sister-kin. This is the very best of what we hope for in our lives as both
intellectual beings and kindred spirits.
Bibliography
Cannell, Fenella. 2013. The Re-enchantment of Kinship. In Vital Relations:
Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship, ed. Susan McKinnon and Fenella
Cannell, 217240. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.
Carsten, Janet. 1995. The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth:
Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness Among Malays in Pulau Langkawi.
American Ethnologist 22(2):223241.
PREFACE xi
Carsten, Janet. 1997. The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay
Fishing Community. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fortes, Meyer. 1969. Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry
Morgan. Chicago: Aldine.
Fortes, Meyer, and E.E.Evans Pritchard. 1940. Introduction. In African Political
Systems, ed. Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, 123. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis. 2009 [1874]. The Ancient City: A Study on the
Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
McKinnon, Susan. 1991. From a Shattered Sun: Hierarchy, Gender, and Alliance
in the Tanimbar Islands. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
McKinnon, Susan. In press, 2016. Being and Doing: Process, Essence, and
Hierarchy in the Making of Kin. In The Routledge Companion to Contemporary
Anthropology, ed. Simon Coleman, Susan Hyatt, and Ann Kingsolver. Abington:
Routledge.
McKinnon, Susan, and Fenella Cannell. 2013. The Difference Kinship Makes. In
Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship, ed. Susan
McKinnon and Fenella Cannell, 338. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research
Press.
Schneider, David M. 1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Strathern, A. 1973. Kinship, Descent and Locality: Some New Guinea Examples.
In The Character of Kinship, ed. Jack Goody, 2134. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Weston, K. 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. NewYork: Columbia
University Press.
Acknowledgments
New Directions in Spiritual Kinship has been a fascinating and enriching

collaborative experience for its three editors: Todne Thomas, Asiya Malik,
and Rose Wellman, each of whom contributed equally to the works intel-
lectual inspiration, development, and publication over the past five years.
This book would also not have been possible without the generous
support of a Wenner-Gren Workshop grant and the considerable assistance
of Laurie Obbink, the Foundations Conference Program Associate. In
March of 2014, we held a provocative workshop with our future chapter
contributors entitled, The Sacred Social: Investigations of Spiritual Kinship
among the Abrahamic Faiths. The event brought together a diverse and
dynamic group of international researchers over the course of two and a
half days at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia and led
to thoughtful and stimulating conversations about theories, case studies,
and histories of spiritual kinship. We extend our thanks to each workshop
participant including Guido Alfani, Jolle Bahloul, Fenella Cannell, Carol
Delaney, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Frederick Klaits, Naomi Leite, Susan
McKinnon, and Don Seeman.
This book is also indebted to our mentor, Susan McKinnon, Professor
of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. Susan has been a central
part of our intellectual development during our graduate and postgradu-
ate careers. It was Susie who brought the three of us together to begin this
project and her unwavering support, guidance, and encouragement have
been invaluable to its success. Susie was also instrumental in reading and
reviewing preliminary versions of this work, particularly in the initial stages
of grant writing. In addition, we are thankful to faculty and staff in the
xiii
xiv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
University of VirginiasDepartment of Anthropology, who kindly hosted

the Wenner-Gren Workshop in Brooks Hall, thus opening our discus-
sions to the broader University community. In particular, we extend our
thanks to Edith Turner, Eve Danziger, Vanessa Ochs, and Kathleen Flake,
Jennie Doberne, Arsalan Khan, and Irtefa Binte-Farid, who also provided
invaluable support as the workshops graduate assistant. Our thanks to
Mildred Dean and Karen Hall who gave us considerable accounting and
administrative support during the workshop. Neal Grandy, the Director
of Research Administration in the College of Arts and Sciences, together
with the Sponsored Programs Office at the University of Virginia also
helped with the financial administration of the Wenner-Gren grant.
We are grateful to the Contemporary Anthropology of Religion series edi-
tors at Palgrave Macmillan, Tulasi Srinivas and Don Seeman, as well as the
external reviewer for their critical insights and feedback at various stages
of writing and volume submission. We also acknowledge the contributions
and assistance of the Palgrave editorial team.
Finally, this project would have not happened without the unequivocal
support ofour partners, children, relatives, colleagues, and friends.
Contents
1 Introduction: Re-sacralizing the Social: Spiritual Kinship at

the Crossroads of the Abrahamic Religions1
Todne Thomas, Rose Wellman, and Asiya Malik
2 Spiritual Kinship Between Formal Norms and Actual Practice:

A Comparative Analysis in the Long Run (from the Early
Middle Ages Until Today)29
Guido Alfani
3 Spiritual Kinship in an Age of Dissent: Pigeon Fanciers in

Darwins England51
Gillian Feeley-Harnik
4 Kinship as Ethical Relation: A Critique of the Spiritual

Kinship Paradigm85
Don Seeman
5 Kinship in Historical Consciousness: A French Jewish

Perspective109
Jolle Bahloul
xv
xvi CONTENTS
6 We All Ask Together: Intercession and Composition

as Models for Spiritual Kinship131
Frederick Klaits
7 Forever Families; Christian Individualism, Mormonism

and Collective Salvation151
Fenella Cannell
8 Substance, Spirit, and Sociality Among Shii Muslims

in Iran171
Rose Wellman
9 Expanding Familial Ties: From the Umma to New

Constructions of Relatedness Among East African
Indians in Canada195
Asiya Malik
10 Rebuking the Ethnic Frame: Afro Caribbean and

African American Evangelicals and Spiritual Kinship219
Todne Thomas
11 The Seeds of Kinship Theory in the Abrahamic Religions245

Carol Delaney
Index263
Notes on Contributors
Guido Alfani is an Associate Professor at Bocconi University, Milan (Italy). A

social and economic historian and an historical demographer, he published exten-
sively on Early Modern Italy and Europe, specializing in the history of godparent-
hood and of social alliance systems, in mortality crises (famines and epidemics) and
in economic and social inequality. He is currently the Principal Investigator of the
ERC-funded project EINITE, Economic Inequality across Italy and Europe
13001800. He is the author of Fathers and Godfathers. Spiritual Kinship in Early
Modern Italy (2009) and he edited, with Vincent Gourdon, the volume Spiritual
Kinship in Europe, 15001900 (2012).
Jolle Bahloul is a Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Jewish Studies at
Indiana University-Bloomington. Her books include The Architecture of Memory
(Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Le culte de la Table Dresse (A.M.Mtaili,
1983). She has conducted the ethnography of migrant Jewish groups in France
and in the United States for several decades.
Fenella Cannell is a Reader in Social Anthropology at the London School of
Economics and Political Science. Her books include Power and Intimacy in the
Christian Philippines (winner of the Harry J. Benda Prize of the Association of
Asian Studies in 2001), The Anthropology of Christianity (ed. Cannell, 2006), and
Vital Relations; Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship (ed. McKinnon and
Cannell,2013). She is currently completing a monograph on American Mormons.
CarolDelaney is aProfessor Emerita at Stanford University. She received an MTS
from Harvard Divinity School and a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the
University of Chicago. She was the associate director of the Center for the Study
of World Religions at Harvard and a visiting professor in the Department of
Religious Studies at Brown University. Delaney is the author of several books
xvii
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
including The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society,
Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth, and Columbus and the Quest
for Jerusalem.
GillianFeeley-Harnik is aProfessor Emerita in the Anthropology Department,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her areas of ethnographic and archival
research include Madagascar, the United States, and Great Britain. Her research
has been published in many articles and books, including A Green Estate: Restoring
Independence in Madagascar, The Lords Table: The Meaning of Food in Early
Judaism and Christianity, and two books in progress: comparative studies of
Charles Darwin and Lewis Henry Morgan, including their kin and co-workers,
focusing on popular ideas and practices concerning kinship and ecology, religion,
and science.
FrederickKlaits is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at
the State University of NewYork at Buffalo. He is the author of Death in a Church
of Life: Moral Passion during Botswanas Time of AIDS (University of California,
2010) and editor of The Request and the Gift in Religious and Humanitarian
Endeavors (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan).
Asiya Malik is an anthropologist and Independent Researcher in Canada. She
researches and writes in the areas of diaspora studies, British colonialism, Islam,
identity, memory, and kinship with a particular emphasis on the historical and
contemporary migrations of East African Indians. She recently published
Remembering Colonial Pasts: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Making of a Diasporan
Community in a special journal issue of the American Review of Canadian
Studies (2014).
DonSeeman is anAssociate Professor in the Department of Religion and the Tam
Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University. He is the author of One People,
One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to Judaism (Rutgers, 2009) and co-
editor of a special issue of Ethos devoted to phenomenological and psychoanalytic
anthropology. He is also co-editor of the Contemporary Anthropology of Religion
series at Palgrave and a recent recipient of an SSRC research grant. He writes
broadly in the a nthropology of religion, phenomenological anthropology, ritual
theory, and Jewish Studies.
TodneThomas is an Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Vermont.
Her research examines the intersections of religion, relatedness, ethnicity, and race
in the African Diaspora. She has published in the Journal of African American
Studies, the Journal of Africana Religions, and Anthropology and Humanism. Her
work has examined the gendered, institutional, interpretive, and methodological
implications of Afro- Protestant productions of religious sociality. Her current
book project examines how the members of an Afro-Caribbean and African
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix
American evangelical group in Atlanta, Georgia mobilize kinship in ways that

reproduce and critique the mainstream US evangelical emphasis on the heteronor-
mative family.
RoseWellman is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center at
Princeton University. She specializes in Islam, Iran, and the Middle East, as well as
in the anthropology of kinship, food, and religion. Wellmans doctoral research at
the University of Virginia was funded by the Charlotte W.Newcombe Foundation,
the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Her current
book project examines how state-supporting Shii Muslims create relationships
between kin, citizens, and God through practices such as praying, cooking, and
attending commemorative state rituals. Wellman recently published Regenerating
the Islamic Republic: Commemorating Martyrs in Provincial Iran (The Muslim
World 2015).
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 Feeding Pigeons in the Guildhall Yard, engraving by George

Goodwin Kilburne (Anon. 1877b, 612). According to the
anonymous author of the story, tradition identifies the flock of
some hundred as the descendants of a few wild pigeons taken
under Civic protection by the Guildhall. Domiciled on its roof,
they walk the Guildhall Yard amid crowds of people convinc[ed]
of their perfect security from molestation. Mr. John Roe,
long-time officer of the Guildhall Police Court, feeds them
daily at 10:00 AM (Anon. 1877b, 603, 606). 57
Fig. 3.2 Engraved portrait of Saml Brent Esq. and vignette of Noahs
Dove by J. Scott at the front of Brents A Fathers Present to
his Children (1811). Courtesy of The Carl H. Pforzheimer
Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 69
Fig. 3.3 Feeding Pigeons in the Courtyard of the Mosque at
Bajazid, Constantinople: Sketch by Our Special Artist
[Melton Prior], Illustrated London News, 17 February
1877, 149. The sketch is to illustrate ordinary incidents in
the social life of that city. One of them is the daily feeding
of the flock of pigeons kept in the courtyard of the Mosque of
Bajazid. This is regarded as a laudable act of piety, as well as
of natural kindliness and benevolence, in which many of
the devout Moslem are willing to take part (Anon 1877a, 166). 70
xxi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Re-sacralizing theSocial:

Spiritual Kinship at theCrossroads
oftheAbrahamic Religions
TodneThomas, RoseWellman, andAsiyaMalik
In March 2014, we convened a Wenner-Gren Workshop, The Sacred

Social: Investigations of Spiritual Kinship among the Abrahamic Faiths,
at the University of Virginia. As organizers, our aim was to rethink spiritual
kinships analytical enclosure within the study of godparenthood and re-
employ the concept in current debates about secularism, modernity, and
T. Thomas (*)
Department of Religion, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA
R. Wellman
The Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf
Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
A. Malik
Independent Researcher, Toronto, Canada
The Author(s) 2017 1

T. Thomas et al. (eds.), New Directions in Spiritual Kinship,
Contemporary Anthropology of Religion,
DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_1
2 T. THOMAS ET AL.
religious sociality. Focusing our attention on the religious practitioners

of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, we asked workshop participants to
consider how and to what extent spiritual relations, writ large, shape fami-
lies, communities, nations, and transnational religious networks. Given
the Abrahamic focus, we also challenged our colleagues to consider what
it means for religions to be related.
Participants enthusiastically explored how the connections between the
sacred and the social forge relations of inclusion and exclusion, as well as
equality and hierarchy, across practitioners social worlds. Together we
considered how naturalized identities such as biogenetic relationships,
gender, and ethnicity/race interact with these sacralized identities. We fur-
ther investigated how spiritual kinship organizes political affiliations, social
networks, and moral orders across domains and scales. Our workshop pro-
ceedings led to critical discussions of the Christian centrism implicit in the
field of spiritual kinship studies and the need to move beyond the confines
of the spiritual to explore a broader landscape of the idioms, ethics, pro-
cesses, and actions that make religious kinship.
New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties Across the Abrahamic
Religions is the product of these conversations and debates. We consider
the significance of spiritual kinship, or kinship reckoned in relation to the
divine, in creating myriad forms of affiliations among Christians, Jews, and
Muslims. Traditionally, anthropologists have operated with a narrow, bio-
logically based definition of kinship that conceptualizes spiritually based
kinship as fictive or pseudo and opposes these relations to real,
natural, or biological kinship. In such scholarship, spiritual kinship,
commonly equated with godparenthood, is defined in radical opposition
to natural or carnal kinship (Alfani and Gourdon 2012) and is there-
fore conceived as a minor field of inquiry within kinship studies.
In contrast, New Directions in Spiritual Kinship draws from recent inves-
tigations in feminist and kinship studies that have laid the groundwork for
comparative investigations of kinship forged through nonbiological means
(Schneider 1984; Carsten 2000; Franklin and McKinnon 2001). Scholars
of kinship and religion have made rich explorations into the ways in which
people create relatednessor long-standing social relationships pro-
duced by idioms and practices of sentiment, substance, and nurturance
(Carsten 2000, 22)through processes such as co-residence (Bahloul
1996; Eickelman 2002), sharing food at the hearth (Carsten 1995), or
working on land (Labby 1976). In much of this research, however, kin-
ship continues to be framed as a secular phenomenon (Delaney 1995;
INTRODUCTION: RE-SACRALIZING THESOCIAL: SPIRITUAL KINSHIP... 3
Cannell 2013). Similarly, to the extent that anthropologists have inves-

tigated religious identities, they have tended to focus on how religious
belonging is molded by globalization, economics, and politics. They
have seldom examined the powerful ways in which sacred and spiritually
defined kin relationships can themselves be foundational to the organiza-
tion of diverse social, religious, and political affinities.
By liberating spiritual kinship from its traditional confinement to studies
of Catholic godparenthood, New Directions in Spiritual Kinship explores
how kinship is constituted through spiritual and sacred properties that
work alone or alongside other forms of kin-making. Put differently, we
are interested in the associations, solidarities, affects, and intimacies that
are derived from, but are not necessarily circumscribed by, religious prac-
tice. With our resurrection of spiritual kinship, we explore how naturalized
identities like gender and ethnicity/race interact with sacralized identities
mediated by shared ideas of spirit, divinity, and covenant (understudied
aspects of anthropological kinship analysis). An attention to spiritual kin-
ship, we argue, allows us to ask: What kinds of solidarities are being con-
stituted at the symbolic crossroads of materiality and immateriality, blood
and spirit, and the immanent and the transcendent?
We recognize that our usage of spiritual kinship combines the termi-
nology of spirituality and kinshipslippery concepts around which
contested comparative projects have been forged. As scholars of spiritual-
ity and religion have observed, spirituality is categorically invoked in plural
and oppositional terms as both a part of and a counterpoint to religious
life, in particular, the institutional, hierarchical, civic, public, and collective
features associated with popular academic definitions of religion (Bender
and McRoberts 2012; van der Veer 2009). Similarly, the study of kinship,
as discussed in greater detail below, is fraught with a number of discursive
shifts that oppose biological, naturalized, and material definitions of kin-
ship with social, metaphorical, and immaterial definitions. Nevertheless,
the contributors of this volume collectively demonstrate that an explicit
study of spiritual and sacred kinships can illuminate the ways in which
religious participants are mobilizing kin ties both up scales into political,
national, and transnational frames to build and define community rela-
tions, and down into and between the intimate affects, spaces, and bodies
of persons.
Although we have chosen to define spiritual kinship more broadly
as kinship reckoned in relation to the divine, our contributors also
acknowledge that the designation of spiritual kinship as a concept for
4 T. THOMAS ET AL.
comparative analysis is not without its potential shortcomings. Scholars

have examined a broad range of spiritual kinship practices such as ritual
kinship among practitioners of Eastern and Russian Orthodox Christianity
(Alfani and Gourdon 2012; Muravyeva 2012), the formation of urban
communities of Haitian Vodou practitioners around spiritual kinship net-
works (Brown 2001), the syncretism of compadrazgo with the ritual kin-
ship of Afro-Cuban santeria (Clark 2003), and the relatedness constituted
between Buddhist teachers and initiates (Prebish 2003). Yet much of this
research has been heavily shaped, if not overdetermined, by Christian ter-
minologies and worldviews.
Indeed, during the Wenner-Gren workshop that preceded this vol-
ume, participants questioned whether spiritual kinship was a sufficient
analytical framework for comparative investigation across the Abrahamic
religions given its prevalent associations with the Christian institution of
godparenthood, ritual baptism, and its dichotomous rendering of spirit
and matter. Such critical insights are distilled in volume contributions
like Kinship as Ethical Relation: A Critique of the Spiritual Kinship
Paradigm in which Don Seeman argues that the study of spiritual kin-
ship to date has derived from hegemonic Christian theological influences
and institutional structures that distinguish between the spiritual and the
biological. Seemans argument resonates with Talal Asads well-known
critique of the anthropology of religion as a field that tends to universal-
ize Western Christian worldviews and operationalize them as analytical
concepts (Asad 1993).
To move beyond Christian ascetic and ritual formulations of spiritual
ties, we added the term sacred kinship to index a broader religious land-
scape of discourse, moralities, and practices of making kinship that does
not compartmentalize physical and spiritual reckonings of relatedness.
Across the internal variations of Abrahamic religiosity, volume contrib-
utors employ sacred kinship to refer to modes of kinship that are not
necessarily defined in spiritual terms. Thus, while some of our con-
tributors draw from local contexts to use spiritual kinship confidently
(e.g., Alfani [Chap. 2], Klaits [Chap. 6], and Thomas [Chap. 10]), other
authors engage spiritual kinship more experimentally (Feeley-Harnik,
Chap. 3), critically (Seeman, Chap. 4), or simultaneously employ spiri-
tual and/or sacred kinship for different analytical reasons in their texts
(Bahloul [Chap. 5], Cannell [Chap. 7], Malik [Chap. 9], Wellman [Chap.
8]). Nevertheless, it is important to note that as a result of the workshop
discussion, all contributors revisited their conceptualizations of spiritual
kinship and thoughtfully situated their terminologies within local and

comparative contexts. Authors who employed and critiqued the paradigm
of spiritual kinship did so with an increased awareness of its historical,
religious, and political implications.
In the following sections, we trace the Christian origins of spiritual kin-
ship and explore its impact on the study of kinship in Islam and Judaism.
We analyze the significance of positioning spiritual/sacred kinship as a
provocative area of anthropological study in light of the failed prophecy
of secularism, and we push the boundaries of kinship studies to include
theoretical and ethnographic research across a broader range of religiously
oriented social domains, networks, and trans/national collectives. Finally,
we consider the rich comparisons and contestations afforded by the study
of spiritual/sacred kinship across the Abrahamic religions. Together, the
chapters of this volume contend that the study of spiritual and sacred kin-
ship is a rich site for exploring and understanding the ritual and discursive
practices that intensely shape Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious soli-
darities and divisions.
The Christian Origins ofSpiritual Kinship Studies

The study of spiritual kinship, historically, has focused on the Catholic
institution of godparenthood (compadrazgo) in Europe, Latin America,
and the Philippines (Alfani and Gourdon 2012; Bloch and Guggenheim
1981; Coster 2002; Davila 1971; Du Boulay 1984; Jussen 2000; Mintz
and Wolf 1950; Sault 2001). Anthropologists and historians have exam-
ined the constitution of the relationships between godparents and god-
children (paternitas), godparents and birth parents (copaternitas), and
godchildren and godsiblings (fraternitas) via ritual baptism, patronage
relationships, and marriage restrictions. In addition, they have explored
how everyday interactions can be mediated by this ritualized sociality: as
evidenced in the etymological connections between the word gossip and
godsib (god-sibling) for instance (Mintz and Wolf 1950).
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, ethnographic and ethno-historical
spiritual kinship studies were particularly prevalent within the field of
anthropology. Researchers depicted numerous institutions of spiritual
kinship and investigated how religious practitioners adapted these socio-
religious ties in the wake of the social changes instigated by moderniza-
tion. In much of this literature, spiritual kinship was defined by a radical
opposition between the natural (carnal) kinship and spiritual kinship
6 T. THOMAS ET AL.
(Alfani and Gourdon 2012, 18; see also Bloch and Guggenheim 1981,
378380; Coster 2002). Compadrazgo was positioned as separate
from and supplementary to natural cognatic ties (Foster 1953, 9;
Gudeman 1971). It was perceived to sustain the ethical ideals of consan-
guineal kinship without being subject to the same conflicts and ruptures
that were associated with blood relations. As Pitt-Rivers famously wrote,
compadrazgo is what cognatic kinship aspires to, but cannot, be (1968,
412). Even more, compadrazgo was seen in contradistinction to actual
law (Gudeman 1971, 48). For these scholars, however, a key point of
interest became compadrazgos adaptability and flexibility as compared to
biological relations. It could link members of the same social class hori-
zontally, or link people vertically, binding together persons of different
social classes (Mintz and Wolf 1950).
Nonetheless, it is important to note that the confluence of spiritual
kinship studies with predominantly Christian contexts was more than
a by-product of the ethnographic contexts anthropologists selected for
study. The Christian influence on spiritual kinship studies also shaped the
terms and categories of engagement. As anthropologists of Christianity
have consistently observed, anthropology has been heavily shaped by
Christian theological ideas (Robbins 2006), including ideas/ideals about
agency (Keane 2007), and individual versus collective understandings of
religious personhood and salvation (Cannell, Chap. 7, this volume). More
specifically, anthropologyand the anthropology of kinshiphas also
been shaped by Christian theologies of kinship. In The Christianity of
Anthropology (2005), Cannell argues that anthropological theory repro-
duces Christian theological idealizations of spirit over matter; this includes
the Christian privileging of spiritual kin life over ordinary family relations.
She elaborates:
The undoubtedly powerful ascetic current in Christianity has generally been

accompanied by an attitude to ordinary family life and kinship which regards
it as, at most, a kind of second best to the spiritual life. The most obvious
examples come from monasticism. Monks and nuns give up their earthly kin
for a celibate devotion to Christ and to their new spiritual brothers and
sisters. (Cannell 2005, 342)
Building on Cannells insights, we attribute the common tendency for

anthropologists to study kinship and spiritual kinship along an axis that
segments and differentially values the ordinary and the spiritual
(2005, 342), the material and the immaterial, and even the real and the
fictive to this ascetic crypto-theology embedded within the discipline (see
also Seemans Chap. 4).
Studies of spiritual kinship were also punctuated by changes impacting
the broader field of anthropological kinship studies. By the 1980s, the
field of kinship studies severely retracted as a result of disciplinary critiques
posited by feminist anthropologists and kinship theorists that were moti-
vated by post-structuralism. In particular, the analytical concept of kin-
ship was identified as an outgrowth of Western genealogical assumptions.
David Schneider, for instance, a key kinship theorist within the American
anthropological tradition, called for a reformation, if not a collapse, of the
field of kinship studies (Schneider 1984). In particular, he critiqued the
universalization of the Western genealogical grid as a category for cross-
cultural comparison and the accompanying reduction of socially complex
phenomena of kinship to biology.
Spiritual kinship studies saw a further decline with academic prophe-
cies of secularism (Cannell 2006) and the presumption that spiritual kin-
ship forms like Christian godparenthood had lost significance as a result
of social and economic processes of modernization (Alfani and Gourdon
2012). The contributions in this volume demonstrate the need for an
investigation of spiritual kinship that both troubles the framing of spiri-
tual kinship in opposition to natural or biological kinship and reas-
serts the Durkheimian view that the sacred is a significant technology for
metaphorizing and moralizing the social (Jones 2005). The chapters here
also rewrite a meta-narrative of the disappearance of spiritual kinship into
the tides of what was a theorized but never fully realized secular modernity.
In Spiritual Kinship Between Formal Norms and Actual Practices:
A Comparative Analysis in the Long Run, Guido Alfani examines how
European Christians complexly intersected biological and spiritual kin-
ship ties. He argues that European Christians spiritual kinship practices
worked against the grain of Protestant and Catholic Church reforms and
frustrated religious dictates that endeavored to bring spiritual kinship
from the social to a more strictly outlined sacred sphere. Alfanis analysis
prompts an important attention to belief versus practice and the shifting
terrain between Christian theologies and practitioners strategic imple-
mentations of relatedness.
Moving to contemporary Christian contexts, Thomas and Klaits illus-
trate the ways in which spiritual kinship is constituted by contemporary
Christians not only through inherited theologies of spiritual relatedness
8 T. THOMAS ET AL.
but discursively enacted through contextual emphases of familial over

public-sphere identities and via rituals of asking. In Rebuking the Ethnic
Frame: Afro Caribbean and African American Evangelicals and Spiritual
Kinship, Todne Thomas examines black evangelical juxtapositions of
spiritual kinship and ethnic identities as opposed to the popular analyti-
cal comparison of spiritual and biological kinship. In particular, Thomas
illuminates the ways in which Afro Caribbean and African American evan-
gelicals mobilize spiritual kinship as an authoritative discourse that creates
institutional familial belonging and critiques the ethno-racial bounding of
congregational life in the US social landscape. Thomas ultimately repre-
sents spiritual kinship as a powerful yet contested mode of religious social-
ity that is dually imprinted by the universalistic aspirations of evangelical
Christianity and the situated ethnic identities, ambivalences, and ethno-
racial hierarchies that emerge from the conjoined racial and religious land-
scapes in the United States.
In We All Ask Together: Intercession and Composition as Models
of Spiritual Kinship, Klaits studies the performative dimensions of spiri-
tual kinship by exploring how spiritual kinship is constituted by Botswana
Apostolics and American Pentecostals through shared practices of asking
that generate spiritual intersubjectivity among practitioners and between
practitioners and the divine. Klaitss comparison of different modes of ask-
ing via intercession (in American case) and composition (in Botswana set-
ting) and his exploration of the strained relationships between Pentecostal
converts in New York and their Catholic relatives also illustrate intra-
religious variation in contemporary Christian imaginations and enact-
ments of spiritual kinship. Taken together, Thomas and Klaits illustrate
that spiritual kinship persists today despite the contractions of spiritual
kinship instigated by the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-
Reformation, and document the contemporary dynamics of Christian
spiritual kinship in contexts shaped by the migrations, institutions, alien-
ations, and modes of care mediated by global capitalism and neoliberalism.
In contrast to Thomas (Chap. 10) and Klaits (Chap. 6), Feeley-Harnik
(Chap. 3, this volume) outlines a kind of spiritual kinship that is informed
by Christian ideals but created beyond Christian institutional contexts. She
explores a kinship that is broadly imagined by nineteenth-century English
pigeon breeders to encompass humans and all creatures, and is shaped by
the dissident perspectives of Christian nonconformism and the outlines of
emergent evolutionary thought. Her work demonstrates an imagination
of religious sociality that confounds classical analytical models of Christian

spiritual kinship.
In Forever Families: Christian Individualism, Mormonism and
Collective Salvation, Fenella Cannell unseats the singular use of spiri-
tual kinship in studies of Christian sociality and instead examines the out-
lines of sacred kinship among US Latter Day Saints. Cannell argues that
Mormon imaginations of salvation are emphatically social and executed
through Mormon adoptive and baptismal practices that graft spiritual
(immaterial) and genealogical (material) understandings of kinship into
an idealized celestial model of kinship. Thus sacred kinship rests at the
unstable junctions of spiritual and physical genealogy, and collective and
individual salvation.
Taken together, the chapters complicate a previous equation of spiritual
kinship with pre-modern and Catholic religious practices, and illustrate
the ways in which Christians conscript not only spiritual kinship but also
other sacred dimensions of kin-making to sustain biological family inter-
ests, to create highly esteemed spiritualized connections between practi-
tioners and the divine, and to critique the shortcomings associated with
naturalized ethnic and genealogical memberships.
The Study ofSpiritual/Sacred Kinship inJudaism andIslam

The Christian origins of spiritual kinship have further influenced the
study of kinship in both Judaism and Islam. Islamic milk kinship, in
particular, has frequently been explored as a version of Christian god-
parenthood. According to Islamic law, the suckling of breast milk from
a womanwhether ones own biological mother or notcreates ties of
kinship between the baby and the woman, and between their respective
families, resulting in marriage restrictions (Parkes 2001, 2004; Altorki
1980; Khatib-Chahidi 1992). Some scholars have suggested that despite
significant divergences, both Christian godparenthood and Islamic milk
kinship originated in the same practices of foster-kinship in the ancient
Mediterranean (Parkes 2003, 749). They have further argued that milk
kinship, like Christian godparenthood, expresses and reinforces bonds of
trust between families and clients and patrons of unequal status (Ensel
2002; Parkes 2003; Khatib-Chahidi 1992; Altorki 1980). Anthropologist
Remco Ensel, for instance, related: In both [Christian and Islamic insti-
tutions], we deal with a fictitious kinship relationship between people of
10 T. THOMAS ET AL.
unequal status that is embedded in a long-term exchange of goods and

services that we know as patronage (2002, 83). The emphasis here on
milk kinship as a presumably fictive form of relatedness (as against biologi-
cal kinship) echoes the work of scholars of Christian spiritual kinship.
The Shii Alevi and Sunni observance of ritual co-parenthood consti-
tuted through a circumcision practice called kivrelik has been another point
of comparison to Christian spiritual kinship (Kaser 2008; Magnarella and
Trkdogan 1973). Even though this practice is not based in Islamic law,
kivrelik reinforces new political, economic, and social alliances or exist-
ing friendships and also can establish impediments to marriage between
involved participants (Magnarella and Trkdogan 1973; Kaser 2008).
These accounts build on the work of their Christian counterparts to asso-
ciate fictive kinship with spiritual kinship and oppose both forms to
biogenetic or real kinship.
In this volume, both Malik and Wellman endeavor to broaden the study
of Islamic spiritual kinship beyond any necessary analogy to the analytic
frames of previous research on the subjectoften questioning the very
use of the term spiritual. For instance, Malik in Expanding Familial
Ties: From the Umma to New Constructions of Relatedness among East
African Indians in Canada provides an analysis of sacred kinship in Islam
through the lens of the ummathe ideal of a unified, inclusive commu-
nity of Muslims envisioned in religious texts and discourses. Her chapter
explores how Sunni Punjabi East Africans (SPEAs) in Canada forge and
negotiate diverse kinships from the level of the umma to more exclusive
ties of relatedness with other migrants that are shaped by their common
sectarian and regional affiliations, shared historical experiences, and cul-
tural practices. Wellmans contribution, Substance, Spirit, and Sociality
among Shii Muslims in Iran, also moves beyond Islamic kinship prac-
tices conceived as counterparts to Christian godparenthood by showing
how everyday and ritual acts of praying, feeding, and sharing inherited
substance (e.g., the blood and purity channeled through prophetic gene-
alogy) shape Shii Iranian families as right, ethical, religious, or pure.
In a parallel fashion, scholars of Judaism have often applied the term
spiritual kinship to the sandaka ritual role that has been translated,
in contemporary history, into the Christian inspired concept of godfa-
ther. But, as Bahloul argues in Kinship in Historical Consciousness: A
French Jewish Perspective, the concept of spiritual kinship, as it relates to
Christian godparenthood, may not exist at all in Judaism. This is for two
reasons: First, the concept is redundant because kinship itself evolves in
the domain of religious belief and law (Bahloul, Chap. 5, this volume),
and second, Jewish kinship has rarely considered the sandak as a pivotal
kinship actor. Bahloul shows that the presence of the godparent in the
childs upbringing is in fact minimal.
Taken collectively, this volume provides a means of studying spiritual/
sacred kinship in Jewish and Muslim contexts beyond the confines of its
analogical relationship to Christian spiritual kinship. By using the term
sacred kinship and considering the multiple ways in which immaterial and
sacred qualities can inflect concepts of sociality, this volume provides a new
lexicon and conceptual paradigm for understanding a full spectrum of kin
relations. The exploration of sacred kinship (rather than spiritual kinship
alone) thus provides a window into the manifold ways that practitioners
of Judaism and Islam configure and demarcate belonging and otherness
in relation to genealogical families, religious collectives, communities,
nations, and broader transnational networks.
Spiritual/Sacred Kinship andtheProphecies

ofSecular Modernity
New Directions in Spiritual Kinship also challenges analytical metanar-

ratives that presume an inevitable decline of religion in modernity. The
interconnected processes of modernization and secularization may have
created the grounds for disenchantment or, the historical process by
which the natural world and all areas of human experience become expe-
rienced and understood as less mysterious; defined, at least in principle,
as knowable, predictable and manipulable by humans; conquered by and
incorporated into the interpretive schema of science and rational govern-
ment (Jenkins 2000, 12). Nonetheless, modernity has also contained the
seeds and outgrowth of oppositional re-enchantments that have frac-
tured the self-referential and universalizing meta-narrative of scientific and
rationalist epistemologies (Jenkins 2000, 12). Religion, rather than waning
in significance and receding into the confines of the private sphere, has
become a foundation for political mobilization and a number of public-
sphere affinities and activities.
It is our contention in this volume that religious affiliations, communi-
ties, and alliances have remained significant for practitioners. Religious
practitioners construct and mobilize their communities within and against
various social, political, and moral orders, and their solidarities impact
the shape of global events (Eickelman and Piscatori 1990; Levitt 2007).
12 T. THOMAS ET AL.
As Jerry G. Pankhurst and Sharon K. Houseknecht poignantly observe

in their examination of religion-family linkage, Religion is not dying;
unilinear secularization cannot be taken for granted. Instead, religion
is a dynamic process with ups and downs in its prominence in society
(2000, 4).
In the same vein, kinship has been shown to have continuing relevance
in modernity. In Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of
Kinship, Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell call for a re-examination
of kinship in relation to the the myths of modernity or, put differently,
the narratives that we all tell ourselves about how modern social life is
different from, and differently structured than the past (2013, 8). They
cogently argue that we must move beyond the oft assumed radical disjunc-
ture between an imagined traditional past that coheres around kinship and
status and a more complex secular, rationalized social formation organized
by contract.
Such definitions of modernity severely limit our view of the past, the
present, and the nature of social change. Modernity cannot be presumed
to be a harbinger of secularism nor even be an outgrowth of a secular
intellectual genealogy. In this volume, we aim to explore spiritual/sacred
kinship not only in relation to a modern, but also to an immodern
that does not merely precede but that exceeds the social domaining and
bureaucratic practices associated with the modern (Lambek 2013, 256).
While it must be acknowledged that historical processes of moderniza-
tion have changed the organization and constitutive practices of religion
and kinship, the contributions in this volume unsettle the association of
secular modernity with the waning influence of religion and kinship. Guido
Alfanis chapter illustrates that the advent of the Protestant Reformation
(often associated with a set of religious and social changes that kick-started
European modernity with a de-centering of Catholic church hegemony)
and the subsequent Catholic Counter-Reformation did not signal an end
to spiritual kinship practices. Rather than being replaced by the modern
nuclear family, the extended social networks constituted by godparent-
hood persisted into the modern era. The contributions by Gillian Feeley-
Harnik and Carol Delaney illustrate the overlapping character of the
religious and the secular by demonstrating how religiously defined notions
of kinship and genealogy have shaped scientific formulations of evolution,
genealogy, and procreation. Feeley-Harnik shows how the early scientific
communities of pigeon breeders in which Charles Darwin participated
were heavily influenced by nonconformist Christian religious ideals about
transcendence, relatedness, and truth. In The Seeds of Kinship Theory

in the Abrahamic Religions, Carol Delaney also catalogues the ways in
which Western procreative metaphorsthat attribute procreative seeds to
men and a subsidiary nurturing role to womendescend from Abrahamic
religious conceptualizations of reproduction and persist in the wake of
biogenetic theory that has illustrated the equal genetic contributions of
women and men. New Directions in Spiritual Kinship thus calls for a study
of kinship that locates the ways in which technologies of the sacred and
the social have had a generative effect on social life, the im/modern, and
the (re)enchantment of post-modernity.
Spiritual/Sacred Kinship Across Domains andScales

Several chapters in this volume also explore spiritual/sacred kinship across
domains and scales and examine how such relations influence and orga-
nize public and private sphere institutions. Anthropologists have offered
rich critiques of the presumably separate domains of politics, econom-
ics, religion, and kinship (Yanagisako and Collier 1987; Schneider 1984;
McKinnon and Cannell 2013). According to McKinnon and Cannell,
theories of social evolution presuppose that kinship organizes pre-state,
simple societies but not complex, modern state societies (2013, 3). Thus
while pre-modern societies are assumedly organized along kinship lines,
group relations, and religious ideas, modern societies are organized in
relation to territory, market, individual relations, secular contracts, and
laws. The result of these assumptions is that many scholars of kinship and
religion have relegated kinship to the domestic domain and have not con-
sidered the complex ways kinship intersects with political, economic, and
religious relations (McKinnon and Cannell 2013, 5). The authors of Vital
Relations attempt to read across domains and investigate how kinship
operates beyond the domestic sphere to shape political, economic, and
religious institutions (McKinnon and Cannell 2013, 815).
New Directions in Spiritual Kinship similarly asks how kinship relations
shape and are shaped by broader political, economic, and religious concerns
as well as local and global events. Contributors not only challenge the
relegation of kinship to the domestic sphere but simultaneously highlight
the little attention given to spiritual/sacred kinshipoften described as
fictive and associated with the purportedly declining Christian institu-
tion of godparenthood amidst secularizationwithin kinship studies (see
also Wellman 2014). Through our comparative study, we seek to broaden
14 T. THOMAS ET AL.
understandings of what constitutes spiritual kinship within the three

Abrahamic religions and its role in the formation of social relations among
practitioners on different scales from the level of the family and religious
congregations to the nation and transnational communities. The chapters
by Malik, Thomas, and Bahloul in this volume most directly engage with
spiritual/sacred kinship across domains and scales. These chapters high-
light the complex intersections and tensions between universal construc-
tions of a sacred community and particularized constructions of religious
families that are informed by practitioners historical, cultural, ethno-
national, and diasporic identities. Specifically, their chapters explore how
religious practitioners negotiate the varied tensions between the different
scales of religious belonging from the level of the more exclusive fam-
ily and community to the more expansive yet equally contested Muslim
nation, global Jewish family, or universal church.
Malik examines how some SPEAs in Canada connect with other
Muslims in Toronto as part of a larger Muslim community, nation, or
umma. Yet, at the same time, first- and second-generation migrants also
reinforce local boundaries of belonging through their associations where
they cultivate intimate kin ties with other members based on their mutual
sect, regions of origin, cultural backgrounds, as well as shared colonial and
life histories that establish intergenerational relationships of trust.
In contrast to Malik, Thomas investigates how members of an Afro
Caribbean and African American evangelical church network in the Atlanta
metropolitan area construct spiritual kinshiprelatedness that is derived
from practitioners mutual embodiment of the Holy Spirit and socially
produced through shared discourses, practices, and affects. These church
members critique the particularized ethnic formulations of US congrega-
tional life and instead promote an aspirational universal and multi-ethnic
familial community amidst the symbolic and material boundaries instanti-
ated by US ethno-racial hierarchies.
Along related lines, Bahloul presents an apt historical analysis of how
naming practices associated with godparenthood exemplify the shifting
political and cultural identifications of French Jews of North African ori-
gin over the course of the twentieth century. She illustrates how migrant
naming practices extended beyond reinforcing sacred kinship ties to
their grandparents/godparents to demonstrate migrants commitment
to the French Republictheir adopted godmotherafter World War
I.After the 1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, naming practices shifted once again
to reflect the renewed political and cultural connections of French Jews
to Israel. Together, Malik, Thomas, and Bahlouls scholarship begins to

make visible how shifting political and cultural identifications shape and
are shaped by ties of kinship that cannot always be mapped onto discrete
social domains.
Kinship, Ethics, andSociality
Several of the authors in this volume call attention to the cultivation of

ethical relations as an alternate and/or overlapping means of describing
spiritual kinship(s). This work builds on an increasing scholarly concern
with concepts of ethics and ethical action as a means of understanding
the cultivation of what have often been explicitly pious subjects or dis-
positions (Mahmood 2003; Zigon 2008, 23; Parish 1994). Mahmood
(2005, 148), for instance, explores how, for women in the Islamic Revival
Movement in Egypt, bodily action serves as a developable means (Asad
1993) through which certain kinds of Muslim-centered ethical and moral
capacities are attained. Importantly, with Foucault (2000, 263), ethics are
here seen as a reflexive practice of freedom or a technology of self-
transformation emergent from within the given techniques of subjection
(see also Faubion 2001, 12). Similarly, Zigon (2008, 57) illustrates how
Russian Orthodox women pray in a specific way to be, or to create, the
kind of person who has this kind of relationship with God. Importantly,
in these accounts, socially prescribed forms of embodied conduct (e.g.,
codes, commands, or prohibitions) are understood not as external con-
straints, but rather, as potentialities through which the self is realized
(Mahmood 2005, 148; Lambek 2010, 16; Foucault 2000). And further,
the self is always socially and discursively produced. The self, after all, is
always, in part, determined by the self-making projects or the acts of oth-
ers (Lambek 2010, 16).
Going even furtherand with a focus on kinship and relatednessthe
authors in this volume specifically explore instances in which it is not the
self, per se, but rather the family, the nation, or the transnational net-
work that is the object of ethical cultivation (see also Khan etal. 2013;
Faubion 2001; Lambek 2010). Wellman demonstrates that in the case
of Shias in Iran, explicitly religious acts of prayer and feeding help culti-
vate and demarcate pure and religiously permissible (halal)family rela-
tions as against potentially corrupt extended family, in-laws, and outsiders.
Here, the ethical and religious work of making the right kind of family
relationships is deeply entangled. In addition, Wellman draws from the
16 T. THOMAS ET AL.
anthropology of ethics concern with the ordinary, tacit, and quotidian

to understand the multiple layers of Iranian kinshipthe physio-sacred
bodily substances and the ongoing (pious) acts that shape the family.1
Finally, by focusing on the micro-processes by which relations are formed,
protected, and maintained, Wellman points to the long-term and difficult
work of constructing specific kinds of pure or pious relations, thus (re)
conceptualizing spiritual kinship as something that is developable.
Similarly, Don Seeman (Chap. 4, this volume) draws from his ethno-
graphic research among Ethiopian Pentecostals living in Israel to argue
that the analytic concept of ethical relation is actually a better starting
point for investigating religious relationships among members of the
Abrahamic religions. He begins by pointing out the inadequacy of spiri-
tual kinship in the context of Jewish textual and ethnographic materials,
and contends that the term ethics allows for a more accurate comparison
across the Abrahamic religions. He writes that the idea of kinship as an
ethical relation (which here again is an analytic term) offers better com-
parative purchase on a range of phenomena related to kinship while situ-
ating kinship as something that is constantly being negotiated, reflected
upon, and deliberated by social actors. In so doing, Seeman shows that
spiritual kinship emerges as just one potential model for managing the
crucial tension between genealogical and non-genealogical kinship claims
in the Abrahamic religions. Initially, turning to the term ethical specifi-
cally to avoid some of the problems of the word spiritual, Seeman fur-
ther argues that the analytical exploration of kinship as an ethical relation
provides room to explore a fuller spectrum of religious forms, qualities,
and hierarchies that are involved in contemporary social and political life.
Finally, Feeley-Harnik focuses on ideas and practices of kinship, reli-
gion, and science among the animal breeders in mid-nineteenth-century
England at a time when nonconformist Christian perspectives, noninsti-
tutionalized spiritual practices, and emergent scientific modes of theory
were conjoined. Disillusioned with the sectarian and theological exclu-
sions of denominational memberships, pigeon breeders created contem-
plative communities that affirmed the potential for rank-and-file believers
to access transcendent truths about humanity, creation, and their inter-
relation. Moreover, Feeley-Harnik illustrates how pigeon-breeding com-
munities fostered an inclusive ethics through shared relationships of trust
and practices of eating, drinking, pipe-sharing, toasting, and storytelling
and emergent theologies of kinship and friendship. It is in this religious
nonconformist scientific milieu that we see how the cross-fertilization
between pigeon breeders discussions and practices of artificial selection

shaped Darwins theories of natural selection. Feeley-Harniks explo-
ration leads to important questions about the disassociation of religious
and spiritual genealogies versus secular and scientific modes of reasoning.
Taken together, these works seek to contest, reframe, and broaden the
very boundaries of spiritual kinship as an analytic concept. They further
offer new insights into the ritual processes and acts of sacralization that are
often intertwined with the making of kinship.
Why theAbrahamic Religions?

By emphasizing the shared interreligious genealogies that form the coor-
dinates of Abrahamic religious connections, this volume also contemplates
what it means for religions to be related (see Malik, Chap. 9, this volume).
We limit our work to the religious practitioners of Christianity, Judaism,
and Islam for two main reasons. First, as previously discussed, the study
of spiritual kinship has most notably emerged in analyses of Christian,
Jewish, and Muslim institutions of religious sponsorship, fosterage, and
patronage. Second, and more importantly, however, by focusing on what
are in many ways related religions and their diverse practitioners, we
aim to tease out the vectors of shared history and commonality as well
as of conflict and difference that have shaped contemporary practices of
spiritual/sacred kinship. However, our call for a reinvigorated study of
spiritual kinship, sacred kinship, and processes of kinships ritual sacraliza-
tion should not be limited to the Abrahamic religions. We encourage and
challenge future scholars to think about the intersection of the sacred and
the social in a wide range of social and religious contexts.
In The Voice, The Word, The Books: The Sacred Scripture of the Jews,
Christians, and Muslims, F.E. Peters points out that although Jews,
Christians, and Muslims are perhaps more famous for their often-violent
differences, they share a textual, monotheistic, and genealogical heritage
as Children of Abraham and People of the Book and concur that
God has spoken directly to His Creation (2007, 1, 5). For instance,
Jews, Christians, and Muslims hold the Word of God as a sacred text
that they have faithfully preserved and observed via the Torah, the Bible,
and the Quran (Peters 2007, 1). Yet whereas for Jews the Torah is essen-
tially an Instruction and a Recitation (miqra) representing the idea
of the covenant, for Muslims, the Quran is a Recitation (quran)
and a Remembrance (dhikr), the perfectand finalword of God
18 T. THOMAS ET AL.
(Peters 2007, 5). In contrast, the central documents of the Christian Bible
are the four Gospels, each called the Good news (euangelion) (Peters
2007, 56). These texts, regardless of their differences, constitute overlap-
ping narrative and representational economies: including interpenetrating
stories such as that of Eve and Adam, Abrahams sacrifice, or that of Mary
or Maryam as seen in Christianity and Islam (Siddiqui 2013).
Yet, as noted by David Biale in Blood and Belief: The Circulation of
a Symbol between Jews and Christians, the common language holding
together some Abrahamic practitioners is not the result of shared scripture
alone, but alsoa common repertoire of symbols and meanings about the
power of blood and spirit (2007, 8). However,similar symbolic empha-
ses do not preclude ideological conflict. As Biale notes with regard to
medieval Christianity and Judaism, this common language is in part the
result of the interaction between Jews and Christians living in proximity
and defining themselves in opposition to one another. He argues that the
polemic between Christians and Jews over whose blood rituals were more
efficacious or sacrilegious was a struggle for representational power.
Significantly, Christians, Jews, and Muslims also engage in the com-
mon language of monotheism and with varying grammars profess the
oneness of God. There is no god but God (Quran) or there is but
one God (the Bible). At the same time, however, the very notion of
monotheism is a subject of debate across the Abrahamic religions. For
Christians, Jesus is often seen as a divine member of a Holy Trinity. Here,
according to Christian Trinitarian discourses, the singular supreme God
is an integration of the persons/manifestations of God the Father, Jesus
the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Siddiqui 2013, 72). For Muslims, in con-
trast, Jesus is only a human prophet. They refuse to accept that plurality
in a divine being could mean anything other than plural divine beings
(Siddiqui 2013, 86). Among Shias in Iran, this distinction is similarly
emphasizedthat Jesus is a prophet is not in question; rather, what is in
question is his being part of a Holy Trinity, and relatedly, his status as the
son of God (Wellman 2014).
Regardless of these divergences, as Carol Delaney (1991) argues,
Abrahamic cosmologies have important correlations with concepts of
gender, kinship, and procreation. In The Seed and the Soil: Gender and
Cosmology in a Turkish Village Society, she points out that for practitio-
ners of monotheistic religions, procreation and reproduction are embed-
ded in and shape a complex web of religious, scientific, and nationalistic
beliefs about the world and the way it is constructed (1986, 510).
She argues that monotheistic worldviews in which God has no divine
partnersuch as Christianity, Judaism, and Islamsubscribe to mono-

genetic notions of procreation that privilege a singular masculine
creativity and potency (Delaney 1986, 497). In such monotheistic tra-
ditions, the feminine element is subordinated and becomes symbolically
equated with the passive vessel of creation, rather than with active cre-
ative power. Focusing on conceptions of Islamic procreation in Turkey,
for instance, Delaney argues that two complementary notions are preva-
lent: male seed, which carries the primary essence of creation, identity,
and inheritance; and female soil, which provides nurture and substance
but is amorphous and undifferentiated (1991, 38). Her work thus makes
the argument that ideas of kinship and religion are powerfully interwo-
ven across the Abrahamic religions, producing similarand consequen-
tialgendered hierarchies.
Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious practitioners also locate them-
selves within and against Abrahamic religious and interreligious gene-
alogies. Across all three religions, Abraham is located as a key religious
progenitor at the beginning of long foundational mythologies that result
in three related scriptures. In addition, all agree on a line of prophets
and messengers after Mosesthough there is fierce contention as to who
and how many (Peters 2007, 2). At the level of self-representation, reli-
gious practitioners in each group identify themselves genealogically as the
favored descendants of Abraham: whether by birthright (Jews), by spiritual
transference from the firstborn (Christians), or by an act of supersession
(Muslims) (Peters 2007, 2). Conversely, differences between the religions
and even within them (as in the case of Muslims) are often explained in
terms of favored and marginalized lines of descent. It is significant that
Muslims recognize their line of descent through Abrahams first-born son
Ishmael, the son of Hagar. According to Muslims, Ishmael is a prophet
and ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad, and it was Abraham and Ishmael
who built the Kaba the most central and revered place of global Islamic
worship and pilgrimage together in Mecca (Peters 2007, 11). In contrast
to the significance of Ishmael in Muslim genealogical imaginary, however,
Christians and Jews construct genealogical relatedness through Abraham
and Sarahs son Isaac (Peters 2007, 10).
Yet, rather than being three equal siblings with a shared progenitor,
Abraham, Delaney (Chap. 11, this volume) cautions that Islam, Judaism, and
Christianity are more like three brothers fighting over the true word of God.
Similarly, Jon Levenson warns against the uncritical mobilization of Abraham
as a source for interreligious reconciliation. In Inheriting Abraham: The
Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Levenson argues:
20 T. THOMAS ET AL.
It is surely the case that Jews, Christians, and Muslims have more in com-
mon than most of their adherents recognize, and one important item they
have in common is a tendency to reflect on the figure of Abraham as he
appears in their respective collections of authoritative literature. But those
collections differ, the Abraham who appears in each of them is distinctive
in important ways, and, although interreligious concord is devoutly to be
desired, the patriarch is less useful to that end than many think. (2012, 9)
Across the fields of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, the ancestor, pro-
genitor, and prophet Abraham has many manifestations. It follows then
that Abrahamic religiosity constitutes an umbrella of religious and inter-
religious discourses of relatedness and otherness through modes of de-
kinning and disavowal, of making and writing others out of religious and
familial legacies, traditions, and history all of which can and have had
profound political and territorial effects. For example, the curse of Ham
outlined in Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim texts (a myth that holds that
Noahs son Ham and Hams descendants were cursed to serve Hams
brothers because of Hams refusal to cover Noahs nakedness) has been
mobilized by Abrahamic religious practitioners as a mythic and theological
resource for racialization, dehumanization, and enslavement. In The Curse
of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, David M.Goldberg (2003)
argues that the authors of fourth-century Syriac Christian and seventh-
century Muslim texts made explicit associations with blackness, slavery,
and the curse of Ham. More than an inheritance of Jewish rabbinic litera-
ture, Goldberg asserts that the Abrahamic exegetical terrain surrounding
the curse of Ham, blackness, and slavery was heavily conditioned by the
emergence of ethno-racial categories that stemmed from conquest, par-
ticularly the Arab conquests of the Islamic slave trade, European Christian
imperialism, and trans-Atlantic slave trade. Thus, the relationship between
Abrahamic productions of similitude and difference must be contextual-
ized within broader discussions of geopolitical processes. Moreover, the
genealogical politics of Abrahamic religious narratives and the social pro-
cesses of macro-political and economic structures must, at minimum, be
conceptualized as bi-directional.
Answering the question of what it means for religions to be related,
moreover, requires for scholars studying contemporary currents of reli-
gious sociality to capture the cohesions, ruptures, and ambivalences
instilled by spiritual and sacred notions of kinship even as they are mind-
ful of the very material stakes involved in their representations of those
solidarities. Nevertheless, we argue that the Abrahamic religions and their
related kinship frameworks are an interesting starting point to examine the

broad imaginaries and fraught boundaries of spiritual and sacred kinship.
Because of their overlapping histories, genealogies, textual traditions, and
worldviews, an Abrahamic focus allows for an investigation of authorizing
frames of affinity and discord, as well as modes of intra- and interreligious
belonging and boundary-making produced across various historical eras.
Moreover, an examination of spiritual and sacred kinship formations, as
they are differentially conceptualized and enacted by Christian, Jewish,
and Muslim religious practitioners, creates a new space for comparative
projects at the crossroads of kinship and religious studies.
In conclusion, New Directions in Spiritual Kinship provides a critical
opportunity to consolidate, critique, and theorize the emergent work on
spiritual and sacred kinshiphere defined as the myriad ways in which
religious practitioners of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism create spiritually
defined and/or revered forms of relatedness among themselves and the
divine. Key topics of inquiry taken up by our authors include the histori-
cal study of spiritual kinship; the varying scales and domains of spiritual/
sacred kinship for families, nations, and transnational religious networks;
the efficacy of spiritual/sacred kinship for the naturalization and sacraliza-
tion of conflict and/or inclusions and exclusions; and finally, the power-
ful and co-mingling discourses, narratives, mythologies, and metaphors
of the Abrahamic religions. Contributors show that these sacred affinities
are mediated by religious ritual and text, belief and discourse, notions of
body and spirit, concepts of time and space, and the shifting boundar-
ies between the sacred and the mundane. This book is a dynamic and
collaborative endeavor that makes important contributions to anthropo-
logical knowledge about sociality, the sacred, as well as to the ongoing
significance, diversity, and breadth of kinship. Finally, this work defini-
tively enriches the corpus of ethnographic studies of Christianity, Islam,
and Judaism.
Chapter Summaries
In Spiritual Kinship between Formal Norms and Actual Practice:
a Comparative Analysis in the Long Run (from the Middle Ages until
today), volume contributor Guido Alfani traces the development of spiri-
tual kinship formations through baptism and godparenthood in Europe
from the early Middle Ages until the present. Alfani contends that early
theological and church regulations relating to spiritual kinship were fairly
22 T. THOMAS ET AL.
uniform across Europe, even though they varied over time, geographi-
cally, and locally. The Reformation ended this unity-in-diversity approach,
leading to diverging theological opinions about spiritual kinship between
the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian churches. Alfani also
highlights the everyday, localized implications of godparenthood that was
employed as a means of religious guidance and also for the cementing of
economic, political, and familial alliances.
Gillian Feeley-Harniks chapter, Native of All Countries: Kinship and
Religion among the Pigeon-Breeders of Darwins London, explores a
historical community of pigeon breeders in nineteenth-century London
and Charles Darwins interactions with them to examine how breed-
ers belonging to pigeon fancier clubs negotiated the lines between reli-
gion and science. Feeley-Harnik demonstrates that religious ideals were
mobilized by a diverse community of Dissenters for processes of scien-
tific discovery, while scientific concerns were mobilized by the symbolic
pursuit of the sacredthat is, to discern the plan of Creation while also
recognizing that pigeons exemplified spirituality across diverse religions.
Feeley-Harnik considers why Darwin chose a sacred bird to make scientific
arguments about the kinship of all creatures. Her work makes visible the
often hidden and subtle intertwining of religious and scientific ideals and
practices, with regard to both the lives of the animal breeders and their
notions of relatedness.
Don Seemans contribution, Kinship as Ethical Relation: A Critique
of the Spiritual Kinship Paradigm, questions the utility of a spiritual kin-
ship paradigm and outlines kinship as an ethical relation. Drawing from
fieldwork among Ethiopian Pentecostals living in Israel, among other
sources, Seeman illustrates key problems in the use of the term spiritual
kinship from the point of view of Jewish studies because of its strong
Christian connotations. He then explains why ethical relation might be
a more appropriate frame for Jewish kinship and comparative research.
Finally, Seemans work examines circumcision and conversion as sites for
the discussion of spiritual and ethical kinship in Judaism as well as case
studies from the writings of Maimonides.
In We Ask Together: Intercession and Composition as Models for
Spiritual Kinship, Fred Klaits examines how spiritual kinship ties are
mediated by forms of asking and giving in an Apostolic Christian congre-
gation in Gaborone, Botswana, and a Pentecostal Christian congregation
in Buffalo, NewYork. Klaits argues that the social logic of spiritual kin-
ship among New York Pentecostals is organized around the practice of
intercession, which demonstrates divine assurance, while spiritual kinship

of Botswana Apostolics is structured around the practice of composition,
which focuses believers attention on one anothers sentiments. Taken
together, Klaitss analysis illustrates some of the nuances of Christian spiri-
tual kinship affinities and their vital role in social reproduction.
In Kinship in Historical Consciousness: A French Jewish Perspective,
Jolle Bahloul argues that for Jews in postcolonial, post-Holocaust France,
integration into the French Republican cultural order meant espousing
French culture, especially in naming practices. Babies born after decolo-
nization and the exodus of North African Jews to France now bear the
burden of French Republicanism. A French first name is a sign of politi-
cal allegiance, as if the Republic was a godmother. This chapter pres-
ents ethnographic material on naming practices among French Jews of
North African origin to show how the analysis of spiritual kinship may be
extended beyond the personal relationship of godparents to that of the
community amidst major historical changes such as transnational/trans-
cultural/transpolitical migration.
In Forever Families: Christian Individualism, Mormonism and
Collective Salvation, Fenella Cannell examines Mormon theologies of
sacred kinship and their juxtaposition of spiritual (pre-mortal) and physi-
cal (mortal) bases of relatedness. Cannell argues that an examination
of Mormon sacred kinship not only troubles a Protestant and Catholic
Christian opposition of spiritual and carnal ties; it also exposes an unre-
solved tension in the broader field of Christianity between individual and
collective imperatives for salvation that are highly valued but unable to be
certified by practitioners. Cannells analysis illustrates that it is ultimately
the myriad, unstable intersections of sacramental relatedness and physical
genealogy that are symbolically marked and personally contemplated by
Mormons that belie the mystery of Mormon sacred kinship.
In Substance, Spirit, and Sociality among Shii Muslims in Iran,
Rose Wellman draws from ethnographic research in Iran to explore how
state-supporting Shias (here Basijis) work to cultivate Islamic and ethi-
cal family relations through everyday and ritual acts of cooking, feeding,
praying, and visiting. In particular, Wellman contends that, for her inter-
locutors, key substances of kinship (such as shared blood and food) can
be actively imbued with immaterial, sacred, and moral properties to bind
people together or set them apart. Here, kin relations formed through
claims to shared natural substance or Islamic law simultaneously depend
on the pious, processual, and strategic shaping of the physio-sacred family.
24 T. THOMAS ET AL.
Asiya Maliks contribution, Expanding Familial Ties: From the Umma

to New Constructions of Relatedness among East African Indians in
Canada, considers the myriad ways in which migrants create and negoti-
ate kinship ties at the level of nation, community, and family. Malik illus-
trates tensions between goals to create a universal and inclusive community
of Muslims through the umma and practitioners more particularized
and everyday formations of kinship. She argues that while SPEAs forge
broader connections with other Muslims of varied backgrounds locally,
solidarities with other SPEAsthrough their shared sect, provenance, cul-
tural practices, colonial and life experiencessimultaneously inform their
construction of a more intimate and exclusive familial community.
Todne Thomass Chap. 10, Rebuking the Ethnic Frame: Afro
Caribbean and African American Evangelicals and Spiritual Kinship,
examines the means by which the members of an Afro Caribbean and
African American evangelical church network in the Atlanta metropoli-
tanarea constitute spiritual kinshipa field of relatedness that is believed
to derive from Christians mutual embodiment of the Holy Spirit and
that is socially produced through shared discourse, practices, and senti-
ment. More than a framework for religious sociality, Thomas argues that
black evangelicals conceptualizations of spiritual kinship underline their
critique of ethno-racial religious solidarities in the United States and their
aspirations to generate familial religious intersubjectivity and identity.
Finally, our volume concludes with Carol Delaneys Chap. 11, The
Seeds of Kinship Theory in the Abrahamic Religions. Rather than view-
ing spiritual kinship as separate from real kinship, Delaney suggests that
all Abrahamic kinship is of a spiritual nature due to beliefs about pro-
creation that are found in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures. The
creative power of God is symbolically transferred to men in procreation.
The male is said to provide the seed, which encapsulates the soul and iden-
tity of a child, while the female is thought to provide merely its physical
nature. This monogenetic belief, in turn, generates shared definitions of
father and mother, patriarchal descent, and gender relations.
Note
1. The concept of physio-sacred is here adapted from the term
physio-spiritual which was put forth by Naomi Leite in her role as
the discussant of Wellmans paper at the Wenner-Gren workshop
that preceded this volume, The Sacred Social: Investigations of
Spiritual Kinship among the Abrahamic Faiths.
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CHAPTER 2
Spiritual Kinship Between Formal Norms

andActual Practice: AComparative Analysis
intheLong Run (from theEarly Middle
Ages Until Today)
GuidoAlfani
In Christian societies during the late Middle Ages, baptism did not merely
represent a solemn and public recognition of the natural birth of a child.
Rather, it was considered a second birth, a spiritual birth within a group
of relatives normally different from that based on blood relations: the
spiritual family, composed of godfathers and godmothers. Both for the
Catholic and the Orthodox Churches, the baptismal ceremony established
a tie of kinship between the people involved in the ceremony. This kind of
kinship was called spiritual (in Latin, cognatio spiritualis) to distinguish
it from others and in particular from the natural kinship (cognatio natu-
ralis) connecting the baptized to his or her parents and blood relations.
G. Alfani (*)
Dondena Centre and IGIER, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_2
30 G. ALFANI
Beyond their religious significance, spiritual kinship ties had great social
importance.
The notion of spiritual kinship developed during the early Middle Ages
in the Eastern Church, spreading to the Western from the eighth century.
In the following centuries, and even after the East-West Schism of 1054,
considering theology and church regulations, there were no relevant differ-
ences across Christian Europe in spiritual kinship and in related matters, like
godparenthood. As happened with all other kinds of kinship, spiritual kin-
ship was accompanied by an impediment to marriage between all those who
were tied by it. Its extension (the number and kind of people among which
it was established) changed in time, but by the fifteenth century, it involved
all the key actors of the baptism (the baptized, his or her parents, the god-
parents and the person officiatingusually, a priest) as well as others. The
extension of spiritual kinship changed also in space (between West and East,
but also within such areas), mostly due to the number of godparents tak-
ing part in each baptisman aspect regulated by social norms and practices
which often disregarded partly or entirely the official norms.
From the sixteenth century, the Reformation ended this situation of
unity in diversity. By stating that spiritual kinship simply did not exist,
while maintaining godparents who were considered useful tutors of the
Christian education of children, Lutherparadoxicallyallowed the
survival in Protestant Europe of Medieval social practices about godpar-
enthood. In Catholic Europe, the Council of Trent, while reaffirming
spiritual kinship, limited its extent and deeply reformed godparenthood
consequently changing how ties of spiritual kinship were used as rela-
tional instruments. These transformations also differentiated Catholic and
Protestant churches from the Orthodox, giving birth to an all-round pro-
cess of divergence of norms and practices across the European continent
and between the main Christian religions of the area. This chapter analyzes
the implications of such divergence, focusing on the formal norms regu-
lating spiritual kinship in different times and in distinct Christian religions,
and on how spiritual kinship and godparenthood were used to pursue aims
very different from those prescribed by religious teaching. For reasons of
synthesis, the area considered will be mostly Europe.
From Antiquity totheMiddle Ages

