Conceiving relatedness: non‐substantial relations among the Kamea of Papua New Guinea

This article considers the implications of imagining kinship as a non‐embodied relation. In recent years, it has become commonplace to argue that relatedness is a gradually acquired state that can be built over time and by non‐sexual means. In this view, relationships of consanguinity are not given at birth but are created through purposeful acts of feeding and caring. Here, I address a question that has been less commonly asked by anthropologists: need kinship always be imagined as entailing an embodied connection? Is there a way of thinking about cross‐generational relationships that does not ground them in bodily connectedness, or, at the very least, one that imagines contexts in which they are not embodied as a substantial link between people? Drawing upon data collected among Kamea of Papua New Guinea, I describe a world in which the parent‐child tie is conceptualized as one that is inherently non‐embodied.