The Creativity of Kinship mit Janet Carsten - Ringvorlesung Beziehungsweise Familie

In the organizer's words:

Family is a vague collective term for the most diverse forms of togetherness. It stands for origin and belonging, but also for obligation and conflict. As a central building block of social life, the family conveys rules and norms, shapes desires, fears and goals.

At the same time, there is no binding definition of what a family is. In different times and cultures, it can be understood and taken for granted in very different ways.

The interdisciplinary lecture series "Beziehungsweise Familie" is dedicated to the contradictory reality of the model of the nuclear family that is widespread today, especially in Western industrialized countries, and asks for alternatives from a global perspective.

Renowned academics from various disciplines and subject areas will present current research for discussion that examines the potential of alternative family and kinship concepts in terms of their creative, ethical and innovative aspects.

The lecture series is the prelude to the Humboldt Forum's theme year of the same name, which starts in fall 2025.

Conception of the series: Prof. Dr. Daniel Tyradellis (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Dr. Alia Rayyan (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Dr. Laura Goldenbaum (Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss). The lecture series takes place in the Humboldt Forum as part of a cooperation of the institutional network.

Programmatic director of the cross-institutional cluster: Dr. Laura Goldenbaum.

About the lecture by Prof. Dr. Janet Carsten (School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh)

This lecture challenges conventional understandings of family by reflecting on the imaginative, ethical and creative qualities of everyday kinship over time - qualities that are often ignored by social scientists. Rather than constituting a realm of conservatism and normativity, as is commonly assumed, I propose instead a historically nuanced understanding of kinship and relationship that centers on change and transformation. Here I revisit themes from my decades of work, including research in a Malay village in the early 1980s, a study of adopted children's search for their birth relatives in Scotland, later urban research in hospital blood banks and clinical pathology laboratories in Penang and, more recently, work on the nature of married life in the ethnically and culturally diverse world of contemporary Penang in Malaysia. I consider the ways in which ethical imagination, caring and creativity expand the seemingly closed, conventional boundaries of kinship. The search by adopted children for their biological relatives broadens the horizons of their familial relationships and requires ethical considerations of family relationships and the constitution of the self. Marriage brings new elements into the heart of kinship and is a source of change and renewal under the convincing guise of continuity and convention. It requires a constant process of adjustment and accommodation - or refusal of accommodation - to a spouse and kin. Selectively and cumulatively, intimate familial processes of ethical imagination constitute and enable political change. These processes, I argue, are at the heart of the generativity and creativity of kinship and its contribution to historical and political change.

Prof. Dr. Janet Carsten is Emeritus Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.Her research focuses on the anthropology of kinship with particular reference to Malaysia and Britain; it includes domestic relations, gender, historical migration, the home, adoptive reunions, and kinship and memory. She has worked on notions of bodily substance and the interface between folk and medical notions of blood in Malaysia and Britain.Janet Carsten is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a member of the Academia Europaea. She was recently awarded an ERC Advanced Grant to investigate contemporary changes in marriage in a global perspective. She is the author of After Kinship (2004) and Blood Work: Life and Laboratories in Penang (2019), among others.

- Free admission

- Language: German

- Location: Room 3, ground floor

- Part of: Lecture series Beziehungsweise Familie