The origin of the notion of spiritual kinship dates back to the first cen-
turies of the Christian era. It appeared more or less at the same time
as the other social and religious institution considered in this chapter,
SPIRITUAL KINSHIP BETWEEN FORMAL NORMS ANDACTUAL PRACTICE:... 31
godparenthood, but it can also be noticed that the latter had antecedents
in the sponsorship practice used by the early Christians. In this sec-
tion, the historical developments of godparenthood and spiritual kinship
from the late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages will be synthetically
reconstructed.1
The early Christians were normally baptized as adults. Between the sec-
ond and the fourth centuries, a series of practices, called together catechu-
menate, evolved to test and instruct aspiring Christians. To be admitted
to this course of instruction, it was necessary to be accompanied and
presented by two guarantors (fideiussores, sponsores) who vouched for the
dignity and the trustworthiness of the candidate. This practice, although
suitable for the religion of a minority living in a mainly pagan world and
at risk of facing persecution, was no longer necessary when Christianity
prevailed and infant baptism became customary (already by the fifth cen-
tury AD, Saint Augustine was viewing infant baptism as the norm: Lynch
1986, 120). Baptizing infants created a ritual and theological problem,
given that the rite demanded an active participation and the use of speech.
Godparents, direct descendants of the ancient sponsores, were introduced
to answer the priests questions in place of the child, and the Church soon
attributed them the role of tutors in his or her Christian education.
An early development was the exclusion of parents as godparents of
their own children, a prohibition that was connected to theological elabo-
ration, notably to the distinction between the carnal generation and
the spiritual generation (Guerreau-Jalabert 1995, 161162). This pro-
hibition was clearly stated by the Council of Mainz of 813. The notion
of spiritual generation and the exclusion of parents from godparenthood
of their own children do not automatically explain the emergence of new
impediments to marriage. It was the taboo of incest, so strongly rooted in
European societies, and the deeply disturbing suspicion that even the ties
between people related by godparenthood could create barriers not to be
crossed, which led civil and religious authorities to lay down rules estab-
lishing matrimonial bans also for the spiritual generation.2 Where there is
incest, there is certainly kinship; the safest foundation for spiritual kinship
was, right from the outset, the restriction on sexual intercourse (Alfani
2009a).
The idea of spiritual incest first developed in the Eastern Church. The
first ban on marriage on account of spiritual kinship dates to 530 and
was later included in the Justinian Code. The ban concerned marriage
between a godfather and his goddaughter, and was justified by the fact
that the very relationship of godparenthood, more than anything else, can
32 G. ALFANI
generate paternal affection, and therefore this kind of union is incestu-

ous. In the following centuries, the extension of spiritual kinship would
grow and impediments would include marriage between a godfather and
the mother of the godson (Trullan Synod of Constantinople,3 692), from
which the notion of compaternitas, that is, the spiritual kinship relation
between godparents and the parents of their godchildren, would develop.
However, there continued to be cases of spiritual incest, both where the
people were unaware of any impediment, and, to a lesser degree, where
they were conscious of it. From the very beginning, then, regarding spiri-
tual kinship, we find signs of a divergence between formal norms and
actual practice. As will be seen, this was due to the fact that Christians
found godparenthood as a social institution very useful to fulfill tasks
deeply different from those assigned to it by the religious authorities.
The Western Church was slow to accept the theological and regulatory
innovations regarding spiritual kinship. Only after the Council of Rome
of 721 AD, which accepted most of the canons of the Trullan Synod, was
the development of spiritual kinship assured also in the West, with bans
on marriage due to spiritual kinship being included in the edict of the
Longobard king Liutprand of 723. Such bans included marriage between
a godson and the daughter of the godparent. This is the principle of the
fraternitas spiritualis (spiritual brotherhood); when fully established, it
resulted in a ban on marriages between all the children of a given godfa-
ther or godmother and all their godsons and goddaughters. Also frater-
nitas spiritualis developed first in the Eastern Church. In particular, the
Ecloga, an ambitious project of reform of the Justinian code put forward
by the emperor Leo III and his son Constantine V, published in 726 or in
741, recognized fraternitas spiritualis as well as bans on marriage between
the children of the godfather and his compatres (that is those who were
connected to him by compaternitas spiritualis), and between the baptizer
and the person baptized (Lynch 1986; Alfani 2009a).
On this point at least, the Western Church welcomed innovations from
the East and was fairly quick in accepting the new bans included in the
Ecloga. However, the spread of the notion of spiritual kinship in the West
was not without opposition, particularly because it implied unpopular
impediments to marriage. The situation appears different from the East,
whence came most innovations in the field and where the Church contin-
ued to extend the interdictions on marriage due to baptism to include all
the blood relations of the godchild, and all the blood relations of the god-
parent to the degree already recognized for consanguinity (Fine 1994).
After the Schism of the East (1054), the capacity of the two sides of
Christianity to influence each other was abruptly reduced, though not
entirely interrupted. As far as spiritual kinship is concerned, the Schism
did not determine any deep differences among Orthodox and Catholic
versions of Christianity, as the notion of spiritual kinship continued to
develop and to expand in both areas. In the West, for example, in the
canonical collection of Gratian (1140), which had a wide circulation and
was largely used also in the following centuries, we find a clear description
of the three components of the system of spiritual kinship in use at the
time: the paternitas, or the direct link between godfathers, godmothers,
the person who administered baptism and the godchild; the compaternitas
that linked godfathers, godmothers and the minister of baptism to the
parents of their godchild; the fraternitas that established spiritual kinship
between the natural children of the godfathers, of the godmothers and of
the minister of baptism and their godchild. In time, however, the com-
mentaries to Gratian added to the direct relationships quoted above,
other indirect ones: between the godchild and the spouses of the god-
fathers, of the godmothers and of the minister of baptism; between the
parents of the child and the spouses of his (or her) godfathers, godmothers
and of the minister of baptism (Guerreau-Jalabert 1995).
Both in Catholic and Orthodox Europe, then, spiritual kinship con-
tinued to expand throughout the Middle Ages. As will be seen, only after
the Reformation and Catholic Reformation (or Counter-Reformation)
in the West would a deep fissure develop with the East regarding spiri-
tual kinship. The situation is different, though, if we look at an aspect of
considerable social importance: the number of godparents admitted per
baptism. If one looks only at regulations, then we find the same tendency
both in the Eastern and Western Churches during the Middle Ages, but
the same is not true if actual practice is considered. Here it will suffice to
recollect the main points.4
In the early times of infant baptism, it seems that each new Christian
was given only one godparent, normally of his or her same sex. It also
seems that a tendency very soon developed to increase the number of god-
parents; what is sure is that in the West from the ninth century, the Church
began to oppose the spread of these new practices (Council of Metz of
893. Lynch 1986, 205206), promoting instead the ancient custom of
just one godparent per baptism. In spite of this, the new practices spread
far and wide, developing not only into specific local customs but also into
a fragmented local regulation with synod rules being applied instead of
34 G. ALFANI
canons coming from ancient and obscure councils. For example, in France,
the synod statutes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries allowed only
one spiritual parent at Dax and Cahors, one or two at Bourges, two at
Chlons, three at Bayeux, Nantes and Arras, three or four at Chartres, and
four at Cambrai (Alfani 2009a, 2425).
It is difficult to know which of the many rules regulating the mat-
ter were really applied, and which were the most widespread customs
in different parts of Catholic Europe. The available studies on specific
areas from the late Middle Ages suggest that there was a clear difference
between law and practice, and in fact much legal innovation in both spiri-
tual kinship and godparenthood aimed at reforming or banning entirely
specific practices. This has two implications. First, it suggests that new
research on practices is surely needed, especially for Orthodox Europe.
Second, and with reference in particular to Catholic Europe, the insis-
tence of the Church on specific regulations which were repeated over time
(in particular, the attempts to limit the number of godparents) provides
additional proof of the resistance of European societies to reform in the
field, which in itself is proof of the importance they attributed to their own
godparenthood practices.
At present, the best documented case (the one for which we have
more information about actual practice) is that of Italy. Here, libri di
famiglia (family books) recording relevant events such as baptisms,
marriages and burials have existed since the fourteenth century. They
suggest that the selection of numerous godparents and godmothers
was common in regions as diverse as Tuscany and Veneto (Klapisch
1985a, 1990; Haas 199596, 1998; Grubb 1996). At the end of the
fifteenth/beginning of the sixteenth century, books of baptism were
introduced in many places, well before the Council of Trent (ended
1563) made them mandatory for all Catholic parishes. They demon-
strate that, where local customs allowed, the number of godparents
participating at baptisms was very large, in certain cases rising to 2030
and even beyond.
A recent survey which I conducted on Northern Italy showed that the
abundance of godparents was not limited to social and economic elites
and was largely independent of status. The survey also showed that each
community indeed had its own model of godparenthood, often markedly
different from that of communities nearby (Alfani 2009a). On the basis
of the survey results, I elaborated a typology of godparenthood models,
which for reasons of synthesis cannot be described here.5 It will suffice
to note that this typology is aimed at making possible extensive compari-

sons, across time and space, of the customs of godparenthood. In fact,
until recently, the only work comparing godparenthood practices across
Europe was an article by Klapisch (1985a) covering Tuscany, France and
England. Striking differences were found between Tuscany, where god-
parents were abundant, and France/England, where two godfathers and
one godmother were given to male children and two godmothers and
one godfather to females. This French-English model, which I will call
ternary, is only part of a more general distinction between Northern
Europe (England, Holland, Denmark, perhaps Sweden and the North of
Germany) and France, where the ternary model prevailed, and Central and
Southern Europe (Italy, probably Spain and Central-Southern Germany)
characterized by a greater propensity to multiple godparenthood and
probably by a greater fragmentation in the practices in general (Alfani
2009a, 3640).
For Eastern (Orthodox) Europe, we have to accept that there is a severe
scarcity of studies on the early developments of godparenthood. It seems,
however, that here the custom of the single godparent, characteristic of
early Christianity and transformed into law by a series of councils during
the Middle Ages, was resisted longer than in Catholic Europe. Indeed,
when referring to the custom of giving two godparents (a godfather and
a godmother), the late-fourteenth-century Orthodox theologian Kiprian
called this a Latin custom which was consequently to be rejected in
favor of the single-godparent tradition. It seems, then, that contrary
to the process of expansion of spiritual kinship (a process that saw the
Eastern Church influencing the Western), regarding godparenthood, the
Orthodox were fighting against Western influences. Apparently the fight
was at least partly successful since, in the case of the Russian patriarchate,
for example, the presence of both a godfather and a godmother at baptism
was accepted only in 1666 (Muravyeva 2012).
It should be remembered that these broad distinctions are based on
tendencies. For example, in areas where the ternary model was prevalent,
we also find communities following different customs.6 However, it seems
clear that overall Orthodox Europe was hostile to multi-godfather models
and that in central and southern Europe the variety of models was alto-
gether greater (and, very often, the number of godparents larger) than
in the northern part of the continent. This social geography would have
been deeply changed by the Reformationespecially, and a bit paradoxi-
cally, for Catholic areas.
36 G. ALFANI
Before proceeding, something more should be said about the religious

and social significance of godparents in Medieval Europe. The Church
attributed to godparents religious and ritual functions, adding to these a
responsibility as tutors of the Christian education of the godchildren (a
function, it seems, that they rarely truly performed). On the other hand,
the tasks assigned to godparents by the clergy were only a small part of
their range of functions, many of which escaped the control of the reli-
gious authorities to a greater or lesser degree. Research on this topic has
greatly increased in the last few years, and here it will be possible to pro-
vide only a succinct account.7
The first and fundamental point to underline is that the tie of spiritual
kinship considered the most important was that of compaternitas between
the godparents and the godchildrens parents, and not the one between
the godparents and their godchildren (a tie made fragile by high infant
mortality). As a consequence, in the selection of godparents, the sex of the
newborn had far less influence on the number and quality of those given
to him, or her, than one might expect (Alfani 2009a; Klapisch 1985a).
Furthermore, while many works underline the relative rarity of material
help of godparents to godchildren, relationships of compaternitas were
the vehicle of much more frequent and relevant social and economic
interaction.
The main social use of godparenthood, and particularly of compater-
nitas, was to weave or activate ties between individuals and households
or families. Contrary to other forms of relationship, the baptismal cer-
emony gave to these new ties a ritual character, holy and public, given
that they were established in facie communitatis (in front of the social
and religious community that witnessed the baptism). All this conferred
on such ties a much stronger value than that of simple social contacts.
Through the relationships established at baptism, individuals and fami-
lies became publicly bound by a set of social rules regarding forms of
solidarity, cooperation, friendship and forbidding hostile behavior (Alfani
and Gourdon 2009, 2012c). Interestingly, compaternitas could bind
different and unequal actors, and also due to this, it could be used to
pursue different aims: creating or reinforcing economic ties or political
alliances (Klapisch 1985b; Haas 199596); pacifying a conflict between
great families or even between neighbors (Gauvard 1993); strengthening
a tie of friendship; being charitable toward the poor; and so on. From the
specific point of view of economic activity, five main fields in which god-
parenthood was relevant have recently been enumerated (Alfani 2012c):
protection of common or complementary economic interests between

economic actors; formalization and ritual protection of business relation-
ships; economic mediation and access to information; establishment of ties
of patronage or of clientele; and financial and material help from godpar-
ents to godchildren. The way in which godparenthood could be used to
pursue specific aims strongly depended on the number of godparents who
could be selected for each baptisma matter which, in certain areas of
Europe at least, was deeply perturbed by the Reformation and subsequent
events, roughly covering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Age ofReformation andtheDivergence

ofNorms andPractices AcrossEurope
Even after the East-West Schism in 1054, theology and legislation about
spiritual kinship continued to proceed along the same path in different
areas of Christianity. Differences were to be found, instead, regarding
godparenthood practices, with the number of godparents per baptism
increasing in the West over time, while seemingly in Orthodox Europe
these Latin tendencies were kept at bay. However, this development
was not related to the accepted version of the Christian religion, but was
the result of the inability of Western Church authorities to fully control
religious behavior as it related to social practice.
The Reformation ended this situation of unity in diversity. Luther him-
self rejected entirely the idea that a spiritual kinship could exist, as there
was no reference to it in the Holy Scriptures. Therefore, it had to be
abandoned, along with all the impediments to marriage it implied. On
the contrary, godparents had to be preserved, as they could play a use-
ful role as tutors of the Christian education of their godchildren (Bossy
1985; Spierling 2005; Alfani 2007, 2009a). As shall be seen, this decision
allowed traditional customs regarding godparenthood to survive almost
unchanged under the Reformation.
Calvin was more radical. Not only did he reject the very notion of
spiritual kinship, as Luther had, but he also tried to eliminate godparents:
they were to be replaced at the baptismal font by the parents of the infant
(a practice forbidden since at least the Council of Mainz of 813). Indeed,
Calvin tried to impose his views upon the citizens of Geneva, but found
himself faced with strong opposition, and in the end he had to accept
many compromises (Spierling 2005), including the presence at baptism
of godparents. Their role, however, was scaled down, as now they shared
38 G. ALFANI
the task of presenting children at the baptismal font with the natural par-
ents and the congregation as a whole. Calvin also faced strong opposition
on a number of other aspects, including his attempts to forbid baptismal
banquets and parties (Alfani and Gourdon 2006, 2009) and his reform of
the baptismal rite and rituals. Opposition to Calvins attempts at reform
is yet further proof of the affection of European societies for ancient cus-
toms regarding godparenthood, and suggests that this social institution
was important to themimportant enough to become a source of harsh
conflict with the preachers whose lead they were ready to follow in other
matters (Alfani 2009a).
Generally speaking, the Reformed churches followed the same path,
rejecting spiritual kinship while preserving godparents. This is true, for
example, of the Church of England (Coster 2002) and the Church of
Sweden (Ericsson 2000; Piilahti 2012). Indeed, of the many churches and
sects adhering to the Reformation, only those that rejected infant baptism
totally, such as the Anabaptists, abolished godparenthood. Without spiri-
tual kinship, godparents became simply witnesses to baptism and were
defined as such in some Protestant areas, but this change in definition does
not seem to have had any relevant implication for actual social practice.
In other words, the loss of theological relevance did not imply any loss
of social relevance, and under the Reformation, we find godparenthood
models and practices which are very similar, if not identical, to those that
had been in use during the Middle Ages (Alfani and Gourdon 2012c).
The Catholic Church, in reply to criticism and derision from Protestants
(particularly about spiritual incest, at the time quite widespread and har-
binger of scandal), resorted to introducing a reform of the sacrament of
baptism which led, from the point of view of social customs, to much
more drastic transformations. The Council of Trent is a turning point in
the history of Catholic godparenthood as a social institution. The Council
acted on two fronts: the extension of the ties of spiritual kinship and of
the relative impediments to marriage, and the admissible number of god-
fathers and godmothers.
Regarding spiritual kinship, wanting to reduce the incidence of spiri-
tual incest, the Council stated that spiritual kinship existed only between
godfathers and godmothers on one side, parents of the baptized child
on the other; between the child and his godfathers and godmothers; and
between the child and the person who baptized him. This innovation did
not bridge the gap with the Protestants (who had canceled spiritual kin-
ship entirely) but distinguished the Catholic from the Orthodox, who
continued to recognize the older, wider boundaries to spiritual kinship.
As for the admissible number of godparents, the Council stated that

one godparent was enough, be it male or female, but a maximum of two
of different genders were acceptable: one godfather and one godmother.
The new rules about godparenthood encountered a great deal of resis-
tance which was finally overcome by means of the new control powers
quickly acquired by the counter-Reformed Church, and their applica-
tion caused a significant shift in the distribution of godparenthood models
across Europe. In fact, from now on, Catholic areas were characterized
by few godparents, similar to the Orthodox, while in much of Protestant
Europe, abundant godparents continued to be common.
The change which occurred in Catholic Europe had important and
largely unexpected consequences for social practice, which in many ways
compromised most of the traditional uses of godparenthood. The Council
of Trent had aspired to transform godparenthood and compaternitas into
horizontal relationships, in which godparents of equivalent social rank
to the parents would truly assume the responsibility for the spiritual edu-
cation of their godchildren. Instead, what they obtained was a vertical
relationship, in which, with only one godfather permissible, he was the
most prestigious possible and so the whole institution of godparenthood
tended to become a means for establishing and reinforcing social clien-
teles. The lower ranks of society tended to concentrate their choices on
the elites, both noble and non-noble, a process that can be measured
statistically thanks to the parish books of baptism. In Italy, for example,
between 154049 and 160009, among the children of fathers without
title (neither noble nor belonging to the productive elite of master artisans
and similar), the share of Signori (high social rank) godfathers rose from
18% to 52% at Voghera in Lombardy, from 64% to 89% at Mirandola in
Emilia, from 5% to 28% at Finale in Liguria, from 7% to 37% at Turin and
from 20% to 42% at Ivrea in Piedmont and from 7% to 11% at Gambellara
in Veneto. At the same time, the highest ranks of society intensified choices
made within their groups (fellow nobles, political partners etc.). In Turin,
the proportion of Signori godparents given to children of other Signori
rose from 46% to 93%, while in Ivrea, it went from 58% to 88% (Alfani
2009a, 120131).
All the research carried out on this process of transformation suggests
that it is during the Early Modern period that Catholic godparenthood
acquired the strong vertical character (to establish social clienteles) that is
so apparent to historians and historical anthropologists of Mediterranean
Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth or, in some areas, even the
twentieth centuries. In Portugal, as in Spain, there is a clear tendency, during
40 G. ALFANI
the Early Modern period, to transform godparenthood into a system of

patronage. For the great noble landowners, acting as godfathernot only
for the children of their peasants, but also for those of their higher-level
employees or providers of services such as notaries and merchantswas a
common strategy for publicly reaffirming their social dominance (Chacn
Jimnez 1988; Garca Gonzlez and Gmez Carrasco 2008). There are
indications that the procedure was also the same in France (Alfani and
Gourdon 2012a). Across Catholic Europe, this situation would start to
change only from the late eighteenth or the nineteenth century, when it
became the custom to choose godparents from within kin, a choice which
was almost entirely avoided in the Medieval and Early Modern period.
As already noted, verticalization of godparenthood in Catholic Europe
was an unwanted consequence of the Catholic reform of baptism. This is
even more striking if we consider that, in Protestant Europe, godparent-
hood continued to be mainly horizontal, and was used in ways entirely sim-
ilar to those common throughout the continent before the Reformation
(Alfani 2007). Godparents continued to act as economic mediators in
eighteenth-century rural Germany (Sabean 1998); artisans and guild
masters protected their common interests by acting as godfathers of each
others children in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sweden (Ericsson
2000); and probably most significantly, merchants continued to formalize
and ritualize their economic ties by using the baptismal rite (Safley 2000).
Recent research on Protestant entrepreneurial communities in Catholic
areas during the Industrial Revolution (e.g., the Swiss cotton entrepre-
neurs in Piedmont and Lombardy, or the Protestant businessmen in Paris,
active in key sectors such as finance) showed that these patterns of behav-
ior were still common in the second half of the nineteenth century and
later (Alfani and Gourdon 2012c).
In Catholic Europe, by contrast, the verticalization of godparenthood
affected the economic elites as well. Not only did merchants begin to
systematically choose nobles as godparents to their children, but doing
so also seems to have fed their ambition to become nobles themselves,
which usually implied abandoning trade to invest capital in land. This
tendency might also have favored a change in the attitude toward how
to do business, and in particular, might have favored the appearance of
customs which could easily involve moral hazards (Alfani and Gourdon
2012c). In fact, a different propensity when looking for patrons, favored
by the Catholic reform of godparenthood, might help to explain behav-
ior testified to by anthropological research on contemporary societies, for
example, the selection of politicians as godparents in the hope of receiv-

ing favors and protection from them (Piselli 1987). More generally, in
Catholic Europe and especially in Italy, the verticalization of godparent-
hood might have acted as a force for the closure of societies, bringing
increasing rigidity of social-economic structures and ultimately weakening
the vitality and innovativeness of the economy (Alfani 2009a, 130; 2012;
Alfani and Gourdon 2012c).
Contrary to what one might expect, and notwithstanding abstract theo-
logical positions, in post-Reformation Europe, the practices of Protestant
godparenthood were much more similar to the Medieval ones than the
Catholic: large groups of godparents were still selected, the strategies
regulating choice of godparents were complex and varied, and pious eco-
nomic actors continued to use godparenthood to establish connections to
foster their economic interests. The Catholic reform of godparenthood,
instead, brought radical change to ancient practices, succeeding where
the Church had failed for many centuries: reducing the number of god-
parents. As a consequence of this, the Catholic reform of godparenthood
was able to change societies much more than the Protestant one, fostering
(albeit unwittingly) the appearance of new patterns of behavior.
From theEighteenth Century Until Today

From the theological point of view, the past three centuries have been
a peaceful period for spiritual kinship. Under the Reformation, nothing
happened as the notion of spiritual kinship had already been canceled by
Luther. The situation of the Roman Catholic Church is more interesting.
The Council of Trent had reaffirmed the ability of baptism to create spe-
cific ties of kinship, and this idea was defended for a long time. However,
in 1917, the new Code of Canon Law reduced the extension of spiritual
kinship by recognizing that it existed (as the related impediment to mar-
riage) only in the case of paternitas spiritualis: that is, in the case of the
relationship established between godfather, godmother and the minister
of baptism on one side, and the baptized on the other. Impediments to
marriage due to compaternitas were abolished, as well as any tie of spiritual
kinship related to the sacrament of confirmation. Then, in 1983, the new
version of the Code of Canon Law (resulting from the Vatican Council
II, 196265) did not include any reference to spiritual kinship and conse-
quently neither to spiritual incest (Alfani 2009a, 212). In the meantime,
in 1969, the promulgation of the Ordo baptismi parvulorum by Pope Paul
42 G. ALFANI
VI had established a ritual for infant baptism in which the role played by
the childs parents was clarified and explicitly strengthened, to the detri-
ment of godparents who had been the only ones mentioned by earlier
rituals (Revel 2004).
These late developments are the final results of a long period during
which the notion of spiritual kinship was questioned, at least in a part of
Catholic Europe and overall in France, where it became involved in the
attack of the religious thinkers of the French Enlightenment against the
dogma of the original sin (Alfani and Gourdon 2012b, 2829). More
importantly, the renounce of the Roman Catholic Church to spiritual kin-
ship seems to have reflected its declining significance in practical terms:
as by the early twentieth century, godparents were largely selected from
within kinship, and consequently the spiritual connections established at
baptism did not alter the situation regarding impediments to marriage and
other aspects.
The increase of choices of godparents from within kin is by far the
most important transformation in social practice regarding godparent-
hood occurred in the last two to three centuries. The process has been
interpreted as part of a more general process of familialization which
also involved the ceremony of baptism being increasingly perceived as a
celebration of the family (Alfani and Gourdon 2009). In the context of
the classic opposition being made between intensive and extensive
choices of godparents (Mintz and Wolf 1950), selecting them from kin
is usually seen as the clear expression of a will to double an existing rela-
tionship (vertical, clientele-building godparenthood being considered
instead as the typical example of extensive choices). Given that it simply
strengthens a pre-existing tie, it is apparently obvious to conclude that
godparenthood and compaternitas, when associated with a blood relation,
lose their specificity and their relational power. Many scholars, then, sug-
gested that the transformation from a situation in which extensive choices
are dominant to one in which intensive, intra-kin ones are preponderant
marks a weakening of godparenthoodand even more so of the notion
of spiritual kinship.
Indeed, a recent enquiry into the Italian and French cases showed that,
in the 1980s, more than three-quarters of godparents were selected from
close kin, with uncles and aunts of the baptized being the most common
choice (Alfani etal. 2012). This is a situation entirely different from that
found, in the same areas, from the Middle Ages until the seventeenth cen-
tury and after, suggesting that a transformation took place in between. The
few available studies about godparenthood in nineteenth- and twentieth-

century Europe, both in Catholic and Protestant areas, suggest a similar
trend.8 However, if we know the general direction of the transformation,
we are still uncertain about the chronology of a complex process whose
characteristics varied according to different parts of Europe or even the
world. We are sure, though, that this chronology changed according to
country, area and social milieu. In Northern Italy, Cristina Munno has
shown, for Veneto, a large increase in the choices from within kin dur-
ing the nineteenth century and particularly the last three decades,9 while
Guido Alfani has described a similar development for Piedmont (Alfani
2008). However, it would be only after World War II that selection of
godparents from among kin became prevalent. In other parts of Italy, this
would happen even later, such as in Sannio in the central part of the pen-
insula where the 50% threshold of within-kin choices would be exceeded
only after the 1980s (Palumbo 1991, 134137). In other areas, the re-
orientation of choices toward kinship was largely completed by the end
of the eighteenth century. This would be the case of Neckarhausen in
Germany (Sabean 1998) and of Nonantola in the North Italian region of
Emilia (Alfani 2009b). In France, the information collected by folklorists
about the last part of the nineteenth century supports the idea that in rural
areas relatives were preferred as godparents (grandparents for the first-
born; uncles and aunts, followed by cousins or older brothers and sisters
for the others). This has been largely confirmed by historical and anthro-
pological research on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.10 Also in
France, this situation could be the result of a process that had begun in
earlier periods, with detailed genealogical studies suggesting that in some
villages kin could account for 80% of godparents by the eighteenth cen-
tury (Bardet 2009).
It is not easy to explain these differences in the proportion of godpar-
ents selected from kin and in the chronology of the transformation, as
most of the information we have is scattered and sporadic in nature. At
least at first, the increase in choices of godparents from within kin seems
to be a characteristic of social and economic elites. We have hints of this
already for the Middle Ages, and more consistently for the Early Modern
period. In Catholic areas, this difference was probably deepened by the
verticalization of godparenthood after the Council of Trent, a process that
affected mainly lower and middle social strata (Alfani 2008). Belonging
to the higher echelons of the social hierarchy (nobles, officials, merchant
and entrepreneurial elites) logically implied selecting godparents from
44 G. ALFANI
within the same group of social peers (economic partners, political allies),
but also from among relatives. Already during the eighteenth century, the
merchants of Albacete in Spain showed a marked tendency to select their
relations as godparents to their children (Gmez Carrasco 2009), but it is
during the nineteenth century that the difference in behavior at different
levels of the social ladder widened.
It is apparent that the process of familialization of godparenthood
was closely tied to another major transformation (the two developments
reinforced each other): the increasing horizontalization of choices. In the
industrial village of Follina in Northeast Italy during the nineteenth cen-
tury, while it was fairly rare to choose godparents from lower social ranks
than the parents (less than 10% of choices throughout the century), hori-
zontal choices (social peers) increased from about 45% before the 1840s
to more than 60% after the 1850s, with a parallel reduction in the selection
of higher-rank godparents (Munno 2008). In general, the sparse informa-
tion available from around Catholic Europe strongly suggests that god-
parenthood stopped being a means of establishing ties of clientele and
vertical social connections. Instead, it became increasingly common to use
it to strengthen ties within ones own social group.
Of course, this is not to say that networks of clientele based on god-
parenthood disappeared altogether from Catholic Europe (they did not
see, e.g., Fortunata Pisellis (1987) study of how godparenthood could
be used to build political clienteles and to organize voting-control sys-
tems in certain areas of Southern Italy). Also, godparenthood continued
to have an economic significance and was used to establish connections
between different levels of the social ladder (e.g., between workers and
factory owners) throughout the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth
century and later, until todayand this, both in Catholic and in Protestant
areas. It is not possible to go here into details about these processes of
transformation/persistence of social practices, which have been analyzed
elsewhere (Alfani and Gourdon 2012b, 3335, c). What is clear, though,
is that in present-day Europe, godparenthood is prevalently a horizontal
tie connecting mostly relations. Another point to be underlined is that
such development was not explicitly favored by religious authorities, but
corresponds to a somewhat autonomous change in society and culture.
On the basis of the still-limited amount of information available, it is,
however, fair to formulate the hypothesis that the increase in the number
of godparents chosen from within kin is a process common to Catholic
and Protestant Europe. This suggests a similarity in social practices,
notwithstanding the way in which the respective religious authorities had

tried to shape the institution of godparenthood. What is more, theologi-
cal differences were largely canceled by the de facto abolition of spiritual
kinship by the Catholic Church. We could wonder, then, what happened
in Orthodox Europeconsidering that there the ability of the baptismal
ceremony to create spiritual kinship and consequently to establish impedi-
ments to marriage is still explicitly recognized.
If we consider the main change in practices that involved the rest of
the continent, that is the rise of the frequency of intra-kin choices of god-
parents, very limited information is available. For example, in Russia, in
the St Petersburg region, the quota of godparents chosen from within
kin was around 910% at the beginning of the eighteenth century, rising
to 2122% by the beginning of the nineteenth (Muravyeva 2012, 266),
a rise which could suggest a general and growing process analogous to
that described above for Catholic and Protestant Europe, but in this case,
any generalization would be very risky. We would also like to know more
about the social significance of godparenthood in Orthodox areas. A clas-
sic study of godparenthood in the Balkans in the 1960s and earlier by
Hammel (1968) has provided evidence that godparenthood was used to
establish and strengthen relations of solidarity between peers; to show
respect toward a godfather of a higher rank than their own (and some-
times to become his clients); to integrate and finalize marriage alliances;
to overcome disputes and bring an end to blood feuds; and so on. There
is a clear resemblance between these uses and those described for Catholic
Europe in earlier epochs, although possibly with a stronger focus on the
use of godparenthood to prevent violence and maintain peace within frag-
mented and divided societies. However, research currently underway on
contemporary godparenthood in other Orthodox areas seems to suggest a
high variability of actual practices, including in the number of godparents
per baptism (Vasile 2012).
To conclude, the available evidence suggests that from the very begin-
ning, formal norms regulating spiritual kinship have contrastedwith actual
practice. During late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the notion of
spiritual kinship was elaborated largely to contain specific practices involv-
ing baptism and godparents. Later, the norms introduced to regulate
given aspects, and in particular the selection of godparents, proved to be
very ineffective, if not for a specific point: that is, the reduction in the
number of godparents imposed on Catholic Europe by the Council of
Trent (which, however, produced results very different from those hoped
46 G. ALFANI
for by the religious authorities). Lastly, in the more recent centuries, we

find traces of common changes in actual practices throughout Central and
Western Europe, independently from which Christian religion is consid-
ered and from the theology of spiritual kinship, and possibly also including
the Orthodox of Eastern Europe. It is a striking characteristic of godpar-
enthood as a social institution to be able to change and to frustrate most
attempts at bringing it back from the social to the (strictly) sacred sphere.
Recent historical acquisitions strongly hint at a complex and very interest-
ing picturea picture which, however, requires much more coordinated
research to be fully unveiled.
Notes
1. For a fuller reconstruction, see Lynch (1986), Alfani (2009a),
Alfani and Gourdon (2012b).
2. Canonical tradition recognized four forms of kinship (cognatio)
which prohibited marriage and sexual relations: natural kinship or
blood relations, kinship due to alliances or affinity (ensuing from
marriage), legal kinship or adoption, and spiritual kinship (Cimetier
1932).
3. This synod or council is usually called in trullo or trullan
because it took place in a domed hall (troulos) of the imperial pal-
ace of Constantinople. The council played an important role in
establishing differences in rituals and other aspects of religious
practice between the Western Church (which never recognized the
Trullan Synod as ecumenical) and the Eastern Church.
4. See Alfani (2009a) for a complete reconstruction.
5. For a general presentation of the typology, see Alfani (2009a,

4145).
6. For example, in France, in the late Middle Ages, Lyons already fol-
lowed the couple model (one godfather and one godmother),
which the Council of Trent would generalize to most of Catholic
Europe (Couriol 2012).
7. For an updated synthesis, Alfani and Gourdon (2012b, 1725).
More specifically about the economic use of godparenthood, Alfani
and Gourdon (2006, 2012c) and Alfani (2012).
8. See, for example, for Spain, Pitt-Rivers (1958, 1971); for Germany,
Sabean (1998); for Sweden, Bringus (1971).
9. The probability of having a godparent chosen from kin increased

by 168% between the periods 18341845 and 18731888 (Munno
2008).
10. For North Bourgogne, Zonabend (1978); for Lower Brittany,

Segalen (2000); for Pays de Sault, Fine (1984).
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CHAPTER 3
Spiritual Kinship inanAge ofDissent:

Pigeon Fanciers inDarwins England
GillianFeeley-Harnik
How do people figure out the nature of their kin relations based on their
own experiences of life and death processes amidst polarized debates over
the ontological bases of existence? How do specialists in life and death
mattershowever they might be culturally understoodcontribute to
homegrown efforts to understand the nature of kinship? How might a
persons insights into such matters gleaned from familial and occupational
or vocational experiences contribute in turn to the reformation of special-
ists ideas and practices of kinship, for example, in theology, science, or
anthropology?
In earlier work (Feeley-Harnik 2001), I argued that Lewis Henry
Morgans ethnographic research among the Iroquois in western
New York State in the 1840s was motivated in part by an effort to
G. Feeley-Harnik (*)
Anthropology Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_3
52 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
solve a question about suffering and death in Protestant theology posed

by Reverend Joshua McIlvaine, pastor of the Presbyterian church in
Rochester he attended: why the innocent should have to atone for the
sins of the wicked? I argued that Morgan pursued revelation as a human
practice guided by principles of inquiry that he and others were begin-
ning to call science. For Morgan, this included means of knowing
and understanding accessible to incarnate human beings and open to
public scrutiny, as when he insisted that the Grand Order of the Iroquois
should share the results of its research rather than remain a secret society
like Freemasonry.
Like Morgan, Darwin and his contemporaries in Great Britain read
widely in many fields of inquiry, including various Bibles, biblical com-
mentaries, and other biblically inspired works, from novels and poetry
to work in the new sciences. Miltons retelling of the Bible in Paradise
Lost, focusing on what brought death into the world, and all our woe
(1.3in all editions), was very popular in Darwins day and Darwins self-
described chief favourite during his Beagle voyage (18311836), the
one he always chose to take on his excursions (Darwin 1969 [written
in 18761882], 85). In my view (Feeley-Harnik, n.d.), Darwins work in
the 1840s was, like Morgans in those years, motivated by long-standing
biblical questions about life and death processes set in relief by such new
research as Cuviers discoveries published in 1796, showing that whole
faunasreplete with mammoths and wooly rhinoceroseshad gone
extinct before the era of humankind.
In this chapter, I pursue these lines of inquiry further by focusing on
ideas and practices of kinship, religion, and science among the animal
breeders in mid-nineteenth-century England whose practices of artificial
selection provided Darwin with the concept of natural selection basic
to On the Origin of Species (1859). These are my questions: (1) How did
religious pluralism figure into the breeders ideas and practices of kinship
in their familial and their occupational or vocational lives? (2) If they were
turning away from particular sectarian interpretations of kinship, then how
did they characterize their new interpretations? (3) If they were pursuing
religious questions by scientific means (in these or other terms), wherein
lay the religious or spiritual nature of their inquiries as they understood
them? (4) How might their new understandings of religion and science be
related to changing ideas and practices of kinship in their own lives or in
the lives of those around them?
SPIRITUAL KINSHIP INANAGE OFDISSENT: PIGEON FANCIERS INDARWINS... 53
Spiritual Kinship: Some Issues

What is spiritual kinship in the Abrahamic religions? Guido Alfanis chap-
ter in this volume shows that the notion of spiritual kinship developed
during the early Middle Ages in the Eastern Church, spreading to the
Western from the eighth century (Alfani, Chap. 2., this volume, p. 30).
Despite the East-West Schism of 1054 CE between Catholic and Orthodox
Christianities, there were no relevant differences across Christian Europe
in spiritual kinship and in related matters, like godparenthood. By the
end of the fifteenth century, Europeans firmly believed that the baptismal
rite conferred new ties of kinship on the people involved in the ceremony.
Through baptism, participants became spiritual kin defined by contrast
to fleshly kin whose relations they governed henceforth, especially in mar-
riage. The Protestant Reformation beginning in the early 1500s marked
the end of this unity in diversity. Luther rejected the concept of spiri-
tual kinship as having no biblical basis, yet perpetuated the notion among
Protestants by supporting godparents as childrens tutors in Christianity.
The Council of Trent (15451563) reaffirmed spiritual kinship among
Catholics, but redefined practices of godparenthood. The four kinds of
kinship (cognatio) defined in canonical texts continued to be recog-
nized: carnal relations of generation (consanguinitas), marital relations of
affinity (affinitatis), spiritual relations of baptism (compaternitas, fraterni-
tas spiritualis), and legal relations of adoption.1 Ongoing debates over the
nature of these relations increasingly differentiated ideas and practices of
spiritual kinship among Protestants and Catholics, and their practices from
those of Eastern Orthodox Christians over the next several centuries. Yet
both Catholics and Protestants converged on what Alfani considers to be
by far the most important transformation in godparenthood in Europe
in the last three centuries: familialization, the increasing preference for
choosing kin as godparents, during which baptism came to be perceived
as a celebration of the family.
As Alfani and Gourdon (2012a, 102324) note in their assessment of
the economic consequences of these debates, the Protestant reformation
in the sixteenth century cancelled the holy character of spiritual kinship
for Protestants, but did not alter the social and economic use of ritual-
ized ties. Protestants and Catholics entrepreneurs alike continued to use
godparenthood or marriage witnessing to protect business ties socially and
ritually up [to] today, whatever their notions of the spirituality involved.
54 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
The most important purpose of these rituals was to create trust between
unrelated parties, thus allowing agreements to be reached even in situa-
tions of imperfect information and reducing transaction costs (Alfani and
Gourdon 2012a, 102324, my emphasis; see Alfani and Gourdon 2012b).
Alfani and Gourdon argue that their analysis of godparenthood among
Protestant minorities can be applied more broadly to other milieux, and
to other kinds of formalized ties [for example] the Jewish elites of Paris in
18751914, where, of course, godparenthood could not be used, [and]
witnessing to civil marriage played a comparable role in building trust
across social differences (Alfani and Gourdon 2012a, 1023; see Bahloul,
Chap. 5, this volume).
How inter-religious debates among the Abrahamic religions across
Eurasia might have affected diverse and changing Christian ideas and
practices of spiritual and carnal kinship, and vice versa, are still open
questions. Baptism and godparenthood in Christianity are like circumci-
sion in Judaism in being situatedas Goldberg (2003, 45) says of circum-
cisionat a node between kinship links and communal structure [where]
social status could be enacted, enhanced, and contested. Jews in medieval
Europe, where circumcision in the synagogue became a norm, created a
new positionmaster of the circumcision (baal brit , m.; baalat ha-
brit, f.)for the person who helped prepare the baby, brought it to the
synagogue, and often held it during the operation.2 The derivation of the
later Yiddish term sandek (sandak in Ladino) for the person holding the
baby from a Greek word for a godparent in the rite of baptism, given a
common emphasis on the relationship between the parents of the child
and the co-parents (Goldberg ibid.), suggests the possibility of inter-
religious communication.3 Parkes (2003, 2005, 308) argues that godpar-
enthood in eastern and western Christianity and milk kinship in Islam
are both forms of adoptive kinship that coexisted throughout much
of Eurasia and North Africa as institution[s] of clientage in tributary
states. But he does not examine possible cases of mutual influence where
they overlapped.
How might diverse Christian understandings of spiritual and carnal
generation have changed in relation to new theories of animal and human
generation among naturalists, especially after the intensification of experi-
mental animal breeding following the introduction of Merino sheep into
northern Europe in the mid-1700s (Wood and Orel 2001, 2632)? This
question requires us to re-examine not only inter-religious relations and
key terms like spiritual and carnal or natural, butalso secular, the term
given to worldly matters since the early 1500s. For historian Jonathan
Sheehan, the decline of religion after 1800 [is] a fantastic product of
the secularization of scholarship in the twentieth century rather than a
reflection of any real historical trend; secularization in Europe since the
Enlightenment needs a thorough reassessment (Sheehan 2003, 1063, cit-
ing Anderson 1995, 648; see Wahrman 2003). McKinnon and Cannell
(2013, 2836), following Cannell (2010, 2011, 2013a, b), note signifi-
cant parallels in ideologies of secularization and ideologies of status to
contractfor example, in claims about the privatization or dwindling
importance of religion and kinship in secular modern lifeand suggest
that these ostensibly separate domains should be analyzed in a common
social framework.
Many new Protestant sects originated alongside the new scientific soci-
eties and clubs that began to proliferate across the Anglophone Atlantic
in the early 1800s. These include The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
day Saints founded in Fayette, New York, in 1830 (Cannell, Chap. 7,
this volume), the Plymouth Brethren movement founded in Dublin in
18271828, which influenced the formation of the Corinthian Bible
Chapel and Dixon Bible Chapel in Atlanta (Thomas, Chap. 10, this vol-
ume), and the many holiness and later Pentecostal churches emergent from
evangelical Protestant sects (especially Methodism), eventually contribut-
ing to the formation of the Pentecostal Eternal Hope church in Buffalo,
New York, and the Baitshepi Apostolic church in Gaborone, Botswana
(Klaits, Chap. 6, this volume; see Klaits 2010, 5153).
My case study is based on the assumption that sectarians and ani-
mal enthusiasts shared common concerns in debates over kinship
spanning life-and-death issues carnal, natural, spiritual, secular, or oth-
erwise, that only many decades later came to be sharply distinguished
as religious and scientific, and therefore a broad comparative perspec-
tive would benefit our understanding of their common and divergent
interests. In this study of pigeon-breeders in nineteenth-century Great
Britain, I explore three areas in particular: (1) shifting ideas and prac-
tices concerning the nature of proof and evidence in theology and
natural science alike; (2) disillusionment with sectarianism, associated
with movements toward non-denominationalism and new bases for
moral universalism; (3) and in keeping with their universalist aspira-
tions (however diverse), the development of more inclusive ethical
principles like truth and trust drawing on ideas and practices of kinship
long entwined with friendship.
56 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
Pigeon-Breeding inDarwins Origin ofSpecies

Like Morgan, Darwin worked directly with people who were involved
in questions about life, death, and kinship in their everyday lives, includ-
ing their occupations and their avocations. During his five-year around-
the-world explorations of geology and zoology on the H.M.S. Beagle in
18311836, Darwin focused on the study of animals and plants in the
wild. Almost immediately on returning to Great Britain, he began study-
ing domestic animals and plants. He worked with breeders at home and
abroad, largely through correspondence, but eventually in the mid-1850s,
he began breeding fancy pigeons. In these years (18551857), he worked
directly with tradesmen in London who bred fancy pigeons as a hobby,
becoming a member of two of their clubs, albeit briefly (Feeley-Harnik
2004, 2007).
His explicit purpose in breeding pigeons was to provide a strik-
ing example of the transformative powers of sexual reproduction: how
the systematic selection of mates in breeding produces diversity (if not
actually speciation in this case). His initial inquiries into the breeding of
animals and plants in the late 1830s were on landed estates, first those
of his kin (Darwins and Wedgwoods). Only gradually, as he decided in
the mid-1850s that he would try breeding for himself, did he chose to
breed pigeons, taking advantage of the qualities that had made them ide-
ally suited to close quarters with humans for millennia: male and female
pigeons can be easily mated for life; and thus different breeds can be kept
together in the same aviary (Darwin 1859, 28).
Feral pigeons were as populous as people in London, and beloved inhab-
itants of the city, especially around landmarks like St. Pauls Cathedral and
the Guildhall. Hyde Park and Regent Park were lined with dove cotes
belonging to the town houses around their peripheries. Bird-sellers kept
shops throughout London in wealthy and poor areas alike, and poulter-
ers who carried fancy pigeons could be found in most neighborhoods.
Darwin was surrounded by pigeons in city and country alike, yet they were
not there for the taking. Trust was a key factor in getting good fancy birds,
which fanciers exchanged like art, not meat (Fig.3.1).
For help, Darwin contacted William Yarrell, a tradesman, long-time
naturalist, and fellow member of the Linnean Society and the Zoological
Society of London. Yarrell was an important intermediary among the
several classes of people who bred animals and plants, including Darwin.
Jones & Yarrell, Booksellers & Newsmen, was a family business run with
Fig. 3.1 Feeding Pigeons in the Guildhall Yard, engraving by George Goodwin
Kilburne (Anon. 1877b, 612). According to the anonymous author of the story,
tradition identifies the flock of some hundred as the descendants of a few wild
pigeons taken under Civic protection by the Guildhall. Domiciled on its roof,
they walk the Guildhall Yard amid crowds of people convinc[ed] of their perfect
security from molestation. Mr. John Roe, long-time officer of the Guildhall
Police Court, feeds them daily at 10:00 AM (Anon. 1877b, 603, 606).
a paternal cousin in the parish of St. James, where British aristocracy and
gentry had kept their houses and clubs since the 1600s and their scientific
societies since the early 1800s. Yarrell & Jones dealt with almost all of
them (Forbes 1962, 50506). Yarrell introduced Darwin to John Baily
& Son, poulterers and dealers in live birds, whose shop was nearby in the
West End; Darwin got his first birds there. Yarrell also introduced him to
William Bernhard Tegetmeier, a journalist and pigeon fancier; Yarrell had
been the landlord of Tegetmeiers fathers house in St. James (Richardson
1916, 100). Tegetmeier introduced Darwin to fellow fanciers and to the
58 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
two pigeon-breeding clubsthe Southwark Columbarian Society and

the Philoperisteron Societywho accepted him into their memberships
(C. Darwin to W. E. Darwin, 29 [Nov. 1855], Burkhardt et al. 5:509;
C.Darwin to Tegetmeier, 1 Jan. [1856], Burkhardt etal. 6:1; Richardson
1916, 10102).
Religious andSocial Diversity intheEmerging

Sciences ofthePigeon Fancy
The members of the Southwark Columbarian Society were little men as
Darwin described them, referring to their size, social status, presumptions,
odd customs, little birds, and absurd claims. So he wrote to his eldest son
William in a letter in late November 1855, as he prepared for an evening
meeting in south London near London Bridge:
I fancy, I shall meet a strange set of odd men.Mr. Brent was a very queer
little fish; after dinner he handed me a clay pipe, saying here is your pipe
as if it was a matter of course that I shd. smoke. Another odd little man
(N.B. all Pigeons [sic] Fanciers are little men, I begin to think) & he showed
me a wretched little Polish Hen, which he said he would not sell for 50
& hoped to make 200 by her, as she had a black top-knot. (C.Darwin to
William Darwin, 29 November 1855, in Burkhardt etal., 5:509)
They were tradesmen, and, as Alfani and Gourdon would surmise, many
of them came from the same or related trades. Like William Yarrell and
Tegetmeier, many of the pigeon fanciers Darwin got to knowlike Bult,
Esquilant, Weir, and Wolstenholmewere in the paper-based communica-
tion trades, ranging from newsagents shops (which also sold books, pam-
phlets, stationary and related print and engraving jobs), to account books
and other paper goods related to finance and banking, to journalism
writing and illustrating. Brent came from a long line of ship-builders, but
the business had begun to collapse in his grandfathers generation, and
he also lived by writing. Wicking was a brewer, Eaton and Corker were
merchant tailors, and Esquilant was connected through his father, mother,
and fathers sister to the decorative leather, silk-weaving, clothing, uphol-
stery, fringing, framing, and molding trades. From the perspective of
landed gentry like Darwin they came from lower classes then associated
with trades and crafts. (Darwins father was a physician, the Wedgwoods
manufactured pottery.) However, they shared aspirations to move up
in the world. The Philoperisteron (Pigeon Lovers in fanciful Greek)

had been formed in 1847 by Southwark and City fanciers who wanted a
West-end Society (Fulton n.d. [18741876], 385). Furthermore, many
of the pigeon-breeders shared with each other and with Darwin a broad
background as Protestant Nonconformists or Dissenters.
The Anglican Church became (and remains) the established Church of
England in the wake of the Revolution, the era that Horace Mannorga-
nizer of the census of Religious Worship in England and Wales which
accompanied the census of the population of Great Britain in 1851called
the birthday of religious sects in England owing to the political free-
doms that allowed them to expand (Mann 1854, 1011). Nonconformists
were those who refused after the Act of Uniformity in 1662 to conform
to every precept in the Book of Common Prayer. Dissenters came into use
following the Act of Toleration of 1689, which exempted Nonconformists
who pledged their allegiance to the Crown from having to attend the
services of the established Church (Mann 1854, 810). Polemical debates
kept both terms in use. The numbers of Anglicans and Nonconformists
in attendance on Census Sunday in 1851 were roughly equal (Mann
1854, Table 23). However, the Anglican Church (unified in name, but
theologically and organizationally diverse) was one among many more
kinds of churches: 35 different religious communities or sects,27
native and indigenous, 9 foreign. These included three sects of Scottish
Presbyterians, five sects of Baptists, and nine sects of Methodists. Mann
did not count the many more congregations of religious worshippers
who did not seem sufficiently numerous and consolidated to be called a
sect (Mann 1854, 2). His count did include the Latter-day Saints or
Mormons and also Brethren (or Plymouth Brethren), despite the fact that
theyas he notedsaw themselves as individual Christians [who] utterly
refuse to be identified with any [sect]. Their existence is, in fact, a protest
against all sectarianism (Mann 1854, 41). Others called them Brethren
perhaps because this term was common among Dissenters generally.
Latter-day Saints were listed with various Catholic and Orthodox groups
under Other Christian Churches; Foreign designated Protestants
from Germany, France, and the Netherlands; Jews were a unique cat-
egory; Muslims, Hindus, and other non-Christian groups were not
listed (Mann 1854, 2).4
Darwins life shows the complex affiliations characteristic of Dissenters
with the means to forge ties with the established Church of England when
needed. Darwins mother (Susannah Wedgwood) adhered to her familys
60 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
Unitarianism, illegal in England until 1813 (Mann 1854, 25), just four
years before her death. His father and grandfather, Robert Waring and
Erasmus Darwin, were also Unitarians, skeptical verging on athe-
ism yet willing to subscribe to the 39 articles of the Church of England
in furthering their childrens professional advancement. So the Darwin
daughters were baptized as Unitarians, while the sonsErasmus and
Charleswere baptized as Anglicans. When Charles Darwin gave up the
study of medicine at Edinburgh in 1827, Robert Waring Darwin sug-
gested he adopt the 39 articles required to enter Cambridge and Oxford
Universities, thus taking the first step to ordination in the Anglican church
(Pallen and Pearn 2013, 21213). Pallen and Pearn (ibid.) suggest this
blend of skepticism, religious dissent, and pragmatic conformity character-
ized Darwins relationship with the church for the rest of his life.
William Bernhard Tegetmeier (18161912) was the eldest son of
Godfrey Conrad Tegetmeier of Hanover, who became a British citi-
zen, served as a surgeon in the Royal Navy, and later, after settling in
Buckinghamshire, then London, also an apothecary in the West End.
William Tegetmeiers son-in-law wrote later that [d]espite his German
name and possibly even Jewish ancestry [he] knew no word of German, nor
encouraged his children to learn it (Richardson 1916, 220). Tegetmeier
was a skeptic; his religious beliefs emerge only in Richardsons discus-
sion of how he helped Darwin:
Tegetmeier was, of course, a firm believer in Evolution, but I do not think

he troubled himself much about theories: his life was too fully occupied
with fact, with living interests with men and women and other animals,
to worry about abstruse metaphysical ideas. Agnostic he may have been
called, but atheist never at least justly. He allowed others the same free-
dom of thought and belief he claimed for himself, and he never disparaged
religion. His wife and family were members of the Church of England, to
which he subscribed, if not in doctrine, in money, to his last days. Referring
to his reputed agnosticism, I asked him once if he denied the existence of
God. My boy, he replied, how could I, when every leaf on every tree
proclaims its Maker, and is a living witness to the power, wisdom, and provi-
dence of the Creator of the leaf and of life and of all things? (Richardson
1916, 20506)
Richardsons concluding words convey the resistance to sectarian labels

and short-cut theologies that seem to have characterized the breeders
relations with one another as well: With this I was and am content to leave
Tegetmeiers religious beliefs: they were between him and his Maker not
me and my readers (ibid.).
Bernard Peirce Brent (18221867), whom Darwin described to his
son as a very queer little fish, was named after both his paternal (Brent)
and maternal (Peirce) forebears. His fathers family had been ship-builders
since the early 1700s, but the increasingly successful business had col-
lapsed in the generation of his grandfather, Samuel Brent (17601814),
then at Greenland Dock on the Thames, and closed in 1828 (Streit 2000).
His father William became a miller in a rural village southeast of London,
and his son B.P.Brent worked abroad in his youth (perhaps as an overseas
trader for his mothers mother in Dover), before returning to England
where he married Laura Marsh of Dover in a General Baptist meeting
house in 1849. While B.P.Brent eked out a precarious living by writing,
supporting his wife and eventually fourteen children (he died at 44 before
the birth of the fourteenth), he became one of the most highly respected
contemporary experts on pigeons besides Tegetmeier, based on his essays
in the Gardeners Chronicle and Gentlemans Companion (later Journal of
Horticulture) and book, The Pigeon Book (1859, in a 3rd edition by 1871).
Brents fathers and mothers families were General (Unitarian)
Baptists of long-standing.5 A letter that Jane Peirce Brent wrote to B.P.
Brent, her firstborn, on 28 April 1828, when she thought she was dying,
shows the Truth Honour follows of course, tolerance and enlight-
ened personal judgment she hoped her son would achieve in his religious
and worldly affairs alike.
The established church is the religion I wish you to embrace in attending

public worship once on the lords day is my particular request but I would
not have you suppose I think the established church the only true religion.
No, I believe the good of every denomination will be happy. God regards
the heart not the outward form but read the Bible and form your own
opinion and decide for yourself. As a voice coming from the grave I trust
that you will duly consider and weight the importance of every word and
sentence contained herein for your good. (Richard Brent, Personal Home
Page)
Baptists, as Mann (1854, 20, his emphasis) explained to his readers,

rejected infant baptism, and thus the established Churchs use of spon-
sors like godparents of infants Christianity. Adults [are] therefore held
62 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
to be the only proper subjects of the ordinance; joining the church was a
later choice. Jane Peirce Brents letter, written when her son was five years
old, anticipating that she would be dead when he came of age, conveys her
understanding of the spiritual kinship between them that could be made
or broken by how he would choose to act on her dying words. At the
top of her letter she wrote: For Bernard Peirce Brent: not to be opened
by any other person, and he not to have it until he can read it himself.
B.P.Brent inherited the letter when his mother died four years later, and
he kept it for his descendants together with his mothers diaryPriscilla
Tavenor her Booke Aprill 24 :1678:a record of deaths, births, and
marriages in the Peirce and related families, to which he too contributed.
In his study of the involvement of Quakers and Jews in science in
Great Britain in the nineteenth century, historian Geoffrey Cantor argues
that scientific institutions were among the few areas in public life where
Dissenters and other religious minorities and Anglicans could congregate
and exchange views. Although some professional organizations, like the
Royal College of Physicians, were closed to non-Anglicans, most scien-
tific organizations, including the Royal Society of London for Improving
Natural Knowledge (so called from 1663) and the British Association
for the Advancement of Science (founded 1831) were open to all. They
adopted a religiously neutral stance and endorsed the view that science
is a form of knowledge that transcends religious differences (Cantor
2005, 103).
Tegetmeiers pan-theist response to his son-in-laws question about his
reputed agnosticismevery leaf is a living witness to the power,
wisdom, and providence of the Creator of the leaf and of life and of all
Things (cited above)expressed the common view of his fellow fanciers.
George Ure of Dundee concluded his memoir, Our Fancy Pigeons (Ure
1886, 282) with these words: The study of Natures works leads directly
to more intelligent appreciation of the Almighty Power, to greater rever-
ence for the Unseen Cause, to more sincere and heartfelt adoration of
Natures God,in short, to higher and nobler ideas of religion than all
the creeds can supply. How did the fanciers from diverse backgrounds
realize their universalizing moral, philosophical, and intellectual ideals in
practice? What kinds of social relations did they strive for? How did they
relate their various religious, scientific, and avocational interests in pairing
pigeons to their familial experiences of such matters among their human
kin?
Inter-Religious Scientific Sociality ofBreeders

inHomes andClubs
The pigeon fanciers were involved in home-based sciences. Judging from

those who wrote books, like Brent, Eaton, Tegetmeier, and Ure, they got
into the pigeon fancy through a relativefather, uncle, or brotheror
otherwise a close childhood friend. Emma Darwins familys correspon-
dence shows that her mother and Darwins mother (Emmas FZ) kept and
exchanged pigeons when their children were young (Meteyard 1871, 261;
see 357), but Darwins correspondence never mentions them. As adults,
the fanciers raised their birds in their own homes and yards in the city,
andin some casesthe growing suburbs where Londoners began mov-
ing in the 1840s after the expansion of omnibus lines and railroads. They
also organized themselves in pubs and clubs around London through
which they connected their homes to ever widening worlds.
Darwins description of the Southwark Columbarians meeting place as
a gin-palace in the Borough (Darwin to R.H. Huxley, 27 Nov. [1859],
Burkhardt etal., 7:404) reflects his experience of the scientific and social
clubs patronized by the aristocracy and gentry, which proliferated in
the West End in the years after the end of the Napoleonic War in 1815.
These included scientific societies like the Linnean Society, the London
Zoological Society, and the London Geological Society, to which Darwin
belonged, and the Atheneum Club into which he was invited through
social contacts who included his brother Erasmus who was already a mem-
ber. Having no funds for real estate, the pigeon fanciers clubs met monthly
in taverns, inns, chop-houses, and coffee-rooms. Gin Palaces were the
latest thing since the 1830sgas-lit, mirrored, and mahoganiedwhere
smart damsels rather than old Boniface with his red nose served the
clientele (Dodd 1856, 471). They staged their annual shows in steadily
finer venues, culminating in the late 1860s in the Crystal Palace, built in
Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, then moved to the wealthy
south London suburb of Sydenham in 1854.
What did pigeon fanciers do when they met? A reporter for the
Illustrated London News covered the Philoperisterons annual show held
at the famed Freemasons Tavern, Great Queen Street in 1853. Just as
Horace Mann (1854, 3), contemplat[ing] such multiplied diversities in
the Religious Census of 1851, felt he should supply some sketch, how-
ever slight, of the prominent characteristics of each sect to reveal
64 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
admitted truth [and] erroneous doctrines, so the reporter gave his read-
ers a glimpse into the diversities of cosmopolitan Londons many clubs:
The Philo Peristeron Society have usually held from twelve to sixteen meet-
ings in the year. At some of these, young pigeons are shown; at others, the
adult birds. When members are requested to attend, they are expected to
produce at least two choice birds. Each class of birds [e.g., Carriers, Barbs,
Pouters, etc.] is kept separate; and at a meeting of amateurs of the higher
order, it may be held as certain that the rarest productions, each of its own
kind, are exhibited. After the show the members of the society sat down to a
recherch dinner at the Freemasons Tavern. (Anon. 1853, 38)
In short, the show pen was central to their monthly meals, which they
attended with their choice birds in chambered carrying baskets.
The show pens of the Philoperisteron Society, depicted in the London
Illustrated News (Anon. 1853, 37), were large free-standing rectangles,
enclosed by thin iron rods, floored in green baize, and framed with
slender mahogany posts, twisted into spires like the wood and stone
finials of contemporary neo-Gothic church buildings and furniture.
The Scotch fancier, Robert Fulton (n.d. [18741876], 385)in touch
with London fanciers through his work in the silk trade and resident in
London for some years as a pigeon-dealerrecalled the noted show
pen of the Feather Club, which met at Mr. Redmonds house in the
Borough (south London) back in the 1820s. When Mr. Redmond
moved, he sold it to the City Columbarian Society: This pen has
since been the distinguishing feature of all meetings of that society.
The sociality of the breeders meetings centered on the eating, drink-
ing, pipe-sharing, toasting, and storytelling entwined with showing in
which people were identified with the finest qualities of their beauti-
ful birds: Bult with his exceptionally immaculate Pouters, Eaton with
his Almond Tumblers, Jones Percival with his Dragons, Tegetmeier
with his racing pigeons, P. Jones with his Barbs, or Esquilant with
his elegant Jacobins. Birds might be judged against bets of food or
drink like a bottle of wine, bowl of punch, or a rump and dozen
(Eaton 1852, 26); they might be bought and sold; and the fanciers
Gentlemen of the Fancymight become Brother Fanciers to one
another in the process.6
Truth-Seeking: Judging Descent inBirds
In his analysis of Quakers religious convictions about their scientific

research in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Cantor (2005, 23347) is
able to be quite specific about how the Quakers saw the workings of the
Inner Light in their studies of nature because they discussed these matters
explicitly among themselves. Given the complexities in religious affilia-
tions, Cantor (2005, 358360) is still careful to include an appendix on
Who is to count as a Quaker or as a Jew?
In the inter-sectarian gatherings of the breeders beginning in the 1840s
and 1850s, it is more difficult to determine what is to count as religious or
as scientific. The Quakers doctrine of the Inner Light was based on a the-
ology of the priesthood of all believers broadly shared among Dissenters.
Perhaps its most powerful expression was in statements about truth-
seeking, in particular, the capacity and obligation of every human being to
seek truth for him or herself, not to depend upon clerical intermediaries or
other self-described experts, and to be respectfully open to listening
as writer and editor Edward Miall (1848, 107) put it in an essay on The
Listener written for his Nonconformist newspaper published in London.
Let it not be imagined that we take truth to be hopelessly buried in uncer-

tainty. On the contrary, we believe it is to be met with and recognized
oftener, and in many more quarters, than is commonly supposed. The
spirit against which we protest is that which persists in looking for truth
only in one direction, from one position, and under one aspect, and which
obstinately refuses to look for it elsewhere. That condition of mind is not a
favourable one, which turns generalizations, as soon as they are formed, into
rigid petrefactions, and thus fixes them against all further change.
John Matthews Eaton, the tailor who was president of the Southwark
Columbarian Society when Darwin joined, used this quote from Locke as
the epigraph to his Treatise on the Art of Breeding and Managing Tame,
Domesticated, and Fancy Pigeons (Eaton 1852, title page): All that a
Man knows, or ever will know, is by Observation or Reflection. Locke.7
Ideals of truth were crucial to evaluations of descent in particular. The
breeders were interested in pedigrees. But like Charles Dickens in The
Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (serialized in 18431844), they
mocked the pretensions of the fake pedigrees that had become stereotypi-
cally associated with the genealogies of the nobility and gentry. Dickenss
66 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
Introductory, concerning the Pedigree of the Chuzzlewit Family, gave

the laughably classic case:
As no lady or gentleman, with any claims to polite breeding, can possi-

bly sympathise with the Chuzzlewit Family without being first assured of
the extreme antiquity of the race, it is a great satisfaction to know that it
undoubtedly descended in a direct line from Adam and Eve; and was, in the
very earliest times [in the Garden of Eden], closely connected with the agri-
cultural interest [Dickens dig at landed gentry]. If it should ever be urged
by grudging and malicious persons, that a Chuzzlewit, in any period of the
family history, displayed an overweening amount of family pride, surely the
weakness will be considered not only pardonable but laudable, when the
immense superiority of the house to the rest of mankind, in respect of this
its ancient origin, is taken into account. (Chap. 1in all editions)
B. P. Brent documented his growing familys kin relations in Priscilla

