Short Abstract:

The panel stimulates new debates at the intersections of kinship and economic anthropology, discussing kinship through the lenses of un/commoning. Does the concept contribute to a better understanding of the economies of sharing, distributing and exchanging within and between intimate relations?

Long Abstract:

Without using the concept (un)commoning itself, the anthropology of kinship analyses how being related to others creates but also questions practices and feelings of communality. For this dynamic, kinship studies have used comparable concepts like “sharing“ or “mutuality of being“. These widely used concepts share with commoning the provenance from economic anthropology. In complex, possibly contradictory ways, emotionally laden practices of kinship and relatedness include economic dimensions, highlighting that kinship is a lived but also contested resource. Looking anew at the economic within kinship, the concept of (un)commoning might help focusing on these complex processualities.

Commoning of children between different sets of parents, but also uncommoning of responsibilities upon separation, degrees of commoning of elderly care of parents among siblings, processes of commoning costs for family gatherings and rituals like marriages or funerals, or commoning of love relationships in constellations of polyamory, are examples for the economic within kinship. With the panel, we seek to stimulate new debates at the intersections of kinship and economic anthropology. Our aim is to take up this dimension by discussing ethnographic constellations and cases through the lenses of commoning/uncommoning. We ask, in how far the concept contributes to a better understanding of the economies of sharing, distributing and exchanging within and between intimate relations. We welcome ethnographically rich and/or conceptual papers addressing the complexities of un/commoning of the intimate.

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