From kinship systems to kinwork and oddkin: a view from Scandinavia

Current social theory has moved away from treating kinship as a discrete system, instead embedding kinship in practices that produce and contest relations: kin-work. Yet archaeology still often deploys a model of kinship as normative cultural elaboration of biological descent. We explore late Iron Age bodies (bioarchaeology; burials) and houses from Scandinavia as evidence for politically-charged kin-work. In particular, we trace practices around food that simultaneously connected lives together, and subjected them to differences of power. These elements of kin-work are vital to understanding how elites related to one another; but they also suggest vital roles for subaltern and nonhuman bodies in kinship, something that has been underexplored in Scandinavian archaeology to date. Drawing on the biopolitics of food, diet and commemoration, we show that 1st millennium kinship was not a straightforward process of biological relation but a sometimes fraught process of contesting obligations, authority, and exclusion.