Paper short abstract:

Drawing from fieldwork in Palestine and based on Héritier’s observation that having a “fixed” position in a set of possible siblings is an unchangeable condition of life, I argue that generation is among the last remaining areas of kinship that cannot be remade by technoscience nor ontological reimagining.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates the responsibility that comes with belonging to a particular generation. Long a topic of interest to anthropologists in the context of kinship obligations, my paper takes an alternate route by considering generational responsibility in the family through the lens of phenomenology. Drawing from fieldwork in Palestine and based on Françoise Héritier’s observation that having a “fixed” position in a set of possible siblings is an unchangeable condition of life, I argue that generation is among the last remaining areas of kinship that cannot be remade by technoscience nor ontological reimagining. That is to say, according to Héritier, no known kinship system in the world allows a given ego to move up or down temporally in the order into which one is born. Stopping short of biological determinism, I nonetheless take this unchangeable reality of kinship to explore how ethical life is organized by the facticity of generation, here by being born in a fixed kinship order.