Kinship In Anthropology Research Paper

Nowadays at least two major questions can be asked. First, why did anthropologists predominantly prioritize kinship over politics, economics, and religion? Second, why lately have they shown a decided lack of interest in kinship, or rather in ‘kinship’ as it was conceived traditionally within anthropology? The answers will take us to problems in the major presuppositions underlying anthropology’s highly valued analytic constructs of kinship and society. Although it has been the case that kinship from the start has always been the object of strident debate, it is only since the 1960s that the legitimacy of the topic itself began to be queried. In more recent years the process of doubting has accelerated due to very basic epistemic shifts within anthropology in the wake of feminism and other modes of disciplinary self-inspection about its claims to knowledge. One prevalent conclusion forthcoming from such transformations is that much of received kinship theory is no longer seen as justifiable.

1. The Narrative Of Kinship

1.1 Law And Order By Another Name

The primary puzzle for the anthropologist throughout the first half of the twentieth century was how to explain the maintenance of order within the ‘simple societies’ of far-flung regions where anthropologists conducted their research. Such societies lacked the basic law and/order organizing institutions of Western society. They had no government to speak of, no marketplace as we know it, and no law courts, police, or armies. It was clear that they did not compartmentalize their social life into the distinct and separate institutions that we recognize as kinship, economics, politics, and religion. Anthropologists found instead that these peoples used the idiom of kinship to frame most of their activities, including those with political, economic, and religious intent. Analytically, the step from this insight was to view kinship to be the major institution of ‘tribal’ societies, and the kinship tie to be the one that compelled all others in social relations. Kinship, as the strongest of social bonds, became seen as the basis through which ‘primitive’ societies maintained order; it was through kinship ties that people created relations of social solidarity. Thus, ‘social structure,’ that is, those rules regulating the kinship, marriage, and residential institutions of a people that endow social role and identity, and which, therefore, perpetuate societal relationships, became anthropology’s proper object of inquiry (e.g., see Radcliffe-Brown 1965). Everything else, a society’s morals, law, etiquette, religion, politics, and education, was to be studied as but an aspect of social structure (Radcliffe-Brown 1965), or in other words its kinship system.

The emphasis anthropologists placed upon the problem of ‘societal order’ cannot be stressed too much. As Firth comments, the perception of order was fundamental to their investigation (Firth 1961). An underlying concern was over what could replace the authority of government in ‘simple’ societies, and the answer was to view kinship as having this coercive power. In other words, it was the kinship system that came to be understood as playing the same official function among ‘primitive’ peoples as government does in western societies. The reasoning leading to such a conclusion is circular, for kinship as a system became defined as the primary source for the rules and regulations that provided for order and continuity within ‘native’ society. It was presumed that the status, role, rights, duties, and obligations of a person in a ‘simple society’ were forthcoming from and ascribed by the person’s place within the kinship system. The primary societal organization of these societies was then understood to be ‘kinship-based,’ and it was the ‘kinship polity’ (see Fortes 1969) forthcoming from either patrilineality or matrilineality that was the key concern. The slippage was simple: we have government, while they have the politics of kinship.

The evolutionist agenda underpinning such kinship theory is obvious, despite the Functionalists’ claim to the contrary. It was a bias that assumed that the history of humankind’s social development discloses a progression that moved from a reliance upon the natural facts of kinship, and the cultural elaboration of them, to a Western style of development that increasingly compartmentalizes the societal institutional ordering of kinship, economics, politics, and religion in such a way that kinship eventually becomes deprioritized. Anthropology’s main object for study has been modern Europe’s alien other, all those ‘primitive’ peoples attached to worlds marked as an uncivilized part of nature to be transcended and dominated by modern civilization. In large part anthropology’s technical vocabulary has denoted primitivism, and ‘kinship’ is no exception. First of all, the institution of kinship, more than any of the other primary domains of society, was understood to be the one most closely linked to the natural in human activities: while kinship can modify nature, it cannot transcend it. As Schneider (1984) argues, an axiom critical to kinship theory has been that the social and cultural attributes of kinship are derivative of the biological relations of reproduction. Thus, if all those alien societies studied by anthropologists were kinship-based, and if for their people the idiom of kinship took priority over economics, politics, and religion, their primitive status was further confirmed.

