Kinship

Practice, the fifth volume in the Kinship series, takes up a question that is easy to ask and hard to answer: what do we actually do, every day and over a whole life, to become kin? The series starts from the view that we are bound up in a web of relations with other people and with nonhuman beings alike, from the microbes living in our guts to the trees that release the oxygen we breathe. For many cultures, the book notes, being human grows out of this wider sense of family.

The Kinship series, subtitled Belonging in a World of Relations, runs to five volumes: Planet, Place, Partners, Persons and Practice. Across them, more than seventy contributors offer essays, interviews, poems and stories about how people and other living things depend on one another. Among the writers are Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, David Abram, J. Drew Lanham and Sharon Blackie. Their pieces lead readers through different cosmologies, personal narratives and ordinary encounters that treat the more-than-human world as deserving of care and accountability. Together the many voices show that there is more than one way to become a better kin.

This volume approaches kinship from three angles: the recognition that nonhuman beings are persons, an ethics centered on kin, and the idea that kinship is a verb, something sustained through active and continuing participation. Its essays and poems consider the relationships people tend and build as part of how they live ethically. Maya Ward, a creative writer and dance teacher, weaves together landscape, story, song and the moving body. Tiokasin Ghosthorse, a Lakota peace activist, considers language as a way of knowing and of practicing kinship. Amba Sepie, a cultural geographer, asks how a person can become kin once ancestral ties have weakened.

The book closes with a wide-ranging conversation among John Hausdoerffer, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Sharon Blackie, Enrique Salmon, Orrin Williams and Maria Isabel Morales about the many forms kinship practices take and the qualities they carry.

Proceeds from sales support the Center for Humans and Nature, a nonprofit that does not take partisan sides. The Center works with thinkers from many fields, including philosophers, ecologists, artists, political scientists, anthropologists, poets and economists, to examine what people owe one another and the more-than-human world, and to imagine a resilient future for all living things.