Ṣilat al-Raḥim : Kinship, Birth and the Pursuit of Worldliness in a Palestinian refugee community (SAR) builds on a paradox that binds birth, kinship and worldliness for long-term refugees. Obligations between kin can and are often reflexively interpreted as reverberations of the gift and debt of an individual’s birth or appearance into the world. The thisness of kinship ties, in this basic sense, presupposes the prior presence, and amenability, of a world into which to be born and dwell. Refugees, however, come into being with arts of governmentality that disjoin birth from the world. Citizenship laws typically minimize their share of the ordinary modes of practical involvement by way of which worldly reality, and worldly selves, are made to appear for full subjects of the state. SAR traces everyday events by way of which kinship ties acquire shape, substance and force as refractions of birth for Palestinian men and women divested, by law, of much of a world into which to appear, and it explores the paradoxical figurations of worldliness that such events and relations entail.