1.2 The Plot Thickens: The Distinction Between The Domestic And The Jural

The ‘law and order’ thrust of traditional kinship studies, which equated the kinship system (of ‘primitives’) to ‘society’ itself, also came to include the critical distinction between the ‘domestic’ and ‘jural’ domains of kinship. The realm of the domestic was composed of relations of filiation between parents and children; it was the domain of the hearth, the family, the husband, his wife, and his children. In Fortes’ terms (1969), it was the domain where the ‘axiom of amity’ reigned. In contrast, within the ‘jural’ domain the everyday relations of amity and filiation were for the most part irrelevant, for the principles of descent and lineage ruled its membership and provided the backbone for its jural structures of dominance and subordination. It was the jural domain that comprised the polity and, thus, provided society with its order and continuity. The prescriptions and regulations of the kinship polity (composed of its ‘corporate descent groups’) were what ruled and constrained ‘primitive’ people. A man’s jural status, rights, and obligations within society were in essence provided by his place within the lineage of his birth. Genealogy determined one’s political status, and one’s rights to land and other entitlements.

Given the above narrative of the place of kinship in ‘native’ societies, we can understand that the received wisdom of kinship theory until as late as the 1970s was that unilineal descent systems were necessary as a sticking plaster of ‘primitive’ societal order—despite increasing evidence to the contrary. As Radcliffe- Brown (1965) asserts, ‘unilineal institutions in some form, are almost, if not entirely, a necessity in any ordered social system.’ Even Levi-Strauss, in his major critique of descent theory in kinship studies, finds the existence of unilineal descent essential to the logic of his model of elementary structures of marriage ex-change. He says that this is because the social cohesion of elementary systems of kinship that are premised on the notion of groups of men exchanging wives requires a rule of descent, for the groups themselves must be defined by such a ‘stable’ rule of descent (Levi-Strauss 1969). One should be aware, however, that Levi- Strauss began his formidable attack upon the preva- lent view of ‘descent as societal order’ in 1949, and that his stress upon alliance over descent as the salient ordering principle of ‘primitive society’ did not become part of mainstream debate until the 1960s (e.g., Leach 1961, Needham 1964), but also see the earlier debate between Radcliffe-Brown (1953) and Dumont (1953). The concern of Levi-Strauss, it is to be noted, was with creating a minimal model of society by showing the ways in which kinship groups were integrated through rules of marriage exchange, that is, he wished to demonstrate how classifications of kinship and marriage logically provided a broader level of societal integration than that achieved through rules of descent alone.

The rather chauvinistic reductionism of the structural functionalist and structuralist grand paradigms of society and societal ordering, where society itself was to be equated with male structures of order and control, took another couple of generations to unveil and unravel.

2. The Question Of Definitional Rigor

2.1 Kinship, Descent, And Marriage

In itself, a fuller ethnographic record began steadily to undermine many of the major analytic constructs of kinship and societal order, particularly the idea that ‘primitive society’ was universally based upon exogamous, corporate, land-holding, unilineal descent group structures. By the 1950s and 1960s reports of field research especially from the Pacific on kinship systems that were not premised on a unitary rule of unilineal descent but upon cognatic, bilineal, ambilineal, or double descent principles became legion (cf. Bohannan and Middleton 1968). The debate over the unitary view of unilineal descent basically was closed by the influential article by Scheffler (1966), who was able to demonstrate through the ethnography by then at hand that notions of descent were used among different peoples, and by the same people, toward highly varied ends, and not necessarily toward that of corporate group structure.

By the 1970s, for instance, through the ethnography from Amazonia that began to enter mainstream debates on kinship and marriage, it became clear that the notion of descent itself could hardly be declared a universal principle of ‘primitive’ social ordering, for there were peoples who did not recognize a principle of descent as relevant for any social or political purpose (e.g., see Riviere 1969, Overing 1975). Even kinship and marriage as analytical constructs per se came also under attack, especially the notion of achieving any type of unitary view of either (but also, see Leach’s (1961) earlier hacheting of these sacred constructs of societal ordering). We find Needham (1971) announcing flamboyantly that ‘there is no such thing as kinship, and it follows that there can be no such thing as kinship theory!’ He was referring to ‘minimal’ definitions of kinship when framed in the context of genealogically reckoned jural rights, such as their allocation and transmission from one generation to the next. Cross-culturally, the ethnographic evidence could not uphold a totalizing view that assumed a predictable relationship between the cultural constructs of kinship and its classification, social roles, rights, and obligations, and the allocation of individuals to particular types of social groups. It was this unitary package of kinship as part and parcel of particular politico-jural orders that earlier anthropology had indeed upheld.

