A geração de casas e crianças na Bahia: paternidade e relacionalidade no Baixo-Sul

In “Riachão”, a village of fishermen and seafood harvesters in Bahia state’s “lower South” region, recognition of paternity occurs in the period between conception and the process of making a pregnancy public. People situate themselves as relatives and affines through houses, which are key agents in the constitution of relatedness. The ethnographic discussion makes clear how relatedness emerges in the dynamics of lovemaking, sexual initiation, procreation, and the fabrication of paternity, in which houses are always present. To create kinship in this context, it is necessary to propagate houses. The article contributes to the study of kinship and the social aspects of reproduction in Brazil through problematizing treatment of biological organisms and physiological processes as separate from the material worlds they inhabit and from the objects and things through which they are constituted. Simultaneously, the discussion of the forging of paternal connections in “Riachão” contributes to the literature on “house-ing” through a focus on the imbrication between processes of making new persons, new houses, and relatedness.