Declaring Kinship – Some Remarks on the Indeterminate Relation between Commensality and Kinship in Western Kenya

Abstract

Based upon ethnographic fieldwork in Western Kenya, this article re-evaluates the widespread assumption that commensality constructs or, at least, earmarks kin or kin-like relations. In contrast to such generalizations, our ethnographic data suggests that the relation between kinship and social practices such as eating together is culturally not predetermined in Western Kenya. This understanding of the relation between social practices and kinship as indeterminate allows the inhabitants of Kaleko, a small marketplace in Western Kenya, to use different and conflicting strategies of ‘declaring kin’. These conflicting strategies include assertions of biological kinship, refusals to clarify the specific kin-relation and evocations of love and care. Understanding kinship as an effect of strategic practices of individuals and not of cultural norms or social practices has analytical repercussions for an analysis of marriage customs and infertility.