In March 2014, we convened a Wenner-Gren Workshop, âThe Sacred Social: Investigations of Spiritual Kinship among the Abrahamic Faiths,â at the University of Virginia. As organizers, our aim was to rethink spiritual kinshipâs analytical enclosure within the study of godparenthood and re-employ the concept in current debates about secularism, modernity, and religious sociality. Focusing our attention on the religious practitioners of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, we asked workshop participants to consider how and to what extent spiritual relations, writ large, shape families, communities, nations, and transnational religious networks. Given the Abrahamic focus, we also challenged our colleagues to consider what it means for religions to be related.
Participants enthusiastically explored how the connections between the sacred and the social forge relations of inclusion and exclusion, as well as equality and hierarchy, across practitionersâ social worlds. Together we considered how naturalized identities such as biogenetic relationships, gender, and ethnicity/race interact with these sacralized identities. We further investigated how spiritual kinship organizes political affiliations, social networks, and moral orders across domains and scales. Our workshop proceedings led to critical discussions of the Christian centrism implicit in the field of spiritual kinship studies and the need to move beyond the confines of the spiritual to explore a broader landscape of the idioms, ethics, processes, and actions that make religious kinship.
New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties Across the Abrahamic Religions is the product of these conversations and debates. We consider the significance of spiritual kinship, or kinship reckoned in relation to the divine, in creating myriad forms of affiliations among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. Traditionally, anthropologists have operated with a narrow, biologically based definition of kinship that conceptualizes spiritually based kinship as âfictiveâ or âpseudoâ and opposes these relations to âreal,â ânatural,â or âbiologicalâ kinship. In such scholarship, spiritual kinship, commonly equated with godparenthood, is defined in radical opposition to ânaturalâ or âcarnalâ kinship (Alfani and Gourdon 2012) and is therefore conceived as a minor field of inquiry within kinship studies.
In contrast, New Directions in Spiritual Kinship draws from recent investigations in feminist and kinship studies that have laid the groundwork for comparative investigations of kinship forged through nonbiological means (Schneider 1984; Carsten 2000; Franklin and McKinnon 2001). Scholars of kinship and religion have made rich explorations into the ways in which people create ârelatednessââor long-standing social relationships produced by idioms and practices of âsentiment, substance, and nurturanceâ (Carsten 2000, 22)âthrough processes such as co-residence (Bahloul 1996; Eickelman 2002), sharing food at the hearth (Carsten 1995), or working on land (Labby 1976). In much of this research, however, kinship continues to be framed as a secular phenomenon (Delaney 1995; Cannell 2013). Similarly, to the extent that anthropologists have investigated religious identities, they have tended to focus on how religious belonging is molded by globalization, economics, and politics. They have seldom examined the powerful ways in which sacred and spiritually defined kin relationships can themselves be foundational to the organization of diverse social, religious, and political affinities.
By liberating spiritual kinship from its traditional confinement to studies of Catholic godparenthood, New Directions in Spiritual Kinship explores how kinship is constituted through spiritual and sacred properties that work alone or alongside other forms of kin-making. Put differently, we are interested in the associations, solidarities, affects, and intimacies that are derived from, but are not necessarily circumscribed by, religious practice. With our resurrection of spiritual kinship, we explore how naturalized identities like gender and ethnicity/race interact with sacralized identities mediated by shared ideas of spirit, divinity, and covenant (understudied aspects of anthropological kinship analysis). An attention to spiritual kinship, we argue, allows us to ask: What kinds of solidarities are being constituted at the symbolic crossroads of materiality and immateriality, blood and spirit, and the immanent and the transcendent?
We recognize that our usage of spiritual kinship combines the terminology of âspiritualityâ and âkinshipââslippery concepts around which contested comparative projects have been forged. As scholars of spirituality and religion have observed, spirituality is categorically invoked in plural and oppositional terms as both a part of and a counterpoint to religious life, in particular, the institutional, hierarchical, civic, public, and collective features associated with popular academic definitions of religion (Bender and McRoberts 2012; van der Veer 2009). Similarly, the study of kinship, as discussed in greater detail below, is fraught with a number of discursive shifts that oppose biological, naturalized, and material definitions of kinship with social, metaphorical, and immaterial definitions. Nevertheless, the contributors of this volume collectively demonstrate that an explicit study of spiritual and sacred kinships can illuminate the ways in which religious participants are mobilizing kin ties both up scales into political, national, and transnational frames to build and define community relations, and down into and between the intimate affects, spaces, and bodies of persons.
Although we have chosen to define spiritual kinship more broadly as âkinship reckoned in relation to the divine,â our contributors also acknowledge that the designation of spiritual kinship as a concept for comparative analysis is not without its potential shortcomings. Scholars have examined a broad range of spiritual kinship practices such as ritual kinship among practitioners of Eastern and Russian Orthodox Christianity (Alfani and Gourdon 2012; Muravyeva 2012), the formation of urban communities of Haitian Vodou practitioners around spiritual kinship networks (Brown 2001), the syncretism of compadrazgo with the ritual kinship of Afro-Cuban santeria (Clark 2003), and the relatedness constituted between Buddhist teachers and initiates (Prebish 2003). Yet much of this research has been heavily shaped, if not overdetermined, by Christian terminologies and worldviews.
