Unarchiving Family and Kinship: History, Violence and New Pathologies of Citizenship

My interest in the family's archive does not pertain to the “family” in a general sense, nor to the cultural differences that have been focal points of anthropological inquiry since the inception of the discipline (such as kinship terminology, parent-child relationships, the role of the maternal uncle, and the nature of affective ties). Rather, I am compelled by what these notes disclose about how family relations (and kinship roles) have been reconfigured—or more accurately, disfigured and dismembered—by historical events, as they were gradually and imperceptibly altered by bureaucratic systems, administrative actions, and scientific knowledge.