Turning newcomers into locals: Kinship practices and belonging in low-income neighborhoods in Finland

Abstract

For a long time, researchers have explored practices of kinship, but while focusing on individuals and groups, have ignored a crucial aspect of social life: place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in low-income neighborhoods in Finland, this article analyzes practices of kinship as emplaced, asking what kinship in a particular urban setting does and how. Empirical data suggests that the social function of kinship practices is to make people belong to a neighborhood. The process of becoming family provides emotional and practical support but is also beneficial in previously understudied ways: For newcomers, kinship is a shortcut for becoming “a local,” whereas for established residents, kinship serves the reproduction of the historical place narrative and local moral order. As meaningful sources of respect and recognition, kinship practices connect people to families but even more to places in which they live.

Introduction

Manufacturing a social tie of kinship is an effective process through which acquaintances, even total strangers, can become close. Calling someone “Grandma” or “my son” or claiming someone “belongs to the family” is a powerful way of saying that a person is a legitimate member of a group—that she or he belongs. Wirth noted in (1938) that the ineffectiveness of actual kinship ties in modern urban contexts encourages people to create what he calls “fictional kinship groups” (23). Social ties described in kinship terms, as Tonkiss (2005: 24) puts it, “rely on the imaginative, emotional and political work of maintaining the fiction; on people honoring for itself a bond they have in fact invented.”

For a long time, sociologists have recognized the functions that practices of kinship serve, but mainly on an individual level. Social ties described in kinship terms have been recognized as constituting a meaningful part of social networks that provide individuals material, economic and social support, especially in times of need. At the collective level, scholars have argued that kinship practices serve as resources contributing to social support and control. Incorporation of unrelated individuals into an extended family network helps communities mitigate alienation and social disorganization and enhance community solidarity (Ebaugh and Curry, 2000).

However, these approaches have failed to address a significant factor in social life: place. Although sociologists have long noted that kinship practices provide resources that help people make it from 1 day to the next, they have paid surprisingly little attention to the fact that practices of “doing” kin depend on groups with collective pasts and futures that are spatially situated. Thus, a meso-level analysis (Fine, 2010) that understands human action and interpretation as deeply emplaced has yet to be employed in scholarship exploring the use of kinship. In this article, I aim to fill this gap by examining kinship practices as emplaced practices that exist in and through place. As Nelson (2013: 260) states, becoming “like-family” is a process in which “an individual designates some non-kin individual (or individuals) in their social worlds.” In the following, I trace the process of becoming related, fusing on “the importance of local context in constituting social worlds” (Fine, 2010: 355).

The article offers an ethnographic description of kinship practices in low-income neighborhoods as practices of belonging. Empirical data suggests that becoming family is a kind of shortcut for becoming “a local” in an environment where the process otherwise might take years, even decades, and where the distinction between established and recently arrived residents might be a source of conflict and suspicion. The context of Finland—a Nordic welfare country, where social support systems are extensive, and people can rely on the state to secure their basic necessities—allows me to look beyond the common understanding of the use of kinship in low-income neighborhoods merely as strategies for surviving material hardship.

First, I discuss my approach to the practices of kinship and their functions in low-income neighborhoods. Then, I introduce the research setting and describe how “ethnographic kinship” (Jauregui, 2017: 77) helped me gain access to the field and pay attention to the emplaced practices of kinship that appeared to flourish in the two study field sites. Then, in the analysis, I follow the process of forming a kinship relationship between an established community member, Maija ¹ , and the Lehikoinen family, who arrive in the neighborhood as outsiders, but soon are made family. The analysis focuses on the emplaced nature of the relationship, showing how everybody benefited from the arrangement, albeit in different ways. Finally, I conclude by reflecting on the study results, emphasizing the use of kinship as a catalyst for neighborhood belonging and a source of recognition in low-income neighborhoods.

