Project Description

Kinship relations have been subject to manifold transformations due to historical, political, and socio-economic restructuring; the translocal stretching of family ties because of migration and shifting national borders; the changing moral contexts in which they are embedded, including the reconfiguration of intergenerational commitments. Kinship, once perceived by anthropologists as a relic of the past, has not lost its significance in our increasingly globalised contemporary world. In fact, for many people, kinship remains the most important way to express how they relate to the world and find their place in it.

At the same time, generation, as a way of talking about historical periods, social movements, differences between ‘young’ and ‘old’, or social change and reproduction, has captured the public’s imagination time and again. Contemporary heated public discussions about generations X, Y, and Z, their world views, and their expectations for the future offer an example of the ongoing social relevance of the term and category of generation. However, such public discussions tend to deploy oversimplified explanations, since they sort people with very different social backgrounds into broad categories that blur the differences along class, gender, or ethnicity. They also exaggerate the transformative and conserving capacities of a given generation as well as the magnitude of differences and intensity of antagonisms between different age groups. Moreover, they disregard and confuse the distinctions between various notions of generation, i.e. the structural (age groups), genealogical (intergenerational relationships within families), and socio-historical (a feeling of commonality between people born roughly in the same period and thus sharing similar experiences) (Alber and Häberlein 2010). This is because public discourses about generations primarily aim at reducing the complexity that characterises large-scale social processes.

Social anthropology, as a science dedicated to analysing the dynamics of everyday life in different geographical contexts, is attuned to and well-prepared to question how people relate to or make sense of generational categories in their immediate and intimate social fields. While anthropologists have produced rich ethnographies about intergenerational relationships or how generation, in a socio-historical sense, offers insights into large-scale social processes, scholarly works that systematically trace how kinship and the different notions of generations are interrelated remain scarce. This dearth is surprising because other topics, such as the interconnection of gender and kinship (see Ortner 1974) or politics and kinship (see Alber and Thelen 2022), have been thoroughly examined within the discipline nuancing the anthropological understanding of gender, politics, and kinship. By taking a closer look at how kinship and generations mutually constitute each other and how the three notions of generation interact, intersect, and correspond with each other, the proposed network—‘Kinship Generations: Ethnographic Perspectives from across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East’—aims at rectifying this research gap. It strives to achieve not only conceptual clarity as far as generations is concerned, but also to provide fresh insights into social generativity from cross-cultural perspectives.

Adopting a processual approach, the network of scholars involved in this project perceive kinship as ‘a fraught and formative field in which meanings are constantly being made and unmade’ (Jackson 2017, 102). Similarly, in relation to generation, the network favours a dynamic understanding, maintaining that generations are not only about the reproduction of social structures but also about change and social transformations. In tracing how generations are implicated in and at the same time signal change, the network maintains that paying attention to the slow and subtle modifications of normative orders is as relevant as being mindful of sudden changes due to crisis situations (Cole 2011). Moreover, by conceiving the term kinship generations (Hölzle and Suerbaum 2023), the network takes advantage of a productive double connotation: on the one hand, the concept of kinship generations allows for posing questions about how kinship is continually shaped and reshaped under continuously changing social conditions, all the while generating new meanings about the world. On the other hand, with kinship generations the network seeks to explore what constitutes generations within shifting fields of relatedness and how generations contribute to making and remaking kinship in unpredictable ways. In other words, we are interested in social ‘generativity’ (Bear et al. 2015), which emerges through the interrelation of kinship and generations in correspondence with larger historical, social, economic, and political processes.

Objectives

The network situates itself within critical kinship as well as gender, sexuality, and queer studies. It aims to fill a significant research gap by systematically tracing the interrelations of kinship and generations and thus delivering insights into processes of social generativity from a cross- regional perspective. The network brings together researchers whose regional-ethnographic competence spans Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to

(1) conceptually contribute to the study of kinship and generations and to develop more nuanced understandings of contemporary local, regional, and global transformations in times of multiple uncertainties (pandemics, climate change, war).

(2) instigate new questions and methodologies in approaching the study of kinship and generations.

(3) enhance cross-regional collaborations and comparisons among researchers working on societies in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East and their corresponding diasporas.

