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

Principal Investigators

• Éva Rozália Hölzle (CGCR)
• Magdalena Suerbaum (Bielefeld)

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.