Reimagining familial relationships: intimate networks and kinship practices in Odisha, India

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how family, kin and other intimate relations are reimagined and reconstructed in contemporary India. I introduce the concept of ‘intimate networks’ to analyze connections between villages, cities and abroad, looking at ways in which people create familial relationships in and across various spatial locations. I argue that there is a shift away from traditional norm of emphasizing patriliny and primogeniture to broadening kin and personal relations, including lateral kin and affines, acquaintances and friends to seek opportunities for education and employment. There is a circular flow of people, things, cash and information between villages, cities and abroad, rather than a unilateral migration from rural to urban, as traditional modernization theory advocates. Circular flow is made possible by construction of intimate networks involving exchanges and flow of substance-codes, such as things, cash and information between people. I also examine emergence of new relationships of care beyond family and kin ties in rurban areas where residents combine aspects of rural and urban in ways that defy assumptions of straightforward modernizing transition from rural to urban.

KEYWORDS:

• Kinship
• family
• intimate networks
• fiction
• rurban

Acknowledgement

Substantial parts of this paper are based on an article in Japanese (Tokita-Tanabe 2015). I am grateful to Professors Minoru Mio, Yoshio Sugimoto and other members of Minpaku Integrated Area Studies-South Asia (MINDAS) for their advice and comments on the Japanese version. I thank the two anonymous referees of this journal for their very useful and incisive comments from which I have benefitted very much. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all the Odiya people who have been helping me with fieldwork since 1991. All the names of people and places in thispaper are pseudonyms.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Some economists have revised views about the unidirectional widening economic gap between village and city. Biswanger-Mkhize (2013) points out that urban-rural consumption, income and poverty differentials have not risen in the past thirty years. This is despite limited rural-urban migration and slow agricultural growth. I argue, along with Usami and Yanagisawa (2015), that this paradox can be explained if we pay attention to the circular flow between villages and cities.

2 I consider fiction in the sense that it is ‘something made’, rather than something ‘false’ or ‘unfactual’ (Geertz 1973, 15). I use the term fiction also to denote the creative aspect of people’s actions and narratives. People’s actions and enunciations are not mere repetitions of previous acts reinforcing the status quo, but are enactments enfolding differences that have the potential of bringing about shifts in dominant structure of meanings and values, or ‘functional change in sign systems’ (Spivak 1985, 330). Being creative, however, does not mean that people are free to do whatever they like, since ‘lived social relations’, including family and kin relations, are ‘political constructions’ that are created, negotiated and contested under certain conditions, even as they constitute ‘world-changing fiction’ (Haraway 1991, 149).

3 When I talk about substance-code exchange and sharing, I depart from approaches based on ‘classical Hindu dividualism’ that ‘locks castes and other social categories into a persistent form of inequality’ (Appadurai 2015a, 123). Rather, I stress the potentiality of ‘progressive dividualism’ that focuses on capacity of persons as ‘agents composed of dynamic potentials for interaction (“dividuals”) who enter into temporary associations with many other kinds of energies and agencies in the world’ (147). At the same time, I also note that there is continuity and not just discontinuity between ‘classical Hindu dividualism’ and ‘progressive dividualism’. While people seek to modify kinship in order to create new associations, this does not mean that they can be totally free from existing relationships of family, kinship and caste in which their agencies are embedded. Rather, their agencies can manifest dynamic potentials from within existing relationships, in contact with other kinds of energies and agencies, to shake and loosen the very categories they are embedded in to create new forms of relationships.

4 Reservation measures for women were secured in Panchayat elections in Orissa in 1992, which anticipated a part of the Panchayat reforms stipulated in 73rd and 74th amendments to the constitution. See Tanabe (2007).

5 For comparison, see van Wessel (2001) for the situation in the ‘suburb’ where home-oriented lifestyle is more valued than neighborly care and affection.

6 This does not mean that caste discrimination does not exist. The original inhabitants of Ratnapur who belong to the ST category and the new residents do not eat together in one another’s homes or socialize, indicating covert caste discrimination.

Additional information

Funding

This This work was supported by Japan Society for thePromotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI [Grant Number 15K03040, 19820014, 19K01238, 21520819, and 24520911].

Notes on contributors

Yumiko Tokita-Tanabe

Yumiko Tokita-Tanabe (Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, The University of Tokyo) is a visiting researcher at National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan. She has been conducting fieldwork in Odisha since 1991. Her publications include Gender and Modernity: Perspectives from Asia and the Pacific, (co-edited with Yoko Hayami and Akio Tanabe, 2003, Kyoto and Melbourne: Kyoto University Press and Trans Pacific Press) and Living the Postcolonial: Women’s Agency in Contemporary India (in Japanese, 2011, Kyoto: Sekaishisosha). Her current research interests are construction of new relationships of care in rurban Odisha, and women’s rituals, play, songs, poetry and spiritual practices in contemporary India.