Sibling-Workshop: “Brother- and Sisterhood from an Anthropological Perspective”
From 5 November to 7 November 2009 Prof. Erdmute Alber and Prof. Sjaak van der Geest hold a BIGSAS workshop about siblings which took place at the castle of Thurnau. During this workshop, titled “Brother- and Sisterhood from an Anthropological Perspective”, sixteen scholars and PHD students discussed the presented papers about a variety of topics concerning siblings and their relations. The topics ranged from kinship as friendship in Ghana to the relation of brothers in north China or brother/sister incest discourses. The participants came from Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States.
After its heydays in the fifties of the previous century, kinship has been widely neglected in anthropology, until recently. We are now witnessing a new interest in kinship, but brothers and sisters, the longest kinship relationship in human life-cycle, have received very little attention in that kinship revival. This conference was an attempt to correct this oversight.
The conference was called 'workshop' because of its special character: there were no formal presentations of papers by the authors; the purpose was to discuss and exchange views. All participants had read the papers before the workshop. Authors had only five minutes to present themselves and raise one or two points concerning their paper. Two discussants then gave constructive brief comments about content and argument of the paper, which was followed by a general discussion of about 30 minutes.
In total ten papers were discussed in this way. They dealt with various aspects of brother- and sisterhood, in the present time as well as in the past. Fieldwork for the papers had been carried out in Ghana, Tajikistan, Benin, China, Burkina Faso, Germany, Namibia, and Mexico. Themes that came up, both in the papers and in the animated discussions, included love and affection as well as competition, conflict and avoidance among siblings, changing views on incest through history, fostering and siblinghood, siblinghood in fairytales, support of siblings in times of hardship, and the intergenerational role of siblinghood.
It is the aim of the conveners of the workshop to publish the best contributions in a special issue of an international journal.
Conference pictures: