The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi (by Janet Carsten)

    Based on her time spent in Pulau Langkawi, Janet Carsten attempts to characterize kinship formations of Malay communities on the island, concluding that ideas of kinship form around “relatedness” that centers siblingship, and understands food, particularly the relational practice of feeding one another, and the physical house as life-possessing nourishment that reproduces and frames familial relationships. Carsten explains that women are central to ideas of the home, and the physical house, noting that when new houses are built, a process of reproduction itself that centers on the expansion of family through the birth of a new child, a senior woman, “‘the mother of the house’” (226) resides there as it is constructed. The womb is also understood as a home, the first a person has, framing the home as a life-possessing medium through which a person forms one of their first familial relations — a child to its mother. The womb is also the site of the central process of relatedness — feeding. Carsten observes an emphasis on the transfer of blood as defining the boundaries of kinship, and how blood as a substance is directly converted into food. Incestuous relationships are not defined just by biological reproductive connections, but by the act of breastfeeding. A relationship between two children who have consumed the breastmilk of the same woman, even if that woman is not biologically their mother, is seen as incestuous. Carsten explains that the placenta, the nutrient-giving organ, is seen as the unborn child’s sibling with whom they share a commensal relationship with, and it is ceremonially buried as a person might be after childbirth. She describes this as one of the many ways in which relatedness is framed around sibling sets in the Malay tradition. This connection between the home/house and feeding translates to life after birth as well, where physical houses in Langkawi are designed to center the hearth, the site of feeding. She also observes that relatedness is a continual process, not something solidified by birth or in childhood. Relatedness is constantly being produced and reproduced through different modes of feeding. Certain foods also hold reproductive significance — to feed a child heating foods, as opposed to cooling ones, is to imbue them with life-giving forces.

    The methodology of research conducted by Carsten follows a classic tradition of ethnography, in which the researcher spends an extended period of time with the cultural community they are studying. In Carsten’s case, she notes early on in the article that her stay spanned over an 18-month period, and then a subsequent four-month period. What I find interesting about this methodology is that the conclusions and distribution of this research seem like they would often be inaccessible to people of the communities studied, partly because they employ academic vocabulary in languages often non-native to these communities. So there is limited opportunity for those studied to critique or respond to conclusions made about them, a potential I find particularly interesting and also somewhat troubling as Carsten’s conclusions seem to rest largely on her interpretation of cultural beliefs and values, rather than merely contained to observations made on visible practices and traditions. Of course, this has to be done to some extent because she is interested in studying why kinship forms in the way it does. So when Carsten draws a link such as “the major contribution to blood is food” (224), she is not interested in medical validity, but instead in defining a cultural logic that is coherent with the worldview of this Malay community. She admits that exercising this interpretative power is part of her process in drawing some conclusions, noting at one point, “This argument implies that husband and wife also eventually come to share substance. While I have heard no direct statements to this effect, it seems to me entirely in accord with the logic of marriage…” (234).

    Carsten also mentions briefly a couple times that the Malay people in Langkawi are Muslims, but she does not really try to delineate what beliefs are related to Islam and what are particular to Malay culture that have preceded Islam. I don’t think Islam is that old compared to the cultural traditions of the Malay identity in Southeast Asia, though I’m not the most informed on the religion and its history. I wonder if any of what Carsten has observed is in conflict with notions of Islam in the ways in which it is practiced by the Malay community in Langkawi. And if there are conflicts, how those are navigated. For example, by the logic Carsten proposes, marriage between half siblings who were not born from or fed by the same mother is not explicitly prohibited. I wonder how an issue like that is resolved if at all. She does refer to breastmilk as defining the “prime category” (227) for incestuous relationships, suggesting there are other categories, though she does not specify.

    One last note, I think it’s interesting how this notion of becoming a full person relies on a continual, growing “relatedness” and connection to kin, while Western notions of adulthood often involve ideas of independence — separation makes one whole. Carsten doesn’t describe what actually occurs during the practice of commensality. In the Malay traditions she’s observed, is there a practice of oral storytelling during meals like often seen in the United States, producing another mode of familial bonding and relation?

QUOTES

“Both houses and food share many qualities with the people they contain or nourish; the boundaries between the container and the contained are at some levels unclear” (225).

“Shared blood is shared female substance; it is never paternal blood” (228).

“If a mother dies before giving her child her milk, then, before it leaves the house, the child should be given water cooked in the house hearth. This is the only possible substitute for the mother’s milk” (229).

QUESTIONS

Carsten notes that through her stay with her host family in Langkawi, she experienced a process of “becoming kin,” but promptly dismisses it as “another kind of story that [she] must tell elsewhere” (223). Should there be an expectation that cultural anthropologists acknowledge and reflect on the effects of their presence within the communities they are studying, how they might shift the dynamics of power in these spaces, and how their interpretive power might influence the conclusions they draw?

How might Carsten’s approach have changed if she decided to explore more deeply the relationship between the contemporary cultural beliefs surrounding kinship and the legacies of Islam’s introduction into this community? How might she separate what ideas were founded with Islam and what ideas preceded?