Agnates, neighbours, and friends: Variants of vicinage in Africa, Europe and America

Abstract

This paper develops the notion of vicinage (vicinality) in order better to describe how cohabiting as a process that launches personal ontogenesis is temporally prolonged onto later moments of the relational cycle by modes of relating that depend on continued identities – that is, the continuation in later periods of family life of the implications of the earlier experiences of constitutive intersubjectivity. The text compares three distinct social contexts. In each of them, the preference for specific forms of describing relations tends to reduce the plurality and complexity of the relations between persons, presenting them as relations of a specific kind. In turn, this allows for domestic relations to be grafted onto wider processes of political negotiation. Thus, in the case of the Chope of southern Mozambique, vicinal relations are predominantly presented as patrilineal bonds; in northern Portugal (Minho), as relations between households of neighbours within territorially delimited communities; in coastal Bahia (Brazil), as relations among friends.