Suckling: Kinship More Fluid

by Fadwa El Guindi

A ground-breaking ethnographic study of suckling in the Arabian Gulf , this book reenergises the study of kinship. It analyses the misunderstood and marginalized phenomenon of suckling drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Qatar over a seven-year period. Fadwa El Guindi situates suckling (often given other names or subsumed under misleading classifications) squarely in the analytical category of kinship, with recognition that kinship is necessarily biological, societal and cultural. The volume takes kinship study beyond origins, nature-culture debates, and social nurturing and relatedness, and challenges claims of deterministic, reductionist formulas. As well as key reading for those involved in milk kinship research, this book is valuable for anthropologists, Middle East scholars and others with an interest in breastfeeding, family and social organisation, and religion.

154 pages, Hardcover

Published February 26, 2020

About the author

Fadwa El Guindi is an Egyptian-born in 1941 professor of anthropology with a PhD in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin (1972).[1] At present she is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Qatar University in Doha, Qatar, as well as head of the department of social sciences.

El Guindi graduated from the American University in Cairo, with a BA in Political Science. She worked at the Social Research Centre and participated in the first full-scale ethnographic project to study the way of life of the Nubians of Egypt prior to their government-sponsored relocation due to the building of the Aswan Dam.[1]

In 1986, she made the film El Sebou': Egyptian Birth Ritual, which was sponsored by the Office of Folklife Programs at the Smithsonian Institution. She also guest-starred as Julian Bashir's mother, Amsha Bashir, in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?", opposite Siddig El Fadil and Brian George.[2]
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