(4) facilitate networking and exchanges between early- and mid-career researchers and senior scholars.

(5) revitalise the prominence of kinship studies in German-speaking countries.

Through its approach, the network sheds light on various scales and spheres: it takes regional, national, and local debates into consideration; focuses on micro-processes and how they are affected by larger structural transformations; and turns towards translocal dynamics that require intimate knowledge of local contexts. Ultimately, the network with its focus on kinship and generations seeks to stimulate reflections on the current state of social anthropology and propose theoretical and methodological interventions that trigger engagement beyond the scope of this network. The composition of the network reflects generational change and succession within the anthropology of kinship by including several ‘generations’ of scholars: from PhDs to post-docs and experienced and senior professors. In this sense, the network includes not only a range of regional and theoretical expertise, but also different generational experiences within anthropology. An expected side effect of the network will be the intensification of exchanges between junior and senior scholars that transgress generational lines of knowledge production.

 

Past Events

Workshop 1: On Generation: Crisis, History, Change

Date: 7-8 November 2024

Place: Bayreuth University, Germany)

Conveners: Koreen Reece and Diego Malara

Crisis is frequently cast in generational terms: in the ‘lost generations’ of war or the AIDS pandemic, for example, or the disinherited generations left to live with the failures of their forebears to avert financial collapse or climate change. The trauma of these crises is increasingly understood to be inherited intergenerationally, rendering them chronic (Vigh 2008), and self-reproducing. We suggest intergenerational thinking is key to situating crisis in time (Knight & Stewart 2016, Knight 2015) – whether by charting causation, assigning responsibility, conveying urgency, or orienting responses towards the future. Discussion about critical futures and about the enduring significance of the past around which crises are described often deploy and rely on a rhetoric of generational difference, even incommensurability and conflict. And yet, the analytic of generations is frequently overlooked in anthropological discussions of the most significant threats and challenges we face today, and when thinking about past and future crises. In this workshop, we seek to re-center generations in

anthropological debates about wars, the climate crisis, financial upheaval, forced migration, and the framework of crisis in general. We will explore how intergenerational logic and frictions (Alber, van der Geest and Reynolds-Whyte 2010; Ingold 2024) – in both interpersonal and political spheres – open up opportunities for the critical recalibration of history, as well as for social transformation.

• How do people formulate, deploy, evade or refigure generations in times of crisis?
• How do generations create (or revive) new sorts of collectives, among kin, or across global political spaces?
• And how do these practices – and conflicts that emerge around them – shape and change our experiences of history, and our imaginations of the future?

This workshop will explore how the idea, discourse and practice of ‘generations’ tracks changes in social reasoning about the past, present, and future – creating conflicts that motivate transformation in relationships, values, and broader socio-political worlds. We will investigate how the framework of ‘generation’ allows people to situate themselves and their relations in history; to understand, contest and remake those selves and relations in historical context; and to seek and assert creative possibilities for change in times of crisis.

Alber, E. S. van der Geest and S. Reynolds-Whyte eds. 2010. Generations in Africa: Connections and conflicts. Berlin: Lit Verlag.

Ingold, T. 2024. The rise and fall of generation now. Cambridge: Polity Press.  

Knight, D.M. and C. Stewart. 2016. Ethnographies of austerity: Temporality, crisis and affect in Southern Europe. History and Anthropology 27(1): 1-18.

Knight, D.M. 2015. History, time, and economic crisis in central Greece. Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Vigh, H. 2008. Crisis and chronicity: anthropological perspectives on continous conflict and decline. Ethnos, 73:1, 5-24.

Workshop 2: Family constellations in educational processes: investments, moralities and changing social relations

Date: 3 December 2025

Place: Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

Conveners: Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, Karen Valentin, Uma Pradhan

 Today, in most countries of the Global South, education is seen as key to social upliftment and an important way to reproduce social, economic, and cultural capital over generations. In most parts of the world, kin, and especially intergenerational relations, plays an integral role in the process of career decision-making and educational support. Kin members tend to embrace ‘developmental idealism’ (Thornton 2001) following a paradigm of modernisation and economic development. Educational aspirations are increasingly buttressed by visions of ‘modern enhancement’ (Yeh et al. 2013), the liberal ethos of opportunity and mobility, and often even patriotism. Elder generations influence the new generation’s capacities to aspire (Appadurai 2013). But many family members are increasingly caught up in tensions between growing opportunities outside the web of kinship and changing expectations, commitments, and kinship obligations. Patriarchal norms, gender imbalances, and the high stress on ‘filial piety’ may strongly impact individual kin members. Views, motivations, and parental expectations may be at odds with students’ preferences and their quest to form the self.

