Living kindness: Re-imagining kinship for a more humane future

Abstract

As environmental change and mass extinctions underline an urgent need to establish more humane relationships with non-human beings, there is a creative opportunity to reimagine concepts of kinship to promote the collective well-being of all living kinds. Anthropology draws on culturally diverse interspecies relations: some locate human and other species within distinctive and hierarchical categories, while others have more fluid and egalitarian notions of personhood. Engagements with non-human species therefore range from objectifying and exploiting them, to their acceptance as kin, as persons, and as reciprocal co-creative partners in the composition of shared lifeworlds. Though the concept of kinship is conventionally used to illuminate inter-human relations, this article suggests that it has further potential to raise key questions about how societies engage with non-human beings, and our ethical responsibilities towards them. These questions might usefully inform contemporary debates about non-human rights, and how these might be upheld by state and/or international legislation.