Fictive Kinship

Fictive kinship comprises all those relationships socially understood as kinship different from descent and marriage, indicated by the usage of its terms, either modified (e.g., comadre) or not, as in some cases of fosterage, in which the term mother is the same regardless of whether it is the birth or foster mother. Taken literally, fictive kinship is a misnomer. As an antonym of real, fictive implicitly values such ties to be “false” or “not genuine” kinship. But people engaging in practices of fictive kinship experience these relationships as real as the ones based on “blood” and marriage, not least as they are also often tied to a prohibition of incest. After addressing the phenomenon in general, three aspects will be discussed in this entry that highlight the significance of kinship's fictive forms for individuals, power processes, and theories of society.

Fictive kinship is found worldwide and covers highly diverse practices and experiences. Its most widespread forms are adoption (prominent in Oceania, in Western countries, and among South American Indians), sponsorship practiced in kinship such as godparenthood in Christian cultures (compadrazgo) or oyabun-kobun in Japan, fosterage (Central Africa, South America), blood brotherhood (Africa, North American Indians), more regionally specific types such as milk-kinship in Muslim societies or miteri-bonds in Nepal, and finally forms that are practiced without being named.

The differences between the documented forms of fictive kinship might be ascribed to the ways of its institutionalizations. Although people [Page 683]commonly refer to rituals such as baptism to create a fictive kin relationship, in others people actualize it by continued reciprocal figurative use of kinship terms and actions that are understood socially as ideal kinship behavior. A figurative use of kin terms alone therefore does not institute a fictive kin relationship—it must be accompanied by concrete action. For example, people living together for a prolonged time with concomitant reciprocal use of kin terms may establish fictive kinship ties. Finally, all practices of fictive kinship are discernible as kinship only because people understand them as such. Further differentiating parameters lie in the quality of the relationship preceding the establishment of fictive kinship. Benjamin Paul devised an “intensive” and “extensive” choice of fictive kin for grasping analytically if individuals were related before (intensive) or not (extensive), and Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf addressed the question of whether the people involved were of the same or a different social status with the respective terms horizontal or vertical relationships.

Three aspects of fictive kinship are central for its understanding and theoretical significance: connection, loyalty, and power. First, fictive kinship endows people with a social institution capable of bridging ethnic, religious, and class boundaries, therefore enabling individuals to establish or ascertain kin ties with social others. Fictive kinship, then, is singularly prominent in vertical relationships, especially in patron-client-ties that found their icon in Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather. Albeit the institution of fictive kinship, conferring the egalitarian design of kinship ties upon vertical relations, never achieves an erasure of social inequality in practice, it allows humans to refer ideally to equality.

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