The Marett Memorial Lecture 2025

On Whiteness: kinship, care and the racialisation of welfare

Professor Laura Bear (LSE)

As critical race and queer studies scholars have argued whiteness structures intimate and global inequalities. Yet anthropologists of English kinship have elided the relevance of colonialism and nationalism to care, pedigree, memorialisation and belonging. This contributes to a broader silence about racialisation in the anthropology of the UK and a lack of engagement with critical race theories generated from within UK Imperial histories. Most significantly it means that anthropology cannot fully account for, and contest, the contemporary racialisation of welfare.

This talk examines two important moments in the racialisation of kinship and care. One is the repatriation of destitute ‘Eurasians’ from the UK in the early twentieth century and the links of this to contemporary ancestry online platforms that erase colonial connections. The second is the necropolitics of ‘care’ for minoritized groups, who were seen to have dangerous forms of kinship during Covid-19 in the UK. Overall it calls for a theoretical approach to racialisation focussed on the biomoral that draws on Fanon’s concepts of sociodiagnosis and transmutation. It also suggests anthropological methods that deploy group practices of sociotherapy. Finally it turns to the imagination of new forms of welfare that are restitutive and care-work based.

All welcome!