Kinship and the Politics of Responsibility: An Introduction

This special issue presents a range of case studies that exemplify the potential of kinship for thinking about, and acting, in relation to various kin and non-kin others in ways that invite us to reconsider the boundaries of politics and the political. The ethnographic research that informs the articles in the special issue shows the ways in which tensions and continuities across relations of intimacy, family and kinship, and the political sphere play out in response to crises of capitalism, evident in struggles, hardships and violence. The articles demonstrate the usefulness of exploring the interface and overlaps between the political and other fields that are all too often positioned – within scholarship and public discourses – as the antithesis of the political, variously understood in terms of the private, the familial, the domestic and the sphere of kinship.