Suspended Kinship and Youth Sociality in Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

This paper examines so-called fictive, or tropic, uses of cross-kin terms by college-going youth in Tamil Nadu, India. The paper shows how youth usages of cross-kin terms are motivated out of normative kinship practices, even as they decenter and suspend the semantic and pragmatic norms of such terms. Through such suspensions, forms of youth sociality and identity are performed. Such sociality and identity turn on the ability of tropes on cross-kin terms to distance their users from various hierarchies that youth associate with traditional adult respectability and propriety. At the same time, such practices inscribe new hierarchies of college year, region, class, and gender. The paper then turns to how such kinship appropriations and suspensions are linked to changing conceptions of kinship and practices of cross-kin marriage. The spread of such terms among college youth has gone along with a tendency among the upwardly mobile and urban to avoid using such terms within their kin groups and to avoid such marriages. The paper concludes with reflections on the interplay between normative and tropic kinship, arguing that focusing on the dialectics between kinship semantics and pragmatics, norm and trope, resolves certain impasses in the study of kinship.

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