Tavenors Book begun in 1678, the ancestral work that his mother inher-
ited from her mother and bequeathed to her son. W.B. Tegetmeier hap-
pened to get a copy of the Life History Album (1902) for review when he
was in his mid-eighties, the second edition of the late Dr. Mahomeds
Life History Album, rearranged by Francis Galton, of Eugenics fame,
as his son-in-law described it. Richardson (1916, xvii) found the book
partly filled in [but] the Genealogy has many important particulars.8
Tegetmeier had spent five years as an apprentice to his father to become
a doctor and apothecary, and another five in coursework at University
College London, followed by more medical training before becoming in
1859 a journalist at the Field for some fifty years. As head of the Poultry
and Pigeon Department, he specialized in the domestic and natural sci-
ences and their economies, including the industrial aspects of poultry-
breeding, and came to feel that the fanciers interests in curious points
were too trivial (Richardson 1916, 1022, 14043; see pp.22527).
Mass poultry-farming was the forerunner of industrial breeding, feeding,
and fattening in Great Britain.9
Like Tegetmeier, B. P. Brent took pride in the scientific bases of the
pigeon fancy in his contribution to the Manuals for the Many series pub-
lished by the office of the Journal of Horticulture and Cottage Gardener in
Fleet Street. Noting that the judging and classifying of fancy Pigeons is
creating considerable attention at the present time, his Pigeon Book for the
Many (1859, 1) is based on a scientific and natural classification from
the outset. Beginning with accounts of wild doves and pigeons (starting
with those native to Great Britain), he appears to suggest that fancy

pigeons in all their extraordinary variety might have originated from the
common Rock Dove, a controversial claim for some fanciers. But most of
the book is taken up with accounts of the contemporary classifications of
fancy pigeons, including whatever historical material he can muster con-
cerning their relationships, without committing to their ultimate origins.
Brent later tells the reader that he has raised pigeons all my life, at
times a great many, in England and in Prussia and France (1859, 101).
In short, he combined lifelong experience in breeding with an unusually
broad international knowledge of the fancy that his contemporaries greatly
admired. His ultimate mission is to convince the old fanciers that the
new kinds of pigeons created by continental fanciers are as distinctive and
beautiful as the ancient classics. Indeed the new birds defy any one of
the old fanciers, who call them rubbish, to produce the like from the Blue
Rock, or Chequered Dovehouse Pigeons, by any system of domestication
they may please to invent (1859, 1).
The well-known Scotch fancier, James Huie, in a review of Tegetmeiers
Pigeons Their Structure, Habits, and Varieties (1868b) repeating Darwins
claim in Origin (1859) that all our varieties have been derived from
one and the same wild species (1868b, 2), challenged them both. No
one, he argued, can write on this subject satisfactorily, even to himself,
however scientific he may be, unless he be a Pigeon fancier and one of
practical experience (Huie 1868, 63). By this Huie meant the years upon
years of trial, error, considered judgment, intuition, and good fortune
in matching and managing pigeons required to create even a single
beautiful bird, much less a line or strain of descendants consistent in their
distinctive qualities.
The fanciers were variously interested in the scientific classification and
nature of wild and domestic pigeons. Their common interest was to cre-
ate exceptionally beautiful birds by the informed selection of breeding
pairs over generations: perfecting kinds of birds that had been recognized
for centuries, developing ever more perfect forms of more recently rec-
ognized kinds, and creating unexpected new kinds of beautiful birds in
the process. Darwin (1859, 34) used the breeders practices of artificial
selection as an analogy for his concept of natural selection by downplay-
ing their efforts at methodical selection and highlighting the kind of
Selection, which may be called Unconscious, happening in the process.
Yet in Great Britain as a whole, the breeders practice of selection as a
reasoned process of experimentation, trial and error, steadily stripped of
68 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
their emphasis on personal intuition and good fortune, came to dominate

agricultural production alongside the expansion of factory production in
other sectors of the national economy, resulting in the industrial produc-
tion of animals, beginning with poultry.
Trust-Seeking: Birds andPeople

The breeders recognized and idealizedin some cases, reveredthe
pigeon as a quintessentially biblical bird. Their sources were not only
bibles, but biblical dictionaries, and the growing category of natural his-
tories of the bible, as well as hymnals and other religious song and story
books. So they would have encountered the religious imagery of the birds
in their hymns and stories in church and in homes, if not in the austere
architecture of their chapels. At least in some cases, they could have drawn
on even more personal sources.
B.P.Brent inherited from his father William Brent a book that his grand-
father Samuel Brent wrote for his children in 1811: A Fathers Present to
His Children, Written for Their Amusement & Instruction. Samuel dedi-
cated the book to his father and the memory of his dead mother with
gratitude to God and to them for the Religious course of life set before
me by you, both in doctrine and precept I esteem it the greatest bless-
ing of my Life (Brent 1811, iv, his emphasis). Writing his book was an
act of spiritual kin-making across generations, the fathers purpose being
to pass on the religious teachings he learned from his ancestral forebears
to his children, including their favorite hymns, prayers, stories, and much
else. He prefaced his dedication with this statement: This Book is the
Gift of the Author, and is never to be sold. Freely Ye Receive Freely Give
[Brent 1811, 11, citing Matthew 18.8, his emphasis]. His gift opens on
a small engraved portrait of himself facing on the title page a vignette of
Noahs dove holding an olive branch over these lines from a hymn by the
Nonconformist Isaac Watts: Thus Heavenly Peace, with balmy wing /
Shades and bedews the whole! (Fig.3.2).
The fanciers discussions of the biblical life of pigeons were typically a
springboard to more extensive historical explorations going well before
biblical times and into other religious faiths. Darwin (1859, 27) himself
commented, Pigeons have been watched and tended with the utmost
care, and loved by many people for thousands of years in several quar-
ters of the world. The birds names evoked their cosmopolitan origins
past and present: Oriental Rollers, Barbs (thought to be from the Barbary
Fig. 3.2 Engraved portrait of Saml Brent Esq. and vignette of Noahs Dove
by J. Scott at the front of Brents A Fathers Present to his Children (1811).
Courtesy of The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle,
NewYork Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
Coast of Africa), Turbits of Eastern origin, Owls from the East either
discovered or created at all events perfected by Mahommedan fanci-
ers, Damacenes and Capuchins Lahores, and Burmese all of Eastern
origin Asiatics more particularly speaking, of Indian origin [and]
well appreciated and cultivated in Cairo and Alexandria, Scandaroons of
Persian origin, German toys, including Hyacinth, Victoria, Suabian,
Porcelain, Starling, Fire, Ice, Priest, Brunswick, Letz, among others
(Fulton n.d. [18741876], 192, 225, 243, 289, 299, 333, 337, 341, 345).
Through the ports of London and other major cities in Great Britain, the
birds had long circulated with other exotic goods like silks and spices.
Darwin did historical research on his own, and he learned from people
like Yarrell and Tegetmeier about antiquarian books on the pigeon fancy.
70 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
Fig. 3.3 Feeding Pigeons in the Courtyard of the Mosque at Bajazid,

Constantinople: Sketch by Our Special Artist [Melton Prior], Illustrated London
News, 17 February 1877, 149. The sketch is to illustrate ordinary incidents in the
social life of that city. One of them is the daily feeding of the flock of pigeons kept
in the courtyard of the Mosque of Bajazid. This is regarded as a laudable act of
piety, as well as of natural kindliness and benevolence, in which many of the devout
Moslem are willing to take part (Anon 1877a, 166).
The fanciers own discussions of the great antiquity of the birds, and the
respect accorded them across religious faiths, could only have supported
his observations. Their discussions were occasionally polemical, but more
often expressed their fascination that humans veneration of these crea-
tures transcended any one particular faith (Fig.3.3).
Even the laconic B.P. Brent makes these points: In India a great rage
for them [fancy pigeons] exists among the inhabitants, and I have met
with an account of the flying fancy in Delhi. The Persians are also fond of
Pigeons, and all Mahomedans regard them as sacred, on account of one
having once saved the life of the Prophet. In Kohls account of Russia, the
fondness of the merchants for this bird is also alluded to, and by them it is
regarded a sacrilege to kill a bird in whose form the Holy Ghost descended
on our Saviour (1859, 99). Writing a generation later, Lyell (1875, 302)
is even more emphatic, but his words also convey more of the contradic-
tions involved: Of late years the fanciers of this country have had their
eyes opened in many ways as to the universality of the fancy. Who would
have imagined that from the interior of the lately half-barbarous Russia
would come the wonderful Trumpeters we now see, or from Africa the
beautiful little Owls? Both, without a doubt, the perfection of their types;
and besides which what we had before seen no better than half-bred.
Walking in the southern suburb of Calcutta known as Garden Reach, or
little Oude, after the ex-King of Oude held captive there, whose beau-
tiful birds have made the area the head-quarters of pigeon-flying, he
finds: I have been struck with Shakespeares words, One touch of nature
makes the whole world kin. The usual dark scowl that generally meets the
European from the villainous-looking Mussulman, fanatic parasite of his
ex-Majesty of Oude, would give way, and the swarthy countenance of the
Eastern fancier would light up with a smile, when I have stopped to talk
about pigeons. Then all the rest would be forgotten, and nothing remain
but two brother fanciers.
The fanciers ideals of birds and humans are best examined in their lives,
where Gentlemen of the Fancy could be transformed into brother fan-
ciers who might become spiritual kin as witnesses to marriages or close
trusted friends counted as kin in England in the early 1600s through the
late 1700s (Tadmor 2001, 2010) and perhaps in the breeders lifetimes
some three generations later. The pigeon-breeders drew on terms that had
become commonplace among animal-breeders in the British Isles by the
1780sblood, breed, strain, stock, cross, and selection, among many others
(Wood and Orel 2001, 57123), and perhaps they drew on old kin terms,
including friend alongside brother, mother, and father, not restricted to kin
(Tadmor 2001, 15662, 16772).
The bird and the person were inseparable. Like the earlier breeders of
sheep, cattle, horses, and pigs in their grandparents and parents genera-
tions, the fanciers associated the qualities of the animal, for good or ill,
with the qualities of its breeder. The Scotch fancier George Ures Our
Fancy Pigeons (Ure 1886) makes the connection most clearly because Ure
(18121898), a gardeners son, was looking back over some fifty years.
Ures key term for both is good, and occasionally genuine, real, honest, or
72 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
true, for example, the true fancier (Ure 1886, 7). The good birdits
good form, feather, color, head, beak, eye, and other beautiful qualitiesis
inseparable from its good breeder. The good breeder is skilled and persever-
ing in the management of his birds and in breeding them, which requires
matching or pairing them so thoughtfully and creatively that they will
give birth to birds of equal or even greater beauty. Above all, he is a good
person (for Ure, they are all men): I may say, that in the whole of my
experience I never knew an instance of a real fancier being a degraded or
immoral man (Ure 1886, 7).
A friendship might be sparked by an immediate affinity like their com-
mon love of a particular kind of pigeon. But the crucial test of friend-
ship is long term. The birds take yearsgenerations of their bird-livesto
perfect.10 As Ure (1886, 98) notes: Birds must be well-bred and well-
established before they can be depended upon. It takes a good many
years to form such a strain, and to bring it up to that degree of excellence
when it can be said of it that good blood will tell. So friendships take
many years, even a lifetime, to become truly close.
Ures closest friends, and the famed breeders of the past whom he most
admired, exemplified these qualities. Of these, Ure singled out James
Huie: To MR JAMES HUIE, my dear and life-long friend, in memory
of the many happy days that we have spent together in the pursuit of kin-
dred tastes, this volume is affectionately dedicated by The Author, whom
he portrayed in the Black Pied Pouter Cock (Bred by Mr Ure 1883)
engraved in the frontispiece and embossed in gold on the blue cloth cover,
from a drawing by my friend Mr [Duncan] MNaught of Kilmaurs (Ure
1886, vivix).
As Ure recounts in his chapter on My Early Fancy and Fancier
Friends, he met my now very old friend Mr Huie, then in Edinburgh, in
or about the year 1840, through a pair of short-faced Baldheads that
Ure in Dundee had sent to Mr Bruce in Edinburgh where Mr Huie saw
them and wrote to Mr Ure. He was then travelling for the great engraver
Lizars, of Edinburgh [famed among naturalists, especially bird-lovers]a
brother of Professor Lizars [a well-known surgeon], and brother-in-law of
Sir Wm. Jardine, the naturalist [famed among bird-lovers]so he called
upon me the first time he was in Dundee, and we matched to use a fancy
word [bonded as mates]at once, never to separate, I hope, until the old
scythe-bearer steps in to do his office. From that day the whole of our
family looked forward with pleasure to his periodical visits (Ure 1886,
5455).
The now common notion of friendship as a voluntary relationship

distinct from kinship appears to be historically specific to contemporary
life. Tadmor (2010, Chap. 1, especially pp. 2533) shows that English
vernacular understandings of friends bridging kin and non-kin were incor-
porated into English-language Bibles, notably the King James Bible of
1611, as scholars debated how best to translate complex terms in the
Hebrew language of amity like rea and plural reim that could range
from neighbors to enemies. Her in-depth study of friendship and kinship
documents the persistence of these ideas and practices in England in the
mid-late 1700s: one of the most important characteristics of friendship
was that it straddled what we would now term familial and non-familial
relationships (Tadmor 2001, 212). Based on the diaries (17541765)
of Thomas Turner, a shop-keeper in East Hoathly, Sussex, she shows that
his friends included both kin and non-kin. Bound by ties of sympathy,
loyalty, mutual interest, and many reciprocal exchanges and services,
Turners select friends, as Tadmor (2001, 198211) calls them, included
his wife, some near and distant kin, and various people with whom he had
close intellectual, occupational, political, and devotional relations, in some
cases based on godparenthood, in which the friend served as sponsor for
one of Turners children (ibid., 20105, 213, 224n44, 228). Their friend-
ship was understood as a moral and reciprocal relationship. The moral
duty of friends was to stand by each other, and, if necessary, serve each
other as best they could, and in as many ways as possible. Requests
for favours and services were therefore seen as positive opportunities
for proving friendship: these were opportunities for displaying acts of
friendship, presenting marks and tokens of friendship, and obliging
the friend in further reciprocal exchanges. These relationships extended
beyond Turners neighborhood to form regional networks of relations
(Tadmor 2001, 21214, see p.205).11
The marriages of William Gaskell and Elizabeth Stevenson in 1832 (wit-
nessed by a sibling and a cousin), Charles Darwin and Emma Wedgwood in
1839 (conducted by a cousin and witnessed by sibling-cousins), and Arthur
Bell Nichols and Charlotte Bront in 1854 (conducted and witnessed by
close friends), documented in their letters, diaries, and reports, together
with the lifelong correspondence of Charles Darwin and William Darwin
Fox (his second cousin, FFBDS), from their years at Cambridge University
in the mid-1820s to 1880, show that friendshipsclose long-term morally
valued reciprocal relationships encompassing kin and non-kinpersisted in
these overlapping Nonconformist-Anglican social circles.12
74 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
The fanciers historical traces suggest that they shared this focus on
close friends who were, as Elizabeth Gaskell said about her Aunt Lumb
who raised her, my more than mother my best friend (Gaskell and
Holland 1996, 63), and as Arthur Bell Nichols described the Reverend
Sutcliffe Sowden who conducted his wedding to Charlotte Bront and her
funeral, more a relation than a friend (Bront 2004, 95n2). But per-
haps more than the Darwins, Wedgwoods, Bronts, and Gaskells, whose
names became household words in their lifetimes, the fanciers show how
very private the closest friendships could be.
Ures account of his friendship with Huie and other fanciers of the
time is like those of his contemporaries Eaton, Brent, and Tegetmeier,
in celebrating their relations of truth and trust through birds, especially
the exchange of birds in buying, selling, and gift-giving in their meet-
ings; their activities as participants and judges at the agricultural shows
in major cities nation-wide, which can also be documented in contem-
porary newspapers. Ure never mentions his work as a wine merchant for
P.Dalgairns Wines & Spirits in Dundee, or Huies work (after he moved
to Glasgow) as a curled-hair manufacturer (horsehair) and bed-feather
purifier, or whether their trades documented in contemporary directo-
ries in the 1860s1880s ever converged.13 Ure never married; he lived
with his elder brother, a nephew, and housekeeper, as reported in Great
Britains decennial censuses since 1841. If Ure attended Huies mar-
riage in 1861, held in his wifes rural village south of Edinburgh, neither
recorded the event. Dean Wolstenholmes beautiful hand-colored engrav-
ings of pigeons for Eatons works on pigeons (e.g., Eaton 1852) were well
known to their contemporaries. Wolstenholmes more familial services to
Eatonas his witness in 1855 when he married his former servant at St.
Pancras, London (while her witness was her child out of wedlock, both
signing with an X-mark), and as Eatons character witness in 1867in his
disputed will at the Court of Chancery, Westminsterwere documented
only by clerical and civil officials of the state in whose National Archives
at Kew Gardens their records still reside.14 Eaton died in the midst of the
dispute. In his obituary of the most eccentric writer on the subject of
pigeons in The Field, Tegetmeier (1868a, 277) chose to expose the very
incongruous alliance and the quarrels of his wife and himself brought
very prominently before the public, but he celebrated Eatons steadfast
friend. Eaton was returning from the Isle of Wight where he had sought
refuge when he was seized with insensibility in the train, and was
c onveyed to his lodgings at Chertsey, where he was carefully tended by

his faithful friend and good adviser, Mr Dean Wolstenholme.
Trusted Friends: Rethinking Spiritual Kinship

inanAge ofDissent
Spiritual kinship as expressed in godparenthood and marriage witness-

ing has persisted for centuries, despite the tumults of the Protestant and
Catholic reformations, which cancelled the holy character of spiritual
kinship for Protestants, but did not alter the social and economic use
of ritual ties (Alfani and Gourdon 2012a, 1023). The pigeon fanciers
emphasis on higher and nobler ideas of religion than all the creeds can
supply (Ure 1886, 12) in the midst of increasing sectarianism raises ques-
tions about cultural transformations of religion and spirituality, which
their commitments to truth, trust, and friends akin to kin may help to
elucidate.
Examining the social geography of religious pluralism in Britain in the
mid-nineteenth century, Snell and Ell argue that more open parishes,
whether urban or rural, were characterized by relative freedom of choice
[and] less defensive[ness] of received doctrine than parishes of unified
authority (Snell and Ell 2000, 394). They suggest that religious pluralism
led to disillusionment with religion, contributing in turn to secularization.
Their data on geo-demographic patterns of open and closed parishes
would benefit from the insights of Harrison (2015) who argues that stud-
ies of religiosity and secularism must take into account historically chang-
ing ideas and practices of religion in relation to science. He argues that the
rise of Francis Bacons experimental methods in the 1600s was associated
with a shift from the affirmation of religious beliefs as expressions of trust
in, or between, persons, to expressions of assent to propositional truths
about God and the world. As propositional truths, they could be corrobo-
rated by insights from the several natural philosophies eventually grouped
as science in the early 1800s (Harrison 2015, 1068, 1601).
Cantors work shows that one consequence of growing religious plu-
ralismsectarian debatecould lead to growing disillusionment with
sectarianismendless disputes over doctrinewithout diminishing sec-
tarians interests in the moral and ethical ideas and practices by which they
lived. Elizabeth Gaskells correspondence during these years suggests that
at least some Nonconformists may have developed a distinction between
76 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
prescriptive religion associated with formal institutions like churches and

chapels and spirituality ungoverned by doctrine. Writing from Manchester
to her close friend Charles Eliot Norton in Boston on 9 March 1859, she
exclaimed: oh! For some really spiritual devotional preaching instead of
controversy about doctrines,about whh I am more & more certain we
can never be certain in this world (Gaskell 1966, 537, her emphasis).
Spirituality, as Cannell (2011, 475, 477) shows in her study of popular
genealogy in England a century and a half later, remains a strikingly vague
term. The genealogists were involved with their ancestors in reciprocal
relationship[s] of care they generally agreed were not religion, yet for
some had spiritual aspects. Cannell takes these complexities to be the
outcome of a specific history, and a reflection of the prevailing culture of
secularity that makes it difficult to articulate or inhabit certain forms of
experience against the rationalist mainstream. Spirituality has remained
so persistently imprecise that it warrants analysis as a generic term like
Stratherns (2014) analysis of relations, which she shows to have persisted
as an inveterately vague term for epistemological and familial connec-
tions in the nascent sciences and in kinship since the mid-1500s. Given
the growing opposition between science and religion could the inveterate
imprecision of spirituality be linked to these transformations?
Gaskells rare remark to Norton (she too used spiritual sparingly) suggests
that spirituality ungoverned by doctrine might never be made precise because
it derived from deeply personal convictions about devotion in which doctrinal
conceptions of devotion, dedication, and faith were inseparable from experi-
ences of love, loyalty, trust, and truth felt most intensely in close relations
with particular kin and friends alike. Her contemporary George Eliots Silas
Marner (Eliot 1861, 20) suggests that such deeply specific understandings
of devotion were inseparable from the fostering homethe imponderably
intimate immingling of persons, places, persons, birds, airs, and rustlings in
and through which they were engendered and nurtured.15
The pigeon fanciers shared with one another and with Darwin a broad
background of religious Nonconformism. They were dedicated to ide-
als of truth- and trust-seeking based in common sectarian assumptions
about the priesthood of all believers in which all human beings have within
themselves the capacities to find truth and should be enabled to do so
unimpeded by clerical or worldly experts. Whether or not they followed
the quest of some Nonconformist leaders who advocated for the dises-
tablishment of the Anglican Church as the official Church of England
people like Edward MiallI dont know. However, programs like Mialls
dedicated to furthering an Ethics of Nonconformity suggest that he

might not have been alone in trying to draw diversities of Nonconformists
together around a common ethics of sociality based in trust. They real-
ized their ideals of truth and trust in a language of friendship akin to kin-
ship that had been incorporated from everyday usage into the King James
Bible since the early 1600s and from the bible into everyday usage since
then. They realized their ideals in birds and friends who were in their fin-
est qualities indivisible. Perhaps the birds were incidental. Many of the
pigeon fanciers, and many of their contemporaries, bred other animals.
Yet the fanciers awareness that pigeons, more than any other creature
exemplified spirituality across a diversity of world religions, is notable. The
fancy pigeonsexchanged through world-wide trade routes in ancient
and modern times alikebrought to life their shared ideals in their most
beautifully diverse and perhaps even universal forms.
Acknowledgments This chapter is based on archival research in the London

Metropolitan Archives, Her Majestys Courts Service (Wills and Probate,
Holborn), the National Archives (United Kingdom), the British Library, and the
Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of the New York Public Library, supported by
a Guggenheim Fellowship and research funds from the University of Michigan.
Heartfelt thanks to all these institutions for their help. I am grateful to Asiya Malik,
Todne Thomas, and Rose Wellman for organizing the Wenner-Gren workshop
inspiring me to think about Spiritual Kinship among the Abrahamic Faiths, to
Susan McKinnon and the Anthropology Department at the University of Virginia
for hosting us, and to all the participants for their many insights. Special thanks to
Rose Wellman and an anonymous reviewer for Palgrave Press for their comments
on the would-be penultimate draft and to Alan Harnik for reading countless drafts
before and after.
Notes
1. Only Protestants rejecting infant baptism rejected godparenthood.
Calvins arguments against spiritual kinship also failed (Alfani,
Chap. 2., this volume, p. 3738).
2. In early rabbinic Judaism, circumcisions were done at home; the
synagogue first became an option during the medieval period
among Jews living in Muslim polities (Goldberg 2003, 4344).
3. Another Yiddish term for this position was kvatter (m., kvatterin,
f.) from German (Goldberg 2003, 45). The duties of the variously
named position varied regionally and historically across Eurasia.
78 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
4. Seamen from southern Arabia and south Asia (lascars), mainly

Muslims, had been working on British ships since the 1500s. Some
12,000 arrived annually in Great Britain in 1855, congregating
mainly in Londons East End (Ansari 2004, 35).
5. General Baptists since the late 1500s believed Jesus Christs death
atoned for all people not solely an elect as did Particular Baptists.
By the mid-1800s General Baptists, especially in southeast England,
had adopted so many Unitarian views that they were also known as
General (Unitarian) Baptists in contrast to Particular (New
Connexion) Baptists (Mann 1854, 21).
6. Eaton (1952, xiiixv, 57, 2324, 5962, 71, 87, among many)
adopted Gentlemen of the Fancy and Gentlemen Fanciers
from Moores Columbarium (1735), published when the honor-
ific Gentleman was restricted to persons with familial pedigrees
and coats of arms authorized by the College of Heralds. Over a
century later, in Eatons lifetime, [b]y courtesy this title is gen-
erally accorded to all persons above the rank of common trades-
men when their manners and deportment are indicative of a certain
amount of refinement and intelligence. But in its best and highest
sense, this word is used to denote one who not only does what is
right and just, but whose conduct is regulated by a true principle
of honour, which springs from that self-respect and intellectual
refinement which manifest themselves in unconstrained yet deli-
cate manners (Anon. 1856, 456, in the 8th edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica). Tradesmen (like Eaton) might have
used the term sardonically on occasion, but in his treatises,
Gentlemen Fanciers are characterized by the highest moral con-
duct in their relations with birds and people alike.
7. A paraphrase of Lockes second principle, Of Ideas In General,
and Their Original, which Eaton could have read in An Essay on
Human Understanding by John Locke, Gent[leman]. 27th edi-
tion published in 1836 by T. Tegg in London, Glasgow, and
Dublin; see p.51.
8. The Life History Album first published in 1884 was the work of the
Collective Investigation Committee of the British Medical
Association under the leadership of Dr. Mahomed of Guys
Hospital (Galton 1902, ixx) who died shortly after its publication
of typhoid fever he was researching. Galton (ibid.) was involved in
the project, but was not at all satisf[ied] with the result, so
rewrote it. Dr. Frederick Henry Horatio Akbar Mahomed

(18491884) was a pioneer in the combined study of social and
familial factors in the epidemiology of diseases then called collec-
tive investigation (Hughes 2013, who suggests that Mahomeds
and Galtons particular interest in family history also stemmed
from their own highly distinctive family trees [685]).
9. The Field, the Farm, the Garden, the Country Gentlemans
Newspaper, founded in 1853, was published in Fleet Street,
London. John Henry Walsh, its new editor in 1857, exemplified
the unusual combination of interests he must have admired in
Tegetmeier whom he hired, being a former ophthalmic surgeon
and author of a 722-page Manual of Domestic Medicine and
Surgery [who] hunted with the Heythrop and Worcestershire,
coursed greyhounds, trained hawks, and was the founding
Honorary Secretary of the All England Croquet Club (Harvey
2003, 3).
10. Pigeons start breeding at about six months old; their average life-
span is fifteen years. As the American fancier, Wendell Levi
(1941, 185) puts it, emphasizing that longevity is an intangible
quality in pigeons and humans alike, the age of twenty years in
the pigeon is comparable to the age of ninety years in man.
11. Tadmor (2001, 16971) comments that [s]cholars have noticed
such usages of friend and the importance of friendship, but
they have not done detailed case studies to handle the fact that
friendship could comprise a very broad spectrum of relation-
ships, as Tadmor does in her study of Thomas Turners friends.
12. Uglow (1993, 79), Emma Wedgwood to Charles Darwin [23
January 1839], Burkhardt et al. 2:16970, Litchfield (1915, 2:
2628), Gaskell (1997 [1857], 42122), Bront (2004, 3:95n2),
Larkum (2009, 147, 212, 242, 393, 40407), among many
examples.
13. The directories of Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow kept at the
National Library of Scotland are available at http://www.nls.uk/
family-history/directories/post-office.
14. London Metropolitan Archives, Saint Pancras Parish Church,

Register of marriages, P90/PAN1, Item 110, and Bunce v Ball
[1867], C 16/392/B86, National Archives, Kew Gardens.
15. See Eliot (1861, Chap. 2), especially pp. 1921. Snell and Ell
(2000, v) cite as their epigraph Eliots moving account of Silas
80 G. FEELEY-HARNIK
Marners fostering home in Calvinist Lantern Yard, the slum in

a northern city from which he was forced to move to the rural
Anglican parish of Raveloe, uprooting his Christianity and Gods
kingdom upon earth. They take Eliots words to express the
deeply rooted regionality of religious ideas and practices in
nineteenth-century Great Britain that they hope to illuminate in
part through their geo-demographic analysis of Manns (1854)
census.
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CHAPTER 4
Kinship asEthical Relation: ACritique

oftheSpiritual Kinship Paradigm
DonSeeman
For I have known him, to the end that he may command his children and
his household after him to keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and righ-
teousness, so that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which He has
spoken of him.
Genesis 18:19
Is spiritual kinship a useful comparative frame for anthropological

research across the Abrahamic religions? I will argue, with reference pri-
marily to Jewish materials, that it is not. But I will also argue that the
specific way in which it is notits very inadequacypoints to a better
framework that might be glossed kinship as ethical relation. While
some writers in this volume and elsewhere have used spiritual kinship to
describe any kind of kinship that is heavily conditioned by non-genealogical
D. Seeman (*)
Department of Religion and the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, Emory
University, Atlanta, GA, USA

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_4
86 D. SEEMAN
f actors or, even more broadly, to describe any form of relatedness that has
beenreckoned in relation to the divine (Thomas, Wellman, and Malik,
Chap. 1, this volume), most are also aware that spiritual kinship refers
to a very specific set of Christian discursive and institutional practices,
where kinship according to the spirit was structurally opposed to merely
natural, genealogical kinship, or what Christians sometimes revealingly
call kinship according to the flesh (Alfani and Gourdon 2012; Frishkopf
2003; Jussen 2000; Seeman 2009a). This is a conceptual framework from
which Jews (and others) were specifically excluded by Christian doctrine,
and I will argue that it cannot serve as a neutral analytic category without
subtly importing Christian theological assumptions into the anthropo-
logical study of kinship. Thinking about kinship in an ethical register (cf.
Faubion 2001; Clough 2007) does not require the exclusion of Christian
spiritual kinship from comparison in this context, but actually seeks to
recognize what is distinctive about spiritual kinship by contrast with other
ways of balancing the competing claims to relatednessgenealogical and
otherwise (cf. Hamberger 2013)in which sacred community has played
a role.
What Is (not) Spiritual Kinship?

In its original Christian context, spiritual kinship frequently referred to
the relationships forged between a baptized child, her natal kin, and her
baptismal sponsorsgodparentswho were in many cases not permit-
ted to be blood relatives (Alfani and Gourdon 2012; Jussen 2000). This
kinship, which was based in part on Roman models of patronage and
adoption, also depended heavily on long-standing theological oppositions
between carnal and spiritual reproduction (Alfani, Chap. 2, this volume)
or between spirit and flesh more broadly. Spiritual kinship sometimes gave
rise to incest prohibitions between natal and spiritual kin but even where
this was not the case, spiritual kin were conceived as somehow analogous
and yet opposed to blood relations. James Faubion (2001, 1415) notes,
in a related context, that kinship and election (i.e. membership in the
body of the Church) are such structurally precise binary opposites in
the New Testament that the terms of the former serve also as terms for
the latter. Indeed, though he mistakenly calls this an Abrahamic rather
than specifically Christian topos, Faubion is well-aware of the special power
it holds in Christian Scripture. In Matthew, he writes, the few who are
chosenmust leave all their mundane kin behind. They will find another
KINSHIP ASETHICAL RELATION: ACRITIQUE OFTHESPIRITUAL KINSHIP... 87
father; they will find brothers and sisters in the spirit. This ethic provides
some of the conceptual scaffolding for the later, arguably more moder-
ate institutionalized versions of spiritual kinship associated with baptismal
sponsorship and godparenthood. Blood relations may give a child life and
social standing, according to this conception, but spiritual kin usher him
or her into the body of Christ.
One of the difficulties associated with any anthropological study of
spiritual kinship is that anthropological categories themselves may have
been conceptually informed by this institution. Indeed, it is a matter of
scarcely noted importance to the history of anthropology that European
church records frequently made note of natural (cognatio naturalis or con-
sanguinitas), affinal (affinitas), and spiritual (cognatio spiritualis) impedi-
ments to marriage (Alfani, Chap. 2, this volume; see Jussen 2000, 27), thus
encoding a tripartite model of kinship grounded in nature (i.e. sometimes
figured as blood), lawful marriage, and baptismal sponsorship. Early
anthropologists adopted the nomenclature of consanguineal and affinal
kinship almost without change and then debated (see Faubion 2001, 1)
which should be considered more basic to human affairs. This does not
mean, however, that spiritual kinship disappeared from anthropological
discourse so much as it went underground, to reappear in secularized form
as fictive kinship whenever anthropologists were at a loss to explain how
either blood or marriage could account for some observed relation (such
as the incorporation of new lineages into an agnatic genealogy). While
withering critiques of anthropological reliance upon European folk theo-
ries of blood and naturalized conceptions of relatedness are now com-
monplace (Schneider 1984; Trautmann 2008), the influence of European
theologies and church-institutional practices has received far less attention
than they deserve.
It must seem a little ironic, therefore, when spiritual kinship itself is
invoked as a naturalized exemplar of the secularized category, it helped
to inspire. Michael Frishkopf (2003, 11) defends the use of spiritual kin-
ship as a comparative category by first assimilating it to kinship which
is fictive, which he defines as any system that uses ordinary kinship
terminology but is nevertheless quasi-independent of biological ideol-
ogy. This formulation is confusing, because by invoking biological ide-
ology rather than simply biology as he might have done, Frishkopf
signals that he is not wedded to any naive identification of real kinship
with lines of biological descent. Yet by simultaneously describing spiritual
kinship as merely fictive (since it is not grounded in procreation), he
88 D. SEEMAN
effectively reinscribes those same materialist assumptions. Frishkopf is on

much firmer ground, it seems to me, when elsewhere in the same essay he
identifies spiritual kinship more specifically as any kinship ideology which
is both reliant upon a claim of spiritual or metaphysical relatedness and
also understood to be in opposition to the hegemonic social and political
ideologies associated with [normative] kinship in that society (ibid. p.8).
This latter definition, unlike the former, has real comparative and ana-
lytic value because, rather than doubling down on unfounded assumptions
about what real (as opposed to fictive) kinship must entail, it refers to
the structural opposition between ideologies of spiritual (i.e. non-material)
and other locally normative (especially genealogical) forms of relatedness.
It is unclear to me how well this definition actually fits the many exam-
ples of spiritual kinship that Frishkopf adduces from different cultural and
religious settings (none, I should note, are from Judaism), but it does
seem well-suited to the situation of early Christianity, which came to define
itself in opposition to the baseline of genealogical relatedness it attributed
to the Old Law of the Jews. What makes Christian spiritual kinship
interesting to anthropologists, in other words, is not that it involves a
form of kinship conveyed other than by blood or even descent (the
ethnographic record is full of these), but rather that it represents a form of
kinship standing in self-conscious opposition to the forms of genealogical
relatedness otherwise considered normative in that setting. The opposi-
tion between spiritual kin and natural or genealogical kin described by
historians in the baptismal context is broadly analogous to the way the
church as a whole came to understand itself in terms of spiritual opposi-
tion to the normative genealogical kinship of the Jews and others in the
Mediterranean world. This is not limited to the institution of godpar-
enthood, which purports to rest alongside or in hierarchical relationship
with reproductive genealogy (cognatio naturalis) but extends also to the
more radical devaluing of natal kin in some ancient and modern forms of
Christian practice.
My own fieldwork with Ethiopian Jewish converts to Pentecostal
Christianity (Seeman 2009a, 2013a, 2015a) confirms this pattern. Like
Pentecostal converts elsewhere in Africa, the men and women I came to
know tried to distance themselves socially, rhetorically, and emotionally
from the kinship networks into which they had been born and to claim
an alternative kinship in Christ with fellow believers. Echoing the bibli-
cal passages described by Faubion, converts sometimes introduced me to
their siblings or parents at first meeting only to reveal later that these were
not birth kin but siblings or parents in Christ. This fits Frishkopfs helpful
definition of spiritual kin because these relations are elevated precisely in
proportion to the attenuation of intimacy and connectedness with uncon-
verted birth-relatives in a society where genealogical kinship frequently
means everything. In the real world of course, this can be a messy and
open-ended process filled with ambivalence and longing (Seeman 2015a).
At one circumcision ceremony I attended for a child of Pentecostal con-
verts (Seeman 2013a), those few natal kin who attended sat separately
from spiritual kin and did not visibly interact with them.
The tension between two competing registers of kinship (spiritual and
genealogical) was especially acute in this setting because circumcision itself
is typically conceived not just as a family event in modern Jewish com-
munities but actually a kinship transaction, through which an infant boy
is publically inscribed in the larger national or ethno-religious commu-
nity of Israel. The decision by a charismatic convert to hold a traditional
circumcision ceremony for his son (performed, incidentally, by an ultra-
Orthodox Jewish mohel) and to invite his spiritual as well as natal kin to
attend raises all sorts of thorny questions about the demands and limits
of kinship (as well, possibly, as national belonging) across lines of reli-
gious change that may also be experienced as acute personal dilemmas for
some of the individuals involved (cf. Seeman 2015a). But these are not my
immediate concern. Rather I want to springboard from this ethnographic
vignette to the contested role that circumcision itself has played histori-
cally in Christian-Jewish polemics (cf. Cohen 2001; Boyarin 1994) over
the nature of kinshipespecially spiritual kinshipand divine election.
One of the ways in which Pauline Christianity ultimately declared
itself independent of the historical Jewish ethnos was through the rejec-
tion of circumcision as a requirement for conversion and its replace-
ment by baptism (there is some debate whether Jewish Christians were
also meant to be excluded from circumcision by Paul). Not only was
the act of circumcision itself viewed as a stumbling block for many
potential converts in the Greco-Roman world, but its elimination came
ultimately to stand more broadly for rejection of the whole kinship-suf-
fused notion of covenantal belonging that ultimately governs Judaism.
Without drawing these lines too starkly, it would also seem that the shift
in emphasis from circumcision to baptism signified a shift in empha-
sis from conversion as admittance to the genealogical family of Israel
toward admittance to the avowedly spiritual (i.e. non-genealogical
and non-national) community of the church. It is hardly surprising,
90 D. SEEMAN
given this cultural logic, that the responsibility for baptismal spon-
sorship should eventually pass over from the parents (in Judaism, the
responsibility to circumcise a boy devolves as a matter of law upon his
father) to non-genealogical relatives, also known as spiritual kin (Alfani,
Chap. 2, this volume).
Part of the reason that the idea of spiritual kinship resonates so poorly
with Jewish materials is that it evokes a whole complex of ideas that pit
the spiritual against the carnal (Alfani, Chap. 2, this volume; Jussen 2000)
in ways that were historically in dispute between mainstream forms of
Judaism and Christianity. The structural opposition between spiritual
and genealogical kinship is, for example, directly related to a broader
oppositional hermeneutics (cf. Boyarin 1994) that cast the letter of the
Law (i.e. Jewish ritual obligation) into an unfavorable comparison with
its spirit (Christian grace) and pit carnal Israel (the Jewish ethnos)
against its avowed spiritual successor (the church). It is almost impos-
sible to understand the Christian theology of supersession without refer-
ence to these habits of thought or to understand the historical persecution
of Jews in Christian lands outside of these theological coordinates. It
is therefore telling that the modern Catholic Churchs desire for post-
Holocaust rapprochement with the Jews found its most important official
expression in Nostra Aetates 1965 affirmation (within limits) of the old
(kinship-suffused) covenant. But this should also make it more than clear
why deploying spiritual kinship as an ostensibly neutral analytic term risks
importing an old and only partly resolved theological antagonism into the
heart of contemporary social analysis.
If baptism came to be seen by Christians as a kind of spiritual tran-
scendence of ethnicity and origin, so circumcision came to stand among
Jews for a persistent covenantal loyalty in which genealogical and cov-
enantal (i.e. ethical and ritual) considerations converged (see Schremer
2012). This is still largely true for modern Jews (Seeman 2009a, 2014),
though of course it does not go unchallenged. The imperfect overlap of
state citizenship categories and traditional covenantal ones in the State
of Israel, along with the rise of denominational Judaism (Judaism as a
religion) in the West (cf. Batnitzky 2013), has each in their own way
threatened to drive a wedge between these intertwining (genealogical
and covenantal) grounds of traditional Jewish kinship. The decision by
an Ethiopian Jewish Christian (there is no perfectly good circumlocution
for this) to hold a traditional Jewish circumcision ceremony for his son is
therefore just one instantiation of a much broader dilemma facing mod-
ern Jews of all kinds: to what extent, if at all, can Judaism and Jewishness
really be severed? This question has been posed directly and indirectly
not just by the logic of Jewish modernity and secularization but also by
the deep internal logic of Christianity and, with great insistence, by the
conversionary pressures brought to bear on Jews in both medieval and
modern Christian lands.
While Jewish converts to medieval Christianity were more or less
expected to give up both Jewish religious and communal identity, this
was complicated in various times and places by suspicions that indelible
Jewishness or Judaizing tendencies would remain. It is only in modern
times that some evangelical groups began arguing that converts might
continue to identify as Hebrew Christians (in the language of the
London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Amongst the Jews)
or completed Jews (in the language of some American evangelicals)
without giving up Jewishness as an ethno-national and even theologically
significant categoryand these are precisely the groups that have most
diligently promoted Christianity among my Ethiopian Jewish informants
(Seeman 2009a, 2015a). Yet while the emergence of groups who avowedly
experience no contradiction between Jewish identity and Christian reli-
gious practice is certainly noteworthy (cf. Kornblatt 2004; Seeman 2013a,
2015a), one of the most striking aspects of modern Judaism is that the
vast majority of Jews still seem to resist this logic of splitting. It was the
verdict of Israels secular Supreme Court (in the so-called Brother Daniel
case) that most forcefully articulated the still weighty consensus that con-
ditions Jewish ethnic and national belonging on at least some degree of
religious identification (or, more accurately, on the absence of competing
commitments such as conversion to Christianity). Another way of saying
this would be that for most Jews today, Jewishness is neither a purely reli-
gious category (one can be a secular Jew) nor a purely genealogical one
(conversion to Christianity can qualify or erase ones Jewishness for certain
purposes) but rather a covenantal one for which both genealogy and some
form of covenantal commitment matter. This consensus may well disin-
tegrate over time under the relentless pressure of Israeli state-building
imperatives on the one hand and American Jewish insistence on personal
autonomy as the crux of liberal Judaism (Borowitz 1983) on the other,
but for now it remains the case that sociological paradigms which distin-
guish too neatly between religious and genealogical (or spiritual and mate-
rial) grounds of sacred kinship are simply inadequate to Jewish experience
(Seeman 2013c).
92 D. SEEMAN
While some writers (see Delaney, Chap. 11, this volume) use the term
spiritual kinship loosely to mean almost any kind of kinship ideology in
which religious considerations play a role, I think the contrast between
Jewish and Christian models of relatedness helps to demonstrate the ben-
efits of greater precision. That fact is that while both Jewish and Christian
models of sacred kinship do qualify the determinative role of descent and
genealogy in kinship considerations, they do so in meaningfully different
ways. Rather than opposing spiritual kin to birth kin or opposing spiri-
tual to genealogical/fleshly relatedness, I will argue below that rabbinic
Judaism tends to make genealogyor, if you prefer, socially recognized
genealogycontingent upon certain kinds of ethico-ritual (i.e. cov-
enantal) conduct and commitment. By referring to this kind of kinship
broadly as an ethical relation, I do not mean to imply that it is ethi-
cally superior to any other way of organizing kinship relations (including
spiritual kinship) but simply to highlight the self-conscious role of ethical
(rather than spiritual) framing in this context. Rather than treating the
tripartite division between consanguineal, affinal, and spiritual (or fictive)
kinship as universal axes of comparison, it would seem more appropri-
ate to treat them as just one culturally (and theologically!) contingent
matrix of oppositions and structures for the ordering of human related-
ness. Ethical practices and dispositions are, as others have already noted
(Faubion 2001; Clough 2007), one relatively neglected register through
which kinship can and should be studied in a comparative vein.
Maimonides andAristotelian Family Friendship

Moses Maimonides was born in 1138 in Cordoba, but his family fled
forced conversion to Islam while he was still a boy. The family settled for
a time in Morocco but his peregrinations eventually took Maimonides to
the Land of Israel and then to Egypt, where he became a leading Jewish
religious authority as well as a royal physician. A master of the Islamicate
Aristotelian tradition, Maimonides was without question the leading
Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages and probably its leading jurist as
well. His comprehensive codification of Jewish law, though controversial
in some respects, remains unsurpassed in scope and influence even today.
Some critics (both medieval and modern) have alleged that Maimonides
merely grafted Aristotle onto a recalcitrant Jewish textual corpus, but
I think a fairer and more nuanced approach would acknowledge that
Maimonides used the philosophical traditional in a variety of ways to
sharpen his analytic focus on selected features of the sprawling biblical-

rabbinic tradition to which he was heir (Novack 2005; Tirosh-Samuelson
2008). A good case in point is his reading of Jewish kinship norms in light
of Aristotles teaching on human friendship and sociality (Seeman 2015b),
which amounts, in terms of this essay, to an especially articulate defense
of the idea that kinship might usefully be thought of as a kind of ethical
relation. The most important locus for this discussion is chapter III: 49
of his philosophical magnum opus, The Guide of the Perplexed, where he
argues that biblical sexual and incest prohibitions serve to promote virtue
friendship as a prerequisite to human social and contemplative excellence.
Maimonides reading of Levitical kinship rules through the prism of the
Nicomachean Ethics may seem counterintuitive at first, but Aristotle himself
makes it clear that philiatypically translated in English as friendship
is a broad enough category to encompass marriage and kinship as well as
other forms of social affinity. Maimonides, moreover, would have noticed
that the biblical directive to love your neighbor as yourself (Lev. 18:
19), which he closely identifies with Aristotelian ideals of virtue friendship
(Seeman 2015b, 1617), appears in close textual proximity to the biblical
lists of relatives with whom sexual activity is prohibited. Anthropology has
tended with some exceptions to split kinship, which is central to the dis-
ciplines historical methodology and self-perception, from friendship and
other neglected forms of affinitive sociality (cf. Franklin and McKinnon
2001). Perhaps it is the case that kinship, as an ostensibly rule-bound and
culturally determined practice, seemed to accord more easily with early
anthropologys notions of primitive society than does friendship, with its
connotations of personal agency and voluntarism that were more strongly
associated with the societies in which anthropologists themselves did their
theorizing. It is tempting, in any case to view this divide as just one more
residue of the hierarchical opposition between law and spirit, particular
and universal, to which anthropological kinship theory has been heir. To
be sure, neither Aristotle nor Maimonides assumes any such sharp dis-
tinction, and this allows them to frame kinship along a much broader
spectrum of social relations than most modern anthropologists have been
willing to do.
Aristotle famously divides the good will and generosity of philia into
three broad categories that he refers to as friendships of utility, pleasure, and
virtue, each of which contributes in different ways to human flourishing.
Only virtue friendship can be called true friendship, however, because it
is grounded in disinterested appreciation for and close identification with
94 D. SEEMAN
another person. In one of his early commentaries, Maimonides invokes

Aristotle in suggesting that friendships between men and women are typi-
cally grounded in pleasure, while teacherdisciple relationships are con-
cerned with virtue. Aristotles kinship or family friendship fits somewhat
uneasily into this schema because kin are typically neither chosen nor eas-
ily confined to only one of Aristotles three categories (Seeman 2015b).
Scholars have nevertheless emphasized the close relation between family
and virtue friendship in Aristotles Ethics inasmuch as families are viewed
as important training grounds for the generosity and beneficence that
characterize virtue friendship among those who aspire to a philosophical
life (Belfiore 2001). Aristotle is not, needless to say, insensitive to the fact
that kin relations may also entail competition, jealousy, and the potential
for violence, but still he regards family friendship as (at least potentially)
the best subphilosophic prefiguration of philosophic philia (Cropsey
1977, 269) that he knows. As against the Platonic call for centralized state
control of most aspects of social existence therefore, Aristotle validates
families and what we would call civil society as platforms for the attain-
ment of human excellence.
Maimonides largely accepts Aristotles account of human sociality but
specifies that biblical rules of marriage and kinship represent the divine
legislators intent to create a stable society grounded in mutual benefi-
cence, much like Aristotles philia-based ideal polis. Biblical prohibitions
of incest and extra-marital sexual activity serve, according to Maimonides,
to reduce the conditions for sexual jealousy and violence among men, to
allow for clear lines of descent so that people may know from whom they
can expect mutual aid (see Seeman forthcoming), and to promote an ethic
of sexual moderation that is conductive to philosophical attainment. Such
assertions may of course be challenged on any number of grounds, but
they represent a view of kinship as oriented toward a telos of human good
in which philia plays a central role. Maimonides treats the divine law as an
intelligible mechanism filled with power and purpose for the gradual per-
fection of the human condition over time (Seeman 2013b, 2015b). In his
legal writings, Maimonides identifies Aristotelian friendship with the bibli-
cal obligations to love ones neighbor, to foreswear revenge and to avoid
gossip and tale bearing, all of which contribute, he says, to the inculca-
tion of dispositions most conducive to human habitation and flourishing.
But Maimonides, as I have argued elsewhere (Seeman 2015b), thinks that
biblical kinship rules represent an attempt to leverage everyday family
friendship described by Aristotle into a more expansive set of relations
involving the nation as a whole. It is analytically quite striking, given the

role played by circumcision in polemics between Christians and Jews over
issues related to spiritual kinship, that circumcision is also a primary locus
of kinship as an ethical relation in Maimonides account.
Commentators have puzzled over the fact that Maimonides inter-
pretation of circumcision occurs in the same chapter of the Guide of the
Perplexed as his discussion of biblical laws related to kinship. Like the laws
of prohibited sexual relationships among relatives, Maimonides thinks that
circumcision too is intended by divine wisdom to promote sexual modera-
tion as well as amity and friendship among members of a community. It
iswell known, he writes, what degree of mutual love and mutual help
exists between people who all bear the same sign, which forms for them
a sort of covenant and alliance (Guide of the Perplexed III: 49, Shlomo
Pines translator). This amity, he writes, is actually one of the greatest
purposes of the Law. But this rather functional explanation is not his last
word on the subject:
Circumcision is a covenant made by Abraham our Father with a view to belief

in the unity of God. Thus everyone who is circumcised joins Abrahams cov-
enant. This covenant imposes the obligation to believe in the unity of God:
To be a God unto thee and to thy seed after thee (Genesis 17: 7). This is also a
strong reason, as strong as the first, which may be adduced to account for
circumcision; perhaps it is even stronger than the first.
The complexity of this formulation, which links circumcision simultane-

ously to genealogical Jewishness, to Aristotelian family friendship, and to
the practice of monotheism, finds echoes elsewhere in Maimonides cor-
pus. In his Code of Jewish Law, for example, he explains that even though
Abraham had many descendants, only the lineage of his grandson Jacob
(i.e. the people of Israel) are obligated in circumcision because they alone
are referred to as Abrahams seed in light of their adherence to his ethi-
cal and religious teachings (Hilkhot Melakhim 10: 7).
This is an important point to emphasize because it demonstrates (con-
trary to the implication of Delaneys argument (Chap. 11, this volume)
that Maimonides did not understand seed in any narrow procreative
sense but rather followed rabbinic tradition (see Schremer 2012) in mak-
ing the force of procreative genealogy (seed) strongly contingent upon
a particular ethical and juridical framework. Elsewhere in his Code of Law,
Maimonides identifies the seed of Abraham with qualities of mercy
96 D. SEEMAN
and forbearance toward those who are legally under ones power, such as
slaves (Avadim 9: 8), while in his Laws of Gifts to the Poor (10: 2) he
invokes a Talmudic ruling that one may question the lineage of anyone
who behaves without compassion. Scholars have debated how literally to
apply this ruling, but it indicates at the very least rhetorically that genea-
logical relatedness may sometimes be subordinated to (or mediated by)
other kinds of cultural and ethical ideals, and that it is precisely the media-
tion of genealogy by ethical relation that constitutes seed (i.e. social rec-
ognized genealogy) in this context (cf. Diamond 2003). This goes a long
way to explaining why covenantal kinship (identified with circumcision)
never came to be associated in Judaism with an alternate set of spiritual kin
the way baptism did but was nevertheless distinct from, and irreducible to,
purely tribal or genealogical relations.
The figure of Abraham takes on special importance for Maimonides
in this context. He is treated not only as the progenitor of the Israelite
nation, whose seed will be as numerous as the stars in the heavens
but also (resonant with both rabbinic and Islamic precedents) as an
iconoclastic monotheist and moral exemplar (see Stroumsa 2015). For
Maimonides, Abraham is the founder of a reasoned ethico-philosophical
approach to religion (Goodman 1996; Seeman 2008, 2013, 2015b), and
this makes him not only the paradigmatic patriarch and progenitor but
also and simultaneously the paradigmatic convert and spiritual seeker.
Circumcision, which has always been strongly identified with Abraham
in Jewish tradition, also participates in this doubleness, standing both for
conversion to Judaism and for genealogical continuity through the cir-
cumcision of infant boys. I might even go so far as to refer to circumci-
sion in Judaism as a ritual mechanism for the transcription of freedom
(arguably a prerequisite of any relation we might think of as ethical [cf.
Laidlaw 2014]) into kinship: it represents the transformation of foun-
dational, free-willed acts like conversion into possibilities for stable,
transgenerational commitments to common life and kinship over time.
Anthropologists should consider this claim carefully, because despite our
disciplines emphasis on kinship among affines, anthropology has had
a relatively impoverished vocabulary for the ways in which elements of
choicenot limited to short-term strategic considerations (cf. Bourdieu
1977)might enter dynamically into the logic of kinship. These are, by
contrast, matters which concerned Maimonides greatly, not just in his
abstract analysis of biblical kinship rules but also in the practical rulings he
issued as the preeminent legal scholar of Egyptian Jewry.
Obadiah theProselyte
Obadiah the proselyte was an Arab convert to Judaism living in Jerusalem

who seems to have written to Maimonides with at least three separate ques-
tions. His most famous was whether he, as a convert to Judaism, ought to
recite the conventional liturgy in which Jews call upon the God of our
fathers, or should he rather emend this language to reflect the fact that
his own ancestors were not Jews. In another letter he asks Maimonides to
comment on a local rabbis teaching that success in business and choice of
a spouse are determined by divine providence rather than chance or the
exercise of free will. He also describes a dispute, possibly with this same
rabbi, who called him a fool for denying that Muslim practices like ston-
ing of the devil in Mecca (ironically a practice associated by Muslims with
the prophet Abraham) are idolatrous. There is no explicit relation between
these three questions, but I think that taken together they do help to illus-
trate Maimonides continuous insistence on viewing kinshipexemplified
by both marriage and conversionas an ethical relation.
On the question of liturgy, Maimonides famously invokes the biblical
figure of Abraham to insist that converts like Obadiah should recite the
traditional prayers with no distinction from the way they are recited by
native-born Jews (for the legal background to this question, see Halbertal
2014, 8184, 9496):
The reason for this is that Abraham our Father taught the people, opened
their minds, and revealed to them the true faith and the unity of God; he
rejected the idols and abolished their adoration; he brought many children
under the wings of the Divine Presence; he gave them counsel and advice,
and ordered his sons and the members of his household after him to keep
the ways of the Lord forever, as it is written, For I have known him to the
end that he may command his children and his household after him, that
they may keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice (Gen 18:
19). Ever since then, whoever adopts Judaism and confesses the unity of the
Divine Name, as it is prescribed in the Torah, is counted among the disciples
of Abraham our Father, peace be with himTherefore you shall pray, Our
God and God of our fathers, because Abraham, peace be with him, is
your father. (Twersky 1972, 47576)
Notice how genealogy is subordinated here to covenantal relation

