Kinship as Fiction: Exploring the Dynamism of Intimate Relationships in India

Bringing together emerging ethnographies on kinship in South Asia, this book explores the idea of kinship as ‘fiction’ in intimate relationships. Fictions and fictive kinship within anthropology are contested ideas.Increasingly, research suggests the idea of intimate relationships has to extend beyond the biological assumption of kinship relations.The idea of fiction is also not free from the biological imagination or the persistent dichotomy of nature-culture/nurture-nature.This edited volume resurrects the idea of fiction and fictive-ness to understand how intimate relationships may use these particular labels, translate into practices, or create an experiential understanding around relationships.The chapters in this book reengage the idea of fiction by exploring the ambiguity within household relationships, the process of making and engaging with a craft and skill, and the intricacies of making children through IVF and third-party involvement.They challenge societal norms of marriag