As a ‘regime of belonging’ (Pfaff-Czarnecka 2013), kinship provides emotional backing as well as inspiration. It is a realm of ‘concerted cultivation action’ (Bathmaker et al. 2013). Furthermore, it represents social constellations where educational aspirations, strategies (understood in a broad sense comprising both intentional and taken-for-granted measures to reach goals), and the benefits of education are negotiated. However, economic, social, cultural, and symbolic resources remain unevenly distributed, even within small households. Also, the varying strength of kinship ties, as well as differing intergenerational and gender roles and duties, render kinship constellations diverse. These differences determine whether kin members are prepared to pool resources, invest beyond the household, and finance the education of individual members—for instance, by selling land, taking loans, or undertaking labour migration. Investment can ‘forge or undermine solidarities’ and is driven by the significance of educational choices to the wider kinship.

The overall aim of the workshop is to foster dialogue among researchers exploring how families navigate educational pressures—particularly in the context of expanding educational choices and shifting social obligations within evolving family structures. These pressures often entail significant investments - not only economic, but also social and emotional.

We hope to develop a shared conversation around the following questions:

• How does the pressure for education reshape inter- and intragenerational commitments and expectations within families?
• How does access to education reconfigure patterns of inequality within families?
• What strategies do families employ to maintain social standing through morally charged pursuits of education?

 

Upcoming Events 2026

Workshop 3: Impure Genealogies: Kinship, Religion, and Spirituality Across Generations

Date: 19-21 March 2026

Place: Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

Conveners: Ester Gallo and Éva Rozália Hölzle

Kinship and religion represent two important fields of anthropological enquiry, although their interplay has rarely been analysed within the same framework. This observation is particularly true concerning the anthropology of Europe, where kinship and religion have historically been viewed as aspects of social life relegated to the private realms of home and family. Additionally, to the marginalisation of kinship and religion in anthropological accounts of European societies has partly contributed the fact that both dimensions have been deemed to fade with the rise of an individual ethos disentangled from the constraints of communal life. This has produced the related assumption that the modern self, its experience, and expression are rooted outside the (supposedly antagonistic) spheres of kinship and religion. At the same time, kinship and religion have been applied as central prisms through which non-European societies were approached and analysed. However, here too, it was believed that with the advance of individualization, religion and kinship would eventually lose their importance. Consequently, religion and kinship were viewed as outdated fields of inquiry towards the end of the 20th century, ignoring the fact that both remained consequential to the organisation of everyday life.

Registering the unfaltering significance of kinship and religion in the everyday life of people across the globe, one can observe a renewed anthropological interest for both aspects of social life in the last decades. Thereby, the leading concerns rest in the role kinship and religion play in sustaining or constraining socio-geographical mobility, transnationalism and the globalisation of cultural forms – within and beyond Europe. Yet, to date, theoretical and empirical studies exploring the kinship-religion nexus remain rare. The few available works mainly adopt a cultural reproduction framework and continue to look at ‘religion’ and’ kinship’ as domains of intergenerational continuity, if not ‘traditionalism’.

Drawing from the above considerations, the proposed workshop aims at developing an inter-disciplinary debate on the kinship-religion nexus and exploring the transformative potential that one dimension holds for the other across the public-private divide. In doing so, the workshop has three broader aims. First, it will engage with the question related to the tension between norms and transformations in kinship and religion and explore how – and under what conditions – intergenerational relations foreground the possibility of negotiating, challenging, or reasserting genealogies of relatedness and religious belonging. Second, it will delve into the way gender relations, as well as models of masculinities and femininities, shape – and are shaped by – religiously informed understandings and practices of kinship. Thirdly, it aims to develop a comparative discussion across different areas and religions, thereby including scholars working from/on Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The latter is key to overcoming the tendency to study religious and kinship formations in their singularity – if not exceptionality – and to trace cross-religious and cross-contexts continuities and differences in the way they come to constitute and transform each other among mobile and immobile generations.