(without in any way signaling that genealogical relations are now obso-
lete). Maimonides predecessor, R. Saadya Gaon of Bagdad, famously
98 D. SEEMAN
remarked in the eleventh century that the Jews are a nation only by
virtue of our laws, meaning that the nation has been constituted by a
juridical-normative or ethical relation rather than simply a reproductive
genealogical (consanguineal) one. Another way of saying this might be
that the very notion of consanguinity or kinship is itself a function of law.
Not all medieval writers would agree with Saadyas declaration (cf.
Lorberbaum 1993), but I think Maimonides clearly does: There is no
difference whatever, he tells Obadiah, between you and us. While
we are descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, you derive from Him
through whose word the world was created. As it is written. One shall
say, I am the Lords, and another shall call himself by the name of Jacob.
The role of conversion in this context is not, it must be emphasized, to
create a new category of spiritual kin over against genealogical kin as in
Pauline Christianity but to graft converts onto the genealogical tree of
Israel.
Maimonides insistence that marriage partners are not chosen by divine
providence but by individuals relates clearly but indirectly to this theme.
Just as conversion can be conceived as a ritual mechanism for the trans-
position of choice into kinship, so marriage must be freely entered by the
parties in order to generate the lasting stability of kin relations that will
condition the next generation. If a mans spouse were chosen for him by
divine providence, Maimonides presses, why would the Torah (Deut. 20:
67) grant a military exemption to any man who has betrothed but not
yet lived with his new wife? Shouldnt we have expected the same divine
providence that chose his bride to ensure that he survived long enough
to live with her? The biblical-interpretive question behind this polemic
implies a philosophical position that is worth considering. Anthropology
tends to configure marriage choice as a system of cultural compulsion or
short-term strategic practice, but Maimonides insists that the choice of
partner under Jewish law islike conversionbroadly conditional upon
morally significant acts of choosing. This is not to diminish economic and
strategic considerations in marriage choice or to ignore the legal (and
clearly gendered) limits to personal autonomy in any kinship system,
including the one Maimonides championed (cf. Seeman 1998, 2004), but
by pushing back as hard as he does against more deterministic views of
marriage, Maimonides is also defending his broader insistence that kinship
transactions take place in an irreducibly ethical register. Using different
conceptual language, Adiel Shremer (2015) has argued that the relative
acceptance of divorce by rabbinic authorities (as opposed to its rejection
by early Christianity) reflects this broadly pragmatic, non-ontological

view of human kinship.
Maimonides third response to Obadiah over the stoning of the devil
returns to the status of converts, which he evidently understood to be a
subtext of Obadiahs question. No matter what the pre-Islamic origin of
practices like stoning the devil by participants in the Hajj might be,
Maimonides argues, they hold no polytheistic connotations for contem-
porary Muslim worshippers and so cannot be considered idolatrous by
contemporary Jews. This sort of sophisticated and sympathetic account
of practice by members of another religion is relatively unusual among
medieval writers, but it is hard to imagine that Maimonides does not also
have in mind here his own controversial theory of divine accommoda-
tion, according to which many biblical practices (such as animal sacrifice)
were themselves adapted from pagan sources to serve monotheistic ends.
It is the meaning of a practice to its practitioners, he insists, rather than
its historical genealogy that determines its evaluation under Jewish law.
Just so, converts must be evaluated by their faithfulness to the Jewish
covenant rather than their religion or family of origin. On this latter point
Maimonides waxes acerbic in his condemnation of the rabbi who called
Obadiah a fool. Was [that rabbi] drunk, Maimonides demands, so that
he forgot the thirty-three passages in which the Torah admonishes con-
cerning [the treatment] of proselytes? For even if he had been right and
you in error, it was his duty to be gentle. And yet he called you a fool!
Astounding!
For Maimonides, the gentle and forbearing treatment of proselytes
required by Jewish law is directly tied to appreciation for the difficult free-
dom they have exercised by leaving their natal kin behind:
A man who left his father and mother, forsook his birthplace, his country
and its power, and attached himself to this lowly, despised and enslaved race
[i.e. the Jews]; who recognized the truth and righteousness of this peoples
Law, and cast the things of this world from his heartshall such a one be
called fool? God forbid! Not witless but wise has God called your name, you
disciple of our father Abraham who also left his father and his kindred and
inclined Godward. And he who blessed Abraham will bless you, and will
make you worthy to behold all the consolations destined for Israel; and in
all the good that God shall do to us He will do good to you. (With minor
emendations from Twersky 1972, 477)
100 D. SEEMAN
This passage should be read carefully. The proselyte does not just gain a
new religion according to Maimonides insistent formulation but also quite
literally a new kindred, and it is precisely his adoption of this lowly and
despised new kindred that attests more than anything to his religious com-
mitment. By failing to treat Obadiah appropriately, in other words, the
rabbi has not only failed in a religious and humanitarian duty according to
Maimonides but also signaled that he fails to understand how much is at stake
for Judaism itself in the directive to reconcile genealogical Jewishness with
covenantal choice and to see in Obadiah the proselyte a constitutive model
for the seed of Abraham more broadly (cf. Diamond 2003; Lorberbaum
1993). Like Christian writers, Jewish writers also denied that procreative
genealogy could by itself provide sufficient ground for sacred community,
but unlike Christian writers they rejected the idea of spiritual kinship stand-
ing over against a relatively devalued material counterpart. From their point
of view, the kinship of spirit and flesh had never been parted.
Kinship asEthical Relation inAnthropology
Other scholars in this volume have reached similar conclusions. Jolle

Bahloul(Chap. 5, this volume) notes that spiritual kinship is a redundant
category in Judaism, in that kinship [she means genealogical kinship] itself
evolves in the domain of religious belief and law, while Naomi Leite (2014,
2017), whose paper is unfortunately not published here, showed at our origi-
nal workshop, how contemporary converts to Judaism as well as descendants
of Iberian forced conversos seeking to reclaim their Judaism are sometimes
grafted onto stylized representations of a historical Jewish bloodline, thus
reconciling conversion with genealogical relatedness. Perhaps more signifi-
cantly from a comparative point of view, Asiya Malik (Chap. 9, this vol-
ume) argues that in addition to their broadummaconnections with fellow
Muslims ingeneral, Sunni East African Indians in Canada also create more
exclusive ties of relatedness with fellow migrants based on ties of mutual
dependence, shared historical experience, and membership in a common sec-
tarian community. She quite correctly resists the gloss of this kinship among
migrants as merely fictive and calls upon us rather to attend to local terms
of relatedness.I consider this to be kinship reckoned in relationship to the
divine (Thomas, Wellman, and Malik, Chap. 1, this volume) because being
a Muslim of a particular kind matters to these migrants, but there is no
opposition between spirit and flesh (the hallmark of Christian spiritual kin-
ship) and ethical themes predominate. Most strikingly of all, Rose Wellman
(Chap. 8, this volume) adopts the term ethical kinship to describe the ways
in which everyday expressions of care such as visiting, praying, and cooking

for others create media of relatedness that are channeled down through lines
of descent among contemporary Iranian Muslims. Though this will require
more extended treatment in a separate publication (Seeman forthcoming), I
believe that Maimonides took something similar for granted in his depiction
of the inherited kindness of Abrahams seed, which resonates with the Arabic
idiom of nasab wa-hasab or lineage and (inherited) character traits.
My goal is certainly not to conflate all of these myriad forms of related-
ness into a single model of sacred kinship (or even to insist that the model
I have described exhausts historical Jewish forms of kinship) but rather to
demonstrate how the register of ethical relatedness resonates differently
across each of these contexts, creating obligations and intimacies, ten-
sions within genealogical kinship and possibilities for rupture that bear
much closer phenomenological comparison. Christian spiritual kinship is
just one formulation among others in this broad Abrahamic tableau
(indeed, it is more than intriguing that the New Testament also attributes
spiritual kinship, in its origins, to the patriarch Abraham), but it should
be considered no more or less analytically foundational than Jewish cov-
enantal kinship or the Islamic milk kinship with which it has sometimes
been compared (Parkes 2005; Garmaroudi Naef 2012; Wellman, Chap. 8,
this volume). Confusion results when we mistake a mere example of sacred
kinship for some kind of governing paradigm.
Marshall Sahlins has argued provocatively that the whole cross-cultural
literature on kinship can be boiled down to a concern for mutuality of
being, or the sense that there are people who are intrinsic to one anoth-
ers existencethus mutual person(s), life itself, intersubjective belong-
ing, transbodily being, and the like(2013, 2). One advantage of this
formulation is that it does away entirely with the notion of fictive kinship
measured by some abstract standard of realness in order to focus on
the experienced (and ethically ramified) grounds of kinship and belonging
inlocal settings. Sahlins does not actually discuss spiritual kinship in this
context, but he does cite the extraordinary retort of a New Caledonian
elder to the missionary and ethnographer Maurice Leenhardts sugges-
tion (Leenhardt 1979, 164) that Christianity had introduced the idea of
spirit (esprit) into local thought: You didnt bring us the spirit, the
old man countered, We already knew the spirit existed. We have always
acted in accord with the spirit. What youve brought us is the body
(Sahlins 2013, 1819). Which is to say that Christianity brought the idea
of body and spirit as partible and oppositional taxonomies through which
kinship, among other things, must be framed.
102 D. SEEMAN
Yet despite implicitly historicizing the conditions of possibility within

which the idea of spiritual kinship might emerge, Sahlins falls into a dif-
ferent universalizing trap by failing to really grapple with the myriad ways
in which a certain mutuality of being, as he puts it, may be manifest
in different settings. He does not ask, for example, why conceptions of
genealogical relatedness seem so important to assertions of mutuality in
so many of the societies studied by anthropologists (cf. Shyrock 2013),
including all of those described here as Abrahamic. But more to my
point, he also fails to note the very different moral textures that negotia-
tions over mutuality of being can entail.
Like Maimonides, Sahlins (2013, 20) too invokes Aristotelian philia
and particularly Aristotles claim that a friend is another self, which
seems to support his mutuality of being thesis. But unlike Maimonides
or his medieval Muslim counterparts, Sahlins fails spectacularly to note
the broader philosophical context in which Aristotle makes these claims.
The Nicomachean Ethics, after all, is devoted to a deliberative analysis of
virtue in defining the excellence of a life well-lived. This involves a set
of prescriptive claims which an anthropologist like Sahlins might be for-
given for seeking to avoid. But by splitting Aristotles (and, by exten-
sion, Maimonides) understanding of kinship from the ethical deliberative
context in which it is embedded, we also risk flattening kinship into just
a single register of mutuality that is insensitive to the organized alter-
ity (Faubion 2001), grammar[s] of social proxity (Garmaroudi Naef
2012), or logic[s] of intersubjectivity (Hamberger 2013) that describe
what anthropologists (and sensitive philosophers) actually observe in the
real world. Kinship is never just mutuality of being, in other words, but
also relations of specific obligation, desired distances as well as proximi-
ties, incest prohibitions, distribution of resources, rivalries and strategic
jostling, patterns of erotic desire and repulsion, affective complexities and
intersubjective orientations toward self, body, and time. This is the stuff of
what anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (1997) referred to as local moral
worlds, but it is also the stuff of deliberative ethics (cf. Clough 2007),
which is why thinkers like Aristotle and Maimonides have tried to lift kin-
ship up into an articulate framework for analysis and evaluation. They are
trying to articulate something that is already implicit to the way kinship
gets negotiated in real social situations.
Rose Wellman (Chap. 8, this volume) argues suggestively that her eth-
nography highlights a case in which kinship is the most central object
of ethical cultivation. Her Basiji Shii informants, she writes, seek to
cultivate not only virtuous selves but also virtuous families through pious
acts of food sharing and prayer. Maybe one of the things that the study
of kinship in general can most profitably gain from consideration of these
Abrahamic contexts is precisely the engagement with a group of soci-
eties that have enjoyed a long-standing tradition not just of ethically
inflected modes of kinship and relatedness but also self-conscious reflec-
tion upon kinship as a project of ethical import. Though ethical projects
may well differ in their details or even goals, they also demonstrably share
a great deal across religious lines, particularly where the Abrahamic reli-
gious traditions have each intersected with Greek philosophical concern.
From this point of view, Faubion (2001) may have overemphasized the
distance between Aristotles deliberative habitus and Foucaults technolo-
gies of self, inasmuch as both are programs for the self-conscious genera-
tion of distinctive forms of disciplined (inter)subjectivity. Viewed this way,
anthropological reflection upon the structures of kinship is only a special-
ized and slightly more focused version of the more general human capacity
to reflect upon and modulate social practice. Abrahamic attempts to
reconcile reproductive (genealogical) and spiritual or covenantal kinship
claims are an especially powerful and relatively neglected example of this
broadly shared human potential.
I have argued in this chapter that Rabbinic Judaism resisted two pos-
sibilities that were inherent to the conditions of its own possibility: the
collapse of kinship into purely tribal or genealogical categories on the
one hand and the splitting of kinship into opposing spiritual and genea-
logical domains on the other. In truth, the juridical attempt to hold onto
both ends of the kinship equationboth that which is ethically enacted
and that which is genealogically giveninforms a whole rabbinic ethos
that finds expression in a variety of different contexts. In a situation where
one must choose between honoring ones father or ones teacher, asks the
Talmud, which obligation takes precedence? As Jonathan Boyarin (2013,
7) has already noted, the rabbinic rule is that ones teacher takes prece-
dence, unless of course an individual has also learned at least some Torah
from his father. The rabbinic preference, in other words, is to highlight
an ideal in which these two sources of life and authorityone primarily
genealogical, the other primarily covenantalcohere, while recognizing
in pragmatic terms that not every father is also capable of serving as an
effective instructor. One can see how this sort of view is struggling with
the same set of anxieties that underlie Christian spiritual kinship even as
strikingly different sets of hermeneutic and kinship strategies emerge.
104 D. SEEMAN
Often relegated to the sidelines of social theory, or rendered an inex-

plicable outlier by the use of taxonomies developed with other religious
ecologies in mind, analysis of Jewish materials may help to force renewed
consideration of the relationships between modern analytic presumptions,
state policies, and the theologies in which they are sometimes unwittingly
grounded. J.Boyarin has provocatively argued that the pressured or quasi
forced assimilation of Jews into liberal Western politics, with its concomi-
tant weakening or dissolution of distinctively Jewish families as tradition-
ally understood [see also Bahloul, Chap. 5, this volume] should also be
understood as part of a general attack on all tribal endogamies that is part
and parcel of liberalism. But this relentless push for individualist univer-
salism, which is today sounded almost reflexively in an ethical register (for
how could the promise of universality not be thought ethically superior
to anything narrow and particular?), also has theological roots that bear
directly on the question of spiritual kinship. Pauline Christianitys opposi-
tion of natural and spiritual kin is grounded in an even more general stance
of hermeneutic opposition (cf. D. Boyarin 1994) between circumcision
and baptism, between the literal and allegorical, and between the allegedly
particularistic covenant of the Jews and the universal covenant of Christ:
there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is
no male or female for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3: 28).
[I]n this respect, J.Boyarin continues, post-Enlightenment liberalism and
universalism can be seen as renewals or continuations of the apostle Pauls
call for the transcendence of all particular identities. While every form of
kinship is also simultaneously (and perhaps by definition) a form of subjec-
tification and othering (if only because kinship implies that there are must
be those who are not kin), it is easy to forget that calls to transcendence
and universality also bear within themselves an inexorable, if paradoxical,
logic of exclusion. It is even easier to forget that such exclusions lie mostly
unexamined at the very heart of contemporary social theory. My only cor-
rective to J. Boyarins account is to recall that Jews too wrestled, as I
have shown here, with the relation between genealogical and covenantal
forms of kinship, though they ended by trying to reconcile rather than
split them.
Given the pressures arrayed against ittraumatic dislocation, genocide,
and the reflexive post-Enlightenment framing of almost any endogamy
as primitive or immoralJewish covenantal kinship norms have proven
remarkably resilient. Even today, many Jews continue to understand
Jewishness as a kind of familial relation that one can nevertheless join
(and, more debatably, leave) through acts of religious conversion. Yet the
future is increasingly contested and uncertain. While the demand of the
Israeli state for stable bureaucratic categories grounded in objective lines
of descent generates pressure to override covenantal kinship norms in
one direction, North American demands to reconstitute Jewishness as a
purely voluntaristic category creates pressure in the other. Acceptance of
patrilineal descent in American Reform Judaism, fierce controversy over
the terms and meaning of religious conversion, doubts about the kin-
ship implications of new reproductive technologies (Kahn 2000; Seeman
2010) and exponentially increasing rates of exogamous marriage (cf.
Thompson 2013) represent just a few of the ways in which classical Jewish
kinship patterns are being challenged, adapted, or overridden today in
significant ways. It is perhaps too soon to tell whether North American
impatience with heteronymous norms and Israeli conflations of Jewishness
and state bureaucratic categories may eventually prove too heavy a com-
bined weight for the old ethico-covenantal conception of Jewish kinship
to endure. Anthropologists, at any rate, will be unable to trace the signifi-
cance of these changes or their implications for the societies in which they
work unless they seek more assiduously to grasp the ethical and theologi-
cal negotiations of very long standing that have shaped sacred kinship in
different (yet related) ways across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as social
fields.
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of Early Rabbinic Orthodoxy. Journal for the Study of Judaism 43: 249275.
. 2015. What God Has Joined Together: Predestination, Ontology and
the Nature of the Marital Bond in Early Rabbinic Discourse. Dine Israel:
Studies in Halakha and Jewish Law 30: 139161.
Seeman, Don. 1998. Where Is Sarah Your Wife? Cultural Poetics of Gender and
Nationhood in the Hebrew Bible. Harvard Theological Review 91(2): 103125.
. 2004. The Watcher at the Window: Cultural Poetics of a Biblical Motif.
Prooftexts 24(1): 150.
. 2008. Honoring the Divine as Virtue and Practice in Maimonides. Journal
of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 16: 195251.
. 2009a. One People, One Blood: Ethiopian-Israelis and the Return to
Judaism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
. 2009b. Apostasy, Grief, and Literary Practice in Habad Hasidism.
Prooftexts 29(3): 398432.
. 2010. Ethnography, Exegesis, and Jewish Ethical Reflection: The New
Reproductive Technologies in Israel. In Kin, Gene, Community: Reproductive
Technology Among Jewish Israelis, ed. Daphna Birenbaum-Carmelli and Yoram
Carmelli, 340362. NewYork: Bergahn Books.
. 2013a. Pentecostal Judaism and Ethiopian-Israelis. In Religious
Conversions and Nationalism in the Mediterranean World, ed. Olivier Roy and
Nadia Marzouki, 6076. NewYork: Palgrave-Macmillan Publishers.
108 D. SEEMAN
. 2013b. Contemplating Virtue: Reasons for the Commandments in

Maimonides. Jewish Quarterly Review 103(3): 298327.
. 2013c. Pews Jews: Religion is Still the Key. Jewish Review of Books.
. 2014. Circumcision in Judaism: The Sign of the Covenant. In Religion as
a Social Determinant of Public Health, ed. Ellen Idler. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
. 2015a. Coffee and the Moral Order: Ethiopian Jews and Pentecostals
Against Culture. American Ethnologist 42(4): 734748.
. 2015b. Maimonides and Friendship. Jewish Studies Internet Journal 13:
136.
. Forthcoming. Kinship and Sentiment: Ibn Khaldun and Maimonides
Reconsidered. Manuscript under submission.
Shyrock, Andrew. 2013. Its Not This, Its that: How Marshall Sahlins Solves
Kinship. HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(2): 271279.
Stroumsa, Sarah. 2015. The Father of Many Nations: Abraham in al-Andalus. In
Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict and
Community in the Premodern Mediterranean, ed. Ryan Szpiech, 2939.
Thompson, Jennifer. 2013. Jewish on Their Own Terms: How Intermarried Couples
Are Changing American Judaism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
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of Jewish Philosophy from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. S. Nadler and
T.M.Rudavsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trautmann, Thomas R. 2008. Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Twersky, Isadore. 1972. A Maimonides Reader. NewYork: Behrman House.
CHAPTER 5
Kinship inHistorical Consciousness:

AFrench Jewish Perspective
JolleBahloul
In European ethnography and social history, the concept of spiritual

kinship has been analyzed mainly as a Christian institution (Hritier-
Aug and Copet-Rougier 1995; Alfani, Chap. 2, this volume). The lack
of comparison, in time or space, with other religious systems, and at least
with other monotheistic systems, has led to the usage of this concept in
anthropological theory as designating a universal social structure, thus
importingor perhaps paraphrasingreligious dogma into social scien-
tific analysis. I am grateful to the editors of this volume for taking a cross-
Abrahamic look at this institution, and for leading the discussion and the
recognition of spiritual or sacred kinship as a theological specificity of the
vast Christian world in all its denominations. In effect, Judaic law in its
religious regulations and dogmasrabbinical jurisprudence in Europe in
particularhas diverged from Christianity by not identifying an explicit
J. Bahloul (*)
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_5
110 J. BAHLOUL
kinship institution that could operate as spiritual. Despite this long-

standing theological partition (discussed at length by Seeman, Chap. 4,
this volume1), Jewish history has provided a few cases of evidence that Jews
have actually added forms of kinship in their local traditions and social con-
structions that ritually operated, or at least partially, as forms of spiritual or
sacred kinship. The long-standing presence of Jews in the Christian world
and the daily cohabitation between Jews and Christians have historically
allowed these kinship practices to emerge throughout the centuries, and
up to the modern era, resulting in structured forms of Christianization of
various Jewish rituals of domestic and kinship life. Therefore, the appear-
ance of specific forms of spiritual kinship among Jews of Europe is related
to their relationships with their Christian neighbors, and, in the modern
era, to their political emancipation in civil societies. In most cases, the pro-
cess was part of a noticeable effort on the part of Jews to integrate as a reli-
gious minority into the Christian mainstream local and national societies.
There is a historical paradox in this process. In the post-emancipation
era, that is, roughly the past century and a half, Judaic Christianization of
kinship ritual has evolved through varied forms of secularization of kin-
ship practices. Because civil society in the late-nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Europe was demographically dominated by Christianity, Jews in
search of civil participation have experienced Christianization as forms of
secularization. The emerging rituals of Jewish kinship in the early mod-
ern and modern periods thus challenge the long established concept of
sacred in anthropological theory. What is spiritual in some kinship
practices often collapses the boundaries of the sacred, or in specific histori-
cal contexts, reformulates these boundaries in light of the communities
political and sociocultural status.
My goals in this chapter are multiple. First, the analysis of my eth-
nographic data will allow me to determine whether the observed Jewish
kinship rituals actually are spiritual kinship as it exists in the Christian
dogma and ritual system. Furthermore, if there is spirituality in mod-
ern Jewish kinship practices, it will have to be reassessed in light of the
progressive secularization of the Jews in the twentieth century. Finally,
the difference between Judaism and Christianity in their respective kin-
ship systems will have to be reconsidered in terms of how the distinction
between the spiritual and the biological is elaborated in modern Jewish
kinship practices as opposed to the Christian model. I am basing my theo-
retical demonstration on the long-time ethnography I have conducted
in the late-twentieth-century France among Jews of Sephardic North
KINSHIP INHISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS: AFRENCH JEWISH PERSPECTIVE 111
African ancestry, and in particular, in their ritual relation to the postcolo-

nial French Republic.
Consequently, my social anthropological approach to Jewish kinship
in contemporary France is correlated to the political history of the com-
munities I have studied. I argue that, in such intimate practices as kinship
rituals, Jews elaborate complex systems of practical negotiation between
religious law, which many of them aspire to follow, and their contin-
gent conditions of living in specific political and historical contexts. This
approach, I argue, develops as collaboration between social history and
anthropology, and seeks to reveal how religious structures are maintained
but/and transformed in light of time-based social and political changes.
Is Spiritual Kinship Compatible withtheJudaic

Tradition?
Spiritual kinship, also called sacred, ritual, or even fictitious/pseudo-
kinship (Peristiany 1976), is most typically determined in Christian birth
rituals. As indicated in this volume (Alfanis and Seemans Chaps. 2 and
4), spiritual kinship is socially created between the infant and a person
chosen by the family, in opposition to the biological or genealogical rela-
tions between the infant and his/her biological parents. In Judaism and
in Jewish history, birth has constituted an important moment in both a
Jewish family and a local community, in that it defines kinship statuses,
strategies, and agencies, and the demographic status of the Jewish popula-
tion in its local community. In small and politically vulnerable communities
of the premodern pre-emancipation era, the rabbis most important task
was to stimulate Jewish demographic growth through the support of mar-
riage and reproduction.2 Indeed family and kinship have been backbone
institutions for the reproduction of the entire Jewish community and were
strictly regulated by rabbinical law and institutions until this very day.3
Spiritual kinship is thus a redundant terminology in Judaism, in that kin-
ship itself evolves in the domain of religious belief and law.4 The carnal and
the spiritual are profoundly coalesced in Jewish law and religious ritual.5
In sacred scriptures, the religious law (called Halacha in Hebrew)both
biblical and rabbinicalmentions the several rituals associated with the
birth of a male child, dominated by the brit mila, the circumcision. This
emphasis on male birth rituals is one of the practical formulations of the
Judaic patriarchal and patrilineal rule. Although the Judaic kinship system
is clearly a patrilineal one, the transmission of Judaism operates along
112 J. BAHLOUL
a matrilineal rule, pointing to the fact that religious identity operates as a

kinship relationship: the genealogical is formulated in religious terms; the
spiritual is formulated in bio-genealogical terms.
In the circumcision ritual, the role of the sandak offers further examples
of how Judaism proceeds in defining a fundamental kinship relation. The
sandak is a member of the celebrating assembly who holds the baby dur-
ing the surgical procedure, while sitting in what is customarily called the
Elijah chair. This term refers to the prophet Elijah, a traditional sym-
bolic guest present at most major Jewish rituals, especially those of the life
cycle. In numerous ethnographic accounts, the sandak is typically a Jewish
male relative of the baby boy and of his parents, and accepts the ritual task
as a major honor given to him by the babys biological parents.6 This ritual
role has, in some Jewish communities of the European Christian domi-
nated world, been translated, in contemporary history, into the Christian
inspired concept of godfather.7 Despite numerous evidence of the ritual
interpretation of the sandak as a godparent, Jewish kinship has rarely con-
sidered the sandak as a pivotal kinship actor, let alone an actor of the atom
of spiritual kinship,8 in terms of his actual presence in the childs upbring-
ing, which is minimal. The sandak is thus a limited ritual function that has
been often restricted to male relatives and/or friends, and very rarely held
by women of religious standing, when no male sandak could be found.
In many cases though, the sandak is biologically related to the infant,
thus not the exact equivalent of the Christian godparent. Nonetheless, the
notion of godparenthood (both male and female) can be found in Jewish
history, as Elliott Horowitz describes it among late- sixteenth-century
Italian Jewish families (Horowitz 2002, 61415). Referring to the histo-
riography of Italian Jewries of this period, Horowitz seems to report on
the ritual function of the sandak as the Jewish equivalent of a Christian
godparent. Still this function, most often reserved to the baby boys
close relatives (paternal grandparents, paternal uncle and aunt) remained
ritual in its function, with no consequence in the childs later upbringing.
The ritual apparently existed also among Jews of the Muslim world, as
evidenced in Rabbi Marc D. Angels book on Foundations of Sephardic
Spirituality (2006) that provides an example of this ritual procedure
among the nineteenth-century Jews of the Ottoman Empire. The author
mentions the role of the kitatha (godmother) who carries the infant
to the synagogue where the circumcision would take place, and where the
sandak (translated as godfather by the author) would hold the baby dur-
ing the ceremony while sitting on the Elijah elevated chair (2006, 108).
Rabbi Angel does not specify the type of relation that existed between the
infant and these godparents.
Similarly, contemporary Sephardic Jewsoriginating in Morocco,
Syria, and Lebanon or in the Judeo-Spanish traditionsobserve the ritual
selection of the sandak among close relatives of the baby boy, typically
the grandparents, switching from the paternal to the maternal depend-
ing on the birth rank of each male child.9 So despite the fact that some
Jewish families, essentially in the past century, have considered the sandak
as a Jewish version of the godparent, the Judaic religious tradition does
not. Therefore, what is significant to explain is which historical conditions
have led the Jews to Christianize a Jewish ritual, or perhaps to Judaize
a Christian ritual. Harvey Goldberg suggests that in this process, Jews
living in the Christian world intended to have their own religious rituals
recognized as legitimate by emphasizing the resemblance with equivalent
Christian rituals (2003, 57).
Jewish birth rituals throughout the second half of the twentieth century
and early twenty-first century have evolved as significant social settings for
the negotiation of Jews political status in their respective national con-
texts. The babys naming process, for both male and female children, is
usually an active phase in these processes.10 In its linguistic and practical
formats, the ritual has varied a great deal throughout history and across
diverse regional Jewish traditions; but the naming process has always
remained a context of kinship contention and of significant social and
cultural stakes. The naming process, closely connected to the nomination
of the sandak, is thus a complex classifier, as Claude Lvi-Strauss indicated
in The Savage Mind (1966). This has been particularly tense since the
beginning of the emancipation era, when religious observance has pro-
gressively declined among Jews across Europe, the Mediterranean region,
and the Americas. In my ethnographic exposition of personal naming, I
argue that spiritual kinship has existed, albeit in a transformed version,
among some Jews established in France for over half a century. In doing
so, I extend my analysis of spiritual kinship beyond the mere personalities
and relationships of godparents and biological parents, and I contextual-
ize kinship practices within their political and historical situations. When
working with groups that have experienced major historical changes, not
the least of which is transnational and transcultural migration, ethnogra-
phers need to look at spiritual kinship outside the restricted limits of the
kin group and the immediate socialization community. My demonstration
will use ethnographic data on naming practices among French Jews of
114 J. BAHLOUL
North African originsMorocco, Algeria, and Tunisiacollected in the

early 1980s in French metropolitan areas such as the Parisian region (city
and suburbs) and the southeastern cities of Marseille and Nice.
French Sephardic Kinship: TheHistorical

Background
North African Jews immigrated in France in the aftermath of decoloni-
zation, that is, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In their majority, they
settled down in the Parisian region and in large cities located along the
Mediterranean coast and the Rhne river, as they had primarily entered
the country through main harbors of the Northern shore, for those who
arrived by boat in massive numbers.11 In addition, major Jewish popula-
tions of North African origins can be found in the Southwestern region
of France, notably in the cities of Toulouse and Bordeaux. In analyzing
kinship practices in this group of populations, migration and its conse-
quences have to be considered as primary historical factors in the evolving
family relations and structures. In the postcolonial period, migration has
included the following historical developments.
First and foremost, a massive process of Frenchification, primarily by
way of public schooling, has progressively spread throughout the various
Jewish communities of North Africa since the beginning of the twenti-
eth century, especially in the large cities of the Mediterranean coast, and
has resulted in an equally progressive social and political emancipation.
Decolonization of the late 1950s and the early 1960s has amplified this
process which eventually culminated in the extensive migration of Jews of
North Africa toward France.12
By Frenchification, I mean the adoption of French cultural norms and
habits, which has primarily affected language usage and practices. By the
mid-twentieth century, the adoptive French speakers had progressively
abandoned, partially or totally, the usage of diverse Judeo-Arabic and/
or Judeo-Spanish/Ladino regional languages.13 In the post-WWII era,
a substantial number of male and female members of these communi-
ties spoke French as their daily, public and private language. After the
exodus of the 1960s, only few elderly Judeo-Arabic and Arabic speak-
ers remained, especially among Jews of Algerian origins. Among the
Moroccans, the situation was somehow different because they had not
acquired French citizenship en masse at the end of the nineteenth century,
like their Algerian coreligionists.14 Frenchification among Moroccan and
Tunisian Jews has not been as profound and multifaceted as it has been
for the Jews of Algeria.
Key to this process of linguistic metamorphosis was the relatively rapid
access of the Jews of North Africa to secular education in French pub-
lic schools and in the schools of the Alliance Isralite Universelle15 for both
young men and women. Womens access to secular education has been,
throughout the twentieth century, a very important part of their commu-
nities social and political emancipation. Womens acquisition of profes-
sional and economic education and independence led to major changes
in kinship and matrimonial structures. The Jewish family became increas-
ingly matrifocal and partially matrilineal, both in domestic private life and
in public life. Women were no longer mouths to be fed and started to
bring their own contribution to the familys income, especially those of
the baby boomer generation (Bahloul 1984 and 1996b).
Associated with these historical processes was the decline of religious
traditions. Perpetuating the Napoleonian contract consisting in eman-
cipating the Jews yet requiring that they quit expressing their religious
affiliation in the public sphere, North African Jews developed, throughout
the twentieth century and especially in the post-WWII period, a religious
observance system consisting in the preservation of ritual practice within
the private sphere of domestic family life, while their allegiance to French
culture was displayed in the public sphere. The family and kinship systems
have thus been instituted, through the complexities of Westernization and
emancipation, as the ultimate guardian of religious observancea system
of mutual sustenance between family, kinship, and religion. At the same
time, religious rituals of the calendar and of the life cycle have become, in
many families of the partially secularized middle class, major events of fam-
ily reunion.16 The vibrant spirit of Occidentalism (Carrier 1995) that
animated the adjustment practices among these Jewish immigrants during
the second half of the twentieth century has not kept them away from the
traditional coalescence between religion and kinship, and has in fact rein-
forced the sacredness of kinship socialization and rituals as represented in
the postmigration experience.
In the process described above, female participation in domestic reli-
gion has dramatically amplified, and female birth and puberty rituals (the
bat-mitzvah in particular17) have become part and parcel of life-cycle cel-
ebrations after immigration in France. The postcolonial and postmigration
strengthening of the sacredness of kinship relations has been the result
of and has strengthened female emancipation in education, the job mar-
116 J. BAHLOUL
ket, and economics. In a paradoxical form of social cultural evolution,

secularly educated women have become more present in birth rituals, as I
have indicated above. Grandmothers are now more often included in child
upbringing and domestic education. Secular education now contributes
to the emergence of a renovated religious observance, markedly in major
life-cycle rituals,18 and one that is more tolerant to the inclusion of women.
The ultimate result of this ideological climate has been the mani-
festation, among North African Jews, of a resilient attachment to the
values of the French Republic that had emancipated them since the nine-
teenth century, and that resulted in upward mobility and Jewish access
to professions that were inaccessible in previous centuries (medicine,
law, the academy).
How Has theKinship System Been Affected

bytheAllegiance totheRepublican Rule
andtheSense ofNational Belonging?
Genealogical Kinship Overpowering Spiritual Kinship: Language

asaWeapon oftheWeak19
The traditional naming system among these Jews deserves special atten-
tion here, notably on how it might relate to spiritual kinship. In most
Sephardic traditions, male babies, especially first born, are given the first
name of their paternal grandfather as a preferred name, even if the latter
is still alive.20 The rule is determined by the patrilineal structure of the
Jewish family, and the desire to perpetuate, in a birth, the name of the
patriline, especially when the baby is a male infant. Most of the names
used in the Jewish traditions of North Africa were the Hebrew names of
biblical characters, preferably those of patriarchs, kings, and prophets or
leading characters of the sacred narrative. In politically and demographi-
cally vulnerable communities, naming traditions were used as strategies of
symbolic empowerment, and male babies were linguistically endowed with
the task of reconstituting the biblical Jewish kingdom. Until around the
middle of the twentieth century, generations of Jewish men formed crowds
of Avraham, Yacob, Ischak, Yusef, Moshe or Mushi, Shlomo, David (or
Daoud with the Arabic pronunciation), Elyahu, and Mordekhay. A popular
name throughout the modern period was also Hayim, the Hebrew word
for life, and was used both as a blessing for the new member of the fam-
ily and as a signifier of the constant regeneration of the patriline.21 Other

typical first names used in that period were Arabic blessing names such as
Messaoud (the blessed boy), Aziz or Habib (the cherished), or even
Semah (the happy one). The idea was to endow the new family member
with signifiers of a blessed and happy future.
This tradition has mostly affected male naming, while female babies
were usually given the Judeo-Arabic or Judeo-Spanish names of their
maternal (or alternatively paternal) grandmother or other female relative.
Nevertheless, a naming repertoire similar in signification to the male sys-
tem can be found in its female form. Queens (Soltana, Malka22), matri-
archs (Sarah, Rachel, Rebecca, Lea), and blessed characters (Messaouda,
Perla) are abundant in female naming as well.
Throughout the twentieth century, because most sandakim23 were
grandparents, the ritual consisted in keeping sacred kinship within a
narrow group of close relatives, thus making the patriline and the three-
generation group of relatives a supremeor perhaps sacralizedform
of kinship. That process was related to the symbolic tandem composed
by family and religion that Jewish immigrants utilized to ensure that their
integration into secular French society and culture would not eliminate
basic forms of expression of Jewish religious identity. In addition, the kin-
ship reduction of the sandakim group to three generations of biological
relatives indicates specific changes in the demography of the North African
Jewish family of the first half of the twentieth century.
An essential demographic challenge experienced by many families and
by women in particular was the high rate of pregnancy loss and of infant
mortality during that period, due to poor medical support and inexistent
prenatal medicalization. The low socioeconomic status of the majority
of North African Jewish populations was the main factor in this demo-
graphic situation, until the post-WWII period. For a young mother of the
1930s, especially if she had been married off in her late teens, pregnancy
was a repeated anguishing and traumatic experience.24 She had to dem-
onstrate her ability to reproduce the patriline and to keep her offspring
alive throughout early childhood. It is the emotional stress during the
pregnancy that resulted in the ritual hyper-activity of the birth celebra-
tion. The mother was relieved by her babys live birth, while her husband
and her father-in-law saw in the male newborn the living reproduction of
their lineage. These social and demographic conditions have contributed
to the progressive reduction of the size of the family as a living, residential,
118 J. BAHLOUL
and economic unit and consequently, as a preferred ritual kinship unit as

well.25 They have also resulted in the pure fusion between genealogical
and spiritual kinship, perhaps in an endogenous spirit typical of demo-
graphic minorities, especially those that have experienced migration and
transplantation. The sandakim also transmitted their first names to the
male infants.
The Language oftheRepublic intheAftermath ofTwo

WorldWars
The linguistic manipulation of personal naming taking place in birth ritu-
als reveals the evolving North African Jewish attitudes toward French soci-
ety and culture and toward their political participation in the Republican
system.26 Kinship is now manipulated as a social, political, and cultural
arena for the expression of national identity. Some examples are exposed
below.
In birth rituals practiced for the generation born in North Africa after
WWII, Brit Mila, the Hebrew term for circumcision, is now translated
into the French Catholic term baptme.27 Similarly, sandak becomes
parrain,28 or perhaps continues to be called so. Frenchification is at
its peak after WWII, and the desire to incorporate Jewish ritual within
the mainstream Christian register is the rule. A specific case of vigorous
Frenchism is to be found in the history of Jews of Algeria who had been
granted French citizenship in 1870 by governmental decree.29 During the
war, these Jews experienced a major setback in their integration as French
citizens, as a result of the anti-Semitic climate that dominated political
life in colonial Algeria in the inter-war period. The implementation of the
Vichy laws of racist segregation in Algeria in 1940 deprived the countrys
Jews of their recently granted French citizenship, dragged them back into
their nineteenth-century indigenous status, and culminated in their re-
colonization.30 As a result, Jews of Algeria were excluded from French
public schools and from the French military within which their fathers
had fought during WWI.When their French citizenship was restored and
the Vichy laws abolished in 1943, Algerian Jews intensified their expres-
sion of gratitude to the French Republic, even though it had abandoned
its Jewish children for a few years.31 They turned the French Republic
into a godparent, or perhaps more authentically a godmother.32 Their
children were going to bear French first names. The other two Jewish
communities of North Africa (Morocco and Tunisia) proceeded almost
similarly in the mid- to late 1960s and after their progressive immigration
in France, which occurred later than that of the Jews of Algeria.
Translation asNational Identity Making: Mose Became Maurice

andHayim Became Ren andGood French Citizens
intheProcess
The primary impulse of emancipating Jews led to linguistic translation as
a strategy of integration into French national culture. In reality, the sym-
bolic industry of naming translation began in North Africa, in the early
twentieth century, but continued more strikingly after the two World Wars
and the baby boom that followed them.
After WWI, and in North Africa already, Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic
names progressively withdrew to the position of middle names, and
the first name was most usually the French translation of the traditional
Hebrew name.33 This is how Abraham became Albert, Jacob and Isaac
became Jacques, Mose became Maurice, Hayim became Ren,34 Shlomo
became Salomon, and Shmuel became Samuel,35 as the used first name of
many North African Jewish boys born in that period. Among female babies
born in that period, I have recorded a large number of Stella, Estrella,36
Reine,37 Perla,38 and Esther, blessing names of royalties or stellar charac-
ters borrowed from biblical mythology or popular belief. In the biblical
mythology, preference was given to the characters of Genesis. In principle,
the translation of traditional Hebrew names into customary French names
represents these Jews vibrant desire to integrate into mainstream French
culture, especially in a period characterized by the massive access of Jewish
children into French public schools or into schools of the Alliance Isralite
Universelle.39
More Linguistic Journeys: WWII inCollective Memory

The naming of the baby boomer generation will follow similar histori-
cal and political procedures, with one exception, that is, the emergence,
albeit brief and statistically minimal, of English names such as Jimmy,
Jacky, Charly, Suzy,40 James, or even Marlene. I interpret this linguistic
move as the expression of the gratitude of North African Jews toward the
American liberators who landed in Western Algeria in 1942, thereby
pushing the Nazi military incursion back to Eastern North Africa, and
saving the Jews of these countries from deportation to extermination
120 J. BAHLOUL
camps.41 Jews inscribe their interpretation of global history into their chil-
drens first names.
Generally speaking though, the post-WWII period is characterized by
the slight upward mobility among North African Jews, so naming their
daughters Marie-France or Franoise, Jeanne or Marie represents a major
symbolic advancement into the French middle class for many fathers
whose occupations are still petty merchants or artisans, or lower-middle-
class workers.
The 1970s: Modern Hebrew Integrates theNaming Repertoire

The Arab-Israeli conflict in 1967 has generated the emergence of a dura-
ble identification of French Jews to the state of Israel. As a result, efforts
of the Jewish Agency in France have concluded in the multiplication
of French Jews touristic visits in Israel, and in the opening of modern
Hebrew language instruction in many Jewish cultural centers around the
country. During the 1970s, the baby boomers have reached adulthood
and started to create families. A clear trend in naming practices, though
not spread among the majority of the population, was that French as the
language of daily usage partially vanished from first names given to babies
born in the couple of decades since the 1970s. This process has continued
until this day. Hebrew first names reappear in the naming repertoire of the
first generation of North African Jews born in France. This time though,
patriarchs and matriarchs have been partly substituted by modern Hebrew
names used in contemporary Israeli society. Daniel, Deborah, Michal,
Jonathan, Jrmie, and Yal entered the naming repertoire of this genera-
tion, leaving the kings, and their biblical predecessors behind to open the
door to other biblical, mythological figures of resistance and rebellion.
What happens in this linguistic process?
First, by a clear transformation of political allegiance among these
French Jews, Israel is now integrated into their sacred kinship system,
and grandparents first names partially exit the naming repertoire to be
replaced by modern Israeli names. Family memory moves ahead of the
genealogy; the youngest generation is made into the bearer of the commu-
nitys historical transformation. Finally, the naming repertoire represents
a symbolic geographical migration from Western Europe to the Eastern
Mediterranean, after the baby boomer generation bore the move from
North Africa to France. The linguistic navigation of first names across
the several shores of the Mediterranean traces the typical trajectories of
igration that these Jews have experienced throughout the twentieth cen-
m
tury. What has become sacred in this kinship system is the representation
of the geopolitical history and of the cultural strategies developed to cope
with multiple transits.
I will close my ethnographic voyage with some data about naming prac-
tices among children of intermarried couples, that is, couples that include
one Jewish parent with North African origins and one non-Jewish parent
with Christian origins. Those scenarios can vary across the social ladder,
but they usually follow two types of strategies: (1) the desire for radi-
cal integration into French society or (2) the integration into the Jewish
genealogical order. In the first scenario, children born of a Jewish parent
desiring to give up his/her Jewish identity would receive such names as
Marie-Jeanne, Catherine, Nicolas, or even Christophe, or names of highly
symbolic significance in the French Christian repertoire. These parents
are doing no more than taking their Frenchist attitude to an extreme
point. By contrast, children of the Jewish parent who desires to remain
within the ethnic boundaries of his/her Jewish family would most typi-
cally receive the name of a grandparent, either paternal or maternal, usu-
ally given in a Jewish birth ritual.
Here again is the manifestation of social navigations across historical,
political, and ethnic boundaries. Sacred kinship is a narrative process, and
it is what people make of it, broadly manipulating biological kinship and
transforming it into various forms of relatedness based on their inter-
pretations of experienced social, political, and ideological histories and
aspirations.
Conclusion: Migration, theRepublic, andSacred

Kinship
Does the opposition between biological and spiritual kinship constitute
a major structure in any kinship system? Does the Christian model apply
to other monotheistic religious traditions, and does it constitute a univer-
sal scheme? Historical analysis of kinship seems to respond negatively to
this question and calls for a political and social contextualization of kin-
ship practices as they relate to religion and spirituality. The symbolic and
spiritual manipulations of kinship structures are peoples response to
the challenges of history and the manifestations of their sense of histori-
cal consciousness and agency. Several kinship scholars have challenged, in
the past two decades, the very distinction, in kinship practices, between
122 J. BAHLOUL
the biological and the social/religious/spiritual dimensions of relatedness

(Carsten 2000, 2004; Franklin and McKinnon 2001), going as far as ques-
tioning the biological a priori that has persisted in more than a century of
anthropological studies of kinship. In the Jewish context exposed above,
the reconsolidation of the genealogical and the spiritual in postmigration
kinship is the result of the reduction of the family socialization to the close
relatives of a maximum of three generations. Grandparents became the
natural sandakim or ritual godparents, as they were often called, because
they acquired a pivotal role in their grandchildrens domestic education.
Grandmothers have become more present in this process to allow their
baby boomer daughters to take jobs while they helped raising their grand-
children. In other words, close relatedness became sacred as a response
to the demographic, economic, and professional challenges experienced
primarily by post-WWII women. Close relatedness became sacred (and
thus typically associated with the celebration of rituals of the year and
life cycle) because it allowed its members to preserve religious traditions
and identity while integrating into the French Republican civil society. It
might also be one of the reasons for the return of the Hebrew language
in family rituals.
In their efforts to integrate into and to be considered as legitimate
citizens of the French Republican social and cultural order, North
African Jews of the post-WWII period made profound changes in their
religious ritual system, both in kinship and in food, to comply with
the mainstream Catholic register, going as far as integrating godpar-
enthood in their birth rituals terminology, or even Frenchifying their
food tastes.42 The principle was the embodiment of new political and
national allegiances via the modification of religious rituals, or intro-
ducing those ideological allegiances into the genealogical/biological
order. In that process, they did not abandon the traditional coalescence
between the biological and the spiritual, a major facet of the Judaic
ritual,43 while partially adopting selected Christian godparenthood ter-
minology for integration purposes. One has to wonder whether this
process does not constitute a form of marranism that would consist
in keeping the original tradition behind closed doors while showing
participation in the mainstream (Christian) society to the public eye
(Kriegel 2002; Trigano 1986).
Afterword: Reflexive Kinship andtheWriting

ofEthnography
The brilliant conference that generated the making of this book has been
an experience of kinship in itself. In addition to the spirit of siblinghood
that has animated the intellectual exchanges between the participants,
much of the discussion has reflexively evolved in the orbit of the per-
sonal kinship events unfolding between the end of the conference and
the submission of the book manuscript. During that period, two babies
were born, a wedding was celebrated, and a mother passed away (mine),
reminding all of us as scholars that kinship events are consistently inter-
preted and give us cyclical opportunities to give historical sense to our
lives in various communities. In that sense, kinship is spiritual as long as
we make it so, and provides a genealogical structure to our historical con-
sciousness, turning contingent history into genealogy.
Notes
1. Seemans chapter in this volume emphasizes this Judeo-Christian
essential distinction and points to the usage, in the twentieth-
century anthropology of kinship, of concepts such as spiritual
versus genealogical kinship that derive from Christian theology
and dogma.
2. One of the rabbinical efforts in that matter was to encourage local
Jews to implement the laws of family purity, as they are exposed in
the Bible. These rules, called niddah in Hebrew, ban conjugal
sexual intercourse during menstruation, just to encourage it firmly
after the end of menstruation, when most women experience their
most active fertile cycle (see Wasserfall 1999).
3. In modern Israel, where religion and the state are partially sepa-
rated, family law is the domain of rabbinical legislation and juris-
prudence, as opposed to other parts of the legal system which are
regulated by the states secular governmental institutions (for fur-
ther details, see Weiss and Gross-Horowitz 2013; Elon 1995).
4. For a recent analysis of the status of the family in contemporary
Jewish culture and identity, see Boyarin (2013).
5. See my next endnote.
124 J. BAHLOUL
6. For an extensive review of the social scientific literature on circum-

cision, see Goldberg (2003, 2876).
7. In my French-speaking ethnographic records, informants use the
French word parrain as a translation of the Hebrew term sandak.
Parrain is the French translation of the English godfather.
8. S.DOnofrio mentions this concept, in reference to Claude Lvi-
Strauss approach to the atom of kinship, in Hritier-Aug and
E.Copet-Rougier (1995, 8384).
9. As indicated in Dobrinsky (1988, 429).
10. I am dealing here only with the choice of first names. Family names
are usually not discussed or negotiated, except in couples married
in the past three decades, and in which the mother often requests
that her maiden name be worn by her children.
11. Over 250,000 Jews arrived in France from North Africa within less
than a decade, changing the face of the post-WWII French Jewish
population, and creating significant integration challenges for the
community leadership of that period (see Bahloul 1984, 1996b,
312324; Bensimon-Donath 1971; Laskier 1997).
12. Portions of these emigrating populations have gone to North

America (French-speaking Canada in particular) and Israel.
13. In some communities long established in Berber dominated

regions such as the Moroccan Atlas and Kabylia in Eastern Algeria,
Berber-speaking Jews had progressively abandoned their native
language by the beginning of the twentieth century, but some
female first names continued to be transmitted to a generation that
disappeared by the last decade of the twentieth century.
14. I am referring here to the famous Dcret Crmieux that granted
French citizenship to all Jews of Algeria in 1870 (see details in
Ayoun and Cohen 1982).
15. For details, see Laskier (1984), Benichou Gottreich and Schroeter
(2011).
16. See details in Birnbaum (1996, 2000, 2013), Bahloul (1996b).
17. The female equivalent to the ritual of bar-mitzvah.
18. It is important to note here that this phenomenon of feminization
of birth rituals has also spread among new Orthodox Jews of North
African origins, whose numbers have dramatically increased in the
French Jewish population since the 1980s. Today, female birth
naming rituals and bat-mitzvahs are now celebrated by many
Orthodox families. One has to note that the level of education
among Orthodox returnee women of the baby boomer genera-

tion is generally higher than that of the previous generation.
19. Scott (1987).
20. By contrast, Ashkenazic Jews (of Eastern and Central European
origins) typically do not name their babies after living relatives.
21. The Hebrew word for life is a plural grammatical form, thus
signifying, in the naming system, the repetition of the life-cycle
throughout generations.
22. Hebrew word for queen.
23. Plural form of the word sandak.
24. For a cross-cultural ethnographic account of the reaction to preg-
nancy loss, see Cecil (1996).
25. I have described similar demographic conditions in Bahloul

(1996a).
26. I have given more detailed ethnographic information on the sub-
ject in Bahloul (1985).
27. French translation of the English term baptism.
28. See endnote 7 above.
29. See endnote 14 above.
30. For details on this somber part of North African Jewish history
during WWII, see Abitbol (1989). On the pre-1870 status of Jews
of Algeria as indigenous, see Schreier (2010, 60).
31. Jacques Derrida gives a moving report of that period and phenom-
enon in his 1998 masterpiece. As an Algerian Jewish adolescent
when Jews were excluded from French public schools in 1940,
Derridas response to the Republic, after the war, was to pursue a
brilliant academic career to finally become a professor in the French
Ecole Normale Suprieure and one of the most influential philoso-
phers in the world in the late twentieth century (see Peeters 2012).
For further documentation on this historical development, see also
Stora (2006).
32. The usage of kinship language in the definition of this personal
relation to the French Republic has been potent in my ethno-
graphic contacts, as well as in the scholarly publications on this
somber period (see in particular Bel-Ange 2006).
33. Until this generation, most children were given only one first

name. After WWI, most Jewish children were given a middle name
as well, complying with a habit that had developed in France, even
in rural communities (see Zonabend 1977, 257279).
126 J. BAHLOUL
34. This translation is worth further consideration. The Hebrew name

Hayim means life, while the French name Ren means reborn.
That is why many male first born were named Ren, signifying
their responsibility to regenerate the patrilineal family. When there
was no male child, a female child would be named Rene. Also,
a child born after a miscarriage or the death of an infant would
often be named Ren to signify his status as a regenerating member
of the family obstructed by a childs death.
35. The case for David was easily solved because of the phonetic simi-
larity between the French and the Hebrew versions of the name.
36. Spanish and Italian terms for star.
37. French term for queen.
38. This name is the equivalent of jewel, which gives a sense of how
forcefully these babies, even female, were desired by their parents,
especially their mothers.
39. I would not call this process one of assimilation, as G.Cohen did
in his 1966 essay on the Blessing of Assimilation in Jewish
History. In this piece, the author examines several historical cases
in which Jews adopted the mainstream cultures language, and
names in particular, in their efforts to integrate (or acculturate in
Cohens view) into that society.
40. The spelling of those English-American names has to be noted
here, as the final y reads as more American to the North African
users than the ie more frequently used in the United States.
41. During that period, the Jews of Tunisia suffered from the several
months of Nazi occupation which marked the beginning of some
Jews deportation to concentration camps (see details in Abitbol
1989, and in Satloff 2006).
42. For details on food and religion, see Bahloul (1983, 1996a),

Feeley-Harnik (1995).
43. The difference between Judaism and Christianity for our purpose
has to be emphasized here. In effect, early Christianity rejected
biblical dietary laws as material, thus anti-spiritual religion.
Defilement is a human fact and not a Gods given (Mark 7, Holy
Bible NIV). In this process, it dissociated with the Judaic tradition
of ritual embodiment of biblical rules in food or kinship (see more
on this matter in Feeley-Harnik 1981).
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CHAPTER 6
We All Ask Together: Intercession

andComposition asModels forSpiritual
Kinship
FrederickKlaits
I was on my way out the door for coffee with Kathy, a young woman
who is a member of Eternal Hope, a Pentecostal church in suburban
Buffalo, NewYork, where I conducted fieldwork for over one year during
201314, when my wife Laura called to tell me that our 15-year-old son
Adam was in the emergency room. I phoned Kathy to cancel our appoint-
ment. Hearing the anxiety in my voice, Kathy asked if everything was
all right. I told her that Adam had had a sudden headache while playing
basketball at school and had lost peripheral vision in one eye and sensation
in parts of his right side. Kathy exclaimed, Oh my gosh! Do you want us
to pray for him? I can send out an emergency text to our womens group,
and well all pray.
Um, okay, I replied, half-hesitant for an instant. Yes, thank you very
much. Ill let you know whats going on.
F. Klaits (*)
Department of Anthropology, State University of NewYork at Buffalo,
Buffalo, NY, USA

