Abstract:
People in Sateni, a village in northeastern Romania, express conflicting views about their relationships with relatives. On the one hand, kinship is seen as a moral bond demanding reciprocity and solidarity—values considered essential in a society marked by suspicion and low cooperation. On the other hand, many villagers lament conflicts with relatives they view as unreliable, deceitful, or exploitative.
Ethnographic evidence reveals that neamuri (kin) is a polysemic category encompassing individuals connected through descent, marriage, or ritual, each with varying moral obligations. However, people selectively acknowledge or disregard certain ties, treating kinship as a moral contract rather than a fixed status. Personal circumstances and structural tensions, such as partible inheritance disputes and family feuds, often lead to estrangement and willful amnesia. At the same time, other kinship ties may be revived or newly established based on shared long-term interests. The ”making” and ”unmaking” of kin are publicly and saliently reinforced through rituals and everyday interactions.
I argue that kinship in Sateni is a form of moral interdependence based on partner choice, reputation, and flexible rearrangement of commitments. Villagers strategically invoke the moral rhetoric of kin solidarity to present themselves as desirable social partners, elicit generosity from relatives, and discredit “bad” neamuri. Their deep concern with fairness in kin relationships reflects an effort to maintain cooperative alliances while avoiding exploitative interactions in an unpredictable and perilous social landscape.
 
Radu Umbreș is an anthropologist and associate professor at the National School of Political and Administrative Sciences in Bucharest. His research, based on PhD fieldwork at UCL, led to the publication of Living with Distrust: Morality and Cooperation in a Romanian Village (OUP, 2022), an ethnographic study of social interactions and cultural perceptions in a low-trust community. His work explores classical anthropological themes such as kinship, ritual, and social ontology through a naturalistic, interdisciplinary lens, drawing on insights from cognitive and evolutionary sciences.