Kinship practices in low-income neighborhoods

Scholarship on kinship has relied on many different terms when exploring the processes of becoming family. Social scientists have talked about pseudo-kin (Liebow, 2003), fictive kin (Chatters et al., 1994; Ebaugh and Curry, 2000; Kim, 2009), chosen kin (Weston, 1991) and voluntary kin (Braithwaite et al., 2010) relationships. These concepts refer to “made” (Carsten, 2004: 141), “family-like” relations connecting people who are not related by the “usual” practices of blood, marriage and adoption (Nelson, 2013: 259). However, a growing body of literature has criticized the use of terms that tend to recreate a division between the “biological” and “social,” arguing that most classifications suggest “made” kinship relations are somehow less real or important than relations that are a product of either “biology” or “marriage” (Braithwaite et al., 2010; Weston, 1991).

In this article, I draw on recent approaches to kinship that have emphasized doing over being, stressing “the importance of processual and performative ways of becoming kin” (Carsten, 2020: 321). In these perspectives, the focus is turned from attempts to categorize social ties and understand their essential nature to creative practices of doing relatedness (see Carsten, 2020; McKinnon, 2016). For some, the term “kinship” also carries too much baggage as it so unavoidably implies the defining role of biology. Carsten (2000), for example, concluded that a better analytical tool would be “relatedness,” guiding us to see a spectrum of possibilities of relating rather than being stuck in either/or dichotomies. I believe the critique is justified, but nevertheless, I talk about kinship as it echoes the lived relations and experiences of the people this article aims to describe.

Andrikopoulos and Duyvendak (2020: 303) also note that in many studies of social relations in cross-cultural settings, categories of “fictive” and “real” have merely been projections of researchers’ own understandings of kinship, rather than analytical concepts reflecting people’s own experiences. Scholars note that the term “fictive” is rarely used when discussing relationships of support among those who are White or middle class (Nelson, 2014), while the research tradition has documented the use of kinship mainly among the unemployed and the working poor in ethnic minority neighborhoods (Aschenbrenner, 1973; Chatters et al., 1994; Kane, 2000; Pattillo, 1998; Stack, 1974). In these studies, relationships described in kinship terms are represented as one form of social tie illustrating the different kinds of close, extended and spatially proximate family (-like) ties. In urban sociology, one of the most acknowledged works dealing with this question is Stack’s (1974) pioneering ethnography All Our Kin: Survival in a Black Community. Stack (1974: 40) documents the relationships of support in an African American neighborhood she calls “the Flats,” describing how kin and “non-kin who…conduct their relations within the idiom of kinship” help one another survive. As Nelson (2014: 205) notes, along the same lines as Stack, most of the current literature argues that the use of kinship is a way to enlarge the number of individuals from whom one might hope to obtain social support. Practices of kinship are approached as innovative and strategic forms of relationships that help people get by and overcome the daily struggles of material hardship. This approach, however, is less useful if we want to understand the use of kinship in an urban setting that differs from the findings of previous urban ethnographies. To understand kinship practices in the context of a Nordic welfare country and predominantly White neighborhoods, one needs to look beyond the obvious explanation and ask why people do kinship despite their relatively high standard of living.

My research focuses on urban residents without an ethnic minority background and is conducted in settings where different forms of exchange cannot be claimed to be absolutely necessary for survival. In Finland, welfare provisions are strong, and the Nordic welfare model has substantially decreased income inequalities (Hänninen et al., 2019; Kangas and Kvist, 2018; OECD 2021). Thus, the simple answer to Desmond’s (2012) question regarding how the urban poor survive is with the help of the state. Although residents of low-income neighborhoods experience scarcity, they do not necessarily need their neighbors in order to obtain basic necessities, such as food and clothing, shelter and safety. Thus, it would be an oversimplification to say that practices of kinship exist only because people are “down and out” (Nelson, 2013: 265).

To expand the analysis, I follow Desmond’s (2012) work on disposable ties among the urban poor, based on which he encourages us to ask what social ties do, instead of asking what they are. Rather than asking how social ties described in kinship terms can be defined and how they differ from other relationships (such as those that are claimed as clearly family or friendship), my research is informed by a more pragmatic approach asking for what purposes kinship relationships are formed (Desmond, 2012: 1329). From these standpoints, I consider practices of kinship in low-income neighborhoods as practices signifying belonging. More than a means of helping people to get food and have a roof over their heads, kinship practices are understood as a means of making newcomers locals and to make them belong. The impact of newcomers settling into the life of the established part of the population is a major theme in urban ethnographies that tends to place a lot of weight on difference and conflict. To date, studies have suggested that the distinction between the newly arrived and the “established” (“outsiders” and “insiders”) is a social process requiring imagination and boundary work to be produced and maintained (Blokland, 2001; Elias and Scotson, 1965). In this article, I suggest the opposite, showing that practices of imagining and narrating are employed not only to keep people out but also to take them in.