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_6
132 F. KLAITS
When members of Eternal Hope inquired after Adam a few days later, I
was pleased to be able to say that the doctors had detected nothing more
serious than a complex migraine. Thank you for your prayers, I told
them. Kathys father Benny, a postal worker, told me that he had been
praying too. You never know. Maybe it was a stroke, and God decided to
turn it into a migraine once we prayed. Stephanie, a middle-aged woman
whom I knew only slightly, told me that she had been praying for Adam
and asked after his health. I told her that he had recovered. Thats won-
derful, she replied. You know, I just cant imagine how some people can
face this world without God. Stephanies remark had a certain poignancy,
because everyone in the congregation who knows me is aware that Adam
has never been to Eternal Hope, due to the fact that my wife Laura, a
committed and long-suffering rationalist, wishes to have nothing to do
with this church or its right-wing politics.
In this chapter, I explore how practices of asking help from God, or of
soliciting requests from other people for prayers to God on their behalf,
play principal roles in the generation of persons in Christian communities.
In focusing on asking, I want to develop the argument that speech about
spiritual kinship is apt to reflect concerns both about the ontological
and affective bases of relatedness and about obtaining means of social
reproduction. As techniques of perpetuating specific forms of relatedness
over time, efforts to sustain relations of spiritual kinship commonly con-
stitute methods of securing such means (see Alfani, Chap. 2, this volume;
Bahloul, Chap. 5, this volume; Malik, Chap. 9, this volume). My point
of departure involves questions of how conditions for social reproduc-
tion are understood and valued. Writing of the 2011 mass protests against
the efforts of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to weaken public-sector
unions, Jane Collins discerns a hidden moral economy of care (2012,
15) motivating activists struggle to secure the conditions of social repro-
duction. For Collins, a moral economy of care properly values and com-
pensates the work of social reproduction, which she construes as the
labor necessary to keep households and communities functioning and to
allow them to send productive members out into the world (2012, 17),
for instance the work of teachers, nurses, and garbage collectors. In very
different political and cultural registers, members of the predominantly
white working-class Pentecostal church of Eternal Hope, as well as of an
Apostolic Christian congregation with whom I have worked in Botswana
since the early 1990s (Klaits 2010), ask God to enhance their capacities to
safeguard one anothers well-being over time.1 In both of these faith com-
munities, asking God is very much construed as an activity necessary to
WE ALL ASK TOGETHER: INTERCESSION ANDCOMPOSITION ASMODELS... 133
keep households and communities functioning, for example, by protect-

ing family members health.
Both American Pentecostals and Apostolics in Botswana feel that
their practices of asking enhance their value as persons in Gods eyes and
in one anothers. For instance, members of Eternal Hope were gratified
that I responded to their implicit requests for thanks for their prayers
on Adams behalf; my failure to do so would have represented a lack
of recognition for their concern, and a devaluation of their efforts to
ensure the well-being of my family. Thus, asking is an activity through
which believers value the work of social reproduction. Applying Marxs
analysis of value in capital to the generation of persons and social rela-
tions in human societies generally, David Graeber (2006) suggests that
value is usually realized in various kinds of material tokens awarded in
public or political spheres seen as transcending domestic work, which is
thereby devalued. Graebers argument frames on a more general level
questions raised by Collins (2012) as to how to ensure that processes
of social reproduction, construed as the labor necessary for the proper
functioning of households and communities, may be properly valued.
In this chapter, I explore the divergent logics whereby acts of asking
among Apostolics in Botswana and Pentecostals in the United States
help to generate rubrics for valuing certain relationships and variet-
ies of work involved in social reproduction. In so doing, I interrogate
Graebers thesis that value is necessarily realized outside the domestic
sphere, proposing instead that asking may itself be a means of recogniz-
ing value.
My approach to the importance of asking in social reproduction dove-
tails with recent scholarship highlighting the power of the spoken and
written word in the Abrahamic religions to create relations of kinship and
care (Chipumuro 2012; Klaits 2010; Wellman, Chap. 8, this volume), as
well as to provide grounds for ethical reflection on the conditions nec-
essary for human flourishing (Hirschkind 2006; Seeman, Chap. 4, this
volume). I frame my discussion in terms of asking rather than prayer
for reasons both ethnographic and theoretical. I wish to consider within
the same analytical frame prayers and other styles of requests, for instance,
Eternal Hope members prayers on Adams behalf, Kathys solicitation of
my request for prayer, and Stephanies implicit request to me for an expres-
sion of gratitude. In order to understand how prayers may be m ethods of
securing conditions of social reproduction, it is important to consider how
believers understandings of prayers power draw upon their notions about
asking generally construed.
134 F. KLAITS
On a theoretical level, I wish to question the analytical status of ask-

ing in relation to giving in accounts of social reproduction. The work
of teachers, nurses, and garbage collectors that Collins refers to may be
readily understood as forms of giving that demand recognition and proper
remuneration. In Collinss account, the labor necessary to keep house-
holds and communities functioning and to allow them to send productive
members out into the world is the premise of a moral economy of care.
In her formulation there is an implicit echo of Marcel Mausss declara-
tion that in the obligation to give and to reciprocate we have found one
of the human foundations on which our societies are built (1990, 4).
In the United States, the necessity to recognize and recompense the gift
remains at the heart of progressive political visions of social reproduction.
As Barbara Ehrenreich concludes in Nickel and Dimed, When someone
works for less pay than she can live on then she has made a great sac-
rifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her
health, and her life. To be a member of the working poor is to be an
anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else (2001, 221).
Asking, by contrast, occupies an ambiguous place in these frameworks.
Because for Mauss the source of the obligation to make fair returns lies
in the object itself, which incorporates an aspect of the giver, he tends
to equate giving with moral worthiness and receiving with debasement.
Mauss writes in The Gift of the obligation to receive, but it occupies a
residual place in his theory because receiving does not confer obligations
in turn. Mauss thus construes the person who exercises the social obliga-
tion to give as more worthy than the recipient. Likewise within progres-
sive political registers in the United States, being in a position of having to
ask for resources rather than exerting ones capacity to give is usually con-
strued as disempowering.2 Yet Jesus himself speaks of the obligation to ask
in a morally proper aesthetic that will elicit divine response (Matt. 6: 56,
7: 711). Since requests may foster well-being by conveying aspects of
the person to divine and human hearers in such a way as to sustain moral
consideration, dichotomies between asking and giving may be overdrawn
in both analytical and political registers (see Klaits, in press).3
In common with other adherents of the Abrahamic faiths, the Christians
I describe here regard the word as a generative force. In ways that are
historically and culturally variable, calling someone our brother is apt to
orient the brothers kin to faith communities as well (see Alfani, Chap.2,
this volume; Cannell, Chap. 7, this volume; Malik, Chap. 9, this vol-
ume; Thomas, Chap. 10, this volume). Thus, beyond helping to keep
f amiliesand c ommunities functioning, practices of asking may play impor-

tant roles in creating and reshaping these relationships. While members of
Eternal Hope do not usually speak of themselves as spiritual kin, they do
say that they are all one family, and members of the Baitshepi (Saints)
Apostolic Church in Botswana explicitly call themselves a spiritual family
(losika la semoya, in Setswana) which is distinct from their fleshly families.
My own initial hesitation when Kathy asked me whether she should ask the
Eternal Hope congregation to pray for Adam did not stem principally from
the fact that praying was not my own impulse in the situation, but rather
from the series of bids that had been made to involve my own household in
the church, a situation that entailed its own emotional complexities. Its
our goal to get everyone in our families saved, Eternal Hope members say,
so that circulating the name of a person to be prayed for is a way of figur-
ing him or her as at least potentially part of their familial faith community.
I develop a comparison here between the logic of intercession in white
American evangelical discourses, whereby the person who asks on anoth-
ers behalf is figured as extending his or her self into the world as a gift,
and a logic of composition among Apostolics in Botswana, whereby requests
focus believers attention on how their well-being is comprised of a com-
bination of other peoples sentiments toward them. As logics governing
styles of asking, intercession and composition model the kinds of relation-
ships that believers regard as bestowing value on persons in Gods eyes
and one anothers. In so doing, these logics of asking help to create and
sustain particular premises about the affective and ontological dimensions
of relatedness among persons and between humans and God.
Intercession
Lynne, a middle-aged woman at Eternal Hope, a majority white First-
Wave Pentecostal congregation that comprises about 200 people,4 told
me about her prayers for her son who had been an illegal drug dealer. In
desperation, she said, I went to the altar and asked God to make him hit
bottom. Bring him down, make him so sick that he will have to turn to
You. This soon ensued, she related: he had a severe overdose and had to
be hospitalized. Following this episode, he had begun to attend a church
of the same denomination as Eternal Hope together with his girlfriend.
Later, however, he started doing drugs again. As she was driving in a car
with her son, Lynne told me, I was feeling just sick in my heart about
him just as you must have felt when Adam had to go the hospital. But
136 F. KLAITS
then I heard God saying to me, pray for his girlfriend. So I did. And now
shes brought him back to God, and theyre getting married!
Intercession is a key theological trope in Eternal Hope preaching. We
are all sinners, pastors preach, but since we have been washed in the blood
of Jesus, He will intercede for us when the devil accuses us of our sin-
fulness, both at the judgment after we die and in our daily lives, when
consciousness of sin may cause discouragement. After preaching on this
theme on a Sunday evening, the pastor of Eternal Hope called to the altar
those who felt in particular need of Gods help. And the rest of you,
come forward and intercede for someone, he called. While some kneeled
on or stood in front of the steps leading to the altar, others came and laid
hands on them, interceding for them by praying in tongues.
It is important, Lynne stressed to me, to pray specific prayers for
people whose circumstances you want to change. She referred me to a
bestselling series of books by Stormie Omartian, especially The Power of a
Praying Parent (1995). Omartian writes that she feared becoming a par-
ent, because her mother had been mentally ill and abusive, and worried
that she would mistreat her own children. I discovered that without God
we are destined to repeat the mistakes of our past and to mimic what weve
observed (1995, 14). Omartian casts prayer as an acknowledgment of
her own personal weakness and a request for strength and influence. It is
worth relating at length how Omartian regards admitting personal inca-
pacity as a precondition for intercession and empowerment.
An important part of our job [i.e., hers and her husbands] was to keep
the details of our childs life covered in prayer. In doing this, I learned to
identify every concern, fear, worry, or possible scenario that came into my
mind as a prompting from the Holy Spirit to pray for that particular thing.
As I covered Christopher in prayer and released him into Gods hands, God
released my mind from that particular concern. God didnt promise that
nothing bad would ever happen to my child, but praying released the power
of God to work in his life, and I could enjoy more peace in the process.
(1995, 16)
The Bible says, Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven,
and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven (Matthew 18:
18). God gives us authority on earth. When we take that authority, God
releases power to us from heaven. Because its Gods power and not ours, we
become the vessel through which His power flows. When we pray, we bring
that power to bear upon everything we are praying about, and we allow the
power of God to work through our powerlessness. When we pray, we are
humbling ourselves before God and saying, I need Your presence and Your
power, Lord. I cant do this without You. When we dont pray, its like say-
ing we have no need of anything outside of ourselves. (1995, 18)
Whenever you pray for your child, do it as if you are interceding for his
or her life because that is exactly what you are doing. Remember that while
God has a perfect plan for our childrens lives, Satan has a plan for them too.
Satans plan is to destroy them, and he will try to use any means possible
to do so: drugs, sex, alcohol, rebellion, accidents, disease. But he wont be
able to successfully use any of those things if his power has been dissipated
through prayer. (1995, 22; emphases in original)
Since I have been privileged and comparatively healthy over the course of
my own life, it has taken me a good deal of imaginative effort to appreci-
ate what it might mean to cover someone in prayer, or to feel covered
in prayer by another person. What I find particularly disconcerting is to
begin, as Omartian does, from a premise of personal incapacity. Rather
than asserting that she possesses prior abilities and character traits that she
can bestow as gifts on her children (or through a salaried career, a topic
she does not discuss), Omartian casts herself as powerless in herself to
restrain the injurious effects of painful childhood memories (cf. Csordas
1994). It is not recognition of her capacities to give that she construes as
empowering, but rather her willingness to ask God for help, a willingness
that Eternal Hope members speak of as a personal yielding to God so
as to accept His purposes for ones life. From this standpoint, the refusal
to ask is morally culpable: when we dont pray, its like saying we have no
need of anything outside of ourselves.
It is the impulse to ask rather than to give that provokes the convic-
tion of depending on divine and human others, and that sets in motion
a dynamic of recognizing and recompensing their contributions to ones
well-being. To the extent that Omartian feels that God is interceding
for her, and that she is interceding effectively with God on behalf of her
children, she possesses power: we become the vessel through which His
power flows. Specifically, the intercession elicited by prayer takes the
form of protection from internal and external evils construed as Satans
work, in keeping with George Lakoffs depiction (2002) of Strict Father
Morality in conservative U.S. political discourse. While an outsider might
interpret Omartians prayers as means of helping herself rather than her
child, she regards the act of speaking her own incapacity as a gift, a vehicle
for extending the self into the world (Coleman 2004). Ideally, the person
138 F. KLAITS
who is the object of intercession is told at some point that he or she has
been prayed for. This was the case, for instance, for Lynne and her son,
as well as for Omartian and her son Christopher, whose preface to her
book expresses gratitude for the protection her prayers provided him in
enabling him to survive a car crash. It is important to make known the gift
of intercession so that the recipient of prayer may acknowledge how God
has worked on his or her behalf and engage in future acts of asking.
Echoing a point made by Thomas Csordas (1994, 1997),
T.M.Luhrmann observes that the evangelical Christianity that emerged
out of the 1960s is fundamentally psychotherapeutic (2012, 296). In
line with therapeutic imperatives, preaching within Eternal Hope tends
to frame the peace of mind of the individual believer as a good in itself
perhaps even as the summum bonum. The remission of sins that occurs
through repentance and baptism is said to bring about peace of mind,
together with a desire to ensure its continuity by walking with God
through the difficulties of a lifetime. Believers say that consistent verbal
communication with God in the form of prayer gives them authority
over the work of the devil, which is often identified with conditions that
trouble their peace of mind, such as depression or addiction.
Together with psychotherapeutic discourses, retreat from Catholicism
has been key to many Eternal Hope members understandings of inter-
cession. Many members of Eternal Hope were raised as Catholics and
encountered Pentecostalism through door-to-door canvassing by the
founding Bishop and his wife beginning in the 1970s. Many recall hostil-
ity from their extended families, who told them that leaving the Catholic
Church would result in damnation. A particular source of tension was
the obligation on the part of Eternal Hope members to attend church
on Sunday evenings, when their extended families would usually gather
for dinners. Kathys parents Benny and Janet, who joined Eternal Hope
nearly 30 years ago, have been unable to convince their relatives to attend
consistently, but their commitment to living for God eventually elicited
their respect. Janet told me that her elderly parents would often ask her to
pray for her cousins, who have experienced a range of addiction problems
and abusive behaviors.
Former Catholics recall praying to saints as children, when they con-
strued them as intercessors with God, but now say they understand that
living Christians are the saints who are called to intercede on behalf of oth-
ers. A middle-aged woman named Peggy drew connections between her
childhood desires to pray for the dead buried in a cemetery where she used
to walk, and her current practice of interceding powerfully with women

at the altar of Eternal Hope. It would move on my heart, she told me,
to see the flags left on graves of soldiers who had sacrificed themselves,
but she now realizes that while she may grieve for the dead, it is useless
to pray for them. When she began attending an evangelical Protestant
church, Peggy felt drawn out of sadness to pray at the altar for a woman
who had become pregnant out of wedlock. At the time, she related, she
had thought that it was only because I was touched in my emotions
that she went to pray, but now she understands that it was the spirit of
God using me to work on her. Peggy explained that as she intercedes in
tongues, God uses her to speak His rhema word into the world, utterances
that speak to the troubles of the person for whom she is praying.5
Learning how to ask as an intercessor may constitute an affective
education.6 Over the course of my acquaintance with Kathy, who has
consulted psychotherapists for many years to alleviate anxiety, I have
come to consider that she feels most loved by God when she feels capa-
ble of interceding on behalf of another person. Kathy was at a low point
during our (postponed) coffee, in the midst of an unsuccessful search
for employment as a social worker to assist immigrants in Buffalo. She
had recently been sexually harassed by an immigrant man with whom
she was attempting to develop a friendship. Then, after she complained
about mens lasciviousness on her Facebook page, two of her Christian
male friends took offense and had stopped communicating with her. A
couple of weeks later, however, she was much more cheerful, telling me
that she had spent the period fasting, reading the Bible, and watching
YouTube videos of Pentecostal preachers. I just realized all of a sud-
den that God really loves me! she said. And then, she went on in the
same upbeat tone, I was on my way home when I passed my cousins
house, and the police were there because there had been a fistfight.
My sixteen-year-old cousin has been taken out of her mothers cus-
tody. Ive been talking to her, and shes agreed to come to the church.
When she accepts Jesus, thats going to be such a testimony! And one of
those friends of mine on Facebook has come around. Hes talking to me
again. While I felt somewhat disconcerted by the cheerful manner in
which Kathy related the incident of domestic violence, the conversation
signaled to me how her experience of Gods love led her to recognize
her own ability to extend her prayers as a gift to others, by interceding
on her cousins behalf.
140 F. KLAITS
During this period, Kathys grandmothers health was in a steep

decline, and her mother Janet was staying at her house to care for her.
Kathys father Benny told me that they were keeping Janet covered in
their prayers, especially because she had been too busy to attend church.
Explaining the effects of the prayers, Benny told me, The Holy Ghost
is there with you the whole day. You can lean on Him kind of like a
crutch. Its like Hes there holding your hand. Its not in the forefront of
your mind, but you sort of feel it in the back of your mind. Even though
Janet cannot come to church, Benny continued:
God is always with her. You can feel God being there. You dont have the
time to go [to church] physically, and be there with the body and get really
strengthened, but you can feel the strength and the prayers of others while
youre going through it. Scriptures come to your mind and you know that
God is there. You dont have the proper time to give Him what he deserves,
but Hes gonna be there anyways. And even as Im going through the
day working and stuff, in my mind Im praying for her as Im walking, as
Im doing my job.
By interceding for Janet, Benny and Kathy were valuing the difficulty of
the work she was doing to nurse her mother, recognizing the fact that her
own energies were limited and eliciting Gods assistance for her.
On the other hand, during times of emotional turmoil Kathy has been
led to wonder who in the church has in fact wanted to intercede for her.
Around the age of 14, Kathy told me, she began to suffer from anxiety
disorders. I was irrationally afraid of what people might think of me,
afraid of losing respect, I wanted people to like me, I wanted to have
friends, and I was just this little kid stuck in a middle school with five
other kids [comprising the rest of her class] who could care less. Kathy
always prayed to God to heal her anxiety, but He was choosing not to,
for whatever reason, and she did not confide her illness to most church
colleagues, fearing their gossip. This reticence has made Kathy somewhat
of a marginal figure among her peers in the church, who in many cases
have married and no longer spend much time with her. At the same time,
Kathy identifies her alienation and consequent sense of inadequacy as a
spur to intercede for others: I know what it feels like when you want help
and theres nobody there, and I want to be that person at the altar who
intercedes.
In sum, for these American evangelicals intercession constitutes both
a practice of and a model for reframing the qualities of believers rela-
tionships with one another. Intercession is premised on an understand-

ing of personal incapacity that in theological terms stems from notions of
the sinful nature of the individual, but in practical terms prompts believ-
ers to askfor help from God on one anothers behalf. In contrast to the
nature of requests in Botswana that I treat below, the act of asking is
often figured as an acknowledgement of personal powerlessness which,
upon eliciting divine power, becomes a gift to others, a means of extend-
ing the self into the world. Those for whom one intercedes are figured at
least potentially as spiritual kin, as was the case when Kathy expressed the
expectation that her cousin would accept Jesus as a result of her interces-
sion. On the other hand, by prompting believers to wonder whether their
colleagues are properly interceding for them, the logic of intercession may
give expression to the ambivalence that is necessarily inherent in kinship
relations (Peletz 2001). More generally, intercession is a method of con-
ceptualizing and overcoming the difficulties involved in valuing the work
of social reproduction. In interceding on his wifes behalf, Benny recog-
nized the physical and emotional difficulties of the unpaid labor that they
were undertaking together and found compensation for it in the consola-
tions of the Holy Spirit.
Composition
Apostolic churches in Botswana combine Biblical teachings introduced by
European missionaries with practices of divination and prophecy derived
from indigenous sources. For Apostolics, a principal theme in asking is
transfiguration: making oneself appear in the best possible light to other
people and to God, as well as heard in the most agreeable tones. Through
transfiguration, believers share substances and sentiments with one
another in ways that may lead them to construe each other as spiritual kin
(Klaits 2010). I gloss this process here as composition, since hearing the
requests of others may make one aware of how such requests have helped
to compose ones well-being.
The Setswana verb go rapela to pray also means to entreat. Very often,
such entreaties reflect a profound sense of vulnerability to illness, desper-
ate poverty, abandonment, or occult attack, as well as acute awareness of
how personal well-being is enhanced or diminished by the words of oth-
ers. Thus, Apostolics seek out persons who entreat God on their behalf
and pay close attention to the manner in which their own entreaties and
requests are received (go amogela) by particular people. Such words are
142 F. KLAITS
thought efficacious insofar as they are understood to elicit compassion

from God and love and respect from other people. Entreaties transfigure
those who ask, ideally moving them from conditions of occult darkness
(sefifi) associated with ancestral ill will to states of relational dignity known
as seriti, in which the respect they elicit from others shows that they are
under the shady protection of ancestors and/or God (Werbner 2015).
A woman prophet-diviner named Onalenna in an Apostolic church told
me that she sings hymns to herself during the day. Singing, Onalenna said,
is a way of praying to God so that my name will arrive before him, and
so that she will no longer have so many problems in her life. In church, the
act of singing a hymn is often referred to as bringing it out (go ntsha), an
expression also used in reference to large-scale material contributions asso-
ciated with marriages and funerals. Beginning a hymn, in which the con-
gregation subsequently joins, is thus construed as contributing a prayer,
or giving an entreaty. Both God and the congregation at large are the
intended hearers and recipients of these gifted requests. Many Apostolics
have one or more favorite hymns that they sing during church services
in order to enter into the proper spirit for preaching and prophecy. They
sometimes speak of these personal hymns as my prayers; in effect these
are praise poems that name a person in relation to God and the congrega-
tion. One church leader told me: This is the hymn which a person sings
in order to enter into a covenant with God, and to be received by others.
When were in church we each pray for something different. You may
ask for work, someone else for marriage, and so forth. But when we join
in a persons song we all ask together with that person. In other words,
singing a persons hymn makes others aware of his or her experiences and
needs and joins them in the act of giving his or her entreaty to Godas
Onalenna put it, making her name come before him. In this framework,
the name with which one appears before God is composed of ones own
prayer, together with the prayers of the congregation.
Even as singing a personal hymn is an act of supplication, bringing
out ones name may constitute a style of self-assertion, causing others to
speak as one would have them speak. The anthropological literature has
much to say on how material gifts have comparable effects, for example,
by turning the mind of the recipient toward the giver (Weiner 1988,
65). Requests may likewise be instrumental in bringing particular aspects
of the person of the asker to the attention of the hearer. As Deborah
Durham points out in an insightful article on asking in non-religious con-
texts in Botswana (1995), the words people employ in making requests
are crucial to the everyday structuring of equality and hierarchy. Friends

establish footings of equality through humorous bantering, in which they
ask one another for things that they do not expect to receive and playfully
refuse each others requests. By contrast, serious requests for support help
to establish peoples understandings of whom they depend on for their
well-being. Likewise in entreating God for insight, Apostolic prophet-
diviners acknowledge their subordination to God as giver and protector of
life before they enter the spirit in order to diagnose their clients afflictions
(Werbner 2011).
Preaching and teaching about the workings of the spirit may draw upon
popular understandings of how spoken requests structure the material
exchanges that take place within domestic hierarchies. For many years,
I had close ties with the late bishop of the Baitshepi Apostolic Church,
a woman called MmaMaipelo. Early in our acquaintance, she demon-
strated to me the power of the word, identified with spirit, to elicit love
(lerato) from other people and to bring them physically together. She
called out Gladys! the name of a dependent young woman staying in
her compound, whereupon Gladys appeared in the bedroom, bringing
tea. MmaMaipelo explained that Gladyss spirit, that is, the sound of her
name, had preceded her flesh to the bedroom, and that Gladys had come
with food out of the love she had for MmaMaipelo, her spiritual parent.
On the other hand, MmaMaipelo told me that she did not like to ask
for (go kopa) things from other people. She pointed out that she would
not tell a wage-earning man staying in her compound to buy her sugar.
Instead of explicitly asking, she would let him know when she was short of
something, on the presumption that if he had love for her, he would pro-
vide. Members of this church would often contrast these hinted requests
made within a spiritual family with the habits of so-called jealous kin,
who make insistent demands.
MmaMaipelo told me that she regarded her love as a physical pull
(kgogo) drawing people toward her. She gave church members the word of
God, and these words inspired church members to give her material gifts.
It was rather easy for me, however, to slip into thinking of hinted requests
made to me as indexing my own autonomy, as though church members
purpose in not making direct requests of me were to make me feel that I
was giving gifts out of my own free will rather than out of the love they
had elicited from me by preaching the word of God. I was made painfully
aware of my mistake in 2009 when Maipelo, the late bishops 40-year-old
son, told me that he had received a traffic ticket for 1000 pula (about
144 F. KLAITS
US$140) for running a stop sign with his Mercedes Benz car, and said:
You will pay this for me, right? He told me that he was hard up because
he had just paid his daughters school fees. Although Maipelo and I call
each other brothers, I allowed myself to become irritated. In some mea-
sure my irritation had to do with my residual notions of individual respon-
sibility, but mainly I was annoyed at being constrained by the demand. I
muttered something about needing to go to a bank, and Maipelos reply
was: Then you will organize the money and bring it to me in a few days.
I felt that I was being bullied, even hustledto be blunt. I was annoyed
by the feeling that Maipelo was treating me as a subordinate. I should have
reflected that it is hard for a man like Maipelo, who does think much of
his prominence, to ask for something explicitly, since for Batswana explicit
requests tend to signify the subordination of the asker. Maipelo is more
comfortable subordinating himself to God through his prayers than to
another person through requests, so that in telling me to pay the traffic
ticket he was, I now think, framing me as his equal.
When we saw each other again, I brought the cash but explained how
I was feeling, and offered him the money as a loan, pointing out that he
had a good job and could pay me back. Maipelo reacted by chastising
me for repudiating our kinship. I am a very proud person, he told me,
and I do not like to ask for things. If this is really how you feel about
our relationship, fine, but I wont take a loan. I brought this matter up in
order to test you, to see how you really feel about me. After imploring
him to take the money as a gift, I asked him what his late mother would
have thought of the request he had made of me. He told me that in fact
his mother would not have approved of it, but that she did not understand
his own situation. He explained that his mother was always surrounded
by people who would take care of her, but that he has only his sister and
needs a cushion of people to count on in bad times.7 Its true that I
have a good job now, but you never know how God will test you. What if
the government decides to eliminate my position? What I am telling you
is not so far from the Bible. God can test our faith at any time, as He did
to Job, and just like Job we need to have friends to comfort us when that
happens.
In considering the painful consequences of my misstep, I have felt that
Maipelos request of me served much the same function as does the gift
in Mausss treatment: not merely to elicit a return but to make the intent
of the giver (here, the asker) present in the reflections of the recipient
(here, the hearer). Maipelo told me as much when he said I brought
this matter up in order to test you, to see how you really feel about me.
His allusion to the importance of Jobs friends (with whom, who needs
enemies?) reflected the understanding that what is most at stake in praying
to God is ones relations to other people, and more specifically that God
rewards faithful entreaties by surrounding a vulnerable person with others
who will love them. Simon Coleman points out in relation to Word of Life
charismatics in Sweden that the giving of money and the broadcasting of
the self in language extract the spiritual essence of the person and render
it available to and open to scrutiny by others and oneself (2006, 179).
In Botswana, Apostolic entreaties and songs perform comparable work in
bringing the self to others attention but reflect as well specific presump-
tions about the impact of words on the thoughts and intents of other
people. This Christian discourse thematizes the effects of a persons words
upon the sentiments and well-being of others, so that a principal way God
is seen to act in the world is by enabling a person to have others dance to
his or her tune.
Conclusion
I have bookended this discussion with two accounts of my own ambiva-
lence about other peoples efforts to involve me in spiritual kinship rela-
tions. What these accounts of my discomfort with the requests of others
have in common is my hesitation to value the efforts they were making
to perpetuate households and communities over time. I was reluctant to
recognize Maipelos request as a valid effort to help maintain his house-
hold, and I was reluctant to accept Kathys offer to have church members
pray for Adam in light of the efforts they had been making to involve my
household in their faith community. Beyond expressing concern for the
well-being of others, then, these efforts to assert spiritual kinship con-
stituted means of modeling the activities that contribute to well-being,
intercession in one instance and composition in the other.
Within the Christian communities I have described here, practices of
asking are key means of valuing the work of social reproduction. Yet the
asker is figured in relation to God and other people in rather different ways
in these two logics. In Eternal Hope, the premise of asking is personal
incapacity. Life is difficult, full of losses, misfortunes, illness, and addic-
tion, and only by covering themselves and others in prayer can believers
achieve, at least tentatively, the peace of mind that God provides. The
logic of composition, by contrast, lends itself to reflection on the contours
146 F. KLAITS
of ones dependency upon sources of life. When Apostolics call out the
names of church leaders ancestors in order to thank them for enlivening
them, and sing one anothers personal hymns in order to ask together,
they are recognizing how their vitality has been composed by the senti-
ments of particular others.
In keeping with Apostolics emphasis on the ways in which senti-
ments and substances structure relationships of hierarchy, equality, love,
and dignity within a community of believers, I never heard them iden-
tify themselves as sinners. Instead, they would refer to the sins they
had committed as debts (melato) in need of forgiveness. For Eternal
Hope members, by contrast, one of the conditions of becoming sinners
(cf. Robbins 2004) does consist of becoming convinced of their personal
incapacity, a condition both expressed and remedied by prayer, which
gives them the Christlike power to bring themselves and others to peace
through intercession. This emphasis on personal incapacity constitutes,
I suggest, a mirror image (the same thing, in reverse) of the mainstream
American ideology of individual achievement, in whose terms an adult
person is not supposed to be dependent on anyone. In referring to their
church as a spiritual hospital, Eternal Hope members imply that when
a person experiences failure or anxiety, acknowledging incapacity and ask-
ing God for authority over the sources of trouble will enable him or
her to extend the self into the world as a gift to others. Thus, the logic
of intercession poses a political challenge to the progressive vision of the
gift, both by acknowledging how practices of asking may convey aspects of
the person to divine and human hearers and by laying out rubrics within
which the work of social reproduction that askers perform may be recog-
nized and valued.
Acknowledgments I would like to thank all the participants in The Sacred

Social workshop for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, especially
Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Fenella Cannell, Susan McKinnon, and Don Seeman.
Portions of this chapter were previously published in Frederick Klaits and Shenita
A.McLean, Valuing Black Lives: Pentecostalism, Charismatic Gifts, and Human
Economies in a U.S. Inner City, American Ethnologist 42(4), 2015, published
by the American Anthropological Association; and in Frederick Klaits, Asking as
Giving: Apostolic Prayers and the Aesthetics of Well-Being in Botswana, Journal
of Religion in Africa 42(1), 2011 Koninklijke Brill NV, http://booksandjourn-
als.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.1163/157006611x569229. Reprinted
by permission of Koninklijke Brill NV.
Notes
1. All names of churches and research participants are pseudonyms.
2. For example, disability rights activists have asserted claims to reha-
bilitation services that will enable them to work for wages, so that
they will be not be dependent upon welfare payments susceptible to
budget cuts (Golfus and Simpson 1994).
3. It may be objected that whereas giving creates an asymmetry that
the receiver must redress so as not to be devalued, making requests
of God involves acknowledging a permanent asymmetry between
the asker and the hearer. Yet for many Christian charismatics, prayers
and other forms of asking enhance their value as persons through
reinforcing their sense of the asymmetries between their words and
Gods Word (Coleman 2004, 2006). As Mauss makes clear, the
asymmetry involved in giving stems from the prior fact that the gift
causes the recipient to recognize the person of the giver, so that in
giving one is giving oneself (1990, 46). Indeed, Mausss early work
on prayer (2003) anticipates this line of reasoning in suggesting that
a supplicant may change a divine benefactor by making a request:
Prayer is above all a means of acting upon sacred beings; it is
they who are influenced by prayer; they who are changed (2003,
56). Thus, prayers cause the sacred beings to recognize and value
the person of the asker.
4. First-Wave (or Classical) Pentecostal denominations trace their ori-
gins to Pentecostal churches founded early in the twentieth century
following the 1906 Azusa Street revival.
5. Peggy identified the rhema Word as inspired utterances bearing on
particular persons or events, distinct from logos which she glossed as
the written Word. Her explanation is congruent with the treatment
related on the website of the evangelical media company Sharefaith:
www.sharefaith.com/guide/christian-principles/the-word/rhema-
word-of-god.html, accessed June 25, 2014.
6. Further cross-cultural research needs to be done on how instruction
in asking creates linkages between selves and others. For instance,
Wenzel Geissler and Ruth Prince (2010) have explored how Luo in
Kenya envision childrens maturation as depending on their learning
how to ask and give.
7. It seems to me that Maipelo has been feeling vulnerable since his
mothers death. In part because he is much less charismatic than she
148 F. KLAITS
was, he was not chosen to succeed her as bishop of the church, and
he acknowledges feeling that he cannot count on others good will.
Under these circumstances, his tendency is to try to make others
aware of his claims upon them, sometimes in a peremptory fashion.
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. 2003. On Prayer. Edited by W.S.F. Pickering. New York/Oxford:
Durkheim Press/ Berghahn Books.
Omartian, Stormie. 1995. The Power of a Praying Parent. Eugene: Harvest House
Publishers.
Peletz, Michael G. 2001. Ambivalence in Kinship Since the 1940s. In Relative
Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon,
413444. Durham: Duke University Press.
Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a
Papua New Guinea Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weiner, Annette B. 1988. The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Werbner, Richard P. 2011. Holy Hustlers, Schism, and Prophecy: Apostolic
Reformation in Botswana. Berkeley: University of California Press.
. 2015. Divinations Grasp: African Encounters with the Almost Said.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
CHAPTER 7
Forever Families; Christian Individualism,

Mormonism andCollective Salvation
FenellaCannell
Forever Families
Contemporary Latter-day Saints (LDS), sometimes known as Mormons,
like their historical forebears, are intensely preoccupied by the idea of
entering heaven together with their kin. This ideal shapes the lives of those
within the church and is also the central message used by LDS missionaries
to appeal to the hearts of potential converts in America and beyond. The
song, Famlies can be together forever, is an aural icon of LDS culture
and identity. Instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the church,
always popular for childrens classes and gatherings, it is also used for mis-
sion and publicityparticularly as the theme tune for church videos over
several decadesand is even available as a mobile phone ringtone.1 Just
about every Latter-day Saint (LDS) I know over age five could tell me the
words;
I have a famly here on earth.

They are so good to me.
I want to share my life with them through all eternity.
F. Cannell (*)
London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_7
152 F. CANNELL
[Chorus]
Famlies can be together forever
Through Heavnly Fathers plan.
I always want to be with my own family,
And the Lord has shown me how I can.
The Lord has shown me how I can.
2. While I am in my early years,

Ill prepare most carefully,
So I can marry in Gods temple for eternity. (repeat chorus)
Words: Ruth Muir Gardner, 19271999. 1980 IRI

Music: Vanja Y.Watkins, b. 1938. 1980 IRI
See also Hymns, no. 300.Doctrine and Covenants 138:4748Alma 37:35
http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?locale=0&sourceId=622e2dd
de9c20110VgnVCM100000176f620a____&vgnextoid=198bf4b13819d1
10VgnVCM1000003a94610aRCRD
What this song appeals to is the fundamental idea of the Mormon Plan of
Salvation; that all human beings existed together with God (Heavenly
Father) in the preexistence (i.e. in premortal time) and knew each
other in that state. However, we largely forget this premortal existence
once we are born on earth, retaining only occasional glimpses or recollec-
tions of what was before. The purpose of this earthly life is to gain experi-
ence, pass through mortal physicality and test our obedience to revealed
truth, as manifested in the restored knowledge of Christianity left to us
by the Churchs founding prophet Joseph Smith Jr. and recorded in new
LDS scriptures supplementing the Old and New Testaments. If we pass
through this time of trial successfully, we will be restored to the presence
of Heavenly Father and to each other eternally, as resurrected (and still
reproductive) physical beings in the highest level of LDS heaven, known
as the Celestial Kingdom. In the Celestial Kingdom, all kin who accept the
LDS gospels will be united with each other as families forever. Parents
and children, husbands and wives, ancestors and descendents will all be
linked together, and their relationships will be sacred and permanent (see
Cannell 2005; Davies 2000). The purpose of the Christian life as LDS
see it is therefore, from one viewpoint, to fulfil human beings divinely
intended potential, which is the same as reclaiming and fulfilling their
kinship with God and with each other (Brown 2012). Kinship relations
FOREVER FAMILIES; CHRISTIAN INDIVIDUALISM, MORMONISM... 153
in earthly life can be understood as demonstrating bonds already formed

premortally and are seen as precious connections to be guarded and pre-
served in the hereafter (Cannell 2013b).
Most anthropological approaches to the topic of spiritual kinship
have followed classic patterns in either Roman Catholic or Protestant
practice. As Alfani (Chap. 2, this volume) ably demonstrates, for European
Catholic Christians over many centuries the emphasis was on the ability
of the sacraments of the church to create transcendent bonds in addition
to the links of socially recognised or blood kinship, including the bonds
of co-godparenthood and, where applicable, marriage.2 In addition, the
idea of spiritual kinship within Catholicism has always included the idea
of dedication to the Christian life in preference to social kinship, through
commitment to religious orders, the priesthood, or any other instantiation
of Christs command leave your father and mother, and follow me. As
Seeman (Chap. 4, this volume; see also Leite 2014) reminds us, Christians
have tended to emphasise spiritual kinship thus understood as characteris-
tic of their own faith and to contrast this claim with a modelling of Judaism
as tribal. As Seeman also points out, this is a model we should be wary
of, given that it erases complex debates within Jewish thinking and prac-
tice about the relationship between forms of belonging based on birth and
on the law. A further variation on this caveat could be taken from the work
of Gil Anidjar (2014) who has argued that the Christian presentation of
Judaism as a religion of blood connections is profoundly misleading;
for Anidjar, Jewish physical idioms operate rather through the language of
flesh and bone, while blood is a Christian preoccupation that has colo-
nised many apparently unrelated zones of modern political life.3
This chapter speaks to these observations and those of other authors
in this volume, by exploring one aspect of the internal complexities of
Christian traditions themselves (see also Feeley-Harnik, Chap. 3, this
volume). One effect of the tendency among non-Mormons to cast LDS
as exceptional, or even as not Christiana description my highly
Cristocentric LDS interlocutors reject, and which they find painfulhas
been that anthropologists have not felt the need to account for LDS atti-
tudes to kinship when considering what Christianity is like. I argue,
by contrast, that although the history of the LDS church is certainly dis-
tinctive, it frequently expresses and makes explicit many themes which
run through much broader constituencies of Christian thoughtand
indeed, wider American thought and practice (C.f. Bloom 2013[1992]).
154 F. CANNELL
In particular, I suggest that Mormonism expresses another aspect of

Protestant traditions than those normally engaged by anthropologists;
rather than the focus on the Protestant individual and regimes of sincerity
(Keane 2007) or the loneliness of salvational imperatives in tension with
traditional kinship morality (Robbins 2004, 2007, 2010), I highlight here
the ways in which individual agency and responsibility are held in per-
petual tension with a strongly desired and articulated collective salvational
imperativein Mormonism (c.f. Shipps 1987). This hope for and preoccu-
pation with the idea of being saved together with ones kin itself has ear-
lier historical roots, for instance, in Puritan covenantal thinking (Cooper
1990); further, it found many responsive echoes in wider American
Christian thought in the nineteenth century when the LDS church was
established (McDannell and Lang 2001; Brown 2012) as, in somewhat
different forms, it also does today. To illustrate the continued investment
of my LDS friends and interlocutors in models of sacred kinship, I will dis-
cuss some aspects of the process of conversion into the church as they were
related to me, in which it is the possibility of collective salvation which and
also refer to some of the ways in which LDS may respond to situations in
which the attainment of the Celestial Kingdom by relatives is felt as mor-
ally imperative, but doctrinally uncertain.
The Character ofConversion

My research with the LDS church was divided between time spent with
a ward (local LDS congregation) in upstate NewYork, fairly near to
the area of the Burn-Over District in which the church originated in
the 1820s, and time spent in the LDS heartlands of Utah. Many of the
NewYork church members also had family in Utah, and so the divide
was by no means absolute. However, the NewYork site was distinctive
in that approximately half of the membership of the adult ward was
composed of established, but first-generation, converts to the church,
rather than (as may be the case with wards in Utah) made up almost
entirely of people whose families had been LDS for many generations.
This allowed me the opportunity to ask people about their experiences
of conversion to the church. My fieldwork situation contrasted with
LDS conversion contexts studied by other authors who have focused
on the conversion of non-Americans, or of new American citizens arriv-
ing from other parts of the world such as Asia. In such settings, the
pull to become integrated into American society is often understood
to be part of the attraction of conversion to the church. For my own

interlocutors, however, this could not be the case, since everyone
involved was already an American citizen of long standing.
Conversion to Christianity is a topic which is not infrequently explained
in sceptical terms by outsiders, as a practical response to material pressures,
or else as a form of self-deception and investment in illusion at times of
emotional vulnerability. Where a church has been the target of criticism
by other constituencies of opinion, as is the case with LDS, this kind of
explanation only gathers force.
LDS themselves explicitly recognise that there is often a correlation
between personal suffering and difficulty, and the propensity to con-
vert, but they read this in a different way. Missionaries, in particular,
stress that people who are less insulated by worldly success and good
fortune tend to be more open to hearing and recognising divine and
prophetic truth. The conversion of people who have been living in pov-
erty, or have otherwise struggled, is therefore readable as a completely
appropriate process of the (restored) Christian message being above
all the inheritance of the meek and the humble, as in apostolic times.
I should note that this is not the only way that LDS understand the
recruitment of converts to their church, or the only way they under-
stand the meaning of wealth and poverty. LDS doctrine includes the
idea that numbers of choice spirits may join the church in the days
leading up to the end of times, and that some of these converts might
be drawn from various special or elite groups.4 Moreover, a significant
number of LDS tend to think in terms similar to Protestant prosperity
teachings, that the thriving of their own families and congregations
may demonstrate the continued blessings of Heavenly Father on the
LDS church.
For the purposes of the present argument, the most important point to
acknowledge is LDS, unlike some social analysts, do not think that poverty
constitutes an ulterior motive for conversion that renders it less genuine.
I wish to focus here on a somewhat different aspect of the accounts of
conversion that were related to me; that is, their emphasis on familial
rather than purely individual aspects and implications of conversion. It
is my understanding that in joining the LDS church, people were above
all converting to a particular sense of sacred kinship; this idea, however,
emerged in various, sometimes uneven, ways in the context of different
peoples narratives and often involved converts in complex or even con-
flicted reflection on what collective salvation might entail.
156 F. CANNELL
The importance of the element of rupture or event in conver-

sion to Christianity is a classic (Pauline) theme, on which the work of
Joel Robbins has provided a series of important new reflections within
anthropology (2004, 2007, 2010). Robbins argued that anthropologists
had failed to describe and to theorise discontinuity satisfactorily, and that
in the context of conversion this led to an unjustified focus on elements of
cultural persistence, rather than on the nature and experience of change
itself. Robbinss own Urapmin ethnography seeks to redress this balance
by describing the intense cultural disjuncture of conversion to Pentecostal
Protestantism for a group of Melanesian people.
Despite this focus on the transformative event, Robbinss own descrip-
tion of the Urapmin hinges on the fact that they are not, in fact, fully
transformed, but rather remain suspended or caught between two kinds
of irreconcilable cultural imperative.5 On the one hand, Christian salva-
tion is viewed as an irreducibly individual matter; on the other hand, all
traditional Urapmin values are relational; that is, the condition for the
possibility of the ethical and good within this system (what Robbins, bor-
rowing from Dumont, terms a paramount value) is the making and sus-
taining of kinds of social relationship between different categories of actor,
such as between mothers and children.6 In addition, traditional Urapmin
political leadership involves the ability to make things happen for, and
to help, other people. The tension between this relational ethics and the
teaching that nobody can be saved for or on behalf of any other person is
acute. Robbins describes how his interlocutors are deeply preoccupied by,
for instance, the parable of the wise and foolish virgins; the message that
the wise virgins do not (and should not) lend any of their lamp oil to the
others strikes a very difficult chord for Urapmin sensibilities. The only par-
tial refuge from this conflict is found in millenarian teachings; the idea that
everyone will face the end times together seems to suggest the possibility
that everyone might, somehow, be saved together also.
In Robbinss explanation, therefore, the paramount value of Christian
or Western individualism comes into conflict with the paramount value of
Melanesian relationalism. Robbins, in his discussion of Dumont, acknowl-
edges that other kinds of values may exist within paramount values, and he
gives what is, for the purposes of this paper, an interesting example. The
concept of the family considered as a whole (an instance of holism),
he notes, does exist within Western settings, but is not allowed to come to
the fore in any context where it might conflict with the dominant values of
individualism.7 Against this modelling, let me consider some examples of
conversion stories from my own fieldwork with American LDS.
Converting fortheFamily
LDS conversion experience is supposed, in theory, to follow a very fixed

and powerful model of the transformative event. LDS missionaries prepar-
ing for their 18 months or two years of service are taught to use a series
of staged discussions which can be conducted with potential converts
(investigators). The precise format of these discussions has been revised
several times in the modern period,8 but both the earlier and later formats
pivot around the invitation by the missionaries to the investigator, to read
the Book of Mormon and pray to know that the teachings of the prophet
Joseph Smith are true. This invitation, which comes relatively early in the
sequence of discussions, is intended to create a powerful identification
with the First Vision of the founding prophet Joseph Smith Jr. As a
teenage boy in upstate New York in the early 1820s, Joseph prayed to
know which of the many rival churches of the burnt-over district was true.
According to the version of the vision now accepted as orthodox, two
resurrected personages, God the Father and God the Son, appeared to
Joseph and explained that no existing church was true, and that it would
be Josephs task to restore aspects of the gospels lost through apostasy
since the time of Constantine.9 According to the distinguished LDS
scholar Terryl Givens, the investigator who prays to feel the truth of the
First Vision both enters into a dialogic relationship with the text of the
Book of Mormon, and also encounters a new understanding of the divine
figures seen by the boy prophet, as resurrected beings of flesh and bone.
This latter perception ties into the Mormon Plan of Salvation, and into the
developing knowledge that human beings are literally the sons and daugh-
ters of God, and may eventually attain resurrected (divine-physical) status
themselves, if they gain the Celestial Kingdom (Givens 2002). Further,
all earthly kinship links that have been sacramentally sealed through
Mormon ritual10 will be eternal and permanent in the Celestial Kingdom.
If Mormon conversion is modelled on an event therefore, it is an event
that holds out the potential for the triumph of kinship connection under-
stood as part of the fabric of divinity.
For some of my American interlocutors, conversion was certainly
marked by a sense of this Mormon event, not always prompted by the
First Vision story, but frequently by reading the Book of Mormon. I think
here of Linda, a dedicated member of the ward whose own natal family
were highly observant Mexican Catholics, and who was converted while
staying with LDS family friends. Linda was at first unmoved by the clas-
sic passage in the Book of Mormon which describes the First Vision of
158 F. CANNELL
Joseph Smith. Her knowledge of Catholic Trinitarian doctrine made the

episode seem alien to her. During discussions with LDS missionaries, she
constantly drew back from the idea of God and Christ as separate persons.
That he saw the Father and the Son, I found this unbelievable, you know,
(laughs), I was like, Tell me another fairytale!
This went on until the missionaries reached the teaching on the Mormon
Plan of Salvation. The questions for investigators relating to the lesson
include:
Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? And when
she heard them, Linda felt immediately a profound sense of recognition.
These are the questions that I had always had. I just fell in love with the
doctrine.
Then she had a profound religious experience. She was reading the Book
of Mormon, and had reached the passage in the Book of Nephi (3 Nephi,
1126) in which the resurrected Christ visits the Americas before ascend-
ing to be with his Father.11 Linda was sitting in a big, lacey chair in her
hosts Salt Lake living room, reading the passage in which Christ says,
I havent much time, and I will soon have to leave you, and the people
ask him to tarry with them a little longer. And not only does he take
time to stay, he sends for their children and blesses them;not just the
children all together, but each individual child. It was as if, Linda says,
she was watching the episode enacted on video, because she could see all
the details of what was happening; I was transported I was there I
was with him [Christ] and she saw the faces of each of the children as
Christ put his hand on their heads. I was sitting there, and tears were
running down my face, and I want to repeat, I knew it was true. And then
the father of the family came in, and said, Are you all right? and I said,
Its this book! and he let out a big whoop; that was his reaction. Because
they had all thought I was going to be a convert. Other people, however,
reported a more gradual process in which the sense of event was relatively
muted. They reported that there was no single, dramatic moment of vision
or of burning in the bosom (one key LDS paradigm for the experi-
ence of religious truth), saying instead that Mormon teaching just fit
or seemed right or that it answered persistent questions that had never
found satisfactory responses in their previous churches. These questions,
however, were not an arbitrary selection, but tended to be of the same

kind that Linda had found so resonant, and that are answered for LDS by
the Plan of Salvation.
Whether entering Mormon ontology suddenly or gradually, most of my
interlocutors did their utmost not to convert alone. Many converts were
explicit about the fact that they had been looking for a church that would
be good for their children or other family members, and would support
family relationships both practically and doctrinally. Gladys, who had suf-
fered with lack of family support as a child, and who had been left to bring
up her daughter as a single mother, commented; So we had the mission-
aries over, and my daughter was there and she took [the discussions] with
me. And I learnt something, but I didnt get it clear, there was a lot of talk,
but it was just overwhelming. I thought; how can this be? It [felt like]
something Id been looking for, for a long time and didnt know there
was any such thing. But I needed guiding because I had my daughter
If I was going to do things, they had to be appropriate for my life in rais-
ing her. She added that from her observation, matters were very difficult
when conversion divided family members from each other, and that it was
much better when everybody joined the church together. Another mem-
ber of the ward, Esther, had felt an intense, personal conviction of the
truth of the LDS message; she was encouraged when her children warmed
to the church when they visited one Sunday. Esther told me, however, that
she had not expected to be able to convert because she anticipated that her
husband Morris would not convert with her, and she would never have
split her family. In the event, and to her great surprise, Morris agreed to
join the church with her, and it was, they both told me, the best thing
that we ever did for our marriage. But this did not alter the fact that for
Esther as for many other converts I spoke to, the attraction of the LDS
message was one that they wanted to share with their families, and conver-
sion was something that they wanted to do for their families.
Grafted In
This is not to suggest that the ideas of separation, of leaving something
behind and of renewaltypically associated with born again and other
Protestant paradigms of conversionare not present in Mormon think-
ing. On the contrary, some converts drew consciously on the imagery of
death and resurrection in LDS baptism, to create a dividing line for them-
selves or another member of their family, from a painful past. The use of
160 F. CANNELL
baptism by full immersion is important to LDS and is explained in relation

to the passing of Christ through the tomb and into new life. Mormon
baptisands, whether children or adult converts, know this and rehearse
themselves in the idea of the ritual efficacy of baptism and the change it
will bring; If I do not go all the way under the water, I will have to do
it again as children approaching the baptismal age of eight are taught in
their Sunday school lessons.12 Those who have been baptised know that
they have been made clean and that they have been given the Holy
Spirit to be with them and guide them by personal revelation, in fulfil-
ment of the promises given to Joseph Smith. Esther remarked that she had
comforted a beloved adopted daughter, who had suffered traumatic early
years in her natal home, with the sense that baptism would make her a
new person, since this made her daughter feel safer and more confident in
her life. Other people I knew who had joined the church had also thought
of it as drawing a line between themselves and an abusive former spouse,
neglectful parents, a chaotic childhood or the collapse of an adult love
relationship, or even generations of poverty-related struggle.13
I do remember feeling, when I was baptised in the church in the very begin-
ning, I felt like something that was going to break, break the kind of bad
history my family has, and from my generation forth they would be mem-
bers of the church, they would know the truth. (Clara, Upstate NewYork)
As baptism divides, it also connects. As I have argued elsewhere (Cannell

2013a, b), contemporary LDS are enabled by Mormon teaching on the
premortal existence, to move beyond an opposition between social and
spiritual kinship, and also beyond an opposition between biological and
social bases of kinship. Successful adoptive relationships, for instance, are
often understood by adoptive families as being the fulfilment of premortal
ties. In these framings, adoptive parent and adoptive child had already
known, chosen and recognised each other before life in this world. Birth
parents are the means through which adoptive parents and children are
restored to each other in this world. If all goes well, they can also look
forward to being eternally connected as kin in the Celestial Kingdom. This
means that the anxiety about the grounding of parentchild ties against
or without biological maternity that often figures in Western discourses
of adoption (see e.g. Howell 2009), isat least in theory and often, from
what I can observe, in practicetrumped in Mormon thought by a doc-
trine which places the adoptive relationship both as originary and prior
to mortal birth circumstances, and also (since the premortal existence is

not immaterial nor without reproduction, and neither is the Celestial
Kingdom) endows it with its own register of shared physicality before,
beyond and behind the facts of earthly birth.14 Esthers daughter is
not only separated from her biological parents by baptism but also re-
connected to her adoptive parents, who are understood as parents to her
in a much more than merely social way, and to whom she is ritually
sealed for eternity, as she is to her own husband and children. Mormon
conversion, therefore, can separate people from kin who do not behave as
proper kin should and can connect them with an unbreakable and sacra-
mental bond to those who do. Further, the idea of the preexistence allows
LDS to view these new kin as, in fact, prior and authentic.
These aspects of contemporary Mormon American adoption
although shaped, of course, by their intersection with U.S. secular
law15are also part of a diffuse but connected set of understandings in
historical Mormonism of what adoption might imply. At some stages
in the nineteenth-century past, ordinary members of the rank and file
church were ritually adopted to church leaders in order to share in their
sacramental status and thus protect their path to the Celestial Kingdom
(Cooper 1990). Such sacramental connections could either confirm or
cut across biological and social kinship ties in early Mormonism and the
equation appears never to have been fully stabilised during the lifetime of
Joseph Smith (Brown 2012). Indeed, on the showing of my own research
data, the equation has arguably never been fully stabilised to date, but
continues to be both fluid and complex. During the early twentieth cen-
tury, however, the LDS church ceded the practice of religious polygamy
under pressure from the U.S.Federal state (Gordon 2002; Flake 2004)
and this coincided with the church leaderships turn towards an emphasis
on idea that ordinary earthly parenthood could be profoundly sacred in
character, and could be the channel through which ritual and sacramental
power could flow to successive generations.
The term adoption had a further resonance, related directly to the
understanding of baptism. For the founding prophet Joseph Smith and his
immediate successor Brigham Young, in baptism the physical constitution
of a person could be altered sacramentally. Smith viewed some LDS as the
re-emergent descendants of peoples originally from Biblical Israel, some of
whom had travelled to the New World in ancient times; such people there-
fore physically as well as spiritually connected the present, and Smiths
revealed and restored Christianity, to the earliest promises made by God
162 F. CANNELL
to his people Israel. Where those who were baptised as LDS had no such
descent line, Smith argued, their blood would be physically transformed
during baptism so that they too would be, ever afterwards, partakers of
the promises made to Abraham and his seed.
Mormonism is, as Givens puts it, a religion of thoroughgoing monism
(2002) and therefore there is an intuitive consistency in the idea that ritu-
als that other forms of Christianity might consider as creating spiritual
change only, would also create change in the substance of the person,
since the two are indissolubly identified with each other.
A similar logic seems to underlie one of the classic ways in which knowl-
edgeable LDS describe conversion, which is as a process of grafting
in;a form of description which was also used historically by Brigham
Young. The technique of grafting was a key element in the settlement of
America by Europeans accustomed to agriculture in the old world; variet-
ies of fruit were grafted onto native rootstock to allow the cultivation of a
range of apples, pears, peaches, cherries, and plums that otherwise did not
thrive in the unfamiliar climate. Grafting acquired symbolic significance in
both the making of myths of the frontier and the expression of political
attitudes; for some time, it signified sympathies with the wealthy elite, in
contrast to the democratic overtones of growing fruit from seed (since
fruit grown from seed often does not produce a second generation true
to type) (Kerrigan 2012). According to Kerrigan, grafting also suggested
a skill so specialised as to have esoteric overtones, and complex organisa-
tional powers including the power of carefully timed integration with the
developing market.
Mormon agriculture in Utah was and needed to be highly skilful, in
order to sustain a people in desert terrain; both irrigation and fruit tree
grafting were characteristic of Mormon settler communities. Presumably,
however, the image of grafting appealed to Brigham Young and his fellow
farmer-Saints also because of the mystery of identity that is createdby
human craft and skillin joining together two living organisms. Neither
the root stock nor the fruit-bearing scion is the tree; together they
become the tree, and its unprecedented yield, brought together by pro-
cesses and intentions both pragmatic and mysterious. Like Joseph Smiths
revealed scriptures, in which Christ is discovered retrospectively always to
have been present in the New World as well as the Old World, the process
of grafting recasts the relationship of recent and ancient, and proves the
underlying and mysterious compatibility of two different living strains,
through the medium of a join.
If this is a good metaphor for the restorationist ethos of Mormonism in

general, it has a particular salience in relation to conversion. The Mormon
use of the imagery of grafting certainly builds on and references Pauls
Letter to the Romans, which discusses the fundamental identity of the
Jewish and Christian faiths, and the conversion of Roman Gentiles (non-
Jews). American contemporaries of Joseph Smith appear to have been
interested in Pauls image of the Gentiles as wild olives grafted onto a
good olive tree (the church); the process was contrary to nature since
normally a good scion is grafted onto vigorous rootstock and not wild
fruit onto good rootstock. Nevertheless, the graft resulted in the Gentiles
changing their nature and yielding good fruit (Chapman 1819, 5556).
Like Joseph Smiths account of baptism, therefore, the modelling of con-
version on grafting implied that Gentile converts to Mormonism could
change their substance and not just their belief and institutional affilia-
tion. However, for the early prophets, some Mormon converts were not
Gentiles but descendants of Abraham, rediscovered in America. Like
the apostle Paul himself, they already shared the substance of Israel; their
understanding of this identity, lost through apostasy, had been restored.
One of the crucial teachings of Joseph Smith was that the living should
carry out vicarious rituals on behalf of the dead. By undertaking vicari-
ous baptism on behalf of named deceased persons, living members of the
church were able to extend the blessings of their religion to family mem-
bers and friends who had died without having had the opportunity to
convert to Mormonism. As this doctrine was elaborated, LDS came to
understand that missionaries also worked among the dead, so that no pre-
vious generation would be excluded from the opportunity of attaining the
Celestial Kingdom. New converts to the church whose ancestors were not
members are therefore strongly encouraged to carry out this temple work
for their deceased kin. As a result, the first-generation convert can and
should activate a retroactive process by which his or her ancestors gradu-
ally become LDS. Contrary to nature Mormon conversion can thus
reverse the normal flow of temporality and descent, creating a spiritual and
substantive change that flows backwards from the present to the past.
It is this potential which gives hope to those LDS whose conversion does,
in fact, cause unwelcome breaches with their natal families; eventually, the
family can be reunited, if not in this life (and most LDS converts will put
enormous effort into family reconciliation) then in the next.
If the potential for collective salvation is the central imaginative ground
of Mormonism, it is, however, never a matter of certainty. The principle of
164 F. CANNELL
human free agency is equally embedded in the Mormon Plan of Salvation

as is the prospect of Celestial kinship. For LDS, it is only Satan who wants
to bypass individual responsibility and avoid mortal trials; but without
mortal testing humans will be forever shut out of the Celestial Kingdom
and cannot progress towards divinity. Both the living and the dead have
free agency, and therefore the dead as well as the living can refuse to hear
the truth of Joseph Smiths teachings, and decline conversion. Most LDS
tend to assume that from their vantage point beyond the veil the dead
will in general accept the truth and join the church16; the living are less
predictable. Clara, who was quoted above imagining herself as the bringer
of a new era of truth for her family, added in the same interview, Of
course it hasnt come to pass yet, because my kids arent active in the
church or anything. But then, qualifying herself further, she added that
I think that, theres probably a reason for everything. When people join
the church, theres a reason for that, and it could be something that was
decided on in the pre-existence I love that idea, and its been a strength
to me when Im hit with really heavy things in my life, I think You
know there was a time when I knew this would happen, and I said I could
deal with it, so, Im going to be OK.I can do it.
The really heavy things that had occurred in Claras life had included
experiences which had led to her leaving the church for a number of years
before she later re-joined it. It was partly for this reason that her children
had not had a typical LDS upbringing, a fact that concerned her, but not
unduly. She reasoned that they were good human beings and good citi-
zens, and that the decision to join the church must be up to them. Some
multi-generation Utah Saints I met inclined towards a strict doctrinal lit-
eralism in reasoning about salvation, but like a number of other convert
families, Clara did not feel overwhelmed by the implication that her chil-
dren, unless they were baptised, could never attain the Celestial Kingdom.
She was, she said, Zen about it; she was sure that it would all work out as
it was meant to work out. Or, as another first-generation convert put it, If
I got to the Celestial Kingdom and theres people missing, like my mother
and my father, that doesnt sit well with me. So theres got to be more.
Conclusion
In this paper, I have set out an account of LDS ideas about conversion, in
order to test them against anthropological theories of spiritual kinship in
Christianity that, I suggest, are based on more mainstream Protestant ver-
sions of what Christianity is. In particular, I have considered Robbinss

important revisiting of the idea of Christian conversion as rupture and
event that sets Christian salvific individualism against other paramount
values, such as the kin-centred relationality of Urapmin people.
Mormonism certainly includes a strong focus on individualism, espe-
cially in the context of free agency which is directly tied to questions
of salvific responsibility. But it equally rests on the doctrinal elaboration
of the possibility of achieving collective salvation, both in the sense that
kinship collectivism is identified as the nature of divinity, and in the sense
that LDS canindeed must for the sake of their own salvationtry to
help others to be saved also. The performance of vicarious rituals for the
dead is a way in which ordinary LDS share in the general saving work of
Christ for all mankind (see also Davies 2010), since in the LDS view the
actual performance of the ritual on earth is necessary (though not suf-
ficient) for the attainment of the Celestial Kingdom. Although the ritual
of vicarious baptism cannot force a deceased person to accept conversion
(cannot override free agency), neither can free agency on its own operate
unassisted; the dead must wait for someone to help them to heaven.
While the event is not absent, and may be important, in contem-
porary Mormon conversion stories, I have suggested, even the language
of separation it may entail has quite different implications for individu-
ation than those described by Robbins for the Urapmin case. Tensions
attaching to the individuals self-responsibility before God are not absent
in Mormonism, but they unfold within a context which stresses, if any-
thing, a movement from a more individualistic notion of religious work to
a more collective one. It is precisely this potential for collective salvation
of, for and by kin that appears to be a central motivation and experience
for those who choose to convert to this form of Christian practice.
While it is hardly surprisingand would not surprise Robbins
that cases should differ between Melanesia and Upstate New York, the
Mormon example does, I think, provide a strong argument against too
ready an identification between Christianity, conversion processes and the
progress of individualism as a value. The ethical dilemmas faced by the
Urapmin as they listen to the parable of the wise and foolish virgins are,
perhaps, actually much more widely felt by Christians of different denomi-
nations and in different parts of the world. Certainly they play a part in
Roman Catholic antirecessionary practices for the dead, and in a long
tradition of theological debate about the Christian persons responsibili-
ties to others. Recent fieldwork by Meadhbh McIvor suggests that these
166 F. CANNELL
concerns may be felt in unexpected places, such as among Evangelical

English Protestant Christians, who constantly ask themselves how they
should balance their own salvation against the need to try to reach and
care for others with the word of God (McIvor n.d.). A reaching for a sense
of the Christian collectivist is entirely orthodox in most major forms of
Christian practice. Although LDS teachings on the eternisation of kinship
are unusual, they develop strains of thinking about covenant and connec-
tion which are much more widely present, including in American Puritan
traditions, as well as in Americas more theocratic recent past. The conver-
sion of the solitary Christian individual finds a counterpoise in the conver-
sion for, and towards, kinship.
Notes
1. See http://www.lyrics85.com/FAMILIES-CAN-BE-TOGETHER-
FOREVER-LYRICS/395004/ accessed February 11, 2013. It
should be noted that the Churchs publicity department made a
decision (much discussed in LDS circles) to change the emphasis
of its videos to the Im a Mormon campaign, which featured
diverse and strongly individual Latter-day Saints, in order to
counter stereotyping to which the Church was especially sensitive
during the Romney presidential candidacy. However, the centrality
and appeal of the idea of forever families have never faltered.
2. The necessity for marriage to be blessed by the church or treated
as sacrament (rather than as private contract) has varied and been
contested over time.
. Carsten (2001) has productively problematised the category of
3
blood in anthropological discussions. For direct discussions of this
topic in relation to Mormon idioms of blood and the ethnography
of adoption, see Cannell (2013a,b).
4. One example of this kind of thinking would be the interest that
many in the church show in converts from Judaism, which is given
a special status as antecedent and partial model for Latter-day
Saints.
5. Robbins suggests that only integration in the capitalist economy
would be likely to create Urapmin individuals (2004). On the
matter of continuities, one might note that the Urapmin have kept
all their old gods, just in case there should be a need to return to
them in the future (2004).
6. Robbins specifies that Melanesian societies are not holistic in the

sense applied by Dumont to India, and that therefore there is no
overarching concept of society; I use the term social relation-
ship here for brevity.
7. Paramount values are said to be dominant in key areas of social life,
such as the modern capitalist economy. For a framing that asks how
much such claims are ideological and may disguise the complexity
of social life, see McKinnon and Cannell (2013).
8. Most recently in 2004 when the guide Preach my Gospel replaced
the 1988 Missionary Guide, with the intention of making mission-
ary discussions more personal and flexible. (http://rsc.byu.edu/
archived/volume-14-number-1-2013/histor y-preach-my-
gospel).
9. The First Vision has become foundational in twentieth century
Mormonism and was less known in early Mormonism (Wikipedia).
10. The relevant rituals are generally performed in LDS temples.