Indeed, during the Wenner-Gren workshop that preceded this volume, participants questioned whether spiritual kinship was a sufficient analytical framework for comparative investigation across the Abrahamic religions given its prevalent associations with the Christian institution of godparenthood, ritual baptism, and its dichotomous rendering of spirit and matter. Such critical insights are distilled in volume contributions like âKinship as Ethical Relation: A Critique of the Spiritual Kinship Paradigmâ in which Don Seeman argues that the study of spiritual kinship to date has derived from hegemonic Christian theological influences and institutional structures that distinguish between the spiritual and the biological. Seemanâs argument resonates with Talal Asadâs well-known critique of the anthropology of religion as a field that tends to universalize Western Christian worldviews and operationalize them as analytical concepts (Asad 1993).
To move beyond Christian ascetic and ritual formulations of spiritual ties, we added the term sacred kinship to index a broader religious landscape of discourse, moralities, and practices of making kinship that does not compartmentalize physical and spiritual reckonings of relatedness. Across the internal variations of Abrahamic religiosity, volume contributors employ sacred kinship to refer to modes of kinship that are not necessarily defined in âspiritualâ terms. Thus, while some of our contributors draw from local contexts to use spiritual kinship confidently (e.g., Alfani [Chap. 2], Klaits [Chap. 6], and Thomas [Chap. 10]), other authors engage spiritual kinship more experimentally (Feeley-Harnik, Chap. 3), critically (Seeman, Chap. 4), or simultaneously employ spiritual and/or sacred kinship for different analytical reasons in their texts (Bahloul [Chap. 5], Cannell [Chap. 7], Malik [Chap. 9], Wellman [Chap. 8]). Nevertheless, it is important to note that as a result of the workshop discussion, all contributors revisited their conceptualizations of spiritual kinship and thoughtfully situated their terminologies within local and comparative contexts. Authors who employed and critiqued the paradigm of spiritual kinship did so with an increased awareness of its historical, religious, and political implications.
In the following sections, we trace the Christian origins of spiritual kinship and explore its impact on the study of kinship in Islam and Judaism. We analyze the significance of positioning spiritual/sacred kinship as a provocative area of anthropological study in light of the failed prophecy of secularism, and we push the boundaries of kinship studies to include theoretical and ethnographic research across a broader range of religiously oriented social domains, networks, and trans/national collectives. Finally, we consider the rich comparisons and contestations afforded by the study of spiritual/sacred kinship across the Abrahamic religions. Together, the chapters of this volume contend that the study of spiritual and sacred kinship is a rich site for exploring and understanding the ritual and discursive practices that intensely shape Christian, Jewish, and Muslim religious solidarities and divisions.
The Christian Origins of Spiritual Kinship Studies
The study of spiritual kinship, historically, has focused on the Catholic institution of godparenthood (compadrazgo) in Europe, Latin America, and the Philippines (Alfani and Gourdon 2012; Bloch and Guggenheim 1981; Coster 2002; Davila 1971; Du Boulay 1984; Jussen 2000; Mintz and Wolf 1950; Sault 2001). Anthropologists and historians have examined the constitution of the relationships between godparents and godchildren (paternitas), godparents and birth parents (copaternitas), and godchildren and godsiblings (fraternitas) via ritual baptism, patronage relationships, and marriage restrictions. In addition, they have explored how everyday interactions can be mediated by this ritualized sociality: as evidenced in the etymological connections between the word gossip and godsib (god-sibling) for instance (Mintz and Wolf 1950).
Between the 1950s and the 1970s, ethnographic and ethno-historical spiritual kinship studies were particularly prevalent within the field of anthropology. Researchers depicted numerous institutions of spiritual kinship and investigated how religious practitioners adapted these socio-religious ties in the wake of the social changes instigated by modernization. In much of this literature, spiritual kinship was defined by âa radical opposition between the ânaturalâ (carnal) kinship and spiritual kinshipâ (Alfani and Gourdon 2012, 18; see also Bloch and Guggenheim 1981, 378â380; Coster 2002). C ompadrazgo was positioned as separate from and supplementary to ânaturalâ âcognaticâ ties (Foster 1953, 9; Gudeman 1971). It was perceived to sustain the ethical ideals of consanguineal kinship without being subject to the same conflicts and ruptures that were associated with blood relations. As Pitt-Rivers famously wrote, compadrazgo is what âcognatic kinship aspires to, but cannot, beâ (1968, 412). Even more, compadrazgo was seen in contradistinction to âactual lawâ (Gudeman 1971, 48). For these scholars, however, a key point of interest became compadrazgoâs adaptability and flexibility as compared to biological relations. It could link members of the same social class horizontally, or link people vertically, binding together persons of different social classes (Mintz and Wolf 1950).
Nonetheless, it is important to note that the confluence of spiritual kinship studies with predominantly Christian contexts was more than a by-product of the ethnographic contexts anthropologists selected for study. The Christian influence on spiritual kinship studies also shaped the terms and categories of engagement. As anthropologists of Christianity have consistently observed, anthropology has been heavily shaped by Christian theological ideas (Robbins 2006), including ideas/ideals about agency (Keane 2007), and individual versus collective understandings of religious personhood and salvation (Cannell, Chap. 7, this volume). More specifically, anthropologyâand the anthropology of kinshipâhas also been sh...