Previous researchers commonly observed that in a rapidly changing world, long-time residents in low-income neighborhoods often feel that their place has been transformed so much that their feeling at home is threatened (Kasinitz and Hillyard, 1995). In these circumstances, as Duyvendak (2011: 30) notes, “feeling at home” increasingly comes to depend on the behavior of others who move into what was until then a familiar neighborhood. Based on collected ethnographic data, I argue that “the processual and performative ways of becoming kin” (Carsten, 2020: 321) have yet to be investigated from this perspective. If one needs a particular place to feel like home, or to feel like “one’s family” (Duyvendak, 2011: 30), it is hard to imagine a better strategy for enhancing and sustaining this feeling than making newcomers kin. Nevertheless, very few studies up to now have examined how the framing of social ties in terms of kinship come to indicate belonging to a particular place (but see Baumann, 1995; Edwards and Strathern, 2000; Nave, 2016). This article attempts to fill this research gap by exploring how residents with strong historical attachments to a place (see Duyvendak, 2011: 23; Savage et al., 2010) form kinship ties with newcomers, turning them into locals–even if just for the time being.

Setting the scene

The analysis of the events discussed in this article was produced as part of my ethnographic project examining social life in two low-income, social rental housing neighborhoods in Finland (Junnilainen, 2019). In the study, I investigated what it means to live in neighborhoods that, in the 1960s, were burgeoning areas for working-class families but have now become places of concentrated disadvantage. Both neighborhoods resemble each other in socioeconomic status: high levels of unemployment, low levels of education, high benefit dependency, and high levels of families headed by single mothers. Around 75–85% of the population are ethnic Finns, but in a country that for a long time has remained relatively homogeneous in terms of ethnic composition, even a small ethnic minority presence in urban space engenders stigmatization (Jensen and Christensen, 2012: 83). In Finland, homeownership is also the norm, and social rental housing has been perceived as a solution for failed citizens, resulting in stigmatization of the neighborhoods and their residents (Junnilainen, 2020).

For 5 years beginning in 2012, I engaged in everyday activities in the Steephill and Fireweed Village neighborhoods. Both high-rise neighborhoods are located in two of the biggest cities in Finland, approximately 7 km from the cities’ centers. While in the field, I examined patterns of interactions in the courtyards, cafes, pubs, supermarkets, libraries, schools, youth centers, community centers and other places where locals spent their time. In homes, I drank endless cups of coffee at kitchen tables and on living room couches, talking with the inhabitants. I also followed the functions of various neighborhood organizations and associations, and I attended dozens of public meetings. Throughout the fieldwork period, I went to neighborhood events and festivities and volunteered at festivals, a cooking course for local young people and a cafeteria that hired people recovering from substance abuse. During the course of my fieldwork, I came to know a large number of people, most of whom I became familiar with within these contexts.

In this article, I describe how Maija, one of my key informants, built a tie of kinship with the Lehikoinen family. Milla and Erik Lehikoinen were a young couple who moved to Fireweed Village with their newborn son. They were unfamiliar with the neighborhood, but in no time became locals, as Maija “made” them her kin. Maija was a cheerful, purple-haired lady in her 60s who had lived in Fireweed Village for 40 years. She shared a household with her youngest granddaughter, Sanni, whose mother had died when she was a baby. Sanni’s father was raising her and her siblings together with his mother, who lived on the same street several blocks away. Sanni switched between the houses of her father and granny when she wanted but most nights slept on a couch in Maija’s living room. Maija and her family were important connections for me, introducing me to their neighbors, friends—and practices of kinship.

I did not set out systematically to examine kinship. My areas of interest were elsewhere, but what so often happens in ethnographic research happened: I discovered processes that surprised me and forced me to deal with what Becker (1996: 56) calls “surprise data,” things I did not ask about but was told anyway. In fact, I came across practices and processes of becoming kin at a very early stage of my research, although at the time I thought of it only as a funny coincidence. Eetu, one of my key informants in Steephill, “made” me family by imagining that I was a distant relative of one of the acknowledged local families. Eetu was a big loud man of around 60. He was a retired handyman who had settled in Steephill after a restless and mobile early adulthood. He said that the place had provided him a home and family he never had. “We are one family,” he used to claim when he talked about the neighborhood, making a conceptual link between place and family (see Nave, 2016). For him, the claim “we are family” was commonly used shorthand to refer to residents’ shared societal position, the feeling of communality and a sense of solidarity in the face of outsiders’ assumed stigmatizing perceptions of the neighborhood and the people living in it.

I got to know Eetu almost immediately after entering the field in Steephill. After I had known him for a few weeks, during which he decided to accept the presence of me and my notebook, my family name emerged. “Junnilainen! Are you kidding me? You belong to the Junnilainen family!” he exclaimed. At that moment, Eetu made me one of the locals, as he decided that I was related to the Junnilainen family who had lived in Steephill for decades and was identified as a “real” Steephill name (Edwards and Strathern, 2000: 151). The head of the family had been stabbed to death in his own bed, so the family name was locally recognized, calling for respect. Junnilainen is not a particularly rare last name in Finland, and as far as I know, there was no link between my family and the family in Steephill. However, the lack of proof of my kinship was not a problem. What mattered was that my patronym connected me to the place to which, otherwise, I would not have been connected. I was an educated woman working at the university: good at reading books but terrible at snooker, a popular pastime in local youth centers and pubs. Thus, the process of making me one of the locals was a convenient way of making me a “real Steephiller” and effacing the fact that I was a researcher working on a book about the people with whom I was spending my time. Family, as we know, means people you can trust, even in the case of a metaphor (Weston, 1991).

In the urban ethnography A Place on the Corner, Anderson (2003: 21) describes how his informant Herman told everybody that he and Anderson “went for cousins.” The use of the kinship term signified their close friendship, securing Anderson’s right to be in the liquor store he wanted to explore. The same process of what Jauregui (2017: 77) calls ethnographic kinship is present, for example, in Nave’s (2016) research on relatedness in Ghanaian neighborhoods of Kumasi, where she describes how her informant begins to “take” her as a sibling and call her “sister”. Similarly, having the same last name as one of the locally famous families in Steephill mitigated the stony path of entering the field. Eetu had a habit of asking other residents whether they already knew me. If they did not, he acted surprised, saying, “Really, you don’t know her,” as if there was something wrong with the other person in the conversation. Then, he mentioned my last name in passing, saying I likely was related to the Junnilainen family. I used to resist and explain the situation, but it never really made any difference. Apart from me, nobody refused to accept the tie, even if they knew it was imagined. As I emphasized my role as a researcher and the unlikelihood of my relatedness to the local family, Eetu raised his eyebrows, looked at his audience and stated, “Her father was born in the eastern region of Finland where the Junnilainen family originates.” Everybody nodded approvingly, as if collectively deciding to accept the evidence.

It took me time to realize that the strategy of making me belong to Steephill by doing kin was, in fact, illustrating patterns of interaction present in both neighborhoods of my study. During my fieldwork, I encountered frequent situations in which strangers were made locals in a similar way. Recognizing and analyzing the process of my ethnographic kinship helped me understand how these emplaced practices of kinship worked. It seemed to me that imagining, narrating and performing kin was a recognizable practice of belonging. I now turn to my empirical observations in Fireweed Village, describing how the Lehikoinen family became kin with Maija, and how they all valued and needed the special bond, if for different reasons.

The Lehikoinen family: Becoming real villagers

When Milla and Erik Lehikoinen moved to Fireweed Village, they were new parents and had no social contacts in the neighborhood. They knew nobody. Milla never wanted to move to the neighborhood in the first place. She had passed it several times and had always perceived it as a “shithole” she would never want to live in. However, after they had left the hospital and brought their newborn home to a basement apartment in a rundown house, it no longer seemed to be a suitable place to raise a baby. The house was freezing, and the water pipes froze, leaving the family without running water. The couple had no option but to try to find a new home they could afford. Erik was a truck driver but was out of work at that moment. Milla had been taking shifts as a waitress or a cleaner but was now at home with the baby. After looking for alternatives, she agreed to see a vacant place in Fireweed Village. The apartment was nice, clean and warm. Milla thought that the neighborhood did not look as bad as it had from a distance, so she decided to give it a chance. The family moved in immediately.