Children born to parents married in the temple are said to be
born in the covenant and are automatically sealed to their par-
ents for eternity, although sealings can be forfeit for some sins.
11. This is also the central episode in the churchs Hill Cumorah

Pageant which is held annually close to my upstate NewYork field-
site. The significance of the Pageant for my interlocutors is dis-
cussed in Cannell (in preparation).
12. Known as Primary in LDS circles.
13. Although not my topic here, it seems very probable that contem-
porary Mormonism like wider American Protestant culture has
been influenced by the therapeutic turn in religious life. (Madsen
2014; see also Griffith 2000).
14. All human beings are said to be spirit children of Heavenly Father and
Mother premortally, where spirit is not the opposite of physical
matter, but its first, pre-earthly form. The exact ways in which earthly
kinship is chosen premortally are speculative not doctrinal for
Mormons, and different interpretations of this are possible. For some
examples, see Cannell, (2013a, b) and Cannell (in preparation).
15. On aspects of the historical development of adoption law in the
United States, see Zelizer (1985).
16. People undertaking vicarious baptism for the dead may sense inti-
mations of acceptance from the persons named, although this is
not always expected or necessary.
168 F. CANNELL
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University Press.
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. 2013a. The Blood of Abraham; Mormon Redemptive Physicality and
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. 2010. Joseph Smith, Jesus and Satanic Opposition; Atonement, Evil and the
Mormon Vision. NewYork/London: Ashgate.
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Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle. Chapel Hill/London: University of North
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New World Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, S.Barringer. 2002. The Mormon Question; Polygamy and Constitutional
Conflict in Nineteenth Century America. Chapel Hill/London: University of
North Carolina Press.
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Children. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
CHAPTER 8
Substance, Spirit, andSociality Among Shii

Muslims inIran
RoseWellman
We began the ziarat-e ashura, a ritual prayer and votive meal held in
honor of the martyr, the Imam Husayn, with a list of invitees, a list of
foods, and a central intention: to rid the house of evil and spiritually heal
the family.1 The prayer gathering was my 20-year-old host brothers idea.
He had convinced his parents that this was what the household needed:
Having the prayer at the house, he said, will make it clean (pak)
and fill it with angels. His mother, father, sisters, and brother agreed:
the inner purity of the household had been breached and the evil eye
had struck. The person responsible, they said, was a jealous aunt who
had engaged in harmful prayer taking, a kind of negative prayer form,
over the tea that one or more of us had consumed. This had resulted
in an unusual escalation of tensions between parents and children and
between siblings. For the family, such discord was more than unpleasant.
R. Wellman (*)
The Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf
Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_8
172 R. WELLMAN
It was sinful, starkly contrasting with Islamic ideals of harmonious and

religiously permissible or halal relations between kin. The prayer, the
family hoped, would reverse this trend by cleansing the home of evil,
encouraging reconciliation (ashti) and restoring the purity of family
relationships through the mutual incorporation of blessed foodin this
case homemade saffron rice.
Since the 1960s, anthropologists have interrogated the Euro-American
presupposition that biology is always the ultimate referent of kinship
relations (Schneider 1984; Yanagisako and Collier 1987; Franklin and
McKinnon 2001). They have explored the ways in which people create
relatedness (Carsten 1995) through processes such as residing together
(Bahloul 1996), sharing food at the hearth (Carsten 1995), or caring for
others (Bodenhorn 2000). This approach has successfully re-emphasized
local models of kin making and has challenged presumed analytical
and historically specificdistinctions between real kinship (based on
nature) and not real or fictive kinships such as spiritual kinship.
Yet despite these advances, few scholars have pushed beyond the
tendency to think about kinship in secularist (and materialist) terms.
Schneider, for instance, examined religion as a second-order phenomenon
in his work on the meanings of blood and law in American kinship
and largely neglected the particular religious formations that constituted
American modernity (Cannell 2013). In The Seed and the Soil, Carol
Delaney began a challenge to this partitioning of kinship and religion
(and of politics) by illustrating how concepts of monogenetic human pro-
creation are linked to monotheistic understandings of divine creation in
which God is the Father of creation (Delaney 1986; Delaney, Chap. 11,
this volume). Additionally, important scholarship has now explored how
immaterial or sacred qualities can work alone or alongside other means
of reckoning kinship to define kin relations within and against outside
others (Cannell, Chap. 7, this volume; Wellman 2014; Cannell 2013;
Johnson et al. 2013; Chipumuro 2012). Fenella Cannell, for instance,
has explored the American Mormon recognition of past and future kin
to show that ideas and practices of kinship can occupy a third space in
which kinship rests on neither biogenetic substance nor man-made law/
convention, but rather on something spiritual, immaterial, and ineffable
(2007, 6, 2013; Cannell, Chap. 7, this volume). Similarly, David Warren
Sabean and Simon Teuscher have demonstrated the cultural and historic
specificity of theorists separation between the somatic or physical aspects
SUBSTANCE, SPIRIT, ANDSOCIALITY AMONG SHII MUSLIMS INIRAN 173
of incorporation into kin groups and the non-physical acts and qualities
that create kinship (2013, 7).
In this chapter, I draw from lived examples such as the ziarat-e ashura
prayer gathering (above) to explore how Shii Iranian interlocutors prac-
tice and understand kinship not only through idioms of blood, milk, and
contract as found in Islamic inheritance law, but also through acts of cul-
tivating ideal sacred and ethical qualities such as purity within and among
members of the family. During my research, families intensely strove to
develop and maintain what they called halal, harmonious, and pure rela-
tions through ongoing everyday and ritual acts such as prayer, sharing
food, and visiting.2 They sought to purify and cleanse the inside, intimate
spaces of the home (darun) while defending against incursions of immo-
rality from those beyond or outside (birun) the immediate kin group
(e.g., from certain in-laws, extended kin, neighbors, strangers, or even the
West).
Most of the material I present in this chapter draws from ethnographic
fieldwork in the provincial town of Fars-Abad3 between 2007 and 2010.
Fars-Abad lies near the long Amir Kabir highway that connects Tehran,
Esfahan, and Shiraz and is known locally for its relative conservatism. In
2010 and in contrast to most parts of Tehran and even some neighboring
towns, the black chador was required street attire for women and men
rarely wore T-shirts in favor of long-sleeve garments. The local Friday
Imam, an overseer of town religiosity, was frequently said to be strict
(sakhtgir), often unnecessarily so; and, with a few gossip-worthy excep-
tions, women and men maintained religiously permissible interaction in
public and private.
While in Fars-Abad, I lived in an extended household of pious, Farsi-
speaking, Shii Muslims who not only supported the values of the Islamic
Republic but who had also fought in the Iran-Iraq War (198088). Many
of these interlocutors were card-carrying members of the Basij, a voluntary
force founded by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980. Often described as
the original revolutionaries who upheld the holy war (jihad) (the Iran-
Iraq War), Basijis were the first to go to the front and be martyred (Varzi
2006). Elsewhere, I have mapped out in greater detail the controversial
circumstances of doing research among Basijis as an American (Wellman
2015). For now, though, it is important to note that Basiji membership
was neither the only nor the primary affiliation of the family members
with whom I conducted research. More often, they described themselves
174 R. WELLMAN
as warm-hearted (khun-garm) people from Fars-Abad or as good

Muslims. I here focus on participant observation and interviews with
key members of my extended host family: Ahmad (an Iran-Iraq War vet-
eran), his wife Nushin, and their four semi-adult children. Ahmad and
Nushin were retired teachers and members of Fars-Abads land-owning
community. I also include material from conversations with Nushins and
Ahmads siblings, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbors, and friends,
as well as with a variety of other Iranians from all walks of life in both
Tehran and Shiraz.
As a result of my focus on the homes of supporters of the state, how-
ever, this chapter is necessarily centered on the views and experiences of
a population connected to the officialdom of the Islamic Republic, a very
specific cohort given the diverse political scene of contemporary Iran. This
is important in that many of my interlocutors strongly believed in and
sought to enact the Islamic Republics imperative to promote virtue and
prevent vice, a slogan directed against perceived social injustice, cultural
imperialism, and what is often termed Westernstruckness (a plague
of the West). Today, Article 8 of Irans constitution employs this phrase
and emphasizes the obligation of every Muslim to guide others toward
goodness and save them from evil. It describes this act as a mutual duty
which should shape relations both between people and between people
and the government. For my hosts, then, state politics were complexly
entangled with the pious work of protecting and maintaining pure and
halal family relations.
In the following, I draw from this research in Fars-Abad, Tehran, and
Shiraz to examine my interlocutors notions of the God-given natural
laws that organize gender and family roles, inheritance, and marriage
exclusions. I argue that blood and other shared substances of kinship
channel physio-sacred qualities of purity and simplicity along lines of
descent.4 I then draw from the anthropology of ethics to explore how
pure and halal kin relations are additionally constituted through a range
of everyday and ritual acts such as praying or cooking and feedingacts
which not only infuse the bodies and souls of kin with blessing and purity
but also delineate the inner space of the household from outside cor-
ruption. This chapter thus highlights the embodied, sacred, and ethical
processes by which kin relations are formed and considers how increased
attention to the religious dimensions of kinship, its lived boundaries,
and shifting networks, can reinvigorate the study of kinship in Iran and
beyond.
More thanSubstance: Shii Natural Law

andGods Creation
According to influential Shii Islamic scholars such as the late Ayatollah

Tabatabai and the Ayatollah Motahhari, Islamic kinship is premised on
notions of inherited patrilineal and matrilineal blood, milk suckling, and
heterosexual marriage. These concepts, which appear in laws and commen-
tary surrounding marriage exclusions and inheritance, are governed by the
God-given laws of nature and regulate the differences between the sexes
as well as family duties, roles, and responsibilities (Haeri 1989, 27).
Shii Basijis in Fars-Abad frequently referred to the views of these schol-
ars. They described the family household (khanevadeh) and extended
family (qowm o khish) as groups related through both matrilateral and
patrilateral ties of blood, through shared breast milk, and through mar-
riage. The immediate family is further delimited by those deemed unlaw-
ful to marry (mahram). Mahram persons include, for instance, the father
and mother, the grandparents, and great grandparents; the brothers and
sisters; and the children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, as well
as affinal relations such as the fathers- and mothers-in-law, the sons- or
daughters-in-law, the stepfather, the stepmother, and the stepchildren
(Haeri 1989). In 2010, the notion of same blood (ham khuni) was
particularly prevalent in the ways interlocutors spoke about ties of descent,
siblingship, and relatedness more generally. According to most interview-
ees, patrilateral tiesthrough which Iranians inherit names and citizen-
shipwere more official, although no less formative to the identity of a
child than matrilateral ties.
Yet according to my hosts and other interlocutors, blood and the other
shared substances of kinship are more than mere material substance.5 As
one Fars-Abadi cousin explained, blood from the veins carries spirit
(ruh), energy (energi), and life (jan).6 Others in Fars-Abad noted
that blood carries qualities such as purity along lines of descent, such as
between and among descendants of the Prophet (sayyedha):
A sayyed from the line of the Prophets family was living here in Fars-Abad.
A small baby, he was coming home with his mother from Shiraz in the car.
His name was Sayyed Allah Al-din. Right here in Fars-Abad, he was being
held by his mother when the car crashed. Although his mother died, he
fell into a bush in the desertThey said that his ancestral line protected
him. His mother died, but he lived. We say that sayyeds, because they are
176 R. WELLMAN
in the doorway, at the threshold of Gods presence, that they have a lot
of aberu [the water of ones face, here meaning esteem and purity]. They
are in Gods threshold. We seek help from them the way we do from the
other family members of the Prophet Muhammad. We say, Pray for us. You
are sayyeds. Please request your ancestors line to help us. (Interview with
Nushin, Fars-Abad, 4/24/2010)
In this story, which was told to me on several occasions by different inter-

locutors in Fars-Abad, a sayyed infant and descendant of the Prophet was
protected by his pure ancestry and proximity to God in a tragic car
crash that killed his own mother. The infants purity, storytellers said, was
inherited through the lineage and blood that he shared with the Prophet.
As one neighbor related, a sayyed is a person who is of the same blood
as the Prophet (570632 CE), and who can trace their ancestry to his
holiness Imam Husayn, to his holiness Ali.
On the prophetic genealogy of the sayyeds Engseng Ho writes,
genealogy provided a sublime form of identity that could hold both
pure Prophetic essence and create human substance without contradic-
tion (2006, 187). Similarly, for Shias in Fars-Abad and elsewhere in Iran,
Prophetic genealogies do not oppose spirit and matter, divine light or
blood. Rather, they flow together between generations. Such light is also
referred to as divine grace (barakat). It is depicted in murals and other
votive art, and it emanates from the faces of the family of the Prophet and
their descendants and is further understood as a vital, life-giving essence
that animates the world and its creatures (see also Aghaie 2005). For Fars-
Abadis, however, even those who are not sayyed can inherit immaterial
qualities through blood, qualities such as purity, religiosity, or esteem.
Blood is here at once a substance, material, metaphor, and is powerfully
involved in life, death, nurturance and violence, connection and exclusion,
and kinship and sacrifice (Carsten 2013).
Interlocutors also contended that breast milk is infused with personal
traits and sacred qualities. In Islam, milk suckling creates a sexual taboo
between a child and his or her wet nurses lineal kin, leading to a series
of marriage prohibitions (Quran 4:23, 4:27; Parkes 2005; Clarke 2007).
These marriage prohibitions are the same as those forbidden by ancestry/
consanguinity (nasab). Indeed, the Shii position on this subject, which is
codified in Book 7 of the Iranian Civil Code (Article 1046), stipulates that
marriage exclusions (often glossed as kin relations)created by the act
of suckling are equivalent to marriage exclusions created by consanguinity
(Naef 2012, 174). This is interesting because, as opposed to other inter-

pretations of milk kinship, the Iranian civil code places emphasis on the
act of suckling rather than the substance itself. In Fars-Abad, host family
members emphasized both the act of suckling and the substance of the milk
itself, insisting that breast milk can channel personal, physical, and spiri-
tual characteristics between the wet nurse and the child. For example, in
conversation, someone might say that of course X is a good person, s/he
drank milk from Y who is of known personal esteem (aberu). According
to the anthropologist of Iran Anne Betteridge (personal communication
2008), this is not necessarily a generationally deep tie, but can be if one is
nursed by ones own mother, who was nursed by his or her mother, and
so on. My own research confirms this assessment, especially in Fars-Abad
where people paid close attention to breastfeeding and regarded it as far
superior to bottled dry milk. They argued that sharing breast milk meant
sharing sacred qualities between mother and child. For instance, during
one interview, Nushin confessed that she believed that if for some reason
a baby consumed the breast milk of a female descendant of the Prophet,
he would become a sayyed. Her husband, overhearing our conversation,
jumped in to voice his disagreement: No, no, he said, sharing milk
alone is not enough to confer sayyed status. I note this dispute because it
reveals Nushins application of a local cultural logic: namely, bodily sub-
stances such as milk and acts such as suckling can transfer sacred qualities
between kin.
This combination of kindred spirit and matter appears again in the pan-
jtan, a banner in the shape of hand that is used during Shii commemora-
tions to depict the family of the Prophet (Chelkowski 1979). The sign,
with its palm and five fingers, portrays the Prophet, his son-in-law Ali, his
daughter Fatima, and his grandsons Hassan and Husayn as the members
of a shared body and signifies their shared purity. Furthermore, the
panjtan stands for the witnessing of the Battle of Karbala and support
of the Imam Husayn as against the people of Kufa who had sided with the
evil Yazid. It thus demarcates not only the shared purity of the family of
the Prophet, but also the Shias as a distinct religious group.
Finally, the capacity for the substances of kinship to transfer inef-
fable and sacred qualities between persons is visible in ideas and prac-
tices surrounding spilled martyrs blood. According to interlocutors,
martyrs blood is holy, life giving, and purifying. This message is rein-
forced in Islamic-national commemorations in honor of martyrdom of
the Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala (680 CE) such as the annual
178 R. WELLMAN
rites of Muharram, in events remembering the 1979 Revolution, and in

mourning for the bloody sacrifice of war heroes during the Iran-Iraq War
(198088 CE). Where the blood of the martyrs fall, they say, tulips grow.
Indeed, martyrs blood is thought to bring bodily and spiritual regenera-
tion. Nushin told me that Iranians such as herself pilgrimage to the former
war front with Iraq and collect soil infused with martyrs blood to sprinkle
in their gardens. The resulting herbs and vegetables provide a powerful
means of regenerating the health and purity of the families who eat them.
In addition, through the act of spilling blood on the battlefield, martyrs
receive the power to intercede with God on behalf of their loved ones; and
further, they gain a link to the family of the Prophet. Some said that mar-
tyrs also give their descendants a connection to the divine. As one young
woman told me, this connection can be passed across generations if they
[the descendants] also act with piety and faith (Interview with Atefeh,
Fars-Abad, 5/22/10).
In these examples, kinship rests neither solely on biogenetic substance
nor on man-made law/convention. Rather, it involves the channeling and
containment of qualities that are sacred, immaterial, and ineffable between
generations (see also Cannell 2007, 6, 2013). In the following, I explore
how such shared and kindred qualities are also developed by way of pious
and ethical actions, part of a strategic process of constituting and main-
taining the right kind of family relationships.
Cultivating Ethical/Sacred Kinship

In her work on the Islamic Revival Movement in Egypt, Saba Mahmood
builds on concepts of ethical cultivation to explore how the (pious) self
emerges through embodied practice. She relates: Bodily form. . . does
not simply represent the interiority, but serves as the developable means
(2005, 149; see also Asad 1993) through which certain kinds of ethical and
moral capacities are attained (Mahmood 2005, 148). Similarly, Jarrett
Zigon illustrates how Russian Orthodox women pray in a specific way to
be, or to create, the kind of person who has this kind of relationship with
God (2008, 57). These approaches usefully focus on the actions and
processes by which persons accrue and embody ethical or pious capacities
(Lambek 2010, 16).7 Yet although these scholars highlight performativity
and actionwhether these acts are conceived as complete and irreversible
or processual over timethey have too often focused on the analysis of
the individual subject-self.8
My research points to a different object of ethical cultivation: the fam-

ily unit or (intersubjective) relationship (see also Faubion 2001; Lambek
2010; Khan et al. 2013). For Shias in Iran, I argue, the relationships
between family members are the most central object of ethical cultivation.
Interlocutors sought to cultivate not only virtuous selves but also virtuous
families through pious and relational acts of food sharing and prayer (see
Seeman, Chap. 4, this volume, for a discussion of kinship as ethical rela-
tion). In a similar vein, Zigon has explored an anthropology of morality
that does not presuppose an individualized human being but that centers
instead on the moral experience of expanding, maintaining, repairing, or
even disentangling from constitutive relationships (2014, 27). It is to this
expansive moral concern with family virtue and piety that I now turn. This
approach allows me to better analyze the ongoing ritual activity, care, and
labor involved in making, sustaining, and sacralizing the right kind of
kinship in Iran.9 It further allows me to investigate the local simultaneity
of ethical and sacred kinship for my interlocutors. Indeed, for Fars-Abadi
families, the acts that shaped kinshipsuch as sharing food, prayer, and
visitingwere always multiply infused with blessing, purity, and a striving
for connection to the divine.10
Inner Purity andOuter Corruption: Forging theFamily

Household ThroughFood
As previously noted, for Shii hosts and many other Iranians, the person is
composed of a pure, moral inside (baten) and a corruptible, appetite-driven
outside (zaher) (Khosravi 2008; Beeman 2001; Bateson 1979). The ideal
right or complete person is someone whose exterior expresses his or
her interior virtue. Crucially, rather than a rigid set of distinctions, outside
qualities and actions consistently penetrate the inner core and inside quali-
ties and actions are subject both to outside contamination and redefinition
(Beeman 2001). The family and household are similarly conceived. While
the inner space (andaruni) of the household is the enclosed location of
inner purity, permitted family relations (mahram), physical intimacy,
and devotion; the outside (biruni) is the location of possible corruption,
unrelatedness (namahram), physical restrictions between sexes, and
spiritual vacancy (Khosravi 2008, 46). In Fars-Abad, for instance, people
were always reinforcing these spatial distinctions by emphasizing a distinc-
tion between what was appropriate inside the home (the location of rela-
tive freedom) and outside (the location of societal and self-control).
180 R. WELLMAN
For instance, Nushin, her husband, and sisters often argued that a good
person and a good family memberechoing the phrasing of the Iranian
constitutionmust do good and reject evil and ugliness (dori az badi-
ha o zeshti-ha) by acting from within (baten). She or he must garner inner
purity (safa-ye baten) to forbid the indecent. The same is true for the
family household, a unit that should be defined by halal relationships and
be characterized by mutual respect, obligation, and trust. Here, the ideal
pure and halal family was epitomized by the family of the Prophet and was
characterized by mutual generosity, love, respect, harmonious, and halal
ways of relating. Impure relations, in contrast, were fraught with selfish-
ness, unlawful associations, disrespect, and family schismfor example,
infighting between siblings or between parents and children. Moreover,
the burden of maintaining what might be considered halal, moral, or cor-
rect (dorost) relationships, on the one hand, and the inner, physio-sacred
purity of the bodies and souls of family members through blessing, prayer,
and other ritual acts, on the other, were inextricably interconnected.11
Yet family members often lamented the immense difficulties of fashion-
ing a pure family household. Both Nushin and her Tehrani sister-in-law
Parvin, for instance, were aware that certain others in their immediate
familys vicinity did not fulfill their ideals for purity and rightness and were
negatively influencing the inner purity of her family from without. They
made intensive efforts to create and sustain pure and halal kin relations
as a sacred defense against a dangerous, corruptible exterior afflicted
with drug addiction, immoral sexual relations, and the encroachment of
Western moral decay.
Along with the study of ethics, the anthropological study of food
lends itself well to understanding the (im)material ways family members
constituted pure and halal kin relations. Arguably an embodied practice,
food is very often a medium of relationality and religiosity. It is, as Mary
Douglas has emphasized, an encoded message about different degrees
of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries, and transactions across
boundaries (1972, 61). A particularly fruitful vein of kinship analysis in
recent years has been the study of how everyday acts of feeding and liv-
ing together may influence which persons count as kin (Janowski 2007;
Carsten 2004; Weismantel 1995). As Jane Fajans has argued, Food is not
only transformed, it is transformative (1988, 143).
For families in Fars-Abad, food has this power to transform and trans-
fer purity and blessing. I was often told that, along with blood and other
substances, the family consists of those persons who share both food and
blessing on a regular basis at the dining cloth or sofreh. In Iran, the phrase
spread the sofreh means something like set the table. However, the
sofreh is also a metonym for intimacy. A sofreh-ye del translates to a dining
spread of the heart, and entails confiding ones innermost thoughts and
feelings to another (Shirazi 2005). Sitting at the sofreh on one occasion,
Nushin and Ahmad reflected, for instance: Maybe in America it is not this
way. But we Iranians have to make it such that both our childrens souls
and bodies are right and complete. We say that food makes our chil-
dren happy. Food changes the soul. It affects it (Interview with Ahmad,
Fars-Abad, 6/3/2010). Sharing the right food was central to the ongo-
ing work of cultivating the family, kindred spirit (ruh), and delineating
those who were closest to its intimate and trusted core.
As a result, people made important distinctions between lawful, home-
cooked, and local foodswhich were relatively pure and trusted, and
unlawful, processed, and foreign foodswhich had the potential to con-
taminate the family, spreading spiritual illness in the form of family in-
fighting, sinning, and sickness. They carefully vetted the origins of food
for purposes of protecting and maintaining respectful inner family rela-
tions. For instance, Nushin often asked her sons and husband when they
returned from shopping for bread or other items: where did you buy this
food? Who handled it? Who farmed it? What part of Iran did it come
from? In the privacy of the homes, she, her husband, and her children
paid particular attention to the personal and pious qualities of the bakers,
their life histories, as well as those qualities of the bakery staff and facility.
Often, the bread buyerusually a teenage sonmet with critique: Why
did you buy from there? During the course of research, family members
eventually agreed to buy from one particular bakery that happened to
be farther away from some others, not only because the owner was an
acquaintance, but also because he had fought in the Iran-Iraq War and was
known as a faithful Muslim. By visibly waiting in this bakers breadline, the
family was making it clear to the surrounding community that they were
a pious household that supported the Islamic Republic. At the same time,
they argued that it was important that the foods they consumed originate
from a pure and trusted source.
Food, Intentions, andPrayer

According to my Basiji interlocutors, however, the most potent way to alter
whether food was nourishing or dangerous was through the c ombination
182 R. WELLMAN
of food substance, intentional action (such as stirring or heating), and

often, spoken prayer or verse uttered over or alongside food during prepa-
ration. On a daily basis, this occurred through everyday acts of washing,
dicing, stirring, heating, and cooling. These acts, Nushin and her female
relatives explained, transform the texture, shape, and taste of food as well
as foods more immaterial qualities: its purity or impurity and ability to
give blessing or harm. They further linked the making of good food, and
thus good kin relations, to the virtue and pure intentions of the mother
or cook for her family.
An example of this is the daily act of cleaning the rice of tiny rocks,
stems, or discolored grains before preparation of the lunch meal. Everyday
Nushin and wives cleaned the rice for the lunch meal at the dining spread
on a long plastic tray, pouring the rice handful by handful. They sifted
each grain from one end of the tray to the other. For Nushin, this process
was almost meditative. As we sat, usually on her bright red Persian carpet,
Nushins voice would take on a calm tone as she told stories of the family
of the Prophet. Nushin also took care to coordinate rice cleaning with her
own ablutions and daily prayer. When I asked, Nushin said that this kind
of everyday religious coordination of meals was important for the both
the physical and spiritual nourishment of her children. Making good food
for her family, she said, involved cooking with obligatory (and purifying)
daily prayers, avoiding gossip while cooking, and cooking with continual
mindfulness of God and the family of the Prophet.
In addition, Nushins everyday work in the kitchen sometimes required
explicitly stirring prayers into food or water to create blessed food
(tabarrok) for family members and neighbors, a process that explicitly
transformed food from mere physical nutrition to sacred nourishment. In
Iran, an entire category of religious prayer called vow making centers
on the creation and distribution of votive food to create blessing and fulfill
personal vows to God or the Shii Imams. I argue that such vow making is
a central path for forging the right kind of blessed and pure kin relations
and thus of protecting kin. Even more, the act of cooking votive food
is itself a kind of labor through which one can accrue religious merit/
reward (savab), helping to ensure Gods favor in this life and the next.
Parvin, a mother and the wife of Ahmads brother living in suburban
Tehran, for instance, was struggling to provide money for two of her chil-
drens university degrees. She sought help from Imam Husayn, thegrand-
son of the Prophet, by asking him for a favor from God for a steady
supply of funds. She explained: I myself cook votive food (make vows)
for the health of my children. Food is full of blessing. On the night of

Imam Husayn, I cook saffron sweet rice. I believe in this very strongly.
Her votive offering was the monthly provision of saffron sweet rice to her
family and neighbors. As a supplicant, she had prearranged this monthly
offering in a vow to the Imam: some was to be offered to him before
the fulfillment of the vow, and some was to be held in abeyance until
after the appeal was granted (see also Torab 2007, 120). Concurrently,
she paid the equivalent of nearly 200 dollars for the breakfast of other
women in a Quran reading group in her community so that her daugh-
ter would find an appropriate fianc. I do these things [cooking votive
food and distributing it], she offered, so that my daughter will find
a good husband. In this work, however, Parvin also had to contend
with her daughters approval: her pious, chadori daughter was highly
educated and in touch with questions of world politics. It would not be
easy to find a pious, prosperous man from a good family, Parvin admit-
ted, who her daughter would find appropriate. Nevertheless, Parvin saw
the work of cooking and distributing votive food as a means of ensuring
the purity of her daughters future relations. On at least one occasion
during my stay, she literally brought votive foods such as vegetable soup
with noodles (ash) to the door of a mother of one of her daughters
possible suitorshoping to signify interest and smooth over potential
future interfamily relationships with in-laws. She joked, I need to stop
doing this, she [the mother of the suitor] is becoming full of herself
(por-ru).
By way of sharing votive food with kin and others, then, women sought
to configure the inner purity of the family household, creating and main-
taining current and future family relationships. They and their husbands
worked to establish a shifting network of trusted and pure relationships as
against very real and dangerous corruption from immoral envious relatives
who sought to cause the family harm, neighbors who engaged in immoral
activities, and the increasing prevalence of opioid use among young men
in town.12
This special capacity of shared food substance as a vehicle for shaping
and protecting the family is further visible in family purification rituals,
which were performed on several occasions during difficult times of fam-
ily strife in 2010. The problem on one such occasion was a divisive fight
between a brother and sister over how much babysitting the grandmother
of the baby should do for the sisters child. The brother argued that his
mother was stressed and unwell and that the baby was taking up too much
184 R. WELLMAN
of her time. As protection and remedy against the ensuing arguments and
tensions, host family members sought to purify their bodies (insisting that
the whole family participate, myself included) by consuming protective
verses of the Quran written on paper with saffron ink mixed with water.
Ahmad completed this process for several members of the family, includ-
ing myself. He referred to a printed book on his shelf entitled [Divine]
Healing and Remedy with the Quran and turned to a chapter on the
healing benefits of the Quran. Here, the writer Mojtabi Rezai draws on
comments by the Imam Sadeq to recommend writing a specific piece of
the surah on paper. He performed three steps: (1) sending a formulaic
greeting to God and his descendants (salavat); (2) writing the special
prayer with saffron ink and pure intention; and finally, (3) mixing the
prayer with water and drinking it. When we consumed the mixture we
internalized the word (and thus protection) of God, and cleansed, as
Nushins son Ali put it, our bodies and souls.
This striking consumption of verses of the Quran as a means of cleans-
ing the bodies and souls of the family is perhaps the clearest example of
a lack of opposition between spirit and matter in my hosts conceptions
of body and kinship. Indeed, the consumption of the paper was a means
of incorporating the sacredness of the Quran directly into both body and
soul. At the same time, the ritual illustrated how the consumption of bless-
ings helps forge and maintain pure and virtuous relations between fam-
ily members and between these same family members and God (see also
Bolyston 2013).
Visiting
At night the streets of Fars-Abad fill with families engaging in the practice
of night visiting (shab neshin). They walk from house to house or travel
together on motorcycles along Fars-Abads narrow streets. I participated in
visiting with Nushin, Ahmad, and their children, as many as three or four
times a week. We would walk down alleys, passing bustling shops and the
Islamic meeting house, on our way to the gated courtyard of an extended
kinsperson: Nushin or Ahmads aunt or uncle, a sister or brother, perhaps
even a cousin. Often arriving unannounced, we sat on their carpeted floor,
leaning against the wall, while they presented us with cushions, hot tea,
sweets, and other hospitality. When I first I arrived, I wondered why my
host family visited certain homes of their extended relatives and not oth-
ers. In particular, I wondered why Ali, a pious and vigilant older son, often
warned his parents to avoid the homes of particular extended kin. Talking
to his mother, I once heard him warn her explicitly: You can eat with such
and such person, but not with so and so. Dont go to their house. Dont
drink their tea (Interview with Ali, Fars-Abad, 7/23/10).
It soon became clear that family visits were purposeful and carefully
thought out (see also Hegland 2013). Here, and although Nushin and
Ahmad strove to visit both sides of their family, they favored visiting
Nushins siblings who they described as closer and more cultured and
pious. There, they were comfortable and chatted in relaxed postures, their
legs spread out as they sat on the floor, drinking tea and eating fruit and
other items. These were the kin with whom they had a relationship of
coming and going (raft o amad). They were less trusting of certain
members of Ahmads kin and therefore visited them more sparingly. When
they did visit, they stayed for a shorter time and tried to refuse food and
drink. Overtime, I learned that there were several reasons for this avoid-
ance of certain family members and their food. First, Ahmad and Nushin
did not wish to create reciprocal visiting obligations with certain kin who
might negatively influence their own family members by modeling unethi-
cal or impious actions such as drug addiction, fighting, or prayer taking
practices (harmful praying); and second, they did not wish to share the
possibly contaminated tea or snacks of immoral family members such as
the aunt in the opening vignette, the consumption of which was a ritual-
ized necessity of all night visiting. In these circumstances, when they did
visit with such untrusted kin, they made a great effort to refuse food and
drink or only consume a bare minimumoften unfortunately alerting the
host of their suspicions. So great were the complexities of visiting that
Nushin was constantly anxious about who the family should visit, how
they should visit, or who planned to visit her home.
Significantly, and despite the risks, however, some amount of visiting
with untrusted kin was necessary, if only to ward off retaliation in the
form of casting the evil eye or from prayer taking, a negative form
of prayer which would do even more harm to the family. Prayer taking,
family members explained to me hesitantly, and only after several months
in their home, was a sinful process undertaken by those led astray of true
Islam over foods such as tea. The results were immediate or latent physi-
cal and spiritual sickness, fighting, and/or psychological ailments such as
depression.
As a member of the household, I too was swept up in the danger of vis-
iting. One day, having consumed the food of a particular extended family
186 R. WELLMAN
member, I returned to the house feeling unwell. When I told immediate

family members, they warned: When you go there in the future, dont eat
anything. Actually, its better if you dont go there at all. I later gathered
that my family was worried that the food I had consumed was cursed and
that it would pollute not only me but also the entire familycausing fight-
ing or disrespect between parents and children.
Regardless, for Nushin, Ahmad, and Ali, acts of visiting and food shar-
ing helped distinguish and develop an inner and trusted circle of kin rela-
tions. These kin were closer and were described as having a coming
and going relationship with the family. They were explicitly contrasted
with potentially immoral or impure others who could not be trusted and
who did not model correct and halal relations. Yet knowledge of who
had a coming and going relationship with whom was not made public.
Only those in the household knew who made up their familys circle of
most trusted kin, and they vigilantly kept this information secret from
others. Nevertheless, everyday ethical and religious life was deeply entan-
gled with the work of sorting, maintaining, and protecting shifting circles
oftrusted and correct kin relations.
Returning totheBeginning: Why theZiarat-e

shura Saved Us
Approximately 100 women came to the house on the day of the prayer:
maternal and paternal female family members. No female family member
was excluded from the invitation; even the aunt whom the family sus-
pected of being the main cause of harm to the household was invited. The
ziarat-e ashura, my interlocutors explained, is for cleansing sins, not
only those of the host but also for the souls of others.
The prayer began with the strong voice of the woman prayer reciter.
She sang the prayers verses melodically through her microphone: a dec-
laration of allegiance to the compassionate Imam Husayn, peace be upon
him, and a rejection of his hostile enemies, those who took his life at
the Battle of Karbala. The guests, cloaked in black chadors, sobbed in
solidarity with Imam Husayns plight. Yet the ziarat-e ashuras power
lay not only in its evocation of sacred Quranic verse or even on its mes-
sage of love and support for the Imam Husayn and simultaneous rejection
of his enemies. Rather, the rituals ability to bless and purify occurred to
a large extent through the parallel preparation and distribution of votive,
blessed food.
The night before the ziarat-e ashura we had stayed up late preparing.
We tied 100 packets of nuts and candies with red ribbons, symbolizing
the spilt blood of the Imam Husayn on the fields of Karbala. In addition,
we washed and prepared several large crates of fruit. In the morning, we
began to cook the main part of our votive food offering: a huge vat of
saffron sweet rice. As the rice pudding cooked, several of the women
who were helpinga maternal aunt and some otherstook turns stir-
ring it clockwise while reciting prayers and verses of the Quran under
their breath. They debated the ingredients as they stirred: had we include
enough saffron? Enough sugar? Sometimes we tasted the pudding straight
from the ladle, assessing its readiness. As the guests arrived and during the
prayer, the large vat of saffron rice stood steaming in the next room.
After the womens ziarat-e ashura, the family agreed that the votive
meal and prayer gathering had been successful. We had spread forgiveness
of the sins of those suspected of ill-intentions, and had reconstituted our
bodiesas well as the inner spaces of the housewith prayer and pure,
blessed food. The aunts attempt to cause discord had been averted and
her prayer takingthe dangerous combination of food and prayer that
was believed to be the source of our current households difficultieshad
been nullified. The ziarat-e ashura saved us, they said. At least tempo-
rarily, relationships between family members had been healed.
Conclusions: Beyond Spiritual Kinship

Research of spiritual kinship among Muslims has thus far been largely
confined to the examination of adoptive institutions such as milk kin-
ship and Shii Iranian temporary marriage that offer elective contrasts
to Islamic biogenetic kinship based on inheritable substances such as
blood. The rubric of spiritual kinship has further included important
analyses of Shii Alevi practices of ritual co-parenthood through circum-
cision (Kaser 2008; Magnarella and Trkdogan 1973) and Islamic legal
practices of milk kinship and fostering (rida) (Parkes 2003; Ensel 2002;
Khatib-Chahidi 1992; Altorki 1980).
Of these examples, Islamic milk kinship has been most often explored
as a version of spiritual kinship or Christian godparenthood. Indeed,
some scholars suggest that, despite significant divergences, both Christian
godparenthood and Islamic milk kinship originated in the same practices
of foster-kinship of the ancient Mediterranean (Parkes 2003, 749).13
They have further compared milk kinship to Christian godparenthood
188 R. WELLMAN
because of its similar legal formalization, marriage impediments, and tacti-

cal uses in the creation of alliances, contracts, and client-patron relations.
This research has produced fascinating ethnographic material but has not
taken into account the more nuanced ways in which ideas and practices of
religion may infuse (Islamic) kinship.
A reconceptualization of the study of Islamic spiritual kinship beyond
the confines of its normative comparison with Christian godparenthood
allows for new explorations of how kinship can be actively imbued with
immaterial, sacred, and moral properties to bind people together or set
them apart. For my hosts in Fars-Abad, kinship expands or contracts not
only according to evaluations of shared blessing, trust, and rightness but
also through the creation and maintenance of these qualities in the bodies
and souls of kin. One goal of this chapter has therefore been a rethink-
ing of presumed oppositions between natural kinship and spiritual
kinship as well as between spirit and matter that have so often framed
such studies of kinship among Muslims in the Middle East. For the Shii
Iranians I interviewed in Fars-Abad and beyond, kinship is reckoned not
only through bodily substances such as blood, but also through the chan-
neling of vital immaterial and sacred qualities between the bodies and
souls of kin. It is thus both material and spiritual. It is configured, more-
over, through ongoing pious and ritual actssuch as food sharing, prayer,
and visitingthat are not codified in law but that are necessitated by what
are often changing and problematic relations between family members,
spurred by moral decay in and beyond the home. Indeed, the work of
sanctifying kin is an obligatory part of dwelling in the world, a necessary
means of maintaining, protecting, and delimiting relations.
In the case of Shii Basijis in Iran, then, an exploration of kinship
requires an openness to a full spectrum of material substances, immate-
rial qualities, acts, and processes that can define kin relations within and
against outside others. It requires a reconceptualization of kinship as
something in dialog with religious understandings of the world and its
creation. It further requires an openness to those aspects of kin making
that are granular, embodied, shifting, and in process. As seen in this
chapter, kinship can be made meaningful and demarcated not only by
concepts of inheritance codified in religious law or substances such of
blood, but also by way of ethical and sacred qualities and actions: acts
of cooking, feeding, and praying that create and preserve kindred vir-
tue and piety (Chipumuro 2012; Cannell 2013; Delaney 1991, 1986).
I hope that this analysis will encourage new paths for research on
the relation between kinship and religion among Muslims not only in
Iran, but also in the wider Middle East and beyond.14
Notes
1. I use a modified form of the International Journal of Middle
Eastern Studies (IJMES) for Farsi transliteration. Consonants are
consistent with this system, but diacritics are not used to distin-
guish letters that have the same pronunciation in Persian. The only
vowel marked with a diacritic is the aleph. Instead of diacritics,
short vowels are transliterated with the closest English equivalent
to contemporary spoken Farsi. This means that I use e and o,
rather than i and u for short vowels. Long ye is rendered as i; vav
is written as u. Final heh is written as eh except in the case of
monosyllabic words, in which case they are rendered simply as e
(e.g., panjareh, but se, che, ke, be). Ayn is indicated by and hamza
is indicated by (Olzewska 2015, xviii).
2. An entire range of acts may be classified as halal or its conceptual
opposite, haram or unlawful. These include diet, sexual rela-
tions, daily habits and customs, marriage and divorce, family rela-
tions, public morality, occupation and income, and types of
entertainment.
3. Fars-Abad is a pseudonym for the small town in the Fars Province
of Iran in which this research was conducted. Pseudonyms have
also been used for all persons interviewed.
4. The term physio-sacred is my take on the particular convergence
of the spiritual and material prevalent in Shia Iranian concepts of
kinship. It is adapted from the term, physio-spiritual put forth
by Naomi Leite in her role as the discussant of my paper at the
Wenner-Gren workshop that preceded this volume, The Sacred
Social: Investigations of Spiritual Kinship among the Abrahamic
Faiths.
5. According to Khuri, this propensity for blood is also visible in the
Quran and the hadiths. Blood, he argues, stands for a wide range
of qualities: nobility, origin, genealogy, honor, unity of purpose,
affinity, virginity, love, and personality (Khuri 2001).
6. In contrast, menstrual blood is impure and can be defiling. For this
reason, female family members carefully avoided touching the
Quran or visiting in the inner sanctuaries of the Imams and their
190 R. WELLMAN
descendants when they are menstruating. Haleh, a young woman

and niece of Ahmad, for instance, avoided the inner sanctuary at
the shrine of Massumeh in Qom when she was menstruating. At
home, she and others instructed me to use the end of a pencil to
flip through the pages of the Quran and pray during my menstrual
cycle to prevent defiling the holy book.
7. Here, socially prescribed forms of embodied conduct are under-
stood as potentialities through which the self is realized, not as
external constraints (Mahmood 2005, 148). Foucault argues that
ethics are emergent from within given techniques of subjection and
describes ethics as a reflexive practice of freedom or a technology
of self-transformation (Foucault 2000, 263; Faubion 2001, 12).
8. They have also rarely accounted for the complexities and ambiva-
lences of moral action and its associated discourses in practice
(Schielke and Orient 2010).
9. I employ the term sacred kinship, rather than spiritual kinship
in this chapter to better describe kinship reckoned in relation to
the divine as it is less mired in the Christian theological assump-
tions that have pervaded studies of godparenthood (e.g., a division
between spirit and matter).
10. For instance, interlocutors in Fars-Abad used the term savab for all
forms of merit and did not make a distinction between the Arabic
term pronounced, thawab, indicating religious merit and the Farsi
term savab or right and good, as in the concept of a good deed.
More broadly, being Muslimor at the very least a person of the
book (ahl-e al-ketab)was a prerequisite to being a good person.
11. Interestingly, during research, many interlocutors firmly statedas
per their interpretation of the Quranthat if parents and children
have a very strong disagreement, all of their prayers and good
deeds would lose meaning and become useless. They emphasized
that, even if a Muslim child has a parent who is a hereticthe
ultimate sinhe or she should respect and obey that parent before
any other divine obligation (e.g., Interview with Nushin,
Fars-Abad, 10/1/10). The burden of maintaining pure, halal fam-
ily relations, they said, is of paramount concern.
12. Importantly, although both men and women participate in cook-
ing and distributing votive offerings in Iran, women tend to take
the lead on offerings distributed among other women, family
members, and neighbors. In contrast, men participate when larger
offerings are to be cooked and distributed to a wider range of
mixed gender recipients (including neighbors, strangers, fellow

citizens, and so on). In both cases, however, the cooking of blessed
food is very often part of a vow to an Imam to bless and protect
immediate family relations.
13. Historian of early-modern Italy, Guido Alfani, questions received
accounts of Mediterranean Christian spiritual kinship as a relation-
ship of unequals between godparents and fathers (compare) and
notes that the practice became increasingly asymmetrical only after
the Council of Trent (154563) (Alfani, Chap. 2 , this volume).
14. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Todne Thomas and
Asiya Malik for their thoughtful comments on this chapter
throughout the writing process. Thank you also to Susan McKinnon
and Richard Handler for reading preliminary versions of this chap-
ter. Finally, I am indebted to all of our workshop participants and
my discussant, Naomi Leite. This contribution would not have
been possible without support from the editors of Palgrave
Macmillan, the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for
Iran and Persian Gulf Studies, the National Science Foundation,
and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
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CHAPTER 9
Expanding Familial Ties: FromtheUmma

toNew Constructions ofRelatedness
Among East African Indians inCanada
AsiyaMalik
When scholars consider religiously mediated relatedness or spiritual kin-

ship in Islam, they often investigate the historical practices of milk kinship
in Muslim communities around the world or they examine the histori-
cal, contemporary, and theological significance and manifestations of the
ummaa global nation, community, or family of Muslims whose reli-
gious unity and inclusivity should transcend religious and cultural differ-
ences. The umma envisioned in religious texts and discourses is, however,
delimited by the everyday lived realities of Muslims in different regions
of the world and the particularity of their experiences. By drawing on
the historical and contemporary experiences of a migrant community in
Toronto, Canada, this chapter explores how Sunni Punjabi East Africans
(SPEAs) forge diverse forms of kinship at the levels of the Muslim nation,
A. Malik (*)
Independent Researcher, Toronto, Canada

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_9
196 A. MALIK
community, and family. Although SPEAs have participated in various

endeavors and activities in Toronto that bring together all Muslims, I
argue that for them, boundaries of community and relatedness are simul-
taneously defined and shaped by their mutual sect and region(s) of origin,
historical and colonial legacies, cultural practices, trust built through gen-
erations of shared genealogical knowledge, as well as their life experiences
in the urban neighborhoods of colonial Kenya.
This chapter contributes to a growing body of research on kinship
in Muslim societies that moves beyond explorations of kinship through
the lens of consanguinity and affinity. These studies highlight the unique
ways in which ties of kinship are produced or evoked through ritual prac-
tices of circumcision (Magnarella and Trkdogan 1973), formation of
nation-states (Delaney 1995), new reproductive technologies (Clarke
2009), shared substances (Altorki 1980; Khatib-Chahidi 1992; Parkes
2001; Wellman, Chap. 8, this volume), ritual acts of prayer and feeding
(Wellman, Chap. 8, this volume), genealogy (Ho 2006), and a shared
notion of relationship or claims of common ancestry (Eickelman 2002,
144151). By employing Carstens (2000) concept of relatednesswhich
calls for broader understandings of kinship by considering indigenous
statements and practicesI challenge ongoing scholarly categorizations
of some forms of kinship as fictive or social. In particular, I examine
the salience of place or co-residence in creating ties of relatedness among
East African migrants in Canada.
Several studies on Muslims in North America and/or Canada empha-
size the ethnic, national, cultural, and sectarian diversity of practitioners,
yet they nonetheless draw broad comparisons between Muslim migrant
groups and/or concentrate on an overarching analysis of the umma,
migrants beliefs, practices, and experiences usually in terms of questions
of integration, marginalization, discrimination, gender relations, family
dynamics, and youth issues (Waugh et al. 1983; Moghissi et al. 2009).
I too seek to complicate the use of overarching terms such as Muslim
and to show internal differentiation within the broader umma ideal. More
specifically, through this ethnographically grounded endeavor,1 my goal is
to reveal how formations of family and community are not just a matter
of religious affinity but are also founded on cultural similarities, shared
provenance, and life experiences.
This chapter begins by providing a brief analysis of how the umma
concept has been interpreted by scholars and some of the ways in which
it is evoked or mobilized by Muslim practitioners today. Next, drawing
EXPANDING FAMILIAL TIES: FROMTHEUMMA TONEW... 197
on ethnographic research, I trace the presence of Sunni Punjabis in East

Africa and show how boundaries of community were historically created
and shaped by sect and provenance in East Africa (and historically, the
Punjab), as well as questions of trust and knowledge of family gene-
alogies. I then consider the migration of SPEAs to Canada and highlight
how their experiences as new immigrants brought into focus questions of
identity. Finally, by examining the activities of two socio-cultural associa-
tions, I demonstrate the varied ways in which some of their members forge
connections or larger umma ties with other Muslims in Toronto while also
conceptualizing their particular community as a family and expressing
ties of relatedness with one another based on their shared backgrounds.
Sacred Kinship andtheUmma Ideal

Studies of spiritual kinship have historically focused on the rite of baptism
in Christianity and the subsequent creation of spiritual kin ties through
godparenthood (Alfani, Chap. 2, this volume; Alfani and Gourdon 2012).
Parallel comparisons to Christian godparenthood, however, have been
made with milk kinship in Islam (Parkes 2001), circumcision rituals that
establish co-parenthood or kivrelik among Muslims (Magnarella and
Trkdogan 1973), and even with the sandak (godparent) among Jews
(Bahloul, Chap. 5, this volume). In this chapter, I employ the term sacred
kinship instead as a way to look at spiritual kinship more broadly, thereby
moving away from not only the Christian underpinnings of the term
(Seeman, Chap. 4, this volume; Thomas, Wellman, and Malik, Chap. 1,
this volume) but also its historical focus on godparenthood and godparent-
like relations across religions. Sacred kinship here is utilized to understand
the larger universalistic religious solidarity of the umma as envisioned in
sacred texts and religious discourses and forged among Muslims.
Umma is an Islamic term defined as a people, a community; or
a nation, in particular the nation of Islam which transcends ethnic or
political definition, at least traditionally and before the days of modern,
Western-style nationalism (Glasse 2013, 543). As Frederick Denny, a
religious studies scholar, illustrates there is no clear-cut definition of the
term umma that appears in the Quran (in varied forms) 62 times (1975,
43). Denny states that when the term ummah appears in the Quran,
it usually refers to human community in a religious sense (1975, 34).
Citing Paret, Denny adds that umma also refers to ethnical, linguistic or
religious bodies of people who are objects of the divine plan of salvation
198 A. MALIK
(Paret 1954). In addition to a Muslim umma, the Quran also refers to

a Jewish and Christian umma (Denny 1975, 35). These three Abrahamic
religions are seen as related to one another as they are monotheistic; they
all received messengers or prophets who spread the word of God and
scriptures. The Arabs are the most recent to receive a messenger in the
form of the Prophet Muhammad; the Arab umma came to be the umma
of Muslims (Denny 1975, 3536). As they received scriptures, Christians
and Jews are also known in the Quran as the People of the Book or ahl
al-kitab (Denny 1975, 35, 48; see also Siddiqui 2013).2
Denny argues that the concept of umma develops in the Quran from
a general term that described a human collectivity or oneness in a reli-
gious sense to the ahl al-kitab who were intended to live as one commu-
nity but became divided into Jews and Christians because of their varied
beliefs and practices (1975, 36, 48, 61, 6566). Umma eventually came to
denote a religiously united Muslim community (Denny 1975, 36, 6569).
As a way to celebrate their specialness as a people of God and in order
to differentiate themselves from Jews who had rejected the leadership of
the Prophet Muhammad, Denny suggests that a shift occurred in the reli-
gious practices of the new Muslim umma seen with the re-sacralization
of the Kaba(the most sacred and revered place of worship for Muslims)
in Mecca that was built by the Prophet Abraham, the call to pilgrimage
to Mecca, and the changing of the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to
Mecca (1975, 36, 69). Moreover, he notes that certain usages of umma in
the Quran refer not only to good intentions and spiritual unity but also
of importance to the umma concept is the observation of sacred rites, such
as thehajj or pilgrimage (1975, 6364). Denny states that Muslims in the
Quran were recognized as the true followers and restorers of the religion
of Abraham and through their faithfulness and obedience in upholding
Gods Law, they will be saved (1975, 6769).
However, one of the major political schisms within the Muslim umma
occurred soon after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE
regarding questions of succession and eventually developing into what
came to be the split between Sunni and Shii Islam. Shii Muslims recog-
nized succession through Ali (the Prophets son-in-law) and the descen-
dants of Ali and his wife Fatima (the Prophets daughter), whereas for the
majority, who later evolved into the Sunnis, leaders were chosen through
a selection process (Denny 2011, 7475, 8384; Eickelman 2002, 248).
Over the following centuries, as Islam spread gradually across the Middle
East, Asia, Africa, and Spain, political and religious divisions among
Muslim populations resulted in numerous competing leaders, the forma-

tion of several empires (such as the fifteenth-century Mughal, Safavid, and
the Ottoman Empire that collapsed after World War I), sects, schools of
jurisprudence, and, by the twentieth century, nation-states (Denny 2011,
7495).
In recent years, several studies across academic disciplines (anthropol-
ogy, political science, and religious studies) have explored the multifarious
ways in which Muslims come together today as part of an umma through
shared religious beliefs and ritual observances, Internet technologies, and
processes of globalization. Eickelman (2002, 247248, 250)argues that
most Muslims consider the Quran to be the word of God and agree on
the five pillars of faiththat is, the declaration of faith or shahada (There
is no god but God and Muhammad is His messenger), the five daily
prayers, almsgiving, fasting during the month of Ramadan, and the pil-
grimage to Mecca. He states that during the pilgrimage in Mecca, unity
among Muslims and their wider identification with Islam can be observed
as particularistic and ordinary social relationships with kinsmen, neigh-
bors, and others are given less importance than ones identity as a
Muslim and brotherhood in Islam (2002, 252). Eickelman, however,
also highlights the diversity of Islamic practices and emphasizes the impor-
tance of considering them in relation to the historical contexts in which
given practices are introduced and interpreted, whether practices or
traditions are universalistic or particularistic, and the debate surround-
ing the correct traditions that illuminate relations of power within and
imposed upon societies (2002, 246; see also Asad 2009).
Mandaville (1999) contends that the Internet and information tech-
nologies provide new ways in which Muslims access religious knowledge
and discuss religious matters with one another thus allowing them to
create a new form of imagined community, or a reimagined umma. The
term umma here is not unlike Benedict Andersons (1983) imagined
community where people need not have ever had face-to-face interac-
tions with one another yet they can be connected or united together as a
community beyond borders of nation-states based on a common cause. In
her comparative study based in the USA, Denmark, and Sweden, Schmidt
(2005, 576577) shows how young Muslims stress their universalistic
Muslim identity based on core values and practices that transcend ethno-
national solidarities. However, she questions to what extent this universal-
istic umma vision translates into transnational practice. In Denmark and
Sweden, for example, transnational engagements with other Muslims take
200 A. MALIK
place through religious conferences and (in Denmark) on Danish Internet

forums where English is employed as the common language of commu-
nication (Schmidt 2005, 579580, 583584). Whereas, in the USA, even
though American Muslim scholars are influential in the field of knowledge
production for Muslims in Scandinavia, young American practitioners are
less concerned with building global umma connections and are instead
more interested in forging local solidarities (Schmidt 2005, 581). Thus,
Schmidt importantly demonstrates that transnational enactments of and
commitment to the umma vision vary considerably among youth.
Finally, Marranci (2008) highlights the umma paradox which, on
the one hand, is used by scholars and Muslims to describe the unity of
Muslims as a community of believers, yet on the other hand camouflages
the heterogeneity within the Islamic world. Rather than simply accepting
that all Muslims are part of and unified in an umma, Marranci argues that
Muslims are not part of the ummah because the ummah exists in itself
beyond their physical and mental realities, but because they use it, and
transform it through their feelings of being Muslim (2008, 109). These
feelings, manifested during major political incidents or exhibited for social
causes, can rally Muslims globally behind the concept of umma despite
their differences (Marranci 2008, 114; see also Schmidt 2005, 585).
This brief discussion of sacred kinship among Muslims seen through
the lens of theumma is important in illuminating not only how under-
standings of what constituted a unified nation or community under-
went change historically but also several of the varied ways in which some
practitioners mobilize it today. If we focus on the utilization of the term
in the Quran, one sees how the term shifted from encompassing human
collectivity in a religious sense to limiting its inclusion to the People of
the Book and Muslims, all of whom had received messengers and reli-
gious texts. Umma eventually came to denote a united and equal Muslim
community. However, religious and political schisms over the centuries
resulted in the formation of sects and sub-sects of Islam. Needless to say,
even though the umma ideally includes all Muslims, who constitutes as
part of it is often debated and may vary according to ones religious or sec-
tarian convictions. It is thus difficult to speak of a unified Muslim umma
in the contemporary world. Nonetheless, beliefs and ritual observances
albeit differentially practiced, consumption of Internet technologies, or
feelings of being Muslim may be ways in which some Muslims imagine
global interconnectedness.
While the umma vision may connect Muslims around the world as
sacred kin united by a common faith, in what follows, I show how the
identifications of a migrant community in Toronto illustrate the every-
day complexities of the ideal of religious unity that divides people along
sectarian, cultural, linguistic, and regional lines. This tension between the
ideal of a universal, inclusive religious community and the particularity of
human experiences that creates difference is similarly explored by Thomas
(Chap. 10) in this volume. In contrast to this study, Thomas articulates
how Afro Caribbean and African American members of evangelical church
associations in Atlanta reject the specific ethnic frame that is often used
to characterize their churches. Instead, these congregants highlight and
aspire to the ideals of a universal Christian identity in order to bridge
ethnic divisions between them and to promote an inclusive multi-ethnic
familial community. In this chapter, I contend that even though migrants
practice Islam and have contributed to the overarching umma through
social and philanthropic endeavors both historically and at present, they
simultaneously, through their local and everyday negotiations, articulate
their SPEA community in Canada as family. In order to understand
what constitutes community and family for migrants today, I first provide
a brief historical overview of how SPEAs formed connections with one
another in East Africa.
Making Community inEast Africa: Sect,

Provenance, Trust, andTraceable Genealogies
Even though Indian presence in East Africa dates back centuries, the
ancestors of many Sunni Punjabis and other Indians of varied back-
grounds were recruited by the British on work contracts after the par-
titioning of Africa by European nations during the 18841885 Berlin
Conference. These recruits were employed as laborers, middle-tier
administrators, agriculturalists, traders, or skilled workers primarily for
the building of the East African railway. While many Indian workers
returned to India at the completion of their contracts, several thousand
remained behind (Mangat 1969). Some Sunni Punjabis who decided to
settle permanently in East Africa returned to the Indian subcontinent
to marry and bring their new wives and/or their families to East Africa.
Others migrated to East Africa as independent migrants during the early
twentieth century.
202 A. MALIK
As the colonial foothold strengthened in East Africa (the British con-

trolled Kenya and Uganda and gained Tanzania from Germany after
World War I), so too did imposed political, social, and economic demar-
cations between Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Although nineteenth-
century accounts and official documents identified East African Indians
based on their religious or regional affiliations, they were increasingly
homogenized as Asians or Indians by Europeans. As Asians, they
became middlemena position of both privilege in relation to Africans
(with better access to resources, middle-tier employment positions, and
British-style education) and struggle vis--vis the European colonists and
settlers (they were barred from equal political representation, subject to
migration restrictions, and were segregated especially in towns) (Bonacich
1973; Mangat 1969). SPEAs that arrived in Toronto during the 1970s
were predominantly Punjabi speaking and from Kenya which had the larg-
est Sunni Punjabi population compared to Tanzania and Uganda. Some
migrants had, however, moved between Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda for
employment purposes or marriage.
Sunni Muslims are a decentralized religious community and have never
united under a common vision of Islam in East Africa. Unlike other Indian
Muslim sects in East Africa, such as the Shii Ithna-Asheris or Ismailis,
Sunni Punjabis lacked religious leadership and no one institution uni-
fied or represented them. Salvadori (1989, 207), in her detailed study of
Asian-Indian communities in East Africa, notes that Sunni Punjabis were,
and still are, the most amorphous of all the Asian communities in Kenya.
Instead of establishing communal institutions, Salvadori adds that there
exists a general fraternal feeling of cooperation with other Sunni Muslims
and with Punjabis in general (1989, 207). Despite their lack of institu-
tional organization and leadership, SPEAs historically contributed to the
building of several religious, social, and educational institutions in Nairobi
that catered to all Muslims regardless of sectarian, regional, or linguistic
differences. Migrants in Toronto remember with both pride and nostalgia
how their ancestors established a school for Muslim girls in Nairobi during
the late 1920s, constructed several of the earliest mosques, and also built
a social club with a sports facility.
Boundaries of community, however, are most discernible when inves-
tigating marriage practices in East Africa and questions of trust and the
knowing of families and genealogies. As discussed by Malik (2014), the
older generation of SPEAs in Canada explained how connections to the
Indian subcontinent had weakened for their grandparents and parents
by the mid-twentieth century. Initially, their grandparents and/or parents

had maintained connections to pre-Partition India (primarily present-day
Pakistan) by visiting their families, sending remittances, returning to pur-
sue higher education, or to marry. However, kinship and social connections
gradually weakened due to increasing cultural differences and the lack of
trust between SPEAs and Indians in the subcontinent. Several migrants
described how those who tried to return to settle or work in Pakistan
failed because of unknown and untrustworthy clients and associates.
In contrast, the smaller Indian community in East Africa meant a higher
accountability as those residing in the same, predominantly Indian, neigh-
borhoods of colonial Nairobi trusted and knew about one another(or
could easily ascertain this informationthrough social connections).
As the Sunni Punjabi population grew in East Africa, spouses were
increasingly sought locally and endogamously. Class was not considered
a significant marker of differentiation within the community, although
caste or zaat understood more in terms of region of origin and preser-
vation of nusal (pure blood) for Kashmiris or the long-ago low-caste
professions of ones ancestors in the Indian subcontinent (migrants were
not necessarily practicing these occupations) did at times influence mar-
riage practices. Kashmiri migrants had ancestral connections to Kashmir
in pre-Partition India, although some had resided in Punjab (and there-
fore also spoke Punjabi) before migrating to East Africa. At least for the
first one or two generations, Kashmiris who arrived in East Africa married
other Kashmiris or as one informant aptly stated, Kashmiriyaan dhi nani
ik hai! (All Kashmiris have one grandmother!). Over time, however,
Kashmiris increasingly identified with SPEAs. Proposals from suitors who
were ancestrally of a low-caste background could also be overlooked if
the suitor was wealthy. The increasing preference to marry in East Africa
was because of shared cultural experiences in a context where a potential
spouses genealogical background and their personal and familial repute
could be easily investigated. Weak connections to the Indian subconti-
nent meant that overseas social networks could not always be mobilized to
perform the necessary background checks for marriage proposals. Those
SPEAs that did return to marry often married within their extended fami-
lies. Thus, their spouses were known. The 1947 Partition of India was
also instrumental in weakening migrants connections to and percep-
tions of home that was now divided between two nation-states. Thus,
a shared Sunni, Punjabi (at times Kashmiri), and East African background
all played a crucial role in shaping community boundaries.
204 A. MALIK
During the 1960s, the political, economic, and social stability that many
Sunni Punjabis experienced in East Africa was disrupted with decoloniza-
tion. As I explore below, not only did this upheaval result in the migration
of many SPEAs to the West, but their experiences in Canada perpetuated
their desire to (re)create the community cohesion of the past and form
organizations that unified migrants based on their shared provenance,
sect, and life experiences in East Africa.
Identity Politics inEast Africa andCanada:

OnMatters ofRace, Sect, andOrigins
Independence from Britain during the 1960s for Kenya, Uganda, and
Tanzania brought into focus the Asian question in East Africa. After
independence, some African political leaders questioned the middle-
man status of Indians in East Africa, their (perceived) affluence, and the
sincerity of their allegiance to the new African nation-states given their
continued affiliation with Britain as British subjects and British passport
holders. Even though Indians began migrating to the West in larger num-
bers after decolonization, the 1972 expulsion of Asians from Uganda by
Idi Amin was a catalyst for the out-migration of thousands of Asians from
neighboring Kenya and Tanzania who were seeking political stability and
socio-economic mobility. Canada accepted over 5000 Ugandan Asian ref-
ugees. The majority of SPEAs who reside in Toronto migrated during the
1970s, although some families arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as a result
of Canadian immigration policies that sought skilled workers.
From among the other East African Asian communities in Canada,
Sunni Punjabis are by far the smallest, numbering over 500 individuals.
The migrants who arrived in Toronto were predominantly young families
or newly married couples with young children who had left extended fam-
ilies behind in East Africa and/or had family who had moved to England
instead. In some cases, extended households migrated together to Canada
or joined one another gradually over the course of several years. In many
instances, however, extended households were dispersed around the globe.
As I argue elsewhere (Malik 2014), the early settlement experiences of
SPEAs in Canada played a critical role in shaping their constructions of
community.3 The large influx of Ugandan Asians and other East African
Indians during the 1970s was met with ambivalence by some Euro-
Canadians. After many decades of anti-Asian immigration policies, Canada
finally removed immigration restrictions based on race and nationality in
1962. Those supporting Canadas acceptance of the Ugandan refugees,

including Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, other politicians, and media per-
sonnel, highlighted how migrants would contribute to Canadian society
with their high level of British education, English-speaking ability, urban-
ization, and strong work ethic that reflected middle-class values. Those
Canadians who opposed their migration were concerned about the already
high unemployment rate and feared that the new refugees and immigrants
would burden social services. East African Indians initially experienced
racism and discrimination in Toronto, usually in the form of their inability
to get jobs because of their Asian background and their categorizations as
Pakia term used in a racially derogatory manner to homogenize all
peoples of Asian-Indian background (Malik 2014).
Their experiences of inclusion and exclusion shaped the identities of
SPEAs who formed two associations during the 1970s and 1990s. Both
Salaam-Karibu (Greetings-Welcome in Arabic and Swahili, respec-
tively) and later Baraka (a Swahili word for Blessings) brought together
members who had to be, as stipulated by membership rules, Muslim and
connected to East Africa by birth, ancestry, or marriage. Baraka was
formed during the 1990s by SPEAs who were more religiously oriented.
Although not specified as a criterion, members of both organizations were
additionally of Indian descent. By highlighting their shared regional and
religious backgrounds, migrants were not only rejecting ascribed racial
labels of being Paki but they were also differentiating themselves from
other migrants of Indian ancestry in Canada (Malik 2014). Several SPEAs
highlighted their life experiences in East Africatheir British educa-
tion, English-speaking ability, skills, strong work ethic, and their experi-
ences with peoples of diverse backgrounds (British authorities or settlers,
Africans, and Indians of varied religious backgrounds)as setting them
apart from all other peoples of Indian/Pakistani descent in Canada.
Differences from other migrants of Indian ancestry were also explained in
terms of the high level of trust between East African Indians and questions
of adab or class and refinement (Bhachu 1985; Malik 2014).
The term adab, as described by F.Gabrieli(2007) in the Brill Online
Encyclopaedia of Islam, has undergone immense changes from its pre-
Islamic origins to the present day. Gabrieli notes that in its oldest sense
adab has been considered a synonym of sunnathat is, it was used to
describe the exemplary habits and customs of ones ancestors. The ethi-
cal and social meaning of the term developed over time and adab came
to denote ones good upbringing, urbanity, civility, courtesy, refinement,
206 A. MALIK
and etiquette in terms of eating, drinking, and dressing (Gabrieli 2007).

