In the last chapter, I began to examine the distinction between substance and code that is at the heart of David Schneider's analysis of American kinship. It can also be linked to a wider set of oppositions that are quite familiar in the anthropological study of kinship and beyond: the distinction between nature and culture, and between the biological and the social. As we saw, the deployment of these terms in anthropological analysis appears to have carried quite strong implications about the different nature of kinship in the West and “the rest.”

Schneider regarded the combinatory potential of substance and code as at the heart of what constituted a blood relative in American ideas (1980: 28). But it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the nature of this combination, and the work that both the separation and the combination of these elements do – both for indigenous ideas about kinship, and for their analysis by anthropologists. In this chapter, I focus on relationships that apparently have no basis in substance, but yet are couched in an idiom of “natural” ties – for example, adoptive ties, “fictive” kinship, and gay kinship. What is the force of casting such relations in a natural idiom? And what tensions are entailed in this kind of work of kinship?