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.