The couple’s new neighbors marveled at their son Kaapo, who was a cute white-haired baby. One of his biggest fans was Maija, an old lady who lived on the same staircase. From the early morning until the evening, Maija was astir at her duties in the neighborhood. She walked to the laundry room and back, went to see a neighbor she had promised to help with something, visited her son who lived a few blocks away or went to the grocery store. Frequently, she was accompanied by her granddaughter Sanni. It was impossible not to bump into the pair, who always stopped to babble to the boy, making him smile. By the following summer, familiar relations between the two families had developed. Sanni had always wanted a little sister of her own, so she visited Milla and Erik to entertain the baby. Maija determinedly inquired how the young family was doing, not giving them a chance to withdraw into the private realm of their home. By showing interest in the newcomers’ welfare, she provided them opportunities to become engaged in what Nave (2016) calls ethical acts of kinship: reciprocal help and the sharing of chores and personal problems that engender trust, solidarity and respect. Milla and Erik, for their part, accepted the friendly gestures and helpfulness of their neighbors, as their care made the couple feel welcome. Until Milla got pregnant, they had lived a mobile life, moving for work and adventure. They had been working abroad, offshore and on the road, living not rooted but en route (Blokland, 2017: 1), without a need to identify with certain places. However, their life situation had changed, which, combined with only a few short-distance and close social ties, made them receptive to new acquaintances.

Eventually, the relationship between the two families changed from neighbors to kin. Before the summer, Sanni was known as the baby boy’s “big sister” and Maija as his “granny.” The families began exchanging goods and services, helping each other in times of need. When Sanni struggled with English at school and was in danger of failing her exams, Milla tutored her weekly. Erik helped Maija with small household repairs.

One of the defining elements of kinship relationships is the experience of closeness. Becoming “relatives” means that the distance between two people shortens compared to what it would be in terms of another category, such as neighbors. Based on work on people struggling with poverty, Desmond (2012) implies that the process of creating “family-like” relationships is one of the ways people unfamiliar with each other are able to establish meaningful and intimate social ties within a short period of time. As Desmond (2012: 1315) explains, people decide to “play kin” to uphold the illusion that the ties connecting them are more established than in actuality. Thus, forming a tie of kin is a radical way of people coming together by emphasizing what they have in common while overlooking their differences. As Maija and the Lehikoinen family became as close as if they were connected by blood, they agreed to follow the implicit rules of the game we call “the family”: being on the same side, acting on behalf of the common good and defending each other in time of need. Everybody benefited from this arrangement, albeit in slightly different ways.

Maija provided the Lehikoinen family with practical and emotional support as she became the neighbor—or rather, the “granny”—they relied on. Following Lofland (1998: 10), their interaction was now more than “parochial” because it existed in the private realm, that is, the world of the household and kin network. Whereas individuals who treat each other “as neighbors” engage in practices of neighboring (they greet each other, practice neighborly helpfulness and even provide proactive care), individuals who treat each other “as family” engage in support and love that is much more unconditional and far-reaching (Kusenbach, 2006). When Milla told me about her relationship with Maija, she used to say that she knew she could always knock on Maija’s door at all times, even at night. In the same way as in Baumann’s (1995) research, kinship bonds made Maija a “special kind” of neighbor one could trust and turn to. Milla felt that she was able to show Maija her life as it was: Fatigue with the baby, fights with her husband and anxieties related to money worries and diseases were part of the relationship binding the two families together.

Thus, a kinship relationship appeared to be an effective form of social connectedness that provided support in the Lehikoinen family’s immediate living environment. Relatives who lived farther away might have played an important role in the couple’s lives, but their possibilities to provide daily presence and care were limited. Neighbors were present, but following the rules for neighboring, engaged in parochial interaction rather than intimacy and closeness (Kusenbach, 2006). The welfare state, as vital as it was in providing institutional structures and economic support, appeared “faceless” and quite literally had no door to knock on. Neither the welfare state nor the neighbors and relatives were able to provide safety, support and recognition the way Maija did. Her door was always open.

