Paper
Transnational Kinship in Times of War: Re/configurations from “Below” and from “Above”
presenters
Anna Matyska
Nationality: Polish
Residence: Poland
University of Warsaw / KU Leuven
Presence:Face to Face/ On Site
Keywords:
Kinship, Eastern Europe, War, transnationalism, Ukraine
Abstract:
Anthropology of European kinship is dominated by the Western perspective. In the writings of leading theorist of European kinship, such as Marilyn Strathern (2020), to “make” European kinship is, implicitly, to make Western Europan kinship. This paper delves into Eastern European kinship enacted and reconfigured transnationally in the face of war. My focus is on the onging war in Ukraine, that started in 2014 when Russia invated Crimea and continued as the full-scale invasion in 2022. Drawing on fieldwork research among Ukrainian migrants in Poland, I will explore two dimensions of reconfigured transnational kinship. Firstly, I will discuss the changed intimate landscape of kinship faced by Ukrainian migrants who suddenly have to deal with ruptures and realignments of kinship boundaries, hosting fleeing family members while distancing from Russia-supporting kin. Secondly, I will spotllight the reconfiguration at the political level. War brought, on the one hand, the Ukrainian "disunity" with their Russian brothers, and on the other hand, the reemergence of the ideaology of brotherhood (braterstwo) and sisterhood (siostrzeństwo) with the Polish nationals. Sahlins writes about kin as people who "lead each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths" (2008, 49). Thus, the claim to transnational kinship between the Polish and Ukrainian nations is a political claim to facing life and death together, in the present and in the future—as it is continuously emphasized that the war in Ukraine can physically spill into Polish territory. To conclude, I argue that "unsettling events" (Ryan and Kilkenny 2020), such as war, show that kinship is continuously relevant as a source of practical support and a symbol of unity in Eastern part of Europe, and that the politics of the Russo-Ukrainian war are simultaneously the politics of kinship.