Kinship as Friendship

Abstract

Siblingship and friendship have a paradoxical relationship. They are in one respect each other’s antipode, but they also share common sentiments of belonging and affection. To paraphrase the French poet Jacques Delille, fate chooses your siblings; you choose your friends. Friendship seems voluntary, siblingship ascribed. “[Friendship] … evades definition: the way in which friendship acts to express fixity and fluidity in diverse social worlds is exciting and problematic for the people that practice friendship and for the social scientists that study it” (Killick and Desai 2010: 1). Friendship has in common with marriage that it is a voluntary bond, but it “lacks religious and legal grounding, rendering the creation, maintenance, and dissolution of friendship an essentially private, negotiable endeavor” (Tillmann-Healy 2003: 731).