The Heat of the Hearth

Janet Carsten offers a vivid and original investigation of the nature of kinship in Malaysia, based upon her own experience of life as a foster daughter in a family on the island of Langkawi. Kinship relations are crucial to personal and social identity, and in Malay culture identity is mutable and fluid: it is given at birth through ties of procreation, but it is also acquired throughout life by living together and sharing food. The author shows that the heat of the hearth is not only necessary for cooking and sharing food, but central to domestic life, including childbirth and reproduction. Kinship is a process not a state; people become kin largely through the everyday actions of women in and between households. The incorporation and assimilation of newcomers--`making kinship'--is central to the social reproduction of the village communities; domestic life is thus central to the political process. Janet Carsten gives the reader a fascinating `anthropology of everyday life', including a compelling view of gender relations; she urges reassessment of recent anthropological work on gender, and a new approach to the study of kinship.