Gabrieli states that adab also had an intellectual meaning and (depend-
ing on the time period) it was used to refer to ones worldly education,
knowledge necessary to hold a particular position/ office, or knowledge
of Arabic and non-Arabic literatures. One SPEA interlocutor described
refinement and adab among East Africans in relation to other peoples of
Indian descent in Canada as consisting of having a good education, disci-
pline, and work ethic as a result of British influences as well as a refined way
of dressing, talking, and good behavior toward others that had historically
in East Africa facilitated harmonious relations between diverse communi-
ties. Interestingly, Feeley-Harnik (Chap. 3, this volume) also explores the
centrality of trust and honor (understood in terms of high moral conduct
with birds and people, self-respect, and intellectual refinement) in shap-
ing relationships among pigeon fanciers in nineteenth-century England
(see also Seeman, Chap. 4, this volume). She argues that some fanciers,
because of their mutual interests in truth-seeking based on their shared
Nonconformist religious backgrounds, their love of pigeons, as well as
their interactions with one another in clubs (that were guided by prin-
ciples of trust and honor), became brother fanciers to one another. Like
the fancier clubs, SPEA associations not only brought together members
based on their similar backgrounds and experiences but, as I illustrate
below, their interactions with one another in these spaces were also salient
in (re)creating ties of relatedness between them.
The early members of both associations comprised of migrants who
were East African Indian but of varied Muslim sects, primarily Sunni
Punjabis (and some of their spouses who were of Pakistani origin) but also
Memon and Ahmadiyya East Africans. Largely Gujarati speaking, Sunni
Memons trace their ancestral origins to present-day Sindh in Pakistan and
to Kathiawar and Cutch in India (Salvadori 1989). Doctrinal differences
exist between Sunnis and Ahmadiyyas, the most significant being that a
sub-sect of Ahmadiyyas recognize the founder of their faith Mirza Ghulam
Ahmad, who was born in nineteenth-century Punjab, as a prophet. This
is in contrast to Sunnis for whom the Prophet Muhammad was the final
messenger sent by God (Glasse 2013, 33). Cultural, regional, linguistic,
and doctrinal differences with Sunni Punjabis were perhaps, according
to some members, the reason why the Memon and Ahmadiyya members
eventually left the associations. Even though a few interlocutors acknowl-
edged cultural differences with the Pakistani spouses of SPEAs, Pakistani
members continued to participate in the associations. Thus, although
Salaam-Karibu and Baraka initially began as Muslim and East African

Indian associations, they increasingly came to comprise of Sunni, pre-
dominantly Punjabi, East Africans.
During their early years of settlement, a few SPEA families were also
involved in the establishment of local mosques and social programs that
catered to all Muslims in Toronto. The mosques that were built were
and still are attended today by Muslims of diverse sectarian, cultural, and
regional backgrounds (migrants originating from varied South Asian,
Middle Eastern, and African countries), although some Muslim sects, such
as the Shii Ithna-Asheris, Bohras, and Ismailis, have their own religious
leaders and attend their own respective places of worship. There still is no
one umbrella organization or spiritual leader that represents all Sunnis.
Rather, several large organizations have been established that cater to the
needs of the Muslim umma in generalthat is, they specifically cater to
all Muslims in North America or Canada by providing various social
services, religious and academic instruction, and outreach programs that
promote inter-faith dialogue. Many smaller mosques in Toronto turn to
one or more of these umbrella organizations for guidance but some are
run independently. Although some mosques in Toronto are frequented
primarily by congregants from certain parts of the world, during prayer
times, and other than the mandatory segregation between the sexes, every-
one is equal and, regardless of their backgrounds, they stand alongside
one another to pray together as brothers and sisters. The language
of kinship often utilized between mosque attendees creates a space where
equality and universalistic solidarity between practitioners are emphasized
and differences are, at least temporarily, downplayed.
SPEAs themselves do not attend one particular mosque, and mosque
attendance varies by family and individuals. It is also important to note
that interlocutors rarely utilized the term umma to describe their soli-
darity with other Muslims. Rather several SPEAs described how they
historically contributed to the establishment of mosques for the larger
Muslim community or how they independently or in collaboration with
Muslims of other sects (e.g., East African Ismailis and Ithna-Asheris)
raised funds as Muslims for local Toronto institutions such as hospitals
and social programs (mostly health-related) that cater to all Canadians.
For one elderly SPEA interlocutor, such collaborations are imperative
not only because it is their duty as Muslims and Canadians to give back
to their Toronto community but also because this is a way to educate
others about Islam.
208 A. MALIK
Creating Community asFamily

Soraya Altorki (1980) and Jane Khatib-Chahidi (1992) in their respec-
tive works on milk kinship state that Islamic law recognizes three forms
of kinshipthat is, relations forged through blood (nasab), marriage or
affinity (musahara), and through milk kinship or ridaa. Milk kinship is
formed when a woman nurses or her milk is used to feed a child who is
not hers, thereby creating relations between the two that prohibits mar-
riage between them and among certain members of their families (Altorki
1980; Khatib-Chahidi 1992; Parkes 2001). This section explores other,
everyday manifestations of familial ties among SPEAs in Canada that
extend beyond relationships formed through descent,4 marriage, or milk
kinship to include ties forged as a result of their mutual sectarian, ethnic,
regional, and historical backgrounds. Building on Carstens work on relat-
edness, I explore the myriad ways in which SPEAs in Toronto express,
create, and reinforce ties of relatedness with one another. Carsten (2000)
challenges the examination of cross-cultural kinship relations through a
Western lens that emphasizes biology; instead, she advocates the analy-
sis of kinship through indigenous statements and practices. Her work, as
well as recent scholarship on transnational adoptions (Howell 2006) and
new reproductive technologies (Franklin and McKinnon 2001), has been
critical in questioning previous Western assertions of family ties as neces-
sarily based on biology. More importantly, these works also challenge the
relegation of kinship ties that are not based on relations of descent or mar-
riage to the realm of fictive or pseudo kinship. I too utilize the term
relatedness to understand kinship formations among SPEAs who refer to
their community in Toronto as a big family. The (re)creation of a larger
familial community in Toronto was made possible through the activities of
the two SPEA organizations and the interactions between their respective
members. Although older migrants primarily make and reinforce kinship
based on their memories of past relationships between Sunni Punjabi fam-
ilies in East Africa, I show how the children and grandchildren of migrants
in Canada create their own ties of relatedness based on their interactions
with one another through the organizations. For this section, I focus pri-
marily on the first, and the larger of the two associations, Salaam-Karibu.
Similar to other immigrant community associations and social networks
in North America (Poros 2011; Ebaugh and Curry 2000), Salaam-Karibu
was formed so that migrants could interact on a regular basis, mark reli-
gious celebrations, share news, and provide assistance (such as jobs and
housing information) and support (social, emotional, and material) to one

another especially given the absence of extended family (Malik 2014). The
organization was also an arena where migrants could celebrate their East
African heritage. Even though early migrants kept in touch with family in
East Africa, England, or elsewhere through phone calls and/or occasional
visits (maintaining contact is of course much more consistent and easier
nowadays with the advent of email, texting, and social media), the interac-
tions that took place between the organizations members locally became
a significant part of their everyday lives. An elderly SPEA man, Mr. Abed,
expressed how, during the early years of settlement in Toronto, all the
members participated actively in the organization because everyone was
young, we didnt have any relatives [here]. According to him, it was the
other members who filled the role of absent parents, aunts, and uncles
in times of difficulty and need. For him, the early days were the best
days. Similarly, Mr. Imaan reminisced how the East African community
in Toronto was like a family even though some SPEAs later broke away
to form the more religiously oriented Baraka.
Many migrants and their children remember nostalgically the past
events that were organized by Salaam-Karibu. Members (men, women,
and children) would get together every week to play sports and socialize;
they would have biannual trips to northern Ontario lake country, bar-
beques, potlucks, picnics, and more formal lunches and dinners commem-
orating days of religious observance. Sentiments of relatedness were more
acute for several families who were neighbors in a Toronto apartment
building during the 1970s. SPEA residents described how they would
meet one another regularly and how on Saturdays the aunties would
get together and cook Indian foods that were not locally available. For
Mr. Ahmed, one of the defining features of their East African community
in Toronto is that families have known one another dating back 80 or 90
years. Given the number of SPEAs in Toronto and their histories of close
connections, Mr. Ahmed stated that he initially did not even try to make
friends outside the community.
The nostalgia and desire for these kinds of close relationships and daily
interactions between SPEAs are derived from migrants past experiences
and their memories of living in the neighborhoods of colonial Nairobi.
The neighborhoods of the past and migrants relationships with one
another are remembered frequently and historical knowledge is passed
down through storytelling; their past memories are what brings them
together and also sets them apart as a community (Ingold and Vergunst
210 A. MALIK
2008; Malik 2014). The desire to recreate the Nairobi atmosphere in

Toronto resulted in some migrants suggesting that members either buy
houses close to one another or lease apartments in the same building.
Even though proponents of this plan were unable to garner support
among all members, some migrants did eventually buy houses in the same
Toronto neighborhood (Malik 2014). The power of memory in repro-
ducing cultural identity for displaced populations is also explored by
Bahloul (1996)in her ethnography on the Jewish and Muslim residents of
Dar-Refayil, a housing complex in colonial French Algeria. Past Algerian
Jewish residents residing in France remember their old home, its layout,
and their everyday interactions and close relationships with other Jewish
and Muslim residents where everyone became an assimilated relative, a
classificatory kinsperson (Bahloul 1996, 52, 2844).
Similarly, the shared collective knowledge of past genealogies of
migrants families in East Africa remains central in the formation of
community cohesiveness and ties of relatedness. Many older-generation
SPEAs in Toronto know or have heard about other SPEA families in
Nairobi. I found that older-generation SPEAs often relied on their men-
tal maps of the city of colonial Nairobi in their tracing of genealogies and
making ties of relatedness. To explicate what I mean by mental maps (see
also Lynch 1960; Zilberg 2004) and the importance of places in plotting
genealogies, I turn to a personal example. I met many migrants for the
first time when I began fieldwork in 2005. Interestingly, during several
first encounters, informants claimed kinship with me after positing ques-
tions about my own ancestry in East Africa and where my family had
resided (at times going back several generations) in the predominantly
Indian neighborhoods. One of my first introductions to an elderly Sunni
Punjabi man, whose contact information I had obtained through a friend,
occurred over the telephone. Once he learned of my own East African
ancestry, he began asking me numerous questions about my family and
where they had resided in Kenya. Using markers such as an Indian school,
a mosque, and the names of my grandparents neighbors, he immediately
determined which family I came from and was able to plot my family tree
going back four generations. He also described his own relationship with
several members of my extended family. In this instance, the proximity to
cultural community landmarks provided him with enough information
to map my geographic and genealogical ancestry. Moreover, he was able
to describe an intricate web of connections that established how he was
related to me.
It is important to note that while older-generation migrants are able

to recount genealogies and place people within the landscape of the colo-
nial city, the younger generations (who were born in Canada or came to
Canada as children) are unable to do so. The ability to trace genealogies is
difficult for younger generations especially as they are removed from their
parents place of origin both temporally and spatially. The old neighbor-
hoods of the past, moreover, have undergone change and many of their
residents are now dispersed around the world. Even though relatedness in
Toronto was recreated for their parents based on their ties in East Africa,
some of the children and grandchildren have formed their own kinship
connections based on their interactions with one another through the
community associations.
Expressions of relatedness between SPEAs in Toronto are most appar-
ent through the use of kinship terms. Within the community, every adult
of ones parents age is either aunty or uncle. The use of aunty and
uncle among Asians/South Asians has been described by some scholars
as fictive kinship (Ebaugh and Curry 2000; Vatuk 1969). Ebaugh and
Curry explain how children in Asian communities refer to their parents
close friends as aunt or uncle, therefore establishing ties of fictive
kinship where the same respect, rights, and obligations would be extended
to that individual as to aunts and uncles based on blood or marriage
(2000, 198). Similarly, Vatuk (1969) examines the unique ways in which
new mohalla or neighborhood residents (primarily couples) of a western
Uttar Pradesh city in India create fictive kin by using kinship terms to
address neighbors. The myriad kin terms employed are not only based on
respect, age, or sex but are also determined by whether the mohalla is the
childhood home for the husband or wife (if it is the wifes natal home,
for example, she is considered a daughter of the neighborhood and she
uses consanguineal terms to refer to neighborhood residents while her
husband utilizes affinal ones unless prior connections exist), whether the
couple has any pre-existing real or village kin (fictive kinship estab-
lished among residents from the same village) or, if no such relationship
exists, the couple creates new ties with neighbors (Vatuk 1969, 263268;
see also Lambert 2000; Stafford 2000; Eickelman 2002, 144151).
Nazia, a Pakistani Canadian married to a SPEA man, pointed out that
referring to people as aunty or uncle is not unique to SPEAs, as
being socially related is also a common phenomenon among Pakistani
migrant communities. Immigrant families from the same country often
band together (especially if extended family remained in the country of
212 A. MALIK
origin), develop close relationships, aid one another and, because their
children grow up together, they become social cousins and their par-
ents friends become aunty and uncle. This interlocutors insight was
also invaluable in pointing out how shared immigrant experiences in a new
country were significant in making relatedness (see also Baumann 1995;
Ebaugh and Curry 2000; Qureshi and Qureshi 1983). However, moving
beyond the generic aunty and uncle, even Nazia observed that the
children (who moved to Canada as children or were born in Canada) and
grandchildren of SPEA migrants in Toronto at times utilize more specific
and intimate kinship terminology to refer to other community members
and their aunts and uncles, respectively.
While aunty and uncle or cousin in the above examples cat-
egorize a whole range of relationships under singular terms, I have heard
several of the younger generation of SPEAs utilize more specific kinship
terminology to validate ties of relatedness with people who are not oth-
erwise closely related biologically or through marriage. Some grandchil-
dren of migrants in Toronto refer to their mothers best friend as khala
(mothers sister), their fathers best friend as chacha (fathers younger
brother), their mothers male friend as mammu (mothers brother), or
their fathers female friend as phuppo (fathers sister). However, while
ones fathers male best friend or brother, his wife, and children, for
example, might be considered family, this kinship connection does not
necessarily include the rest of the brothers familythat is, his siblings,
parents, and so on. In some cases, this is simply because the brothers
family does not reside locally, thus preventing the interactions necessary
for the cultivation of relationships. Even if the brothers family does
reside locally, ties of relatedness are not automatically extended to them. I
contend that this is because such relationships are always under negotiation
and, like any familial connection, have to be constantly nurtured as being
a family member (whether deemed an aunty, uncle, or a more specific
relation) entails responsibilitythat is, keeping in touch with one another
on a regular basis, offering support in times of need, planning, attending,
and/or participating in a variety of life cycle rituals including birthdays,
engagements, weddings, funerals, anniversaries, and celebrations for the
birth of a child. Even the aforementioned Pakistani Canadian interlocutor
acknowledged some SPEAs close connections and their unusual use of
intimate kinship terms by stating that these children need to stop refer-
ring to their parents friends using specific kinship terminology, otherwise
they wont be able to marry each other! It is important to note that
cousin marriage, although rarely occurring among these migrants nowa-

days, is, however, permissible in Islam.
Moreover, such ties of relatedness today include and are also initiated
by several of the Pakistani Sunni spouses of younger-generation SPEAs
in Toronto. How prevalent such kinship formations were and are among
South Asian, Pakistani, or other immigrants in Canada is definitely worthy
of further research. In this case, however, I suggest that the utilizations
of intimate kinship terms by some grandchildren of migrants not only
reflect respect toward their elders but also illuminate the close relation-
ships forged between their parents and their siblings, as many of their
parents grew up together in Toronto or interact with one another as part
of a larger family of Salaam-Karibu.
Scales ofKinship: Nation, Community, andFamily
Religion, sect, and places of origin have informed the complex and at
times conflicting ways in which SPEAs in Canada imagine different forma-
tions of family at the level of the nation, community, and personal rela-
tionships between individuals. In this chapter, I explored how these varied
scales of kinship extended out from one another moving beyond genea-
logical and affinal relations to include particularized ties of relatedness
formed between migrants and their conception of the SPEA community
as a family to larger universal sacred ties created with other Muslims.
As part of the larger nation of Muslims or umma, some migrants have
collaborated with other Muslims on activities and projects that cater to all
Muslims and/or Canadians both historically and in the present. In addi-
tion, if one follows Eickelman (2002) and focuses on basic ritual practices,
such as daily prayer or the hajj that all Muslims share in some form, one
can argue that these moments are the realization of the ideal of unity
and equality among all brothers and sisters in Islam. The rich diversity
of Islamic beliefs and practices as well as the cultural differences that
exist among Muslims cannot, however, be ignored. As Eickelman aptly
states, Muslims possess identities in addition to that of Muslim (2002,
253). This statement raises several questions about religiously mediated
relatedness among Muslims as it relates to this study. If the umma is the
overarching universal umbrella and ideal that connects all Muslims to one
another and transcends all other affinities, how can we understand practi-
tioners competing solidarities and other processes of inclusion and exclu-
sion in terms of community and family formations? More importantly,
214 A. MALIK
do these other particularized solidarities also constitute a form of sacred

kinship? Perhaps, in this case they do not because for SPEA migrants,
particularized constructions of kinship are not just founded on their reli-
gious or more specifically, mutual sectarian affiliation (Sunni Islam), but
they are also profoundly determined by their complex relationships with
one another over generations based on common provenance, questions
of trust, known genealogical histories, as well as shared life experiences.
In East Africa, their weakening political, social, and cultural connec-
tions to the Indian subcontinent, colonial and historical experiences,
shared sectarian, regional, and cultural backgrounds, and co-residence
in the neighborhoods of colonial Nairobi (that generated generations of
trust and relatedness) unified migrants. Once in Canada, and oftentimes
in the absence of large family units, migrants drew on their past experi-
ences in East Africa to come together and support one another through
the organizations. However, what began as spaces of interaction that
brought together Muslim Indians from East Africa gradually became pre-
dominantly SPEA.Thus, even though some migrants participate inlocal
activities as Muslims for all Muslims and/or Canadians, generations of
relatedness that exist between SPEAs are also why some migrants refer to
their community as a family and express their ties to one another through
the use of intimate kinship terms.
Acknowledgments I extend my thanks to all the participants of the 2014 Wenner

Gren Workshop The Sacred Social, especially Todne Thomas, Rose Wellman,
Susan McKinnon, and Fenella Cannell, as well as the editors at Palgrave Macmillan,
Don Seeman and Tulasi Srinivas, and the external reviewer for their insightful
comments on this chapter.
Notes
1. This study is based on doctoral fieldwork (in the form of archival
research, participant observation, informal and structured inter-
views) conducted in Toronto, Canada between 2005 and 2008.
Fieldwork between 2005 and 2006 was carried out with the support
of the Canada-US Fulbright Program. In this study, pseudonyms are
employed for all identifying information.
2. The People of the Book in the Quran, according to Glasse
(2013, 32), also included the Sabians (Essene-like Jewish-Christian
baptizing sects) or present-day Mandaeans and sometimes the
Magians or Zoroastrians. In addition, as Siddiqui (2013, 2125)

points out, there is some contention among scholars as to which
Christians, Jews, or Jewish-Christians in particular the Quran was
referring to as the People of the Book.
3. Some of the material in this chapter is derived from Asiya Malik
Remembering Colonial Pasts: Nostalgia, Memory, and the Making
of a Diasporan Community American Review of Canadian Studies,
Volume 44 (3), 2014, published by Taylor and Francis, http://www.
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02722011.2014.939427.
4. Interlocutors did not (except in the Kashmiri case of nusal discussed
earlier) use the idiom of blood or the term for blood in Punjabi,
Urdu, or English to describe kinship relations; rather family ties
were explained through descent and/or genealogical connections.
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CHAPTER 10
Rebuking theEthnic Frame: Afro Caribbean

andAfrican American Evangelicals
andSpiritual Kinship
TodneThomas
Beyond theEthnic Boundary: There Is No Such

Thing astheWest Indian Church
This chapter examines the discourses and practices of religious sociality in
an Afro Caribbean and African American1 evangelical church network in
the Atlanta metropolitan area. Though located in almost exclusively black
religious congregations and set within a social landscape that is imprinted
by black ethnic identity politics and ethno-religious association, the black
evangelicals of Corinthian Bible Chapel (CBC) and Dixon Bible Chapel
(DBC)2 did not represent their constituencies as black church or immi-
grant congregations.
I first noted a local rebuke of the ethnic framethe idea that ethnic
boundaries define the limits of Christian congregational fellowshipin a
conversation I had with Aaron Powell, the octogenarian evangelist who
founded the southeastern church network of which CBC and DBC are
T. Thomas (*)
Department of Religion, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_10
220 T. THOMAS
a part. After a brief review of the mandated Institutional Review Board

form, which originally identified my research project as examining the
familial community of Afro Caribbean churches in the Atlanta metropoli-
tan area, Powell responded:
Well you see I would love to help you with your project here. But as I was
looking over this consent form I saw some things that I cant really support.
There is no such thing as a West Indian church as your paper reads. There
is only one Church. And I cant really do an interview on something that
does not fall in line with my beliefs.
Powell resisted an ethnic classification of CBC and DBC that ran counter
to the church networks self-designation as a familial community. Powells
rebuke of the ethnic frame was also reiterated by a number of Afro Caribbean
and African American church members whose critical perspectives were
shaped by personal experiences of ethno-racial marginalization and the
variable articulations of ethnicity, race, and religious identities mediated by
evangelical religious culture. This situatedness prompts a number of impor-
tant questions: Around what alternative loci of community identity did this
black evangelical community coalesce? How did black evangelical congre-
gational identities produce their own modes of inclusion and exclusion,
cohesion and hierarchy? And, how can we locate this communitys rebuke
of the ethnic frame within broader religious, racial, and ethnic assemblages
and against other modalities of Abrahamic religious sociality?
I argue that the members of this black evangelical religious group
mobilized familial religious identity as a counterpoint to Christian ethno-
religious identities in the United States. Through their shared production of
discourses, practices, and sentiments of spiritual kinshipa set of intensive
social ties that incorporate brothers, sisters, spiritual parents, spiri-
tual children, and prayer partners into an intensive form of belonging
that spans institutional and everyday settingsblack evangelicals cultivated
a closely knit familial sociality that they emphasized as a central signifier
of their religious identity. To be sure, church members productions of
familial religious affinities did not signal an absence of ethnic or socio-
religious difference. In some contexts, local ethno-religious distinctions
created moral hierarchies between African American and Afro Caribbean
congregants. Moreover, the familial communities created by CBC and
DBC members conducted a similar form of boundary work as ethnicity
by locally demarcating members from nonmember community residents.
REBUKING THEETHNIC FRAME: AFRO CARIBBEAN ANDAFRICAN AMERICAN... 221
Even so, an analysis of the contexts in which black evangelicals invoke

familial versus ethnic identities highlights the challenges and ambivalences
involved in the production of contemporary religious identities amidst
landscapes shaped by contemporary racial formations, global capitalism,
and migration. And, closely related to a central comparative theme dis-
cussed in this volume, the study of black evangelicals productions of spiri-
tual kinship alerts us not only to their juxtapositions of the spiritual versus
material identities and chosen versus given identities; it also illuminates the
different moral weights assigned to each.
Black Ethnicities andChristianities intheUnited

States
In the United States, race and ethnicity are overlapping rubrics of hier-
archical group identities. Associated with the seedy past of scientific rac-
ism, race is now generally understood by scholars as a social construction.
However, for those who are marginalized by contemporary racial forma-
tions, like the Afro Caribbean and African American members of CBC
and DBC, the social force of race emerges in the form of very real material
inequalities and precarity mediated by contemporary anti-black racism.
Alternately, ethnicity often emerges as the more palatable doppelgnger
of race. Ethnic identities are generally understood to be more permeable,
voluntary, and particular in their association with cultural and descent
groups. Contrasted succinctly by Craig R. Prentiss in Religion and the
Creation of Race and Ethnicity: An Introduction, race is a social group-
ing or form of peoplehood that is marked by traits that are perceived to
be biologically inherited. Ethnicity, in turn, is defined as a social grouping
or form of peoplehood that is marked by traits that are perceived to be
culturally inherited (2003, 7).
In the contemporary United States, ethnicity is a modus operandi for
constructing collective identitya means of expressing difference and pre-
sumably aspirations for inclusion in the grammar of US multiculturalism.
Nonetheless, scholars have noted that the increasing popularity of eth-
nicity as a public sphere identity has tended to overshadow the ways in
which race structures socioeconomic inequality in the United States. For
instance, Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994, 16) argue that popu-
lar social scientific usage of the ethnicity paradigm applied a universalized
white immigrant model of social mobility analogically to the experiences
222 T. THOMAS
of racial minorities, whose experiences with racialization differentially

shaped their prospects for assimilation. Anthropologist Faye Harrison also
highlights the shortcomings of ethnicity theories in explain[ing] how or
why racism exists and persists, and why, under certain conditions, catego-
ries of human beings are subjugated or privileged because of differences
purported to be fundamentally natural and/or biophysical (1998, 613).
More recently, Vilna Bashi Treitler (2013) argues that ethnic thinking and
ethnic projects actually reproduce white supremacist racial structures in
the United States.
In the United States, cultural agents use ethnic and religious identi-
ties to categorize themselves and others for the purposes of interaction
(Barth 1998, 1314). Ethno-religious congregations oversee private and
public modes of identity-making and institutional formation. Like ethnic
identity groups, congregations are often particularistic, highlighting the
things that set them apart rather than looking for underlying universal-
isms (Ammerman 1997, 352). Similar to ethnic, familial, and class identi-
ties, congregational memberships are also often ascribed versus achieved
statuses (ibid.).
Though scholarship on secularism and assimilation predicted the
abandonment of religious and ethnic solidarities, the straightforward
trek to a secular modernity and an integrated nation-state mediated by
shared white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultural values never
occurred (McKinnon and Cannell 2013; Omi and Winant 1994). Rather,
the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the United States witnessed
a resurgence in religious participation and fundamentalisms and a trans-
fusion of new transnational migrants who maintained affinities to home
nations (Glick-Schiller etal. 1992). Nonwhite and religious others have
also held on to ethnic and religious identities as frameworks for shared
affinity and community formation and mobilized these solidarities into
the public sphere.
Ethno-religious congregations, such as the archetypical Black Church
associated with African Americans and ethnic congregations attributed
to immigrants, have served as mediating civic and social support orga-
nizations for minoritized communities navigating various processes of
cultural and political protest and assimilation (Ebaugh and Curry 2000;
Higginbotham 1993). Black churches in the United States have also been
vital spaces for the expression of black religious identities. From the invis-
ible institution of the black plantation church to the mainline and char-
ismatic Protestant institutional formation of the Black Church, African
American Christians have founded their own Christian religious institu-

tions since the eighteenth century (Raboteau 1978; Lincoln and Mamiya
1990). Such churches witnessed the creation of modes of exilic conscious-
ness that decried the hypocrisies of racist democracy (Glaude 2003), and
the channeling of programmatic resources into church conferences and
ministries designed to foster social uplift and community development for
black congregants (Higginbotham 1993). Black churches have also medi-
ated the provision of vital information, reciprocal support systems, fraternal
connections, and alternative forms of social capital for African American
migrants and Afro Caribbean immigrants moving to US metropoles from
the Reconstruction era to the present day.
Though Afro Caribbean and African American Christian experiences
have tended to be conflated under the institutional construct of the Black
Church, black US-born and immigrant Christians in the United States
have generated a number of ethno-religious distinctions. Since the early
twentieth century, Afro Caribbean and African American Christians have
founded their own churches in cities like NewYork and Boston as spaces
that demarcate and reproduce identity distinctions between both con-
stituencies (Watkins-Owens 1998; Johnson 2006). Afro Caribbeans and
African Americans have also created hierarchies of morality and authen-
ticity around perceived differences in religious culture. For example,
sociologist Omar McRoberts (2003) describes an Antiguan Pentecostal
congregation in the Boston metropolitan area in which Caribbean immi-
grant members mobilized exilic identity as a means of critiquing the per-
ceived cultural norms of US society. He writes, instead of extolling the
virtues of citizenship and cultural assimilation, the pastor of this church
highlighted the morally corrosive aspects of American culture (2003,
77). In other contexts, Haitian and Jamaican Pentecostals in the United
States have criticized African American Pentecostal musical and worship
styles as being too secular (Butler 2007).
Likewise, the Afro Caribbean and African American evangelicals of
CBC and DBC also generated narratives of black ethno-religious differ-
ence. Church members critically characterized Afro-Baptist religiona
mainstay of southern black cultural pathwaysas favoring charismatic
religiosity over substantive biblical teaching. In particular, members
denigrated black Baptist churches as sites for fire and brimstone mes-
sages and hooping-style preaching where church participants did not
always receive vital information central to the gospel message. CBC and
DBC church members also believed that Afro-Baptist church attendance
224 T. THOMAS
e manated from church members concern with status and tradition rather
than genuine religious motives. Thus, this constituency of Afro Caribbean
and African American church members criticized a stereotyped rendition
of African American Christianity for a set of performative features they
considered contrary to the authentic born-again conversion and a Bible-
centered religiosity associated with evangelicalism. And, in doing so, CBC
and DBC generated and moralized ethno-religious boundaries between
their evangelical religious project and an imagined southern Afro-Baptist
religious Other.
The moral hierarchies generated by CBC and DBC evangelical critiques
of a stereotyped African American Christianity, however, are matched by
the representational inequalities engendered in African American cultural
hegemony within the Black Church, global Christian media, and the
black Atlantic that has also solidified ethnic and geopolitical hierarchies,
inequalities, and exclusions (Girloy 1995; Burdick 2013). In the midst of
the ethno-religious distinctions generated by Afro Caribbean and African
American Christians, scholars have noted very little difference in the
intensity and types of religious practices observed by Afro Caribbean and
African American Christians. According to Chatters etal.:
the collectivistic and communal orientations, participatory worship styles

and immediate and personal connections with a divine power are common
to both African American and Black Caribbean traditions and constitute
distinctive forms of devotional practice that are characteristic of peoples of
African descent. (2008, 9)
Despite the similar religious norms that are shared by Afro Caribbean
and African American Christians, the identity boundaries drawn by black
Christians are impacted by the broader field of ethnic identity politics in
the United States. Reified through a number of discourses about economic
competition and immigrant success (Logan and Deane 2003; Pierre 2004;
Vickerman 1999), black ethnic identity politics have been encased in cul-
tural, economic, and political distinctions produced by desegregation, the
liberalization of immigration policy with the Hart Cellar Act of 1965,
an increase in black immigration, and the conservative backlash against
the Civil Rights Movement in which many mainstream neo-evangelicals
took part (Matory 2015). Percy Hintzen and Jean Muteba Rahier (2003)
argue that black ethnic frictions are conditioned by different reckonings
of blackness: a structural politics of blackness often advocated by African
Americans (that foreground blackness primarily asa grammar for exploita-

tion and political mobilization) and a deconstructive political approach
to blackness often advocated by black immigrants (that illustrate multiple
forms of blackness that are not always structurally defined). In Stigma and
Culture: Last-Place Anxiety in Black America, anthropologist J. Lorand
Matory instead proposes that black ethnic differences stem from shared
processes of ethnic distinction and ethnogenesis by which Afro Caribbean
and other black ethnic communities assert cultural distance from African
Americans who are symbolically constructed as homogeneous, unchang-
ing, bereft of the characteristics and behaviors that define the normal citi-
zen, and, according to the national mythology, uniquely embodying the
characteristics and behaviors inappropriate to the normal citizen (2015,
2). Thus, black ethnic distinctions emanate from groups efforts to navi-
gate the symbolic and material deprivations that attend the occupancy
of a racial bottom slot associated with an essentialized and demoralized
African American blackness. Illustrating the generative potential of reli-
gion in black ethnic negotiations and racial resistances, Sylvester Johnson
argues that early-twentieth-century black Jews and Moorish Americans re-
conceptualized religious identity as ethnogenesis and used religion to
assert peoplehoods that transcended prescriptive African American expe-
riences of slavery and racism (2010, 1401). Given the common occur-
rence of ethno-congregationalism as a model for Christian community
in the United States and the usage of religion as a mechanism for con-
ceptualizing and protesting black ethnic difference and racialization, the
ongoing moralization of black ethnic difference and the ethnicization of
Afro-diasporic religious experience might be expected.
A cursory examination of ethnicity in the United States reveals a land-
scape marked by increasing modes of distinction and differentiation.
Nonetheless, scholars documenting interethnic and comparative views of
ethnic identity formation have also pointed to fluidity and shifts in ethnic
identifications. In Black Mosaic: The Politics of Black Pan-Ethnic Diversity,
Candis Watts Smith argues that black ethnic identity distinctions are con-
textual rather than absolute, and black Americans and black immigrants
usually tend to consider each other as partners in a shared struggle against
racial injustice (2014, 6). Therefore, Smith observes that blackness in
the United States, then, might be better conceptualized as a pan-ethnic
identity rather than always being fragmented by ethnic divisions. In The
Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, cultural studies scholar Rey
Chow asserts that ethnicity is dually conceptualized as a universal c ondition
226 T. THOMAS
emanating from human cultural history and as a particular condition that

results from local resistance to the capitalist assignment of ethnics to the
bottom of labor hierarchies. This ambivalence between universal and par-
ticular understandings of ethnicity creates an ongoing cycle by which dif-
ference, violence, and resistance are reproduced. Engaging Max Webers
argument that Protestant idealizations of hard work and struggle became
part of the capitalist ideological apparatus, Chow argues that ethnic pro-
tests (or the resistance to the material inequalities that attend ethnicization
in capitalist contexts) are endemic to global capitalism. Chow explains,
In this context, to be ethnic is to protestbut perhaps less for actual eman-
cipation of any kind than for the benefits of worldwide visibility, currency,
and circulation (2002, 48). Thus, ethnic protests tend to reify rather
than subvert capitalist and ethnic inequalities. Moreover, academic repre-
sentations of ethnic identities can also be conscripted into the discourse
of ethnic projects (Matory 2015) and contribute to an increasing unpro-
ductively balkanized racial landscape in both the academy and in public
discourse (Russell 2015, 114).
Within milieus conditioned by ethnic and pan-ethnic protest and
ambivalence, we might then understand the production of alterity located
in the semiotic space between universal and particular reckonings of
identity that are intoned in spiritual terms. Afro Caribbean and African
American evangelicals usage of spiritual kinship as a set of discourses and
practices by which they produced familial identities reveals the significance
of spiritualized socialities as intervening identities that can bridge eth-
nic constituencies. Furthermore, an examination of Afro Caribbean and
African American evangelical constructions of spiritual kinship generates a
different view of black ethnic interactions by illustrating some settings in
which black Christians can emphasize familial religious sociality over more
commonly ascribed ethno-racial identities as a social script for belonging.
Afro Caribbean andAfrican American Evangelicals

andtheChanging Atlanta Ethnoscape
At the time of my fieldwork in 2008, CBC and DBC were two moderate-
sized evangelical congregations with Afro Caribbean and African
American populations and approximately 50- and 100-member constitu-
encies. Influenced by Plymouth Brethrenism, a nonconformist evangeli-
cal tradition founded in the nineteenth-century England, CBC and DBC
members practiced a religious tradition that is critical of the sectarian and
institutional bounding of modern congregational life (Callahan 1996).

Located in the city of Atlanta and a predominately black Atlanta subur-
ban community, the congregations of CBC and DBC were vitally shaped
by the movement of Afro Caribbean migrants to the Atlanta area in the
1980s. As the home to a number of notable African American educational,
entrepreneurial, political, and religious institutions, Atlanta has been imag-
ined as an ethnoscape, a space being transformed by domestic and interna-
tional migration flows propelled by globalization (Appadurai 1996; Bayor
1996). Additionally, the international notoriety brought to the city after
the 1996 Olympics (Sjoquist 2000), and the citys marketing campaign to
attract young urban professionals has further transformed Atlanta into a
city of migrants. The metropolitan area is now home to a growing number
of Afro Caribbean cultural organizations, hometown and alumni associa-
tions, businesses, sporting leagues, and religious institutionsincluding
several mainline denominations attended by Caribbean majorities. Thus,
Atlanta is an urban site of black ethno-racial negotiations in which Afro
Caribbean migrants have had to navigate the exclusive social networks
of native African Americans and white elites (Hill and Beaver 1998).
Nonetheless, African Americans and black migrants alike must weather
the polarizations of race, class, and space conditioned by white supremacy
that have survived the segregation era (Kruse 2007).
In the midst of the black ethnic differentiations and institutional for-
mations occurring in Atlanta, both CBC and DBC have been depicted
as ethnic communities by local residents. Ann Marume, a Jamaican
social worker who migrated to Atlanta in the 1980s with the first wave of
Afro Caribbean migrants, described DBC as a Caribbean church with
a reputation for taking good care of new migrants to the area. CBC
members also acknowledged that their chapel is perceived by local resi-
dents as a typical black church because of its majority African American
population. Nonetheless, despite being read as ethnic communities, the
Afro Caribbean and African American evangelicals of CBC and DBC, at
times, resisted these ethnic categorizations. In doing so, they took part in
a broader landscape of evangelical negotiations of ethno-racial identities.
Evangelical Christianity andtheLimits ofEthnic Community

Contemporary evangelicals in the United States differentially acknowl-
edge, reify, and trouble ethno-racial identities and ethno-religious institu-
tions. Evangelicals in the US have most visibly addressed the problem of
228 T. THOMAS
ethno-racial hierarchy through the Racial Reconciliation Movementa

set of religious projects spearheaded by parachurch organizations like
the Promise Keepers movement since the 1990s to create spaces for
multiracial worship and, in some instances, to redress racial inequality.
Nonetheless, as observed by Michael Emerson and Jason Shelton, black
and white Protestants profoundly differ in their definitions and understand-
ings of racial reconciliation (2012, 183 [emphasis in original]). White
evangelicals often conceptualize ethno-racial inequality as an interpersonal
problem or as a soteriological concern and use discourses of pluralism
that can obscure the power dynamics between dominant and marginal-
ized groups (Emerson and Smith 2000; Smith 2006). Black evangelicals,
however, tend to frame ethno-racial hierarchy as a structural problem that
cannot be adequately resolved without redistributive policies (Emerson
and Smith 2000; Emerson and Shelton 2012).
In addition to critiquing ethno-racial estrangements, evangelicals use
religious spaces as sites for ethnic identity production and contestation.
First-generation Korean migrants, for instance, form ethnic churches that
emphasize diasporic identities and ethno-religious boundaries (Chong
2004). Similarly, second-generation Korean Americans establish campus
ministries that emphasize shared ethnic origins and religious values amidst
collegiate experiences of racial marginalization (Kim 2006). Yet, in other
contexts, evangelicals in multiethnic congregations and from second-
generation immigrant backgrounds have asserted more universalistic reli-
gious orientations over ethnic identities (Min 2010; Marti 2004).
CBC and DBC evangelicals criticisms and ambivalence around eth-
nicity and blackness as identities for community mobilization could be
interpreted as a by-product of the political conservatism and anti-struc-
turalism that is generally associated with evangelical worldviews. To be
sure, black evangelicals have been constructed by other black Christians
as taking on a degree of whiteness through their proximity to a reli-
gious and political conservatism of evangelicalism that is also presumed
to be assimilative for nonwhite practitioners (McGlathery and Griffith
2003). Moreover, black evangelicals ethnic and religious memberships
are also forged in a climate tempered by post-racialism and the absent-
ing of race and racism as a viable hub for conversations about inequality
in the public sphere (Bonilla-Silva 2010; Delgado 2012). It stands to
reason that black evangelicals contention with prescriptive models of
ethno-religious fellowship results from their assimilation of a mainstream
white evangelical religious culture or their internalization of postracial
r acism that endeavors to absent a p ublically dissident blackness as a locus

for political engagement. Nevertheless, Afro Caribbean and African
American evangelicals rebuke of the ethnic frame might also reveal a
contention with the semiotic limitations of what their loci for religious
identity and community should be.
Social scientists Nina Glick-Schiller, Ayse Caglar, and Thaddeus
Gulbrandsen argue that researchers who uncritically define the ethnic
community as the unit of migrant religious life often miss shared expe-
riences of locality that are expressed through religious practices (2006,
612). By documenting how migrant evangelicals create local religious
solidarities that are produced through neoliberal public sphere political
engagements and intercultural networks that are not ethnically marked,
the authors argue that migrants in born-again religious communities
in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Halle, Germany, produce non-
ethnic forms of incorporation (2006, 614). Nonetheless, questions
remain about what frameworks of nonethnic identity are being invoked
by contemporary evangelical communities to inform group solidarities. A
potential answer to this question is supplied by an investigation of black
evangelicals constructions of spiritual kinship.
Ethno-Racial Disaffections: Experiential Critiques ofEthno-

Religious Fellowship
CBC and DBC evangelicals critique of the ethnic frame did not only
emanate from positive renditions of an aspirational Christian universalism.
Church members negative experiences with the racial exclusions of the
Atlanta religious landscape also shaped their perspectives on ethnic and
racial religious boundaries.
Brother Edwin Goodison, a young adult Afro Jamaican DBC member,
described his first visit to the Atlanta sister congregation that sponsored
the Jamaican Baptist church in which he grew up:
it was kinda something like out of a movie where you walk into a bar and
everything stops and the one black guy walks into the white barIt was all
white. And I was the only black guy. The guy was preaching and he stopped.
And somebody got up and asked me if I was looking for somebody. (pause)
Yeah. And I was like, Yeah. Im with that guy. And he turned around
and said, Yeah. Hes with me. And they proceeded. And when they were
through I was like yeah I dont belong here.
230 T. THOMAS
Another middle-aged Afro Jamaican couple recalled their attendance of

a prominent Atlanta southern Baptist megachurch and being constantly
referred to the international worship service held on Sunday afternoons
for Latino immigrants by white church members during the main morn-
ing worship service.
More than a product of white Southern Baptists racial antipathies, the
ethno-racial exclusions of the Atlanta landscape extend to the ranks of other
evangelicals as well. When describing his interactions with white Brethren
in the Atlanta area who often did not attend the black Brethren functions
to which they were invited, a senior Afro Trinidadian church member
explained, Most of them are basically older Caucasian people whothey
just dont travel very far. I dont think they dislike us. They just dont travel
very far. Though cast in different overtones of disbelief, annoyance, or
resignation, CBC and DBC members interactions with local white evan-
gelicals were commonly discussed in terms of ethno-racial exclusion.3
Asiya Malik (Chap. 9, this volume) explores the definitions of Muslim
community authored by Sunni Punjabi East African Muslims in Toronto
who understand their religious solidarities as part of a global Islamic umma
and in terms of ethnic, cultural, and national origins that gain increasing
salience in a milieu in which Muslim migrants are derisively racialized as
Pakis (Pakistanis). Thus, broader contexts of racialization can shape reli-
gious practitioners ethno-national narrowing of religious belonging.
Yet black evangelicals shared critiques of the ethno-racial bounding
of religious fellowship (conditioned by shared theological perspectives
and experiences with racio-religious exclusion) were not generated in the
absence of ethno-racial discord within church walls. At the time of my
research, the CBC and DBC constituencies were predominately black
with virtually no white members. Church members also conceded that
national origins and ethnic identities can shape the interpersonal connec-
tions that church members form inside and outside of church contexts.
In several interviews, church members negatively depicted this pattern
of ethno-national association as clannish and cliquish behavior. A
small number of church participants even argued that ethnic dissent was
what motivated the foundation of DBC in October 1991. According to
an African American church member Brother James Wilkerson, CBC
began as a majority African American fellowship and became roughly
half African American and half Afro Caribbean in the early 1990s after
the migration of Afro Caribbean Brethren to the Atlanta area. Wilkerson
elaborated:
The [West Indians] came and they meet this rag-tag group of African
Americans: first generation BrethrenBaptists, Methodists, relatively
young. They dont know about this Brethren thing. I mean theyve been
exposed, and they were told that they were Brethren, but their daddies and
mommas werent Brethren. They still have some of this Baptist blood run-
ning through them. So they come in and do the same thing the British
did. The British come and conquer you and say you gotta learn the British
way. Same thing went on at Corinthian. No. Brethren we do it this way.
Excuse me. What are you talking about? Im just as Brethren as you. No,
we do it this way. So things start changing. And you have this cultural ten-
sion and conflict that was existing. And most of the time, the church tears
apart. And most of the time its those from the Caribbean coming and tak-
ing over. Same things as the British. So a lot of people were looking and just
knew we were gonna explode. We didnt explode. And you wanna know one
reason why we didnt explode? DBC started. That was the release valve. Yes
that was a church plant. Im gonna put the best face on it. It was a church
plant and behind that is something that is not so clean and not so pretty.
Wilkersons statement illustrated that ethnicity cannot be absented from

understanding the social dynamics of CBC and DBC congregational
life. His coinage of the terms born Brethren (a category that refers
to Afro Caribbeans who were raised in the Brethren traditions) and
Baptist blood (African Americans raised in the Afro-Baptist tradition
who converted to the Brethren tradition) suggested a local convergence
of ethnic descent and religious heritage. These emic categories of ethno-
religious identity naturalized religious identities and hierarchies, and
in doing so, suggested a reckoning of Christian identity as innate and
inherited that runs contrary to conventional understandings of born-
again Christian identity as the product of a voluntary, individual conver-
sion experience.
To be sure, an analysis of Abrahamic affinities and conflicts illustrates
the ways in which contested notions of ethnic, spiritual, and prophetic
descent can be tethered to different ideals of chosenness (Levenson 2012).
Genealogical descent is a pathway for imagining socio-religious continuity
and special proximity to religious founders and the divine and can often be
mobilized in claims for religious authenticity. The narrowing vertical lines
of genealogical descent versus the singularity of truth claims that tend to
be invoked by the monotheistic claims of Abrahamic religions (Delaney,
Chap. 11, this volume) can create powerful social boundaries and modes
of exclusion. Moreover, as insightfully observed by Sylvia Yanagisako and
232 T. THOMAS
Carol Delaney (1995), the intersections of the social domains of religion

and kinship (via such shared phenomena as genealogical imaginaries) can
naturalize a number of social inequalities among practitioners between
men and women and, in this case, between founders and converts. Among
CBC and DBC Brethren, ethno-religious categories were constructed
over moral hierarchies of religious belonging, leadership, and authen-
ticity. Yet, instead of having a singular ethnic bottom line, the broader
set of Wilkersons reflections contextualized Afro Caribbean and African
American ethnic discord within a broader structural context of class dif-
ferences and imperial history. Thus, he outlined ethnic discord as a central
dynamic but not the singular cause for CBC and DBC conflict.
Though Wilkersons perspective foregrounded the impact of ethnic dif-
ference on the interactions of CBC and DBC evangelicals, his opinion
that ethnicity has a structuring influence on congregational life was not a
prevalent one. Informed by the ideals of a universal Christian identity and
local experiences with ethno-racial exclusion, CBC and DBC members
tended to voice a resistance to the perceived captivity of ethno-religious
fellowships and affirm the significance of creating intensive relationships
across ethnic lines. In using the alternative network of beliefs, discourses,
affects, and sentiments of spiritual kinship instead of ethnicity as a frame-
work for sociality, church members created a form of community they
considered to be distinctively guided by a familial ethos of care, account-
ability, and connection.
The Social Context ofCBC andDBC

CommunityLife
Though Corinthian Bible Chapel and Dixon Bible Chapel are read by
local outsiders and a small number of insiders as ethnic churches, church
members depict the social dimensions of their lived religious experience
in familial terms. Sister Beulah Soloman described the closely knit familial
character of the early DBC community:
We basically did everything together. If someone had a party down the road
everybody was there. If there was a graduation everybody was there since
my family wasnt here. Then the church became my family. I like the small
church. The kinship and the fellowship were good. A sense of caring too.
That is a little bit lost because weve got a bit bigger. But its still pretty
much there.
At the foundation of church members understanding of their familial

community was spiritual kinshipan analytical term that I use to describe
the spiritually defined relatedness that CBC and DBC evangelicals pro-
duce across ethnic and national lines and across the contextual boundar-
ies of institutional and everyday settings. Specifically, church participants
believed that their mutual embodiment of the Holy Spirit (which enters
the body after a born-again conversion) made them kin. As a result, church
members ascribed to idioms, practices, and forms of intersubjectivity that
connected them, in their own terms, as brothers and sisters in Christ,
spiritual mothers, spiritual fathers, spiritual children, and prayer
partners. Together, church members produced spiritually defined kin-
ship ties that were discursively marked through the everyday usage of kin
terms, sacralized through the social contexts of ritual (e.g., the sharing
of biblical reflections, communion, and group prayer) and substantiated
through affective practices of mentorship, confiding, reciprocity, and feed-
ing. Church brothers broke bread, shared biblical reflections, and ritual-
ized an institutionalized fraternalism during their quiet, solemn Sunday
morning communion service. Church sisters prayed together and shared
their insights and life experiences in the comfort of suburban homes over
homemade zucchini bread, fish cakes, and laughter during evening prayer
services. They cooked food for weddings, the sick, new parents, and the
bereaved. Prayer partners called each other every morning before work
and often daylight to share prayer requests and good news, offer encour-
agement, and engage in the spiritual intimacy of moral correction and
accountability. Spiritual mothers and fathers cared for their spiritual chil-
dren young and grown through their sustained conversations about faith
and life.
Two overlapping spiritual kinship forms constituted the social field
of CBC and DBC relatedness. The first institutionalized form governed
church social positions. An institutional fraternalism centered male lead-
ership via pastoral leadership, collective elder governance, and biblical
teaching in the church. While church brothers shared the responsibility
of Sunday preaching and leading adult Bible study, sisters and youth
were prohibited from biblical exegesis during Sunday worship services.
Like mainstream evangelicals in the United States, CBC and DBC church
members also affirmed male leadership (or headship) in the family (at
times a parallel and at times an adjoining institution ofthe church) as well.
Thus, a number of social hierarchies were connected to a patriarchal moral
community that became segmented via gender, generational, class lines, as
234 T. THOMAS
well as marital status, and heteronormative sexuality. All church members

were family but had differential access to knowledge production, autho-
rizing discourses, and the divine. Institutional order, in many instances,
was believed to come at the presumably reasonable cost of hierarchical
distinctions.
The other formation of spiritual kinship created intensive everyday con-
nections that went beyond the interactions of Sunday church fellowship.
Often idealized for their mediation of more egalitarian forms of connec-
tion, the ties created by sisters, brothers, and prayer partners who
studied, prayed, confided, and provided for each other were credited with
best embodying the close spiritual intimacy authentically associated with
the New Testament church. As Klaits (Chap. 6, this volume) analysis of
New York Pentecostal and Botswanan Apostolic fellowship aptly illus-
trates, requests for care and ritualized types of askingespecially in con-
texts that value the semiotic force of spoken and written wordsare vital
to the social reproduction of community life. Therefore, everyday forms
of interaction should not be considered secondary but rather vital to the
overall constitution of spiritual relatedness.
The spiritual kinship claims created by the Afro Caribbean and African
American evangelicals at CBC and DBC do not fit neatly within linear
Christian histories of spiritual kinship. They are shaped by multiple trans-
Atlantic religious influences including the anti-institutional impulse of
Plymouth Brethrenism (Callahan 1996) and Afro-diasporic practices of
familial church association and communal eudemonic joy (Austin-Broos
1997; DuBois 1995; McAdoo 2007). Yet a comparative read of black
evangelicals spiritual kinship ties with the properties classically associated
with Christian spiritual kinship reveals some similarities. As outlined by
Alfani (Chap. 2, this volume), Christian godparenthood in medieval and
modern Europe created horizontal lines of allegiance and vertical lines of
mentorship. Though the relationships between godparents and godchil-
dren were centralized by godparenthood, Alfani notes that it was actually
the horizontal relationship between godparents and birth parents (compa-
ternitas) and their ability to mediate interfamilial alliances that were highly
emphasized by Catholics. Following the Protestant Reformation and its
attendant critique of the extensive spiritual incest prohibitions created by
the Catholic Church before the Council of Trent in 1545, Protestants
tended to emphasize the vertical relationships between godparents and
their children as practical tutorial relationships for new Christians. CBC
and DBC members created horizontal and often homosocial modes of
spiritual kinship between brothers and sisters in Christ and prayer part-
ners as ties that facilitated moral accountability. They also crafted vertical
ties that connect spiritual sons and spiritual daughters with spiritual
parents that take on the mentorship functions associated with Protestant
enactments of spiritual kinship after the Reformation.4
Alfani also notes that the ritual institution of Catholic godparenthood
in medieval Europe emanated from the theological elevation of spiritual
over carnal relatedness and created ties of spiritual kinship between godpar-
ents, birth parents, godchildren, and godsiblings. CBC and DBC members
observed a similar ideological emphasis of spiritual over biological kinship as
relationships that can be traced to a popular American evangelical belief in
the fallen nature of humanity and the need for sociality among believers as
a corrective to innate sinfulness (Emerson and Smith 2000). Nonetheless,
this distinction between spiritual and biological kinship did not translate
into church members having to navigate church and family membership
as competing solidarities as is the case with Ethiopian Jewish converts to
Messianic Judaism discussed by Seeman (Chap. 4, this volume). On the
contrary, spiritual kinship was understood by black evangelicals as creating
modes of fellowship that facilitated Christians moral development and the
formation of the heteropatriarchal families highly prized in contemporary
US evangelical subcultures. Church brothers met for breakfast, prayer, and
discussed the spiritual and material struggles of trying to be providers, hus-
bands, and fathers. Spiritual mothers spoke with their spiritual children
about the sacrifices involved in wifely submission and sustaining long-term
marriages. Thus, the spiritual kinship relationships created by black evan-
gelicals cannot be defined as a metaphorical analog to Western genealogical
kinship but as a spiritual relatedness that acted upon biological kinship and
that created and partially affected the idealized norm of the heteropatriar-
chal family. Moreover, CBC and DBC spiritual kinship provided the foun-
dation for a familial incorporation that could resemble if not rival ethnic
and national solidarities and traverse ethnic divides.
Spiritual Kinship asaSignifier ofAfro Caribbean andAfrican

American Evangelical Identity
Though Brethren like Wilkerson mentioned above understand CBC and
DBC to be arranged around the fault lines of ethnic difference, spiritual
kinship operated as an authenticating discourse for community integra-
tion across ethnic lines. As observed by Gregory Stanczak in his analysis of
236 T. THOMAS
the strategic institutional identities produced in multiracial congregations,

there exists a reciprocal legitimacy between racial/ethnic representa-
tions and religious authority (2007, 860). Located amidst ethnic solidari-
ties and conflicts, ethnic and nonethnic modes of religious incorporation,
and aspirational evangelical universalisms, Afro Caribbean and African
American church members produced and mobilized spiritual kinship as an
institutional discourse of religious belonging.
Most commonly, CBC and DBC members described their chapels as
church famil[ies]social collectives that attended to the spiritual and
material needs of members through a shared ethos of care. During a
weekend Family Life Conference at DBC, African American elder Earl
Washington mediated a reflexive group conversation about the social
dynamics of inhabiting a church family:
We mentioned that we would try to look at what definition of family we are

using. For the sake of time Ill give another Webster definition, and they said
that, people with a common ancestry. Another one said that, a group of
people in the same household, and this caught my attention generally with
one head. And the other one talked about, people who are bound by the
same belief or conviction, and I think that fits us as a church family. But the
idea of a people who have a common ancestry being family and those who
are bound by a common belief or set of beliefs. And its interesting its not
always automatic that people who have a common ancestry are in harmony
together.
Washingtons depictions of church family as a construct of religious

belonging reflected important institutional scripts of community member-
ship. Informed by a theology of spiritual kinship that privileges spirit over
body and the eternal duration of born-again relatedness over the solidari-
ties conditioned by provenance, Washington contemplated the limitations
of shared genealogical or ethnic origins in creating harmonious connec-
tions. Rather than genealogical or cultural ties, shared worldviews were
seen as creating a more binding and affable form of kinship. Intentional
families created around common belief versus inherited identities possess
the potential to create more enduring forms of similitude.
The frame of church family also conditioned a shared sense of inter-
chapel relatedness. Despite their co-existence as separate congregations,
members from CBC and DBC repeatedly referenced a statement of
unity that was composed by both congregations to affirm their special
relationship as local sister churches with interconnected histories.
Brethren church members visited and preached at one anothers services,

anniversaries, and other special events and supported each churchs min-
istries and programs.
Alongside institutional discourses of church family were the familial
relational narratives produced by church members. When I asked about
interethnic conflict, Sister Etta Johnson, a senior African American mem-
ber at DBC, first responded cautiously by asking, What have you heard?
Johnson then described her personal experiences with Brethren chapel
fellowship using kinship idioms to frame her interethnic interactions.
She declared that many of the adult members whom she had known as
children still referred to her as Mama, and she referred to her long-
time spiritual mentor as her spiritual father. In short, the social work
and time depth that generated the intimacies of spiritual kinship, in some
instances, appeared to hold more value than the prescribed cultural and
structural affinities of ethnicity.
Though Brother Wilkerson was frank in his depiction of the ethnic
conflict between Afro Caribbean and African American Brethren, he also
observed that colonialism is just a cousin of racism. Wilkerson con-
cluded that Afro Caribbeans and African Americans have been impacted
by the related social structures of empire and the nation-statewhich
have mutually disenfranchised them. Rather than constructing a view of
Afro Caribbean culpability for ethnic hierarchies and dissent, Wilkerson
kinned Afro Caribbeans and African Americans as religious and politi-
cal brethren. For Wilkerson, spiritual kinship was a call to recognize the
shared Christian dispositions and historical oppressions that CBC and
DBC members experience as black communities located in the African
Diaspora. Wilkersons meditation about the shared diasporic relatedness
between Afro Caribbean and African American church members once
again illustrates that black evangelical productions of spiritual kinship
did not take place in a vacuum devoid of ethnic antipathy or racial con-
sciousness. Nonetheless, church members collective muting of ethnic dis-
sent, critical narratives of ethnic, racial, and religious exclusion, and their
reproduction of narratives of interethnic relatedness (a disposition also
shared by Brother Wilkerson) signaled their institutionalization of familial
reckonings of religious identity.
Just as spiritual kinship creates a framework for community identifica-
tion it also holds the potential to create social boundaries. As noted by
Janet Carsten (2000) in Cultures of Relatedness, kinship is not only used
238 T. THOMAS
to convey peoples understandings of their similarities with one another.

