Milk Kinship in Islam. Substance, Structure, History.

The article critically interrogates an influential theory of Françoise Héritier and her associates that purports to explain Islamic milk kinship as the symbolic product of a peculiar Arab folk-physiology of lactation whereby breastmilk is supposed to be transformed male semen. In Part One, this somatic conjecture is shown to be unsubstantiated by extant ethnographies of milk kinship in the Middle East and North Africa. Reviewing its legal and social histories in Part Two, I indicate that the common deployment of Islamic milk kinship to cement clientage between status unequals, excluding their marital alliance, conditioned its clerical reckoning and symbolic legitimation on analogy with natal kinship. Its similar recognition in eastern Christian canon law, together with its structural parallels in spiritual kinship, suggest broader comparative anthropological prospects for comprehending this culturally distinctive – but by no means unique – Islamic institution of adoptive affiliation and clientage.