However, emotional support was not all the Lehikoinen family gained from the relationship. It also strengthened their feeling at home as they became attached to the place that first had felt unfamiliar, undesirable and repulsive. The development of familiarity that is so fundamental to feeling at home, and normally takes time (Duyvendak, 2011: 37), happened rapidly, as Milla and Erik quite concretely were “welcomed as family” (Kim, 2009: 498). Maija told Milla and Erik stories about the neighborhood and representations of the past, which—as Borer (2006: 186) notes—might even be more real than “the raw data of facts” because they are “directly chosen, felt, told and retold.” Maija taught the couple how to navigate the neighborhood and what to expect, when and from whom (Tavory, 2016), introducing the codes of local life to them. Milla and Erik began to understand the categorizations of “originals,” “locals” and those who for one reason or another did not belong. The couple learned whom to trust and whom to avoid, as Maija informed them about the local gossipers and “crazies.” As the two families became kin, the Lehikoinen family was repeatedly provided models of who and how one should be in the local context (Brown-Saracino, 2015: 41); they were encouraged to align themselves with what Maija used to call “the way we do things around here.” This way, as Nave (2016: 833) suggests, kinship practices reproduced an ethical framework of common expectations about what constitutes good ways to live with other people in a particular context.

The narrative of Fireweed Village that Maija passed on to Milla and Erik became the interpretive frame through which they understood the neighborhood, evaluated others and made sense. Place became a wellspring of identifications, drawn upon to decide who they were (Gieryn, 2000). Over the course of years, I interviewed Milla and Erik repeatedly. After they had been living in Fireweed Village for a while, I asked them how they perceived the neighborhood. Erik told me he loved the place that was his home now, and nothing could make him move elsewhere. When I asked him to tell me why, he drew on the historically informed narrative embraced by Maija and other long-time residents. “Work is gone, but we [the residents] will not fold. This is a good place. I want my kids to grow up in an environment where nobody looks down on you.”

For Milla and Erik, Fireweed Village had changed from a stigmatized, decayed social rental housing neighborhood to a place of equality and acceptance, as everybody shared the same class status, and nobody owned more than others. Their place of residence was no longer a compulsion; rather, it was their choice to live in a neighborhood of good people and solidarity. The practices of kinship had shaped their conception of the neighborhood and transformed them from outsiders into valued and accepted members of the community. Milla, who had been very suspicious of moving to the neighborhood, had also adopted the narrative of place, concurrently becoming an advocate for Fireweed Village. As noted by Brown-Saracino (2015), place narratives are not only about how people draw on the narrative but also how narratives act on people as they become part of the narratives. To explain what she thought about Fireweed Village, Milla imagined if she had the money to live wherever she wanted:

This place is like a village. I really, really want to live here. If I win the lottery, I could imagine considering buying a small farm or so. But on second thought, the place is so ideal for the kids….I guess I wouldn’t leave anyhow.

Maija: Protecting the vanishing core of the village

“She’s not a person you can trust,” Maija insisted every time Erik socialized with the Fireweed Village landlord. Erik had been a workplace steward and participated in various associations. After familiarizing himself with the neighborhood, he had concluded that it needed a person who could speak for the community as a whole. In private, he told me about his plans to harness his experiences as a mediator for the good of the area: “There is so much unnecessary discord…Not sure why, but I’m convinced that improving communication between the owners and us (the tenants) would make life easier for us all.”

However, Maija was not excited about the idea of changing the patterns of interaction between the residents and the landlord. She told Erik that they had always been at loggerheads about how to develop the neighborhood, and there was nothing they could do about it. “Landlords don’t get us. Sooner or later, you’re gonna learn this, too,” she told Erik. Then she colored her claim with stories of the present and all the previous landlords with whom she, along with her neighbors, had struggled. For her, the working-class past of the neighborhood was a meaningful part of the local place narrative (see Junnilainen, 2020), and an alternative future in which tenants and landlords would co-operate threatened the idea of the village as she knew it. When the landlord organized a residents’ evening, to announce that a new recreation park was being planned, Maija interpreted the plan for the Lehikoinen family as one of the landlord’s stratagems for ruining “our neighborhood”. For Maija, the designed park that was featured as space for rest and recreation was evidence of how those who were well-off were unable to understand working-class residents’ real needs.