Some of the key (but not exclusive) questions we would like to address are:

• To what extent, and how, is religion transformed and negotiated across kinship generations? How does the process mark changes across class, gender, ethnicity and other layers of difference and inequality?
• In what forms, and through what processes, can kinship be created and forged through religion and spirituality?
• How is the religion-kinship nexus transformed through migration and transnationalism at different ends of (im)mobility? 
• How do religiously informed ideas of kinship are projected in the public sphere through associations, social movements, and other forms of political and civil participation?
• To what extent ethno-religious borders can be challenged, negotiated and transformed through marriages, intimacy and sexuality? 
• To what extent – and how – are religiously informed ideas, models and practices of relatedness and kinship constrained by the state politics and policies?
• How does religion shape ideas and practices of femininities and masculinities in the context of family and kinship relations?
• Is religion always reinforcing heteronormative ideas of kinship? Conversely, can religion come to constitute a resource to assert and live through non-heteronormative families and if so, how and under which circumstances?

Workshop 4: Selecting Kin: Examining Kinning and the Idea of Genes in Reprotech

Date: 2-4 July 2026

Place: Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Convener: Anindita Majumdar

Within this topical proposal, the relationship between kinship and “genes” _are examined through the intervention of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) and other forms of reproductive biotech (non-invasive prenatal testing, amniocentesis, amongst others). Broadly, we seek to explore narratives of kinning around genes/biology/biogenetic substances that incorporate the idea of intergenerational succession of ties. Thus, Gammeltoft and Wahlberg’s (2018) formulation of “selective reproductive technologies” meets Thompson’s conceptualisation of the “ontological choreography” (2005) of how the IVF clinic creates viable narratives around genes and kinship. In the process, conflicts may emerge, especially in the case of third-party reproduction involving donated sperm and eggs, or in the case of diagnosing possible genetic anomalies in the to-be born. In this workshop, the notion of technologically mapped kinship becomes particularly pertinent as the intergenerational continues to be invoked in the choice of “reprotech”.

Reprotech provides the opportunity to produce “designer babies” through the “mixing” of race, genes and other forms of cultural desirability (Deomampo 2019, Franklin and Roberts 2006, Pande 2021), but leads to complicated notions of inheritance and inheritability. Reproductive technologies, especially those that are used in prenatal/preimplantation screening, are complicit in a form of “forecasting” that makes them uniquely enmeshed within a genetic-generational logic. Thus, the desire to birth “healthy” kin is marked by other insidious pursuits: of “matching” and seeking “desirable” kin and kinship, or of replicating generational similarities.

This workshop is keen on critiquing and reframing the Euro-American privileging of biogenetic kinship (Strathern 1992) to engage with diverse and conflicting cultural understandings and imaginings regarding “roots” and genes. The cross-cultural approach has become an important part of the transnational proliferation of reproductive technologies, especially in the transnational commercial surrogacy industry and in the ways in which gamete providers travel across nations and borders. Even though the idea of roots in a cross-cultural space has been examined within transnational adoption practices (Howell and Marre 2006; Yngvesson 2003), reprotech provides newer ways of conflicting and creating. We invite papers that provoke conversations on how “roots”, genes and kinship are imagined: in all forms of reproductive technologies; in spaces where reprotech is practiced, administered and imagined; in cultures where access to reprotech is mediated through particular customary laws around kinship; in the cultural interface between different nationalities in cross-border reproductive care practices such as gestational surrogacy, egg provision, etc; amongst other relevant areas.

Workshop 5: When a kin is not the same anymore: Rebuilding kinship over time

Date: 28-30 September 2026

Place: University of Hamburg, Germany

Conveners: Erdmute Alber and Julia Pauli

Despite the recent emphasis on the processual making and unmaking of kin, kinship has rarely been studied in a long-term perspective, thus taking the unfolding of time, generations and the life course into account. Such a research perspective, however, could provide important insights into the entangled processes of generations, kinship and self-making.

