The Seeds of Kinship Theory in the Abrahamic Religions
In the Abrahamic religions, Delaney suggests that all kinship is spiritual due to beliefs about procreation found in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures. The creative power of God is symbolically transferred to men in procreation. The male provides t
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The Seeds of Kinship Theory in the Abrahamic Religions Carol Delaney
I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore. (Genesis 22:17)
It may seem odd to begin a chapter about kinship with a biblical quotation. Yet, as will become clear, I believe that early kinship theory, unwittingly perhaps, developed from assumptions about gender, family, and kinship that are deeply embedded in the Bible. Although anthropologists have been trained to understand people in their cultural context, rarely have we analyzed how the Euro-American cultural context contributed to our theoretical frameworks. Since the nineteenth century, at least, when anthropology was beginning to emerge as a distinct intellectual discipline, religion and kinship were treated as separate areas of exploration—one had to do with the spiritual and the other with the natural and rarely did (or do) the twain meet. Yet for hundreds of years, even millennia, the
C. Delaney (*) Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA © The Author(s) 2017 T. Thomas et al. (eds.), New Directions in Spiritual Kinship, Contemporary Anthropology of Religion, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48423-5_11
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C. DELANEY
Euro-American world view, values, laws, and institutions, including family and kinship, were heavily influenced by the Bible. But because the biblical notions of family and kinship were assumed to be natural, obvious, and true, it was difficult for kinship theorists to gain perspective on their own, let alone very different kinship systems. This chapter, therefore, does not address spiritual kinship in the sense of what binds persons in community, as do several of the chapters in this volume. Nor do I address the contested issue of spiritual as “fictive” kinship versus biological “real” kinship. Instead, I am looking at the notion of kinship embedded in the texts (Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and the Qur’an) and some of the practices of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and suggest that it is simultaneously spiritual and natural in its founding assumptions, specifically the meanings of father and mother. These are not simply equivalent terms for male and female parent; one represents the spiritual element in procreation, the other the natural and their hierarchical order has had social consequences. Mine is a more theoretical and critical project than ethnographic though I do include material from my fieldwork in Turkey. The above quotation from Genesis occurs directly after Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son at God’s command. Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, who thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. (Genesis 22:2)
Several things need to be noted at once: (1) in the biblical story, Isaac is not Abraham’s only son, his first born was Ismail, conceived by Hagar, a handmaid to Sarah, his wife. Although Ismail is rarely mentioned in the Qur’an,
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