Kinship Trouble: What, When, Where, Why, and How—and So What?

What is kinship trouble? When and where did it emerge? Why does it matter and how can we overcome it? These questions guide our discussion of kinship trouble, a term meant to capture the difficulties in reconstructing ancient kin relations, but also an attempt to resolve them through interdisciplinary collaboration and ethically adequate approaches. Motivated by the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries and the urgency of working together to understand human diversity in the past and present, we reconsider kinship not only as a biological or genetic but also as a social phenomenon for the study of societies through archaeogenetic, archaeological, and socio-cultural anthropological approaches. As to the question of how kinship trouble could be overcome, we propose making more ‘oddkin’ (sensu Haraway) to bring disciplines into the conversation and foster unexpected collaborations around three themes: ethical collaboration, the integration of biological and social approaches, and kinship studies as acts of care and (non)mutuality of being.