Commentary: Leaning In to Kinship Trouble

Abstract

In this commentary, I approach ‘kinship trouble’ as a cultural and medical anthropologist with two decades of ethnographic and collaborative engagement with genetics, and as someone deeply committed to and interested in interdisciplinary collaboration. From this perspective, the collection’s significance is its focus on the emergent encounter between two very different fields—new kinship studies and palaeogenetics—both of which intersect with archaeology. Combining the intellectual explosion of new kinship studies with the data explosion of palaeogenetics is an enticing premise. What can happen, kinship trouble asks us, if the creativity that characterizes the new kinship studies could be married with the rich new layers of genomic information that have sedimented archaeological scholarship? And what could be lost if this opportunity is squandered? The contributions to this collection read archaeological and palaeogenetic evidence against the grain to reveal active kin-making practices that often disrupt presentist, ethnocentric and heterosexist assumptions. These vibrant interpretations of relatedness provide many ‘carrots’ to entice anthropologists, archaeologists and palaeogeneticists to become ‘oddkin’ and to ‘lean in’ to kinship trouble.