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Paper short abstract

'Inheritance' embodies the ‘history’-‘person’ nexus. By examining how inheritances are engendered, transformed, and transmitted, we can see how these are vectors of connection/disconnection that converge/diverge in time. These delineate belonging and continuities, but also enable distance from kin.

Paper long abstract

One modality through which the interweaving and mutual shaping of the ‘historical’ and the ‘personal’ can be glimpsed at is by attending to forms of inheritance, broadly conceived. This requires attending to how inheritance in its varied forms is engendered, valued, transformed, and transmitted, and the consequences for persons and their relations. Inheritances are vectors of connection and disconnection that emerge in response to historical losses and new opportunities, and which converge and diverge in time. Inheritance can delineate belonging and continuities, but it can also enable distance from kin and lifeworlds. It shapes subjectivity and can enable persons to embark on novel trajectories. In pursuing this picture of inheritance, I foreground the perspective of lateral and diagonal kin – primarily siblings, but also cousins and aunts/uncles – while bearing in mind that the boundaries of these categories can be fuzzy and permit the absorption of others. Attending to these ties, I suggest, sheds light on how heirs relate to, benefit from, or are harmed by, bequests in different ways, and as such, enables a dynamic view of the relation between forms of inheritance and their recipients. In pursuing this personal and historical view of inheritance, I draw from a longitudinal (2014-25) ethnography of kinship and social mobility in the central Philippines. Through the story of one sibling set and their neighbours and relations, I chart how, in the face of landlessness, ordinary villagers mobilised alternative bequests with far-reaching and ambivalent implications.