'His bodily son'

Embodiment and relatedness in ancient Egypt

Abstract

A dichotomy between nature and nurture has long been at the heart of definitions of kinship in the humanities and the social sciences. While an oscillation between biological and socio-cultural constructions of relatedness may feel superseded in favour of a more integrative approach, it is still implicit in works that take a relationship mediated by the body as the basis of kinship. For example, the expression zꜣ⸗f n ẖt⸗f is often translated as 'his bodily son' and understood as indicating a legitimate heir. The implication here is that a biological relation, conveyed through bodily connections, is somehow more real than one that is not labelled as such. This reading comfortably maps onto (mainly Western) expectations about the expression of kinship through a biological body. However, this interpretation disregards the fact that there are different ways of understanding the articulation between embodiment and relatedness in modern and ancient cultures. In this article, I take zꜣ⸗f n ẖt⸗f as a case study to explore ancient Egyptian 'body worlds' and to challenge some of the assumptions regarding relatedness often found in Egyptological scholarship.