It is also used to narrate their perceived differences from other social col-
lectives. Like ethnicity/race mediates modes of hierarchy and exclusion,
familial religious identities can trace lines of belonging that bound social
collectives. Peggy Becker (1999) similarly observes that family congrega-
tions can also be insular. She concludes that family congregations fash-
ion close forms of social belonging through the usage of familial idioms,
the celebration of members life events, engagement in quotidian acts of
care, support, and communion, and the silencing of conflict. Nonetheless,
Becker acknowledges that the interior orientation of familial congregations
can alienate nonmember residents who live in neighboring communities.
Afro Caribbean and African American evangelicals understandings
and practices of spiritual kinship constituted a familial way of conduct-
ing religious fellowship. Nonetheless, their familial religious identity was
generated through similar mythologies of origin, language, and ritual that
often inform ethnic identities (Prentiss 2003). CBC and DBC congre-
gants imaginations of familial identity also rested upon a moral divide
between community insiders and outsiders around perceived differences
in the right (familial) and the wrong (ethno-racial) ways of configuring
Christian fellowship. While CBC and DBC members may have aspired to
traverse ethnic differences, their constructions of familial community re-
inscribed a socio-moral boundary and generated modes of religious differ-
ence. In doing so, their mobilizations and enactments of spiritual kinship
resembled the reproductions of difference caused by ethno-racial distinc-
tions in the United States.
Some CBC and DBC members acknowledge that their churches could
improve the ways they interfaced with the local community that sur-
rounds it. Church members remarked that church members reticence to
engage local residents increases outsiders perception that the churches
are unconcerned with attracting or interacting with new members. Sister
Maya Jenkins, an African American member at DBC, also confessed that
her Baptist relatives think that her religious community is a culta term
that often negatively evokes rigid exclusionary boundaries that work to
the detriment of community members. CBC and DBC members con-
cerns over their congregations insularity suggest that church participants
tended to generate communities of care for members only. Thus, CBC
and DBC evangelicals produced a nonethnic form of everyday famil-
ial membership that bridged social divides of interest (intersubjective/
interfamilial/interethnic) and that reified social boundaries that were not

deemed vital to the production of authentic familial community (church
community/local community).
In closing, black evangelicals rebuke of the ethnic frame provides a
lens from which to view the local constructions of spiritual kinship and
its mediation of church members institutional, everyday, and disaporic
solidarities. More than just an outgrowth of evangelical universalism,
CBC and DBC members negative perspectives on ethno-religious
boundaries were shaped by the ethnic identity politics and ambiva-
lences generated by US ethnic identity politics and neoliberal post-
racialism. Yet, in addition to revealing some of the emergent dynamics
of ethnicity/race, this evangelical associations critique of US ethno-
congregationalism also sheds light on some of the limitations of the
ethnic frame as a model for Afro Caribbean immigrant and African
American community life. The indiscriminate application of the eth-
nic community model can obscure the interior technologies by which
contemporary Christians produce religious affinities and more nuanced
perspectives on the intra-racial distinctions shaping black Atlantic reli-
gious landscapes. Black evangelicals eschewal of (and complex engage-
ment with) the ethnic frame also signals the need for more complex
investigations of ethnicity, evangelicalism, and the other modalities of
community like spiritual kinship that evangelical Christians and other
contemporary religious practitioners are using to generate religious
sociality.
Because of its capacity to mediate various types of affinities that are
interpersonal, institutional, transnational, and even global in scope, spir-
itual kinship is a significant medium for contemporary religious practi-
tioners in a globalizing context (Frishkopf 2003). Nonetheless, the case
study of CBC and DBC evangelicals demonstrates that rather than being
a by-product of biological family relationships or being ranked as second-
ary to naturalized identities like ethnicity and race that are imbricated in
material inequalities, religious participants can, in some settings, privilege
spiritual sociality over public-sphere identities like ethnicity and race. As
neoliberalism generates changing alignments of private and public sphere
subjectivities like religio-familial and ethno-racial memberships, studies
of spiritual kinship must also keep pace with how religious practitioners
tether and prioritize their religious aspirations, collective solidarities, and
enactments of the social.
240 T. THOMAS
Acknowledgments I thank Rose Wellman, Asiya Malik, Susan McKinnon, Carol

Delaney, the other participants of the Sacred Social Workshop, the Palgrave
Macmillan editors and external reviewer, and Bertin M.Louis Jr. for their engage-
ments with this work.
Notes
1. I use the term Afro Caribbean to refer to people, primarily of African
descent, born in the countries of the Anglophone Caribbean. The
term West Indian is alternately used to refer to Anglophone Afro
Caribbean migrants. I use the term African American to refer to
people of African descent born in the United States, including the
second-generation children of Afro Caribbean immigrants. I use the
terms black and Afro-diasporic to refer to both groups collectively.
2. To preserve the confidentiality of research collaborators, I use
pseudonyms as substitutes for actual church and respondent names.
3. It is important to note that the members of this multiethnic black
constituency did not describe personal experiences of ethno-racial
exclusion in the context of localnon-evangelical African American
churches. In two instances, African American attendees described
being marginalized by African American mainline Protestants for
their Republican political leanings and values-based voting. Yet in
most cases, CBC and DBC members described being at odds with
the worship styles, charismatic leadership, religious ideologies, and
biblical practices that they associate with Afro-Baptist Christianity
rather than experiences of ethno-racial exclusion.
4. Though in many evangelical contexts in the United States the term
discipling is used to describe the mentorship process in which
younger and older Christians are engaged, CBC and DBC members
most often use kinship and the language of spiritual motherhood
and spiritual fatherhood to describe such ties.
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CHAPTER 11
The Seeds ofKinship Theory

intheAbrahamic Religions
CarolDelaney
I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the
heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore. (Genesis 22:17)
It may seem odd to begin a chapter about kinship with a biblical quota-
tion. Yet, as will become clear, I believe that early kinship theory, unwit-
tingly perhaps, developed from assumptions about gender, family, and
kinship that are deeply embedded in the Bible. Although anthropologists
have been trained to understand people in their cultural context, rarely
have we analyzed how the Euro-American cultural context contributed to
our theoretical frameworks. Since the nineteenth century, at least, when
anthropology was beginning to emerge as a distinct intellectual discipline,
religion and kinship were treated as separate areas of explorationone
had to do with the spiritual and the other with the natural and rarely did
(or do) the twain meet. Yet for hundreds of years, even millennia, the
C. Delaney (*)
Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_11
246 C. DELANEY
Euro-American world view, values, laws, and institutions, including family

and kinship, were heavily influenced by the Bible. But because the biblical
notions of family and kinship were assumed to be natural, obvious, and
true, it was difficult for kinship theorists to gain perspective on their own,
let alone very different kinship systems.
This chapter, therefore, does not address spiritual kinship in the sense
of what binds persons in community, as do several of the chapters in this
volume. Nor do I address the contested issue of spiritual as fictive kin-
ship versus biological real kinship. Instead, I am looking at the notion
of kinship embedded in the texts (Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and the
Quran) and some of the practices of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam) and suggest that it is simultaneously spiritual and
natural in its founding assumptions, specifically the meanings of father
and mother. These are not simply equivalent terms for male and female
parent; one represents the spiritual element in procreation, the other the
natural and their hierarchical order has had social consequences. Mine
is a more theoretical and critical project than ethnographic though I do
include material from my fieldwork in Turkey.
The above quotation from Genesis occurs directly after Abraham was
prepared to sacrifice his son at Gods command.
Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, who thou lovest, and get thee into
the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the
mountains which I will tell thee of. (Genesis 22:2)
Several things need to be noted at once: (1) in the biblical story, Isaac is
not Abrahams only son, his first born was Ismail, conceived by Hagar,
a handmaid to Sarah, his wife. Although Ismail is rarely mentioned in
the Quran, Muslims, in some traditions, tend to believe that he was the
one to be sacrificed.1 (2) Regardless, in neither case did Abraham ask the
mothersHagar or Sarah, implying that the sons belonged to Abraham
in a way they did not belong to the mothers. (3) In the older, biblical ver-
sion, it is Isaac who is the product of the marriage between Abraham and
Sarah, thus implying that marriage was the bond that legitimated a child
and created the bond of kinship (A more humane concept would be that
every child is legitimate by virtue of being born).
Although Abraham was reprieved at the last moment, he is revered for his
willingness to comply. Indeed, for his obedience to God, Abraham became
known as the father of faith at the foundation of the three religions.
THE SEEDS OFKINSHIP THEORY INTHEABRAHAMIC RELIGIONS 247
Because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine
only son, I will bless thee and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth
be blessed (Genesis 22:16, 18).
For me, however, the most important conspicuous assumption has
been overlooked, and that is the word seed. Though as A.I. Hallowell
said long ago, the most fundamental assumptions of any religious
system are the least transparent (quoted in M.F. Ashley Montagu
[1937]1974, 387), even if in plain view. Because the word seed, inscribed
in sacred texts, has long been part of the discourse, few have thought
to explore its meanings and ramifications. In some recent translations of
the Bible, the word seed has been changed to progeny, but in so doing,
it disguises the very assumptions that undergird the patriarchal struc-
ture embedded in that text, namely, notions of gender, procreation, and
kinship.
While seed did mean progeny, only men were thought to have seed,
only the man could beget a child, thus it should not be surprising that the
child was thought to belong to the man. Women were thought to provide
the nurturing medium, the soil, in which the seed was planted. Women
were (and still are) also described as either fertile or barren words
that further identify them with the earth (that which was created by God),
while potent or impotent are used to describe men, thus highlight-
ing their power. Only men passed on seed, thus, boy children were valued
more highly than girl children, for they were the only ones to continue
the line. All the lineages in the Bible are patrilineages. Seed was imagined
to incorporate the essence, the identity, and even the immortal soul of a
person. Girls and women had souls, of course, but they were bequeathed
by the father.
This ancient theory is inscribed not only in the Bible but also in the
Quran. There Allah (God) speaks to men: Women are given to you
as fields, go therein and sow (Sura 2:223). These ideas are also found
in Aristotles Generation of Animals and other ancient texts which
greatly influenced medieval Christianity when they were rediscovered. In
Christianity, this theory became even more pronounced: God is called
Father, who sends his only begotten son, depicted in medieval paint-
ings as a whole baby descending on beams of light, to be born from the
body of Mary. The religious texts espouse what I have called a monoge-
netic theory of procreationthe principle of creation comes from only
one sourcecomparable, I suggest, to the monotheistic view of the male-
imaged Creator.
248 C. DELANEY
Meanings of father and mother were constructed long before the

modern scientific theory of procreation in which male and female con-
tribute the same kind of material, namely genes to the formation of an
embryo. In addition, of course, women also provide nurture both inside
and outside the womb and the labor of childbirthyet those are the only
aspects that have traditionally defined the word mother. The modern
genetic theory did not become widely known until mid-twentieth century
and then only to certain segments of the population. Even so, the age-old
cultural theory persists because the two theories are separated into differ-
ent semantic contextsreligion and science.
The older, folk-biblical, theory was the way I, an American born in
1940, was first told about how babies come into being, namely the
Daddy plants his seed, and I still hear references to it today. Indeed,
because it is so deeply ingrained I began to repeat it when my daugh-
ter asked the perennial question! Mid-sentence, I stopped and realized in
shock its implications. That moment was the inspiration for all my aca-
demic work. Father still means the one who begets, who is the procre-
ator, and mother is the one who bears the child and nurtures it. (Check
your dictionaries!) Thus, it is extremely important to acknowledge the
way language constitutes how we think about these issues. That the terms
mother and father incorporate the ancient, erroneous, ideas can be
seen when they are used for cultural processes far removed from physical
procreation such as in to father something versus to mother some-
thing, or the father of state and mother nature. So too, the use of
the word reproduction instead of procreation to describe the process
of bringing a unique, sentient being into the world is not only associated
with women but also serves to devalue the process as if it were akin to
something a Xerox machine does. To date, our language has not changed
to adjust toour modern understanding of the process. Furthermore, to
take the terms father and mother as natural and therefore universal
not only distorted the way anthropologists have perceived other cultures
notions of relatedness but also continues to obscure our own.
In order to further investigate my burgeoning thoughts on this issue,
I first attended Harvard Divinity School to do research on the Bible, par-
ticularly the story of Abraham, and on other, surrounding, Near Eastern
cultures. There I learned that in Sumerian culture including the city of
Ur, from which Abraham migrated, the primary deity was Inanna, Queen
of Heaven, and women were priests. And in Harran, to which Abraham
migrated, the people had a very different kinship system from the one in
the biblical text, at least as can be gleaned from their kinship terminology,
and women could adopt children in their own name and hold property.2
I began to wonder whether all peoples of the world had the same notions
of gender and procreation as we do. This propelled me to do doctoral
research in cultural anthropology, and fieldwork in a culture influenced by
Islam, the Abrahamic religion I knew least about, and in a place where
the modern genetic theory of procreation was likely to be unknown.
I chose to go to Turkey, where I had worked previously on an archaeol-
ogy project. I lived in a remote Turkish village for two years (198082)
where I quickly had to learn the proper kinship terms to address individu-
als. After I was well integrated in the village, I began to ask people how
they were related and how babies come into being. All were adamant that
the man was the creator by means of his seed (tohum or dl) and thus, they
were his, they belonged to him. There was no word for the female con-
tribution, only dlyatagliterally, seedbed, that is the womb. These
beliefs about procreation were a major disincentive for a woman to leave
her husband and seek a divorce, even in an unhappy or abusive marriage,
because she would not get custody of the children.
Girls are like the leaves on a tree, they fall off; they are the end of the
line, boys are the trunk. Since a boy child was necessary to continue the
line, women were expected to continue to have children until a boy was
produced. If she did not produce a male heir, she was blamed. She was
not able to hold onto the seed. They had no idea about the roles that x
and y chromosomes in the sperm played in conception. The lack of a male
heir was also the reason a man could divorce his wife or, in some cases,
take a second wife even though that was forbidden in Turkey.
Michael Meeker, another anthropologist who worked in Turkey quoted
his villagers as saying: If you plant wheat, you get wheat, if you plant rye,
you get rye, the man plants the seed, the woman is like the field in which
it is planted (1970, 157), reinforcing the idea that identity comes from
the man. The villagers among whom I lived, agreed. Thus, it is not sur-
prising that my book resulting from this fieldwork was titled, The Seed and
the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society. I used the word
cosmology rather than religion, because I wanted to direct attention to
world view and notions of coming into being rather than just on the
way Islam was practiced in that village.
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal set about con-
structing the modern, secular country of Turkey based on European
models. Unwittingly perhaps, he transferred the religious symbolism of
250 C. DELANEY
pro/creation to the conception of the new nation. The land was sym-
bolically female, referred to as Anavatanmotherland, while he became
AtatrkFather of the Turks. Henceforth, all people born upon its soil
would be called Turks and as fellow citizens were expected to feel some
kind of spiritual kinship.
While anthropologists have traditionally asked about origin myths,
unfortunately, those interested in kinship have rarely asked people about
how babies originate, that is, about their beliefs concerning procreation,
because they assumed the process was natural, obvious, and universal. It
was Bronislaw Malinowski whose work among the Trobriand Islanders
brought the issue to anthropological attention. Before turning to his work,
I wish to step back a bit and turn to Lewis Henry Morgan who is generally
credited as the founding father of kinship studies as an academic field.
Lewis Henry Morgan

While living in upper New York state, Lewis Henry Morgan, a lawyer,
became acquainted with the Iroquois and noticed that they had a kinship
system that was very different from the one with which he was familiar,
at least in terms of its nomenclature. For example, where we have two
different words for father and fathers brother, namely father and
uncle, the Iroquois had only one. For Morgan, it seemed obvious that
family relationships must be the same everywhere since they rest on the
same biological facts of sex and reproduction, established through mar-
riage and constituted by the streams of blood. So he struggled to learn
what could explain the Iroquois system and wondered whether all Native
American groups had a similar system. He devised a questionnaire that
he took when he visited other groups. He also sent it to missionaries,
explorers, and government officials who were working in different societ-
ies around the world. He asked them to fill in the native term that corre-
sponded to our relationships of mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle,
cousin, grandmother, and so on, which seems logical. Yet, forcing other
peoples terms onto the grid used by Morgan and Euro-Americans greatly
distorted their kinship systems, and it took some time for anthropologists
to figure out what these other systems represented.
I cannot possibly cover the various systems in Morgans huge volume,
Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity,3 but hopefully one example will
illustrate the problem. In a number of cases he found that the same term
was applied to several different women, clearly not all of whom could be
the birth mother and, similarly with the terms for men, not all of whom
could be the father. He called such a system classificatory and assumed,
at first, that the people were not pair bonding but engaging in promis-
cuous intercourse and group marriage. Given his belief that always and
everywhere kinship terms reflected biological relations, he assumed that
these groups simply did not know the facts of life. He classed them as
primitive and placed them at the bottom of the cultural evolutionary
scale. The Euro-American system was, naturally, the epitome, the most
advanced, civilized system because it was
based on a true and logical appreciation of the natural outflow of the

streams of blood(and) proceeds upon the existence of marriage between
single pairs, and of the certainty of parentage through this marriage relation.
(1871, 4689)
He called the Euro-American systems descriptive because each relative

has a distinct term, even though in English, unlike Turkish, one term is
used for both the brother of ones father and the brother of ones mother,
namely uncle, and similarly for the female siblings of both, namely
aunt. In Turkish, however, there is a different term for eachamca for
fathers brother and daya for mothers brother, similarly, hala for fathers
sister and teyze for mothers sister. By Morgans definition, the Turkish sys-
tem was more descriptive than the Euro-American one and, therefore,
should have been considered the most advanced. That does not mean,
however, that there was or is gender equality in the Turkish system, far
from it.
John McLennan, a Scotsman, critiqued Morgans analysis claiming
that he had made two major mistakes: he did not steadily contemplate
the main peculiarity of the system its classification of connected per-
sons and thus did not seek the origin of the system in the origin of the
classification (1896, 269). His second mistake was to have so lightly
assumed the system to be a system of blood-ties (Ibid.). Ultimately,
McLennan suggested, instead, that a kinship terminological system was
a way to incorporate, and be able to address, everyone in the group.
Nevertheless, when it came down to real, true kinship, he, too, believed
it was a matter of sex, blood, and biology. But since that was consid-
ered natural it was not of much interest to socio-cultural anthropologists.
That is, not until Bronislaw Malinowskis study among the Trobriand
Islanders.
252 C. DELANEY
Bronislaw Malinowski
Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist who studied in England, went to
New Guinea to begin ethnographic work. But when World War I broke
out he was unable to return to England due to his citizenship. Fortunately,
the Australian government permitted him to remain and proceed with his
work. He chose to go to the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia and settled
on the island of Kiriwina where he set about learning the local culture.
The most remarkable thing, for which he became famous, was his claim
that the Trobrianders were ignorant of paternity. Instead, according to
the people, a woman became pregnant when a spirit (baloma), from the
womans ancestors (her dala), tired of his or her existence on Tumaan
island where the spirits dweltand decided to re-enter the substantial
world to live again among the people. The baloma first had to regress from
its aged spirit-body to that of a tiny spirit-fetus, small and light enough
to float on the foam of the waves or driftwood to arrive at the shores of
Kiriwina. There it would enter the woman who was bathing at sea, or be
carried in a bucket of water to the home of the woman, or possibly be car-
ried by another baloma spirit and deposited with the woman. Sometimes
the baloma would enter vaginally, but more often via the head where it
would descend on a tide of blood into the womb. The rising of the blood
would make the woman feel dizzy and nauseous and was a sign that she
was pregnant.4 For the Trobrianders, sex had little to do with it, and the
people could not understand Malinowskis and other Europeans insis-
tence on this relation.
As they tirelessly noted, the young people engaged in sexual activity
often, even with different partners, yet rarely did a girl become pregnant.
They challenged Malinowski to account for the discrepancy why the
cause which was repeated daily, or almost so, produced effects so rarely
(1954, 236). Just so! Malinowski, unlike others before him, did won-
der why European officials and missionaries focused so doggedly on their
ignorance of paternity rather than on so many other possibilitiesdis-
ease, anatomy, healthand came to the conclusion that it had to do with
Europeans religious beliefs.
The whole Christian morality (he wrote) is strongly associated with the
institution of a patrilineal and patriarchal family, with the father as progenitor
and master of the household (and that) a religion whose dogmatic essence is
based on the sacredness of the father to son relationship, and whose morals
stand or fall by a strong patriarchal family, must obviously proceed by con-
firming the paternal relation, by showing that it has a natural foundation.

(1932, 159, my emphasis)
When the natives asked Malinowski about his and, by association, the
beliefs of his countrymen, he replied: the facts of procreation could be
represented by the simile of a seed being planted in the soil and the plant
growing out of that seed! (1954, 223) That is, he repeated the age-old
biblically based theory. Ironically, it is just as erroneous as that of the
Trobrianders!
The genetic theory of procreation as applied to humans was unknown
at the time. In the late nineteenth century, Gregor Mendel, who founded
the science of genetics, studied the genetics of pea plants and others in
the early twentieth century worked with fruit flies. It was not until the
1940s and 50s when it was explored in terms of sperm and egg! And the
dissemination of the genetic theory to the wider society took much lon-
ger. People today are unaware how relatively recent is the genetic theory
of procreation. Fortunately, Malinowski demonstrated that the old folk
theory was alive and well during his time.
The Trobrianders did have a reasonable explanation for the male ejacu-
late: they said it was a kind of food to feed the growing fetus. In other
words, a man was a partner in nurturing a developing child and, later, also
in caretaking after its birth. Regarding social structure, the primary bond
was not husband and wife but brother and sister. Land, as well as people,
was affiliated through the female line (dala); brothers worked their sisters
land and protected her rights, and their own benefits came not from wifes
land but from their sisters lands. Similar notions surfaced among some
other groups, see, for example, M.F.Ashley Montagus Coming into being
among the Australian Aborigines (1937).
The issue of so-called ignorance of paternity sparked a big debate that
became known as The Virgin Birth Debate, sparked by the 1967 paper
by Edmund Leach entitled simply, Virgin birth. This is an ironic and
misleading title; however, for none of the Trobriand women were virgins!
But there is a more important reason it is misnamed. In the Christian
notion of the Virgin Birth, it is the male-imaged God whose son lodges
in the virgin womb of Mary. Medieval paintings show a fully formed baby
Jesus descending on beams of light to Marys ear. She does not create,
nor is she co-creator; she only contributes a supposedly immaculate womb
that nurtures the already created child. The Fathers seed is the son, Father
and son are oneit is all about creative paternity.
254 C. DELANEY
Although Trobriand notions of coming into being were very much

integrated with notions of gender, kinship, and their religious views, and
Malinowski clearly saw that Europeans notions were integrated with their
religion, no one seemed to pick up on this. Instead, kinship continued to
be investigated in terms of marriage, blood, kinship terminology, and their
relation to social structure.
David Schneider
And that was true even with David Schneider, though he radically changed
the way of thinking about these terms. Stressing that kinship is a cultural,
rather than a natural, system; he said that it is a system of symbols and
thus cannot be analyzed separately from the rest of culture. The task for
the anthropologist, thus, is to learn what those cultural symbols are, but
did he really do that? While he did focus on kinship and relate it to some
other cultural units, he neglected to relate it to one of the most important:
religion.
Regarding American kinship, he learned first that a relative is different
from a friend or colleague: informants told him that a relative is someone
related by blood or marriage or, in a more restrictive sense, only by blood
since one does not usually marry a blood relative.5 While blood might
seem to be a natural, in the sense of biological, category, that is not actu-
ally the case regarding kinship. Schneider made his point in an oft-quoted
statement, where he noted how difficult it is at times to convince an
American that blood as a fluid has nothing in it which causes ties to be
deep and strong (1972, 48). Instead, blood does not constitute but sym-
bolizes certain types of relations. Continuing, Schneider claims that sexual
intercourse between a married pair of male and female is the major symbol
that makes a family. No doubt that is a belief held by many, but then, to
me, he goes astray.
Symbolically, he implies that marriage is a union between equals, usu-
ally illustrated by the equal sign in kinship charts, but it has not been an
equal relationship. In other words, he did not really explore the symbolic
meanings of gender. Schneider believed that language was an important
indicator of the cultural units; thus it is surprising he did not really look at
the way procreation was talked about colloquially or consider the symbolic
implications of traditional wedding ceremonies. First, the womans father
is asked to give away his daughter, a transaction between men; second,
the woman had to promise to obey the husband, whereas he did not
have to agree to obey his wife; third, the union was solidified by apriest
or minister reciting some version of the following: I now pronounce
you man and wife, not husband and wife. Finally, addressing the man,
told him: you may now kiss your wife. Later, this couple would be
introduced as Mr. and Mrs. followed by the husbands first and last name.
Some of these traditions have been changing, but slowly.
Schneider also ignored the fact that etymologically, the word fam-
ily has meant all those dependent on a male head including, in the past,
even servants. But more to the point, he seems to have assumed that all
Americans know the modern, medical, scientific theory in which
both mother and father give substantially the same kinds and amounts
of material to the child, and that the childs whole biogenetic identity or
any part of it comes half from the mother, half from the father. It is not
believed that the father provides the bone, the mother the flesh, for instance.
(Ibid., 23)
That may be the case if informants were directly confronted (something

he discouraged) but at the cultural level, I suggest, the age-old folk theory
persists not just in the Bible but in words such as seminal, to character-
ize a creative work, and in metaphor, imagery, literature, poetry and song,
for example: shes having my baby. Yet, even in his biogenetic defini-
tion, the woman provides much more than just half the genetic endow-
ment of a childnot only the intense labor of birth but also the nurture in
the womb, and often also at the breastthe only aspects that have defined
her role for millennia. Indeed, in 2014 a Virginia senator said that women
are merely incubators! No doubt this view is widespread and may be the
reason behind conservatives desire to restrict the use of birth control and
abortion.
Had Schneider explored the ways in which the culture has symbolized
procreation, he might have quickly encountered what I have called the
monogenetic, seed-soil theory in which it is men who plant the seed
and women provide the nurture. It is the seed that provides the identity,
and typically children take their fathers not their mothers name, further
solidifying that identity and making it difficult to trace the genealogy via
women.
But he might also have thought in terms of origins and that might
have taken him to another major cultural unit: religion and origin stories.
All cultures have stories about coming into being, whether about the
256 C. DELANEY
world, the people, or a baby. And, not surprisingly, as in the case of the
Trobrianders, there is often a relationship between them. The origin story
of the Abrahamic religions presents a male-imaged God who is Creator,
par excellence. Not only did He create the natural material worldgener-
ally imaged as female, even as mother earthbut also created a man,
Adam, from whose body, he took a woman, Eve, in a complete reversal
of what actually happens, namely that male and female babies come out
of the body of a woman. As an anthropologist who advocated a symbolic
approach, Schneider might have asked what this reversal symbolized. 6
He also paid no attention to the fact that the sign of the covenant
between God and Abrahamcircumcisionwas (and is) inscribed on
the male procreative organ! The biblical (and Quranic) origin story is
all about gender, sex, procreation, and kinship.7 He might, then, have
paid more attention to gender and the notion of seed, all the begats, and
the patrilineages. He might have realized how the monogenetic notion
of procreation is intertwined with and perpetuated by the monotheistic
religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Gospel according to
St. John opens with: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was
with God And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among usthe only
begotten of the Father (John: 1:14), that is: Jesus. That the Word was
imagined as Gods seed was made clear to me from the inscription on the
pulpit of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
in Washington, DC, The Word is the Seed of God. And, theoretically,
the role of priests is to spread the wordthe symbolic seedrather than
physical ones.8
Because I was convinced that the symbolic approach in anthropology
espoused by the University of Chicago was most productive, I applied
to and was accepted to their doctoral program and David Schneider
became the chair of my dissertation committee. At first, when I proposed
to study the theory of procreation among Turkish villagers, he, like the
other professors, was dismissive: that is just about nature, not culture!
Nevertheless, when I returned from the field and presented my disserta-
tion, he came around.9
More Recent Trends

While the study of kinship continues to be an important part of the anthro-
pological enterprise, the focus has shifted in recent years, as is attested
by some of the other articles in this volume. Feminist anthropologists
have pointed out that conventional kinship studies were based on assump-
tions about gender. Even though anthropologists were aware that male
and female were defined differently in other cultures and also that their
roles differed, they did not follow through to use that as a mirror to their
own society. It took feminist anthropologists like Jane Collier and Sylvia
Yanagisako to
argue that gender and kinship have been defined as fields of study by our
folk conception of the same thing, namely the biological facts of sexual
reproduction. Consequently, what have been conceptualized as two discrete
fields of study constitute a single field that has not succeeded in freeing itself
from notions about natural differences between people. (1989, 15)
They continued:
men and women are different, just as individuals differ, generations differ,
races differ, and so forth. Rather, we question whether the particular biolog-
ical difference in reproductive function that our culture defines as the basis
of difference between males and females, and so treats as the basis of their
relationship, is used by other societies to constitute the cultural categories
of male and female. (Ibid., 48)
Perhaps somewhere gender differences are defined by the differential dis-

tribution of hair on the body or by breasts or the lack of them. But even
if procreation is a salient area, it is clear from the foregoing that different
cultures, including our own, have understood the process very differently.
It matters whether the male is seen as the progenitor or the woman, or
whether it is a process that takes place when a particular sperm and an egg
are joined; or whether it is imagined to be the project of ancestral spirits
rather than that of the two people intimately involved.
Other recent voices working on kinship have begun to be heard: (1)
gays and lesbians have questioned the heterosexual basis/bias of kinship
and gender studies (e.g. Weston), (2) people who feel a kinship bond
because they or their children share the same genetic disease (e.g. Rapp
etal.), (3) those with adopted children who argue that kinship is about
care and nurture not sex and blood (e.g. Howell), (4) and others who
have used new reproductive technologies which fragment the roles, for
example, sperm donor, egg donor, and the splitting of the role of mother
into biological, surrogate, and birth mother (e.g. Franklin).10 All of these
people have been challenging the taken-for-granted notions of kinship
and forging new definitions, the implications of which we are only begin-
ning to understand and accommodate socially and culturally. Still, none of
258 C. DELANEY
them have used their insights to challenge the theology and religious insti-
tutions that hold such sway over sex, marriage, and procreation. But one
thing is clear: kinship is not something given in the nature of things, but
is constructed in particular cultures in particular ways around particular
notions of persons and the cosmos. 11
Conclusion
If our own cultural theory of gender and procreation has been inter-
twined with religious (biblical) conceptions, one wonders whether or how
the modern, scientific theory will affect religion. Or will the spiritual and
the natural continue to be kept in separate spheres? It is interesting to
note how, in recent times, issues of gender and procreation have become
prominent within the Abrahamic religious traditions, for example,
birth control and abortion, test-tube babies and genetic engineering,12
attempts to define and control marriage (who can marry whom), and
divorce, and whether a divorced person can remarry or still be included
in the fellowship.
Concomitantly, there has been an upsurge of religiously inspired vio-
lence between the three patriarchal religions. To me, these sibling faiths
seem like three brothers fighting over the patrimony, who will inherit the
kingdom and who has the right interpretation of the fathers will?
The fallout, however, tends to land on the heads, often literally, of girls
and women: keeping them from school, discouraging them from pursuing
careers, restricting them to the domestic realm, head coverings, forbid-
ding them to drive, kidnaping them for the sexual gratification of soldiers,
honor killings, and stoning them for adultery.13 In our secular society, I
believe that the increase of rape in the armed forces and on college cam-
puses, while seemingly unrelated to religion, is nevertheless related to the
age-old gender definitions inscribed there. Is male power dependent on
keeping women in their supposedly divinely ordered place?
Some changes have occurred, of course. For example, changes in the
language of religious texts such as from seed to progeny (but I find
this problematic, see above), some women have become rabbis and min-
isters, but not imams, cardinals or the pope, and the image of God is still
male. What does it mean for more women to enter into these patriarchal
traditions and institutions? How much will they be able to change the
underlying structure or challenge the theology?
Perhaps the time has come to consider whether it was God who cre-
ated man in his image or whether, millennia ago, acting on their thoughts
about procreation,14 a group of men in the Near East created God in
their image, and thereby launched the most powerful myth and institu-
tions the world has ever seen, including definitions of gender, family, and
kinship.
Notes
1. For information about this issue see my book, Abraham on Trial,
(1998) pp.170171.
2. The material is scattered and often must be read carefully, with a
gendered lens, to pull out what is said and not said. But some hints
can be found in the following: History Begins at Sumer (1959) by
Samuel Noah Kramer; Early Mesopotamia and Iran (1965) by
M. E. L. Mallowan; and, more recently in Western Asia in the
Second Millennium, by Benjamin Foster, in Womens Earliest
Records From Ancient Egypt and Western Asia (1989), Barbara
Lesko, ed.
3. Some of the ideas discussed in this article have been published
previously; in this case from Investigating Culture: An Experiential
Introduction to Anthropology, 2004:192200.
4. Taken from my The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth
Debate, in Man, vol. 21,(3) 1986: 506.
5. Yet Morgan married his first cousin and the practice was common
in Bostonreferred to as a Boston marriage, and in a number of
other places. In the Turkish village where I worked, it was an
esteemed marriage but not the only kind. See also recent book,
Cousin Marriage: Between Tradition, Genetic Risk and Cultural
Change, Alison Shaw and Aviad Raz, Berghahn Books, 2015.
6. Perhaps it symbolized the reversal of the Sumerian religious
system.
7. Perhaps, as a secular Jew he felt these were just ancient stories that
had no relevance for contemporary life.
8. Although given the scandal in the Catholic Church about priests
raping and molesting children, some took it literally.
9. I had the last laugh when I won the prize for the best dissertation
in the social sciences, 1984.
260 C. DELANEY
10. The New York Times, (2/4/15, page A4) reported that Britain
would allow the in vitro creation of babies using the DNA of
three people as a way to prevent genetically transmitted diseases.
But this would mean altering a human egg or embryo before
transferring it to the womb. Naturally, the Catholic Church and
the Church of England weighed in decrying the procedure.
11. One might also imagine whether the monotheistic religious view
of Creation also has subliminally, affected scientific cosmologists
who have been searching for the original singularity often
described as a single seed smaller than an atom (yet) so potent it
blossomed into everything there is via the big bang. Quotation
is from a TV film, Creation of the Universe, first shown on November
20, 1985.
12. See endnote 7.
13. Schoolgirls are facing more threats, UN Report in New York
Times, February 10, 2015, also article and letters about the Popes
position on birth control.
14. Many anthropologists believe that women were responsible for
domesticating plants and thus understood the relationship between
sowing seeds and the plants that developed. Men were off hunting
and eventually domesticated certain animals. But the early Israelites,
unlike the people in Mesopotamia, were pastoralists, not agricul-
turalists. Watching their animals produce offspring, perhaps it was
but a short step to make an inference or analogy, using the seed
metaphor to apply both to their animals and themselves and simul-
taneously to create a religion in stark contrast to that of Sumer.
Bibliography
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Index
A Altorki, Soraya, 9, 187, 196, 208

Abitbol, Michel, 125n30, 126n41 Ammerman, Nancy Tatom, 222
Abraham Anderson, Benedict, 199
as husband to Sarah, 117, 246 Anderson, Margaret Lavinia, 55
as offering of sacrifice, 18, 246 Angel, Rabbi Marc, 112, 113
as partner of Hagar, 19, 246 Anglicans, 59, 60, 62, 73, 76, 80
as progenitor/father of religions, Anidjar, G., 153
17, 19, 20, 96, 231, 246 Ansari, Humayun, 78n4
Abrahamic religions, ix, 1721, 53, Apostolics (Botswana), 8, 22, 55, 132,
54, 85, 133, 198, 231, 24560 133, 135, 1413, 145, 146,
Abu-Laban, Baha, 217 234
Act of Toleration of 1689, 59 Appadurai, Arjun, 227
Act of Uniformity in 1662, 59 Arab-Israeli conflict 1967, 14, 120
adab (Islam), 205, 206 Aristotle, 924, 102, 103, 247
adoption, 46n2, 53, 86, 100, 114, Asad, Talal, 4, 15, 178, 199
15163, 166n3, 167n15, 208 Ashley Montagu, M.F., 247, 253
Aghaie, Kamran S., 176 Austin-Broos, Diane J., 234
Agnese, Vitali, 47 Ayoun, R., 124n14
ahl-e al ketab or ahl al-kitab, 190n10,
198. See also People of the Book
Alfani, Guido, 2, 47, 12, 21, 22, B
2947, 53, 54, 58, 75, 77n1, 86, Bahloul, Joelle, 2, 4, 10, 11, 14, 15,
87, 90, 109, 111, 132, 134, 153, 23, 54, 100, 104, 10926, 132,
191n13, 197, 234, 235 172, 197, 210
Note: Page numbers followed by n refers to notes

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5
264 INDEX
baptism(among Catholics/Latter-day blood

Saints/Protestants), 4, 5, 21, descent, 87, 88, 162, 174, 175,
2942, 45, 53, 54, 61, 77n1, 89, 208, 215n4, 231
90, 96, 104, 125n27, 138, martyrs, 177, 178
15963, 165, 167n16, 197 nusal for Kashmiris, 203, 215n4
Bardet, Jean-Pierre, 43 purity of, 10, 1736, 178, 180
Basch, Linda, 242 spilling blood and Iran, 178
Basij/Basiji (Iran), 23, 102, 173, 175, Bloom, H., 153
181, 188 Bodenhorn, Barbara, 172
Bateson, Mary Catherine, 179 Bonacich, Edna, 202
Batnitzky, Leora, 90 Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 228
Battle of Karbala, 177, 186 Book of Mormon, 157, 158
Baumann, Gerd, 212 Bossy, John, 37
Bayor, Ronald, 227 Botswana, 22, 23, 55, 132, 133, 135,
Beaver, Patricia D., 227 141, 142, 145, 234
Becker, Peggy, 238 Boyarin, Daniel, 89, 90, 104
Beeman, William O., 179 Boyarin, Jonathan, 103, 104, 123n4
Bel-Ange, Norbert, 125n32 Boylston, Tom, 184
Belfiore, Elizabeth, 94 Brent, B.P., 58, 61, 62, 668, 70
Bender, Courtney, 3 Brent, Richard, 61
Benichou, Gottreich E., 124n15 Brent, Samuel, 61, 68, 69
Bensimon-Donath, 124n11 Bringus, Nils-Arvid, 46n8
Bhachu, Parminder, 205 brit mila (circumcision Judaism), 111,
Biale, David, 18 118
Bible, 17, 18, 52, 61, 68, 73, 77, Bront, Charlotte, 73, 74, 79n12
123n2, 126n43, 136, 139, 144, Brown, Karen McCarthy, 4
224, 232, 233, 2458, 255 Brown, S.Morris, 152, 154, 161
biogenetic theory, 13 Bullard, Kai M., 241
biological kinship/genealogical Burdick, John, 224
kinship, viii, 2, 7, 8, 10, 16, 86, Burkhardt, Frederick, 58, 63, 79n
8890, 100, 101, 11618, 121, 12
123n1, 235 Butler, Melvin L., 223
vs. spiritual kinship and kinship
through marriage or affinity,
viix, 210, 317, 426, 878, C
10914, 11618, 1212, Caglar, Ayse, 229
1315, 145, 153, 1601, 164, Callahan, James, 227, 234
172, 1879, 1957, 208, 212, Calvin, 37, 38, 77n1
221, 235, 246, 251, 254 Cannell, Fenella, vii, x, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9,
Birnbaum, Piere, 124n16 12, 13, 23, 55, 76, 134, 146,
Blanc-Szanton, Cristina, 242 15167, 172, 178, 188, 222
Bloch, M., 5, 6 Cantor, Geoffrey, 62, 65, 75
INDEX 265
carnal generation vs. spiritual Cohen, B, 124n14

generation, 31, 54 Cohen, Gearson D., 126n39
Carrier, James, 115 Cohen, Shaye J.D., 89
Carsten, Janet, viii, 2, 122, 166n1, Coleman, Simon, 137, 145, 147n3
172, 176, 180, 196, 208, 237 Collier, Jane, 13, 172, 257
catechumenate, 31 Collins, Jane, 1324
Catholic Counter-Reformation, 8, 12, compadrazgo, 46
33 compaternitas, 32, 33, 36, 39, 41, 42,
Catholic Reformation, 33, 75 53, 234
Cecil, R., 125n24 conversion, 22, 89, 91, 92, 968, 100,
Celestial Kingdom and Mormonism, 105, 1546, 159, 1616, 224,
9, 23, 15167 231, 233
Chacn Jimnez, Francisco, 40 and Mormonism, 1546, 1616
Chapman, E.J., 163 Converts to Pentecostal Christianity,
Chatters, Linda M., 224 16, 22, 889. See also Ethiopian
Chelkowski, Peter, 177 Jewish Converts
Chipumuro, Todne Thomas, x, 124, Cooper, Rex Eugene, 154, 161
55, 86, 100, 134, 191n14, 197, Copet-Rougier, Elisabeth, 109, 124n8
201, 21940 Corinthian Bible Chapel (CBC), 55,
Chong, Kelly, 228 21921, 223, 224, 22639,
Chow, Rey, 225, 226 240n3, 240n4
Christianity, ix, 2, 4, 6, 8, 1721, 23, Coster, William, 5, 6, 38
31, 33, 35, 37, 53, 54, 61, Council of Mainz of 813, 31, 37
79n15, 8891, 98, 99, 101, 104, Council of Rome of 721, 32
105, 109, 110, 126n43, 138, Council of Trent, 30, 34, 38, 39, 41,
152, 153, 155, 156, 161, 162, 43, 45, 46n6, 53, 191n13, 234
164, 165, 197, 2219, 240n3, Couriol, Etienne, 46n6
246, 247, 256 Cropsey, John, 94
church family(ies), 236, 237 Csordas, Thomas J., 137, 138
Church of England, 38, 59, 60, 76, Curry, Mary, 208, 211, 212, 222
260n10 curse of Ham, 20
Cimetier, Franois, 46n2
circumcision
among Ethiopian Jewish converts to D
Pentecostal Christianity, 16, 22, Darwin, Charles, 12, 17, 22, 5180
89, 90 Davies, Douglas, 152, 165
among Jews, 54, 77n2, 90, 95, 96, Davila, Mario, 5
111, 112, 118, 124n6 Deane, Glenn, 224
among Muslims, 10, 187, 196, 197 decolonization, 23, 114, 204
Clarke, Morgan, 176, 196 Delaney, Carol, 2, 12, 13, 18, 19, 24,
Clark, Mary A., 4 92, 95, 172, 188, 196, 231, 232,
Clough, Paul, 86, 92, 102 24560
266 INDEX
Delgado, Gary, 228 Ensel, Remco, 9, 187

Denny, Frederick Mathewson, 1979 Ericsson, Tom, 38, 40
Derrida, Jacques, 125n31 ethical qualities, 173
Diamond, James A., 96, 100 ethical relations
Dissenters (England), 22, 59, 62, 65 as applicable to Shias in Iran, 15,
divine, ix, viii, 2, 3, 8, 9, 18, 21, 23, 179
86, 89, 94, 95, 97100, 134, definition, 1517, 89, 104, 179
137, 1413, 146, 147n3, 152, of pigeon fanciers, 757, 206
155, 157, 172, 176, 178, 179, in relation to Jewish studies, 22
184, 190n9, 190n11, 197, 224, Ethics of Nonconformity, 77
231, 234, 258 Ethiopian Jewish converts, 88, 235
Dixon Bible Chapel (DBC), 55, Ethiopian Pentecostals, 16, 22, 88
21921, 223, 224, 22639, ethnicity, 21932, 2379
240n3, 240n4 evangelical Christianity, 8, 138, 2279
Dobrinsky, H.C., 124n9 evangelicals (Afro Caribbean and
Dodd, George, 63 African American), 8, 14, 24, 91,
domains and scales, 2, 13, 14, 20814, 140, 201, 21940
21921 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., viii
Douglas, Mary, 180 evil eye, 171, 185
DuBois, W.E.B., 234
Du Boulay, Juliet, 5
Durham, Deborah, 142 F
familialization of godparenthood,
424, 53
E Faubion, James D., 15, 868, 92, 102,
East African Indians, 10, 24, 100, 103, 179, 190n7
195215 Feeley-Harnik, Gillian, 4, 8, 12, 16,
Eastern Church, 302, 35, 46n3, 53 17, 22, 5180, 126n42, 126n43,
EastWest Schism of 1054, 30, 37, 53 153, 206
Eaton, John Matthews, 58, 635, 74, fictive kinship/pseudo kinship, viii, 2,
78n6, 78n7 10, 13, 87, 88, 92, 101, 172,
Ebaugh, Helen Rose, 208, 211, 212, 196, 208, 211, 246
222 Fine, Agns, 32, 47n10
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 134 Flake, K., 161
Eickelman, Dale F., 2, 11, 196, 198, Forbes, Thomas Rogers, 57
199, 211, 213 Fortes, Meyer, viii
18841885 Berlin Conference, 201 foster-kinship, 9, 187
Eliot, George, 76, 7980n15 Foucault, Michel, 15, 103, 190n7
Ell, Paul S., 75, 7980n15 Franklin, Sarah, 2, 93, 122, 172, 208,
Elon, Mcnachem, 123n4 257
Emerson, Michael O., 228, 235 fraternitas, 5, 32, 33, 53
Enlightenment, 42, 55 fraternitas spiritualis, 32, 53
INDEX 267
Frenchification, 114, 118 Gordon, S.Barringer, 161

French Jews, 14, 23, 113, 120 Gourdon, Vincent, 2, 47, 25, 27, 36,
Frishkopf, Michael, 869, 239 38, 402, 44, 46n1, 46n7, 479,
Fulton, Robert, 64 53, 54, 58, 75, 80, 86, 105, 191,
Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, vii 197, 215
Graeber, David, 133
grafting (Mormonism), 162, 163
G Griffin, Traci, 228
Gabrieli, F., 205, 206 Griffith, R.Marie, 167n13
Garca Gonzlez, Francisco, 40 Gross-Horowitz, Netty C., 123n3
Garmaroudi Naef, Shirin, 1012 Grubb, James S., 34
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, 746, Gudeman, Stephen, 6
79n12 Guerreau-Jalabert, Anita, 31, 33
Gauvard, Claude, 36 Guggenheim, S., 5, 6
Geissler, Paul Wenzel, 147n6 Gulbrandsen, Thaddeus C., 229
Genesis, 85, 95, 119, 2457
Gilroy, Paul, 224
Givens, T., 157, 162 H
Glasse, Cyril, 197, 206, 21415n2 Haas, Louis, 34, 36
Glaude, Eddie Jr., 223 Haeri, Shahla, 175
Glick-Schiller, Nina, 222, 229 Hagar (partner of Abraham), 19,
godparenthood/godparents 246
in Catholicism, 3, 5, 29, 30, 33, 34, hajj, 99, 198, 213
3845, 53, 54, 234, 235 halal relations/halal kinship and Iran,
definition, 2, 3, 5, 6, 2931, 33, 36, 15, 1724, 180, 186, 189n2,
37, 53, 86 190n11
historical role, 2947, 53, 54, 234, Halbertal, Moshe, 97
235 Hamberger, Klaus, 86, 102
in Judaism (and ritual of sandak), Hammel, Eugene A., 45
1011, 54, 11213, 117, 118, Harrison, Faye, 222
122, 124n7, 197 Harrison, Peter, 75
in Orthodox Church, 29, 30, 33, Harvey, A.D., 79n9
35, 38, 39, 45, 53 Heath, Deborah, 261
in protestantism 30, 3841, 44, 53, Hegland, Mary Elaine, 185
54, 234, 235 Hriter-Auge, Francoise, 128
Goldberg, David M., 20 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 222,
Goldberg, Harvey, 54, 77n2, 77n3, 223
113, 124n6 Hill, Carole E., 227
Golfus, Billy, 147n2 Hintzen, Percy C., 224
Gmez Carrasco, Cosme, 40, 44 HMS Beagle, 52, 56
Goodman, L.E., 96 Ho, Engseng, 176, 196
Goodman, Mark, 216 Holland, Sophia, 74
268 INDEX
Holy Spirit, 14, 18, 24, 136, 141, Jones, Robert Alun, 7, 56, 57
160, 233 Judaic Law/Jewish Law, 92, 95, 98,
Holy Trinity, 18 99, 109, 111
Horowitz, Elliot, 112 Judaism, ix, 2, 5, 911, 1722, 54,
Houseknecht, Sharon K., 12 77n2, 8892, 96, 97, 100, 103,
Howell, Signe, 160, 208, 257 105, 11012, 126n43, 153,
Hughes, Alun D., 79n8 166n4, 235, 246, 256
Huie, James, 67, 72, 74 Jussen, Bernhard, 5, 86, 87, 90
Justinian Code, 31, 32
I
imagined community, 199 K
Imam Husayn, 171, 176, 177, 182, Kahn, Susan Martha, 105
183, 186, 187 Kaser, Karl, 10, 187
incest/spiritual incest, 31, 32, 38, 41, Keane, W., 6, 154
86, 93, 94, 102, 234 Kerrigan, W., 162
infant baptism, 31, 33, 38, 42, 61, Khan, Arsalan, 15, 179
77n1 Khatib-Chahidi, Jane, 9, 187, 196,
Ingold, Tim, 209 208
intercession vs. composition, 8, 22, 23, Khomeini, Ayatollah, 173
13148 Khosravi, Shahram, 179
IranIraq war, 173, 174, 178, 181 Khuri, Fuad I., 189n5
Isaac (son of Abraham and Sarah), 19, Kim, Rebecca, 228
98, 246 kivrelik, 10, 197
Ishmael/Ismail (son of Abraham and Klaits, Frederick., 4, 7, 8, 22, 23, 55,
Hagar), 19, 246 13148, 234
Islam, ix, 2, 5, 911, 1721, 54, 92, Klapisch, Christiane, 346
105, 176, 185, 195, 197202, Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch, 91
205, 207, 213, 214, 246, 249, Kriegel, Maurice, 122
256 Kruse, Kevin M., 227
Islamic kinship and law
(nasab/musahara/milk), 9, 10,
23, 101, 187, 1757, 208 L
Labby, David, 2
Laidlaw, James, 96
J Lakoff, George M., 137
Jackson, James S., 241 Lambek, Michael, 12, 15, 178,
Janowski, Monica, 180 179
Jenkins, Richard, 11 Lambert, Helen, 211
Johnson, Christopher, 172 Lang, B., 154
Johnson, Sylvester, 225 Larkum, Anthony W.D., 79n12
Johnson, Violet M., 223 Laskier, Michael, 124n11, 124n15
INDEX 269
Latter-day Saints, 9, 59, 15166, Marranci, Gabriele, 200

166n1, 166n4. See also marriage
Mormonism marriage and impediments through
laws of nature/natural laws (Wellman, milk kinship, 10
Rose), 174, 175 and trust, 2023
Leach, Edmund, 253 Marti, Gerardo, 228
Leite, Naomi, 24n1, 100, 153, 189n4, Matory, J.Lorand, 2246
191n14 Mauss, Marcel, 134, 144, 147n3
letter of the law (Jewish), 90 McAdoo, Harriette Pipes, 234
Levenson, J.D., 231 McDannell, C., 154, 169
Levenson, Jon, 19 McGlathery, Marla Frederick, 228
Levitt, Peggy, 11 McIvor, M., 165, 166
Levi, Wendell Mitchell, 79n10 McKinnon, Susan, 2, 12, 13, 55, 77,
Lincoln, C.Eric, 223 93, 122, 146, 167n7, 172,
Litchfield, Henrietta, 79n12 191n14, 208, 214, 222, 240
Logan, John R., 224 McLennan, J.F., 251
logic of composition, 8, 22, 23, 135, McRoberts, Omar, 3, 223
1416 Meeker, Michael, 249
logic of intercession, 8, 22, 23, Messianic Judaism, 235
13541, 145, 146 Meteyard, Eliza, 63
Lorberbaum, Menachem, 98, 100 Miall, Edward, 65, 76
Luhrmann, T.M., 138 middleman/middlemen, 202, 204
Luther, 30, 37, 41, 53 migration
Lyell, James C., 71 East African Indians to Canada, 10,
Lynch, Joseph H., 313, 46n1 24, 100, 195, 197, 201,
Lynch, Kevin, 210 20414
Indians to East Africa, 2014,
20910
M North African Jews to France, 23,
Madsen, O.J., 167n13 11416, 119122
Magnarella, Paul J., 10, 187, 196, 197 milk kinship
Mahmood, Saba, 15, 178, 190n7 definition and use, 9, 10, 1767,
Maimonides, 22, 92102 208
Maimonides and Code of Law, 95 as a form of spiritual kinship, 9, 10,
Malik, Asiya, x, 124, 86, 100, 132, 54, 101, 187, 195, 197
134, 191n14, 195215, 230, 240 Min, Pyong Gap, 228
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 2504 Mintz, Sidney Wilfred, 5, 6, 42
Mamiya, Lawrence H., 223 modernity, x, 1, 7, 1113, 91, 172, 222
Mandaville, Peter, 199 modernization, 5, 7, 11, 12
Mangat, J.S., 201, 202 Moghissi, Haideh, 196
Mann, Horace, 5961, 63, 78n5, monogenetic theory of procreation,
7980n15 19, 24, 247, 255, 256
270 INDEX
monotheism/monotheistic, 1719, P
95, 99, 109, 121, 172, 198, 231, Pallen, Mark, 60
247, 256, 260n11 Palumbo, Bernardino, 43
Moore, John, 78n6 panjtan (Iran), 177
Morgan, Lewis Henry, 51, 52, 56, Pankhurst, Jerry G., 12
2501, 259n5 Paret, Rudi, 197, 198
Mormonism Parish, Steven M., 15
conversion, 1546, 1616 Parkes, Peter, 9, 54, 101, 176, 187,
and individualism, 9, 23, 15167 196, 197, 208
Mormonism/Mormons/Latter-day paternitas, 5, 33, 41
Saints, 9, 23, 55, 59, 15167, paternitas spiritualis, 41
166n1, 166n4, 167n14 Pearn, Alison, 60
Mormon Plan of Salvation, 152, 157, Peeters, Benoit, 125n31
158, 164 Peletz, Michael G., 141
Muharram, 178 Pentecostal Christianity, 55, 156, 223.
Munno, Cristina, 43, 44, 47n9 See also Ethiopian Pentecostals;
Muravyeva, Marianna G., 4, 35, 45 Converts to Pentecostal
mutuality of being (Sahlins, Marshall), Christianity
101, 102 Pentecostals of NewYork, 8, 22, 55,
1313, 13541, 147n4, 234
People of the Book, 17, 198, 200,
N 21415n2. See also ahl-e al ketab
naming practices (French North or ahl al-kitab
Africans), 14, 23, 11321 Peristiany, J.G., 111
new reproductive technologies Philoperisteron Society, 58, 64
(NRTs), 105, 196, 208, 257 physio-sacred, 16, 23, 24n1, 174, 180,
New Testament, 86, 101, 152, 189n4
246 Pierre, Jemima, 224
1967 Arab-Israeli conflict, 14, 120 pigeon
Nonconformist Christians, 8, 12, 16, breeders/fanciers, 8, 12, 16, 17, 22,
5180, 206, 226 5180, 206
North African Jews, 23, 11416, 119, as sacred bird, 22, 6871
120, 122 Piilahti, Kari-Matti, 38
Novack, David, 93 pillars of faith (Islam), 199
Piscatori, James P., 11
Piselli, Fortunata, 41, 44
O Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 5, 46n8
Obadiah (the Proselyte), 97100 Plymouth Brethren/Plymouth
Old Testament, 152 Brethrenism, 55, 59, 226, 234
Omartian, Stormie, 1368 Poros, Maritsa V., 208
Omi, Michael, 221, 222 prayer
Orel, Vtezslav, 54, 71 as healing and purifying (Wellman,
Ottoman Empire, 112, 199, 249 Rose), 1714, 1814, 186, 187
INDEX 271
as intercession and composition S

(Klaits, Frederick), 13145 Sabean, David Warren, 40, 43, 46n8,
as ritual for conversion, 157 172
as unifying (Malik, Asiya), 199, 200, sacred kinship
207, 213 definition, 34, 11, 17886,
Prebish, Charles S., 4 197207
Prince, Ruth Jane, 147n6 sacred social/sacred sociality, xvii, 1,
procreation, viii, 12, 18, 19, 24, 87, 24n1, 189n4
172, 24650, 2539 Safley, Thomas M., 40
Prophet Muhammad, 19, 176, 198, Sahlins, Marshall, 101, 102
206 Saint Augustine, 31
Protestant Reformation, 8, 12, 53, Salvadori, Cynthia, 202, 206
234 sandak, 10, 11, 54, 112, 113, 118,
124n7, 125n23, 197
Sarah as wife of Abraham, 19, 246
Q Satloff, R., 126n41
Quakers and Inner Light, 65 Sault, Nicole, 5
Quran, 17, 18, 176, 183, 184, 186, sayyed, 1757
187, 18990n6, 189n5, 190n11, Schmidt, Garbi, 199, 200
197200, 21415n2, 246, 247, Schneider, David M., vii, viii, 2, 7, 13,
256 87, 172, 2546
Qureshi, Regula B., 212 Schreier, Joshua, 125n30
Qureshi, Saleem M.M., 212 Schremer, Adiel, 90, 95
Schroeter, D., 124n15
Scott, James C., 69, 125n19
R secularization of kinship practices
Raboteau, Albert, 223 (Bahloul, Jolle), 110
Rahier, Jean Muteba, 224 secular modernity, 7, 1113, 222
Rahnema, Saeed, 216 secular/secularization/secularism, x,
Rapp, Rayna, 257 vii, 1, 5, 7, 1115, 17, 54, 55, 75,
Reformation, 8, 12, 22, 30, 33, 35, 91, 110, 11517, 123n3, 161,
3741, 53, 75, 234, 235 222, 223, 249, 258, 259n7
relatedness (Carsten, Janet), 2, 122, seed-soil theory, 255
172, 196, 208 Seeman, Don, 4, 7, 16, 22, 85105,
Revel, Jean-Philippe, 42 110, 111, 123n1, 133, 153, 179,
Richardson, Edmund William, 57, 58, 197, 206, 235
60, 66 Segalen, Martine, 47n10
Robbins, Joel, 6, 146, 154, 156, 165, Sheehan, Jonathan, 55
166n5, 167n6 Shelton, Jason E., 228
Russell, Heather D., 226 Shii laws of nature, 175
272 INDEX
Shii Muslims Taylor, Robert Joseph, 241

Alevi, 10, 187 Tegetmeier, William Bernhard, 57, 58,
Shipps, J., 154 604, 66, 67, 69, 74, 79n9
Shirazi, Faegheh, 181 ternary model, 35
Shyrock, Andrew, 102 Teuscher, Simon, 172
Siddiqui, Mona, 18, 198, 215n2 Thomas, Todne, 124, 55, 86, 100,
Simpson, David E., 147n2 197, 201, 21940. See also
Sjoquist, David L., 227 Chipumuro, Todne Thomas
Smith, Andrea, 228 Thompson, Jennifer, 105
Smith, Christian, 228, 235 Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava, 93
Smith, Joseph (Mormonism), 152, transcendent, ix, 3, 16, 153
1578, 1604 transfiguration (Klaits, Frederick), 141
Smith, Sydney, 81 Trautmann, Thomas R., 87
Snell, K.D.M., 75, 79n15 Treitler, Vilna Bashi, 222
Southwark Columbarian Society, 58, Trigano, Shmuel, 122
63, 65 Trullan Synod of Constantinople, 32,
SPEAs. See Sunni Punjabi East Africans 46n3
(SPEAs) trust
Spierling, Karen E., 37 food preparation (Wellman, Rose),
spiritual family vs. fleshly family, 53, 182
92, 135 kin/family relationships (Wellman,
spirituality, 3, 22, 53, 757, 110, 112, Rose), 181, 183, 1856
121 knowing of genealogies and
spiritual kinship (definition), 2, 3, 29, community formation (Malik,
86, 89 Asiya), 197, 2015
spiritual kin vs. natural/genealogical between pigeon fanciers (Feeley-
kin, 16, 86, 88, 90, 98, 100, 101, Harnik, Gillian), 5180, 206
11618, 123n1, 235 Trkdogan, Orhan, 10, 187, 196, 197
sponsores, 31 Twersky, Isadore, 97, 99
Stafford, Charles, 211
Stora, Benjamin, 125n31
Strathern, Marilyn, 76 U
Streit, J.Brent, 61 Uganda expulsion of 1972, 204
Stroumsa, Sarah, 96 Uglow, Jenny, 79n12
Sunni Punjabi East Africans (SPEAs), umma/ummah, ix, 10, 14, 24, 100,
10, 14, 24, 1957, 20114 195215, 230
Unitarian, 60, 61, 78n5
Ure, George, 62, 63, 71, 72, 74, 75
T
Tadmor, Naomi, 71, 73, 79n11
Taussig, Karen-Sue, 261 V
Tawasil, Amina, 27, 193 van der Veer, Peter, 3
INDEX 273
Varzi, Roxanne, 173 Western Church, 32, 33, 37, 46n3

Vasile, Monica, 45 Weston, Kath, viii, 257
Vatuk, Sylvia, 211 Winant, Howard, 221, 222
Vergunst, Jo Lee, 209 Wolf, Eric R., 56, 42
verticalization of godparenthood, 40, Wood, Roger J., 54, 71
41, 43 World War I, 14, 199, 202, 252
Vickerman, Milton, 224 World War II, 43
Virgin Birth Debate, 253, 259n4
visiting (Wellman, Rose), 23, 101,
173, 179, 1846, 188, 189n6 Y
Yanagisako, Sylvia, 13, 172, 231, 257
Young, Brigham (Mormonism), 161,
W 162
Wahrman, Dror, 55
Wasserfall, R.R., 123
Watkins-Owens, Irma, 223 Z
Waugh, Earle H., 196 Zelizer, V.A., 167n15
Weiner, Annette B., 142 ziarat-e ashura /Ashura (Shia
Weismantel, M., 180 Islam), 171, 173, 1867
Weiss, Susan M., 123n3 Zigon, Jarrett, 15, 178, 179
Wellman, Rose, x, 124, 86, 1002, Zilberg, Elana, 210
133, 17191, 196, 197 Zonabend, Franoise, 47n10, 125
Werbner, Richard P., 142, 143 n33

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CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION

EDITED BY TODNE THOMAS,

More information about this series at

Contemporary Anthropology of Religion

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963221

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration robertharding / Alamy Stock Photo.

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

New Directions in Spiritual Kinship is a groundbreaking work. It is the

rganization, from domestic families to congregations, nations, and trans-

c ommunities at various levels of organization: domestic, congregational,

New Directions in Spiritual Kinship has been a fascinating and enriching

University of VirginiasDepartment of Anthropology, who kindly hosted

1 Introduction: Re-sacralizing the Social: Spiritual Kinship at

2 Spiritual Kinship Between Formal Norms and Actual Practice:

3 Spiritual Kinship in an Age of Dissent: Pigeon Fanciers in

4 Kinship as Ethical Relation: A Critique of the Spiritual

5 Kinship in Historical Consciousness: A French Jewish

6 We All Ask Together: Intercession and Composition

7 Forever Families; Christian Individualism, Mormonism

8 Substance, Spirit, and Sociality Among Shii Muslims

9 Expanding Familial Ties: From the Umma to New

10 Rebuking the Ethnic Frame: Afro Caribbean and

11 The Seeds of Kinship Theory in the Abrahamic Religions245

Guido Alfani is an Associate Professor at Bocconi University, Milan (Italy). A

American evangelical group in Atlanta, Georgia mobilize kinship in ways that

Fig. 3.1 Feeding Pigeons in the Guildhall Yard, engraving by George

Introduction: Re-sacralizing theSocial:

TodneThomas, RoseWellman, andAsiyaMalik

In March 2014, we convened a Wenner-Gren Workshop, The Sacred

The Author(s) 2017 1

religious sociality. Focusing our attention on the religious practitioners

Cannell 2013). Similarly, to the extent that anthropologists have inves-

comparative analysis is not without its potential shortcomings. Scholars

kinship and thoughtfully situated their terminologies within local and

The Christian Origins ofSpiritual Kinship Studies

The undoubtedly powerful ascetic current in Christianity has generally been

Building on Cannells insights, we attribute the common tendency for

but discursively enacted through contextual emphases of familial over

of religious sociality that confounds classical analytical models of Christian

The Study ofSpiritual/Sacred Kinship inJudaism andIslam

unequal status that is embedded in a long-term exchange of goods and

Spiritual/Sacred Kinship andtheProphecies

New Directions in Spiritual Kinship also challenges analytical metanar-

As Jerry G. Pankhurst and Sharon K. Houseknecht poignantly observe

transcendence, relatedness, and truth. In The Seeds of Kinship Theory

Spiritual/Sacred Kinship Across Domains andScales

understandings of what constitutes spiritual kinship within the three

to Israel. Together, Malik, Thomas, and Bahlouls scholarship begins to

Kinship, Ethics, andSociality

Several of the authors in this volume call attention to the cultivation of

anthropology of ethics concern with the ordinary, tacit, and quotidian

between pigeon breeders discussions and practices of artificial selection

Why theAbrahamic Religions?

partnersuch as Christianity, Judaism, and Islamsubscribe to mono-

related kinship frameworks are an interesting starting point to examine the

intercession, which demonstrates divine assurance, while spiritual kinship

Asiya Maliks contribution, Expanding Familial Ties: From the Umma

. 2003. Fostering Fealty: A Comparative Analysis of Tributary Allegiances

Spiritual Kinship Between Formal Norms

The Author(s) 2017 29

From Antiquity totheMiddle Ages

generate paternal affection, and therefore this kind of union is incestu-

11 The Seeds of Kinship Theory in the Abrahamic Religions245