Siblingship beyond siblings? Cousins and the shadows of social mobility in the central Philippines

This article examines cousinship as a border zone that encompasses distance and intimacy, sameness and difference, and which mediates and is mediated by other kinship ties. It investigates how cousinship may bear traces of discord afflicting preceding generations; how it may further or augment them, or allow their repair; and how it is shaped by multiple and contending ideals. It does so in the context of social mobility in post‐1945 central Philippines. Integrating ‘old’ and ‘new’ kinship studies, it analyses cousinship beyond consanguineous marriages; revisits the paradigm of siblingship that has dominated the anthropology of kinship in Southeast Asia; and attends to how inequalities and enmities arise, and are absorbed, within kinship.