How do kin relations continue, disrupt or change over the life course? One common explanation for tensions in kin relations is a moralizing evaluation of kin. Kin might feel that the other, i.e. mother, partner, sibling or any other significant kin, has changed too much and not to the better. Vice-versa, ethical self- and kin-making can also be based on continuity and the feeling of shared similarities that endure all turmoil, for instance the shared experiences of siblings from childhood to later life. Rupture as well as continuity of kinship over time are narrated, legitimized and explained with experiences, materialities, feelings or common tasks. How can we integrate these insights into kinship theory?

The rebuilding of kin relations over time is as much about constructions of others as it is about self-making. If one´s brother has changed, or the husband has become insupportable, how does this relate to one´s own changes and continuities over time, how, and in which way is this conceptualized? How are narratives of changing kin relations related to different ideas about one’s own and the relationship’s past, present and future?

The workshop seeks to theorize as well as empirically describe how kin ties evolve over time. Relational temporalities are still under-theorized in kinship theory. We are therefore especially interested in ethnographic research that has followed kin relations over large time spans. We ask what happens to kin ties during times as well as how breaking or enduring relations are lived, experienced, valued and narrated.

With that, we also want to draw attention to the fact that kinship relations are too often implicitly attributed to a specific time in the life course, whereas the lived reality is often different. Motherhood, for instance, is mainly researched at the beginning of a child´s life. Marriage tends to be looked at mainly during marriage negotiations and weddings. However, both are accompanying one´s life over longer time periods.

If research on motherhood is not limited to the phase of childhood and youth, what can interactions between a mother and her child in later life tell us? What happens when a couple grows apart? And how does siblingship change over time? How can we theorize such changes, ruptures and continuities of kin relations? The workshop seeks to bring together these notions of relational temporality – in the course of one’s own life and in inter- and intragenerational relations, by scrutinizing endurance, change and rupture of kinship relations.

 

Upcoming Events 2027

Workshop 6: Situated Relatedness: Adulthood, Care, and Economic Decision-Making in Intergenerational Settings

Date: Autumn 2027

Place: Bayreuth University, Germany

Convener: Tabea Häberlein

Workshop 7: Motherhood beyond the Human

Date: Summer 2027

Place: Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany

Conveners: Aksana Ismailbekova, Jasmin Mahazi, Deepra Dandekar, and Hilal Alkan)

Upcoming Events 2028

Workshop 8: Of Aunts, Uncles and Other Untold Kin: Generating Relatedness beyond the Heteronormative Nuclear Family

Date: Spring 2028

Place: Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Conveners: Éva Rozália Hölzle, Magdalena Suerbaum and, Ferdiansyah Thajib

Closing Workshop 9: The Future of Kinship Generations: Methodological and Theoretical Reflexions

Date: Spring 2028

Place: Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Conveners: Éva Rozália Hölzle, Magdalena Suerbaum

Principal Investigators

Dr. Hölzle, Éva Rozália, Centre for Global Cooperation Research, Universität Duisburg-Essen, e-mail: eva-rozalia.hoelzle@uni-due.de

Dr. Suerbaum, Magdalena, Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies, Bielefeld University, e-mail: magdalena.suerbaum@uni-bielefled.de

Network members

• Erdmute Alber (Bayreuth)

• Hilal Alkan (Berlin)

• Paul Anderson (Cambridge)

• Deepra Dandekar (Berlin)

• Alice Eliott (London)

• Ester Gallo (Trento)

• Tabea Häberlein (Bayreuth)

• Aksana Ismailbekova (Berlin)

• Ravinder Kaur(Delhi)

• Jasmin Mahazi (Berlin)

• Anindita Majumdar (Hyderabad)

• Julia Pauli (Hamburg)

• Joanna Pfaff(Bielefeld)

• Koreen Reece (Bayreuth)

• Michael Stasik (Basel)

• Ferdiansyah Thajib (Erlangen)

• Zhenwei Wang (Bielefeld)

• Ann-Christin Zuntz (Edinburgh)

 

​

​

Funding
The project has been funded by the DFG Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft since 2025.