| Summary/Abstract |
Life in fishing communities is difficult in most countries in South East Asia. In the Philippines, where this study took place, income from fishing has become even more disastrously low in recent years, with more and more fishing grounds yielding less fish due to overexploitation and uncontrolled illegal fishing. In the fishing community considered in this paper, aside from diversifying sources of income, kinship ties provide a safety net in a rather different sense. People deploy kinship in a deliberately strategic way: they limit their everyday interactions with kin, choosing to be intimate only with a select few. The rationale behind this practice is clear: by choosing a select few with whom they have a reciprocal relationship when it comes to sharing goods and services, they are able to manage their resources well and survive tough economic times. Such a practice of 'forgetting kin', however, has implications for the community's conceptualization of the configurations of kinship, as well as its social cohesion and prospects for political activism, undermining the very economic survival it tries so hard to serve.
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