The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood, and Relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi Author(s): Janet Carsten Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 22, No. 2 (May, 1995), pp. 223-241 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/646700 Accessed: 13-06-2019 16:28 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms American Anthropological Association, Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Ethnologist This content downloaded from 130.236.88.96 on Thu, 13 Jun 2019 16:28:10 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms the substance of kinship and the heat of the hearth: feeding, personhood, and relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi JANET CARSTEN-University of Edinburgh This article describes how, for Malays on the island of Langkawi, feeding (in the sense of receiving as well as giving nourishment) is a vital component in the long process of becoming a person and participating fully in social relations. The process begins with conception and birth; it continues through feeding and through growing and living together in the house; it involves marriage and the birth of new children; and it is only in a limited sense completed when adult men and women become grandparents.