Even more courageous for the times are Riviere’s (1971) queries into the analytic concept of marriage. He argues against any jural definition of marriage, and suggests instead that the institution of marriage first be viewed structurally, as one of many relationships conceived possible between men and women. It was his reading of the ethnographic literature that anthropologists had been defining institutions cross culturally as ‘marriage’ when the said institutions in fact had ‘no feature in common other than that they are concerned with the conceptual roles of male and female’ (Riviere 1971). In other words, to understand what marriage is for any given people the question of the cultural construction of gender relationships must be understood, rather than the jural relations between groups of men that entail their exchange of women.

It is significant that Riviere’s fieldwork experience had been with indigenous peoples of Amazonia, for whom anything approaching a ‘jural’ relationship usually would be stretching the point, as too would lineages and descent-group ordering as normally discussed in the literature. It was as difficult to find corporate land holding groups among Amazonian people, as the elders who might rule them. There were no groups of men forming ties of alliance through the exchange of their women. Instead, ties of marriage, which moreover were highly salient to Amazonian constructs of sociality, were linked to a principle of cognation and not descent. As a consequence the contributions of Amazonian specialists, in line with Dumont’s (1957) reading of marriage alliance in India, played a major part in the later reinterpretation and unraveling of both alliance theory as first formulated by Levi-Strauss and descent theory as formulated by Fortes and Radcliffe-Brown.

2.2 The Structural Analysis Of Kinship Terminologies: The Power Of The Paradigm

It is by now obvious that we cannot achieve an analytic definition of the construct of kinship and related institutions that would be both universally adequate and at the same time respectful of indigenous understandings and knowledge. In short, anthropology cannot, even if it wished, arrive at a universal definition of kinship. Part of the dilemma is of course linguistic, insofar as most of the important analytic terms of anthropology have not only been highly abstract but also continued to carry the complex historical baggage of western thought and practice. Terms such as society, community, family, kinship, descent, lineage, or structure, function, and system, are to be used at the peril of totally eluding another people’s understanding of what they are doing socially—which, one would think, is the very raison d’etre of the anthropological task. As anthropology slowly came to realize, any ‘definitional rigor’ to be achieved through the use of any of these terms is well-nigh impossible. Such constructs tend to sit within particular and forceful paradigms of social order, and therefore carry all the litter of such grand narratives. Structural functionalism was followed by structuralism, and the structural analysis of kinship terminologies was a particularly obvious case of a paradigm so powerful that its highly reductive results killed for the time being the possibility of interesting further advances being made in kinship theory, the very area where anthropology was once so creative and rich in debate.

The overwhelming allure of structural analyses of kinship can be ascribed to the power of their methods which wed anthropology to advances in modern linguistics, a field considered to have become the most scientific of the human sciences. The methods and models of formal analysis were so enlightening of previously misunderstood structures that they gave promise to a mathematical rigor and definitional clarity that would transform anthropology into a ‘true science.’ Their initial success was so stupendous (e.g., see Lounsbury 1968) that they made seeming child’s play of previous attempts to provide order to the complicated structures of many ‘native’ kin terminologies. Anthropologists were taught to be more rigorous in discerning the logical differences between systems. Such sophistication in method was greatly needed in anthropology, and for its example we can be only grateful.

However, as Overing (1987) has noted, the method became confused with world view. The logic of the method through sleight of hand became equated to the logic of terminological use, and thus also with indigenous thought. As a result, we arrived once more at the ‘universal’ to what Schneider so aptly derides as the anthropological ‘Doctrine of the Genealogical Unity of Mankind’ (Schneider 1984) or the genealogical meaning of kinship terms. Kinship is, everywhere, first and foremost about genealogical relatedness (see especially, Scheffler 1978), a resoundingly uninteresting conclusion to come in the wake of such dazzling structuralist performances. It was also a judgment that was highly suspect. It appears that the method itself allowed for no other interpretation because the meanings of terms were made to fit not only the domain of logic, but also western commonsense notions about what kinship is. The demand itself of formal analysis for logical rigor reduces the number of its elements that account for meaning to very few: affinity as well as consanguinity can be allowed, but not the further complications of what such notions possibly mean from the indigenous point of view. It was the niggling doubt over this issue (where are all the people?) that drove many anthropologists away from the technical chore of analyzing kinship logics. As Campbell (1985) remarks, the very abstract level at which structural analysis operates is about the tenth remove from anything going on in daily practice and thought.

The more recent formal analyses of kinship terminologies in the hands of scholars such as Heritier (1981) move in the more promising direction of not assuming indigenous meaning. The aim instead is to specify the structural possibilities of a given classificatory system that in turn frame or limit the choices made in reality. In short, the exercise is no longer directed toward the task of uncovering hidden layers of meaning, but to explore the interplay between structure and the semantics of actual use.

