FICTIVE KIN: Camassia

...Turning people who aren't blood relations into relatives is an ancient and widespread practice, what anthropologists call "fictive kin." Though most of us have informal fictive kin, in the form of friends and mentors and whatnot, under the law there are only two ways to formalize it: 1) marriage and 2) legal adoption.

But other societies are not always so restrictive. Many had ways to create siblings, such as the Norse blood-brother ritual and the Eastern Orthodox brother- and sister-making ceremony. A recent book claimed that the latter was often a de facto gay marriage. That was controversial, but to me the more interesting point is that there was a way to create fictive kin that had nothing to do with procreation. Under current U.S. law, no such method exists. I gather you can do it piecemeal to fill some needs, through power of attorney and how you write your will and so on; but that generally requires a knowledge of the law that I don't have, and that few people do have. There's no simple, elegant way to do it, like marrying or adopting.

Why not? I can't think of a good reason. Probably just because the law traditionally assumed a basically kin-based society, where most of the important people in our lives would be related to us somehow. But today, of course, things have completely changed. My four-person family lives in four different states; I'm 32 and unmarried, and if I remain that way I could end up a single old lady with nobody left. So introducing a broader idea of fictive kinship seems like something I might have a vested interest in even though I'm straight.

After all, gay-marriage advocates argue convincingly that society should encourage commitment, whether or not it's procreative. Why, then, should we restrict formal commitment to sexual relationships at all? Shouldn't we encourage it in all its forms? An open next-of-kin option could cover a lot of different people -- friends, roommates, older couples past menopause, even groups of more than two (though it would make sense to restrict the number of people you could do it with).

With that non-procreative bond more clearly defined, the state could more narrowly define a body of law around couples who are actually procreating. Opponents of gay marriage generally argue that marriage law has traditionally been premised on the assumption of childbearing, not honoring a love match; and indeed, they're right. But legal marriage, even while still heterosexual, no longer maps very well to the people who are actually having babies. Many married couples don't have children, and many unmarried couples do. ...

...Right now we seem to be permanently mired in a dispute about what marriage is actually for -- procreation? benefits? commitment? official approval for a relationship? The reason we can't agree on that is that they are all locked up in only one legal institution. There was once a reason for that, but I don't think there is now.

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posted by Eve at 1:03 PM | link

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