The study of kinship across Oceania has long recognised that social relationships in the region can be highly mobile in nature, often encompassing great distances or multiple countries. At the same time, much of this scholarship emphasises the work people do to maintain ‘traditional’ forms of kinship in the face of migration, displacement, and the effects of historical or ongoing colonial domination. Even as those forms adapt continuously to meet new demands, the canonical idea of social reproduction through descent and marriage is still the one most often imagined by academics, policymakers, and media voices when they talk about the resilience and importance of Pacific families. This panel turns instead to the other forms of social connection on which people in many Pacific contexts are increasingly reliant, sometimes in parallel with ‘traditional’ family structures, and sometimes in lieu of families that have proven not to be so resilient after all, or whose demands and expectations outweigh any support they might provide. These connections are often formed in spaces where people’s presence is transient, such as schools, sports teams, military bases, mining or seasonal workers’ camps. Or they may be spaces with more longevity but that are marginal in nature, such as informal peri-urban settlements, community groups too small to be on the radars of NGOs or government bodies, and networks of LGBT people who seek safety and resource-sharing with each other in some of the more conservative nations of the Pacific. The panel welcomes considerations of what these marginal or highly mobile affinities imply, not only for their expansive potential in discussing what Pacific kinship is in the present era, but also for creating an opportunity to make visible those social connections that support people’s mutual flourishing, but may have nothing to do with ‘kinship’ at all.
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