On another occasion, it took days before a janitor arrived to fix a leaking water pipe in the Lehikoinen family’s kitchen, and Maija told them it was because the landlord had decided to cut maintenance costs at the expense of the residents. For a while, Erik tried to mitigate, convincing Maija that nobody surely intended to do harm on purpose, but soon he had to choose a side. The more he criticized the landlord’s behavior, the more he belonged to Maija’s neighborhood and the narrative, both describing and reproducing it. When Erik began calling the landlord “a princess,” a nickname Maija and her peers had given the landlord to underlie her class position as someone representing supercilious outsiders with more wealth and power but less knowledge of “real life”, Maija was satisfied. “That’s what we call her,” she said approvingly. This way, the family metaphor and the behavior it promoted, as previous studies have demonstrated (Kim, 2009; Nave, 2016), helped stabilize the situation by reconciling conflicting interests and promoting co-operation.

The vignettes above also illustrate the role acts of kinship played in Maija’s life, in particular. Her relationship with the Lehikoinen family provided her both practical and emotional support, but the fact was that she already had a stable network of reliable kin and friends on whom she could count. There was little empty space in Maija’s life that she would have needed to fill with new relatives. Thus, rather than a strategy for surviving material hardship or a shortage of social relationships, for her, acts of kinship were a method by which she could effectively integrate newcomers into existing local hierarchies and power structures (see Nave, 2016). I have shown elsewhere that in Fireweed Village the defining element of the place narrative that informed locals’ understandings of themselves and their relations to others was class struggle: What was understood to distinguish the residents from outsiders was their societal position and the space that was classed as belonging to them (Junnilainen, 2020). According to this narrative, the relationship between the residents and the landlord echoed the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressors, and it was in Maija’s interest to reproduce the confrontation.

As Strathern (1981: 274) notes, “every village has its vanishing core of real villagers,” and as Day (2006: 166) further recognizes, this core is vanishing, because “in a mobile society the more closely the core is equated to those whose ties to the village are fixed forever, the smaller this core is destined to become over time.” In Fireweed Village, Maija belonged to the core group of relatively permanent inhabitants, whose lives were rooted in place: women and men who had raised their children in the area, seen their neighborhood change and witnessed its ups and downs. They were insiders who knew their neighbors and were known by them. However, instead of being a homogeneous village, Fireweed Village was just as heterogeneous, unstable and dynamic as a any urban neighborhood. From Maija’s point of view, life in her village was constantly changing: Old neighbors died or left the area, and new neighbors were total strangers, many of whom came from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Every day made it more difficult for her to sustain the memory of the working-class community and the narrative of the village where everybody was the same, and solidarity flourished (also Blokland, 2001). Nevertheless, Maija viewed the neighborhood as her family and home: a fixed place where people belong (Duyvendak, 2011: 2). Instead of seeing a “shithole” (which the Lehikoinen family had expected Fireweed Village to be), Maija saw something beautiful to cherish and preserve (Small, 2004: 73). Thus, her strategy for adapting to the change and protecting the vanishing core of the village was to welcome newcomers as family. She educated her new relatives to perceive and experience the neighborhood in the same way she did, in this way maintaining the “original” and “true” narrative of place.

Moreover, by recruiting new members to her family and expanding her emplaced network of kin, she also protected her position as a locally recognized person. Two years after moving to the area, Milla and Erik had a second child, and by that time, the neighbors were so used to seeing the two families as relatives that they referred to the newborn as Sanni’s “new little brother.” Maija took the newborn into the yard, presenting her “baby grandson” to people who were already acquaintances—and to strangers she did not know yet. Kinship for her was a performance of loyalty presented to the outside world (see Liebow, 2003: 108–109). For decades, she had enjoyed her role as the head of the family: Her neighbors had always known her, relied on her and perceived her as a spokesperson for the “authentic” voice of the community (Kasinitz and Hillyard, 1995). In tenants’ meetings, the Lehikoinen family, as a large group of people, always had a say. Yet Maija’s position as a local authority had decreased because three of her four children had left the area, and newcomers hardly knew who she was. By claiming and performing kinship, she ensured and showed that her family was still a relevant actor in the area. For her, kinship first and foremost signified loyalty she could expect to reach beyond “regular” neighbor relationships.

