Messages from my father-in-law: Indexing membership and proximity in long-distance voicemails

• Analysis of 18 voicemails on the author's phone over 11 months by her father-in-law.
• Speaker ritually seals kin connection using three overlapping discursive means.
• Speaker ritually, routinely marries interlocutors, further naturalizing interaction.
• Analysis draws on work on indexical order and essentialization by Silverstein (2003).
• Discursive bond of marriage maintains kin relations over a great physical distance.

This is a linguistic anthropological analysis of 18 voicemails left by the author's father-in-law on her telephone over 11 months. Semiotic analysis shows that the speaker incorporates his communications into his daily personal and religious rituals, evidencing a mode of discursively constructing and performing kinship relations and eliciting responses in imagined, or perhaps just slowed, talk-in-interaction. The speaker brings membership licensing, religious fluency, and social proximity necessitated by the bond of marriage. He leaves, with his voicemails, the self-renewing possibility of the strongest of future kin relations, despite being separated by a physical distance of over 2300 miles.