Kinship Generations: Ethnographic Perspectives from across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East

• Applicant: Dr. Éva Rozália Hölzle
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; African, American and Oceania Studies ; Asian Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 555127449

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. By taking a closer look at how kinship and generations mutually constitute each other, the proposed network—‘Kinship Generations: Ethnographic Perspectives from across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East’—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. Moreover, by conceiving the term kinship generations, the network intends to take 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 in a constantly changing world, 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. Through the proposed network, we seek to enable in-depth exchanges among anthropologists whose work centres on localities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East (as well as their corresponding diasporas). Sharing and learning from ethnographic case studies collected in three different geographical regions—which are usually not studied in relation with each other—will create a stimulating atmosphere that accounts for both regional characteristics and global trends. It will encourage network members to think with ‘portable’ research questions about the relevance of kinship and generations.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Magdalena Suerbaum