Conclusions

A major part of the literature on kinship practices focuses on circumstances in which poverty and material hardship are found to be the most obvious explanation for practices of kin. The function of kin relationships is to help people make it from 1 day to the next. These analyses, as significant as they are, have not helped us see what other functions kinship practices in modern urban contexts could possibly serve.

My ethnographic research in Finnish neighborhoods enabled me to look beyond the obvious explanation as I examined the functions of doing kin in a context where the welfare state protects citizens from severe material hardship. In my analysis, I followed the research strand of kinship-as-doing, considering kinship in terms of the practices and processes of becoming (Carsten, 2020), focusing on practices as emplaced in particular. The data revealed that the process of becoming kin in Finnish low-income neighborhoods was a reciprocal project from which both parties of the relationship benefited. For the old-timers, who increasingly felt like outsiders in their “own” neighborhood, kinship functioned as a strategy for protecting the core of the “village” that they felt was in danger of dying out. By recruiting new members to the community, engaging them in the classed, historically informed narrative of the neighborhood and making them locals, old-timers maintained their power positions and reconstructed the moral and social order of the neighborhood. For newcomers, who knew neither the neighborhood nor its residents, kinship provided support and a chance to be included in the community that otherwise might have been suspicious of outsiders.

Thus, kin relationships in this context fulfilled needs that were less pressing than the most basic necessities but nevertheless essential for well-being. Residents of low-income neighborhoods used kinship to protect their right to have a place of their own. In Finland, the welfare state might be capable of getting people off the streets and keeping them from going hungry, but it cannot protect them from feeling excluded or stigmatized. From this perspective, practices of kinship were not survival strategies that helped people stay alive but strategies that helped them to live a life as recognized members of a community. Surviving, thus, was not only a matter of getting food and shelter but also a matter of getting respect and recognition. By becoming family, people who were not in a position to choose where to live promoted moral ownership over place (Savage et al., 2010). Creatively and efficiently, they transformed unfamiliar and constantly changing places into their homes. For these reasons, low-income neighborhoods might be sites for the formation of these kinds of emplaced relationships not only because people turn to each other in times of need but also because “families” effectively attach people to places and make them belong.

However, belonging is a double-edged sword. While fostering belonging (for some), the practices of kinship also create boundaries and hierarchies that work to exclude others. As the established residents turn newcomers into locals, they take them in, but simultaneously define who can belong to the “community” and who cannot, pushing out those defined as not fitting the reproduced place narrative. My findings echo the work of Blokland (2001), who showed how old-timers living in a disadvantaged Dutch neighborhood invented the homogeneous working-class neighborhood at the very moment it was about to disappear, excluding ethnic minorities defined as others. In Finland, the demography of postindustrial, low-income neighborhoods is in flux as the share of ethnic minorities increases, potentially threatening native residents’ sense of home. Therefore, a “village” that needs protection is not just a classed space but also a racialized space, and a narrative that belongs to those identified as “Finns”. As my data suggests, kinship in these circumstances provides a repertoire that promotes sameness and cultural continuity, helping residents to manage—and object to—the ongoing changes.

I conclude by returning to the relationship between Maija and the Lehikoinen family. In the last year of my 5-year fieldwork, Milla and Erik Lehikoinen divorced and moved away. Therefore, the need for the kinship relationship that had connected them to Maija, her family and the place to which they had felt deeply attached disappeared. Milla and Erik found new homes not far from Fireweed Village, but despite their reciprocal promises to remain close, both parts of the relationship allowed the tie first to become brittle, and soon to break. They simply had less use for the tie that had been formed for a particular reason: to turn the newcomers into locals and make them belong to a place. This might explain the fact that the practices of kinship that I explored were often more temporary than long-lasting. As relationships formed in and through particular neighborhoods, they lasted as long as people were connected by place. However, for the time being, these relationships helped people manage instability. Kinship provided not just a feeling of home but also concrete rootedness, which, even if temporary, could turn strangers into “real villagers.”