3. Is There Hope For Kinship?

Schneider (1984) advises anthropologists not only to stop looking for ‘kinship’ but also all the other metacultural categories of economics, politics, and religion which, together with kinship, form a quartet of societal domains embedded in European culture and have been willy-nilly incorporated into the European social scientist’s analytic schemes. While we can heartily agree with Schneider’s full blown rampage against the anthropological treatment of the topic of kinship, such concordance does not entail the dismissal of the study of those social relationships, and their classifications, that were once, more or less, subsumed under the label of ‘kinship.’ People do bear children, and there is a social framework through which they do so, and through which these children are raised to become adult members of human social groups. The members of these social groups follow particular practices in the course of which relationships that are highly significant for them are developed, as too are very interesting ways of thinking about them. With all this we can agree. The overriding question still remains—how do we understand and translate such practices, relationships, and ways of thinking?

Happily, since the 1980s, anthropologists have developed a myriad of ways to approach subjects that formerly would have been classified under the general rubric of ‘kinship.’ While nowadays the topic of something called ‘kinship’ does not loom large in the literature, such issues as ‘self,’ ‘agency,’ ‘gender,’ and the life of values and affect, do. The topics of personhood, emotions, and aesthetics are much more likely to take their place in the titles of doctoral theses than those of kinship, affinity, and jural rules. Thus, we see that the ‘technical’ language of anthropology has been transformed in the wake of the shifts of attention away from something we once called the ‘jural-political domain,’ with its contrast to something we labeled ‘the domestic group,’ and equally removed from the notions of social structure and prescriptive behavior, and those of rights and obligations. In their place, idioms of equality and inequality are now being explored, and such values as nurture, sharing, generosity, and those of peace and violence. The stress is upon ambiguity, flux, the personal everyday, and a multiplicity of voices, rather than upon grand structures of mind and society and societal rules and regulations. The emphasis tends to be upon context and the performative, and not underlying and hidden rules of practice and thought. Such shifts in direction have often been undertaken in a spirit of rebellion, by feminists but also many others, against the ethnocentrisms underpinning the grand narratives of anthropology. The gain has been that anthropologists are presenting very different pictures, certainly in their richness, from those of yesterday of the ways other people view, act, and experience the world of the social. These depictions in themselves are further enlightening of the previous ‘sins’ of reduction, prejudice, and ethnocentrism.

3.1 The Impact Of Gender Studies

It has made all the difference to the ethnographic endeavor to include the subject of women and especially women’s voices. In the process we have time and again discovered a rich symbolic world that demands an understanding of the interplay of men and women, and their respective knowledge, that makes travesty of the simplistic ‘male only’ models of yesteryear. It is only by understanding both male and female (often complementary or conflicting) perspectives that gender relations among another people can begin to be comprehended. As gender studies progressed, it became absolutely clear that the authoritative voice of the ethnographer was insufficient, as too that of the male ‘informant’ (not a designation that we can use today!). Nor can we speak from the perspective of a generic female, for there is no such thing. There is ever a plurality of voices, a seemingly helter-skelter chiming that provides, significantly, fertile layers of evaluative contextualization, the recognition of which has in the end changed our anthropological visions of culture and society.

All those kinship structures through which men established important relationships with each other through the exchange of their muted women, which became the model of ‘society’; all those ‘political’ roles and statuses through which men who controlled the political domain came to be the knowledge-holders of their culture—these were the topics that once were recognized as primary anthropological concerns. From the 1970s onwards, once women were inserted firmly within the context of ‘establishment’ discourse in anthropology, the consequence was a true ‘Kuhnian’ shift of paradigm. The epistemological and methodological foundations of the discipline were indeed shaken when females, fifty percent of the world’s population, finally entered the picture. Thus, the ‘question of women’ did play a large part in upsetting established ways of thinking and practice in anthropology, and not least in regard to the topic of kinship.

One major contribution of the early writings on gender was to make anthropology clearly aware of its exclusion of women as a topic for study, and how such oversight was, moreover, linked to the male bias of dominant theoretical and methodological assumptions of the discipline, and beyond that to major strands of western thought in which anthropology played its part. In Women, Culture & Society, its authors show how women, like men, transculturally ‘are social actors whose goals and strategies are intrinsic to the process of social life’ (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974), and that ‘even in situations of overt sex role asymmetry women have a good deal more power than conventional theorists have assumed (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974). It became quickly obvious that major presuppositions and procedures of the discipline needed to be reconsidered radically in order to include the agency of women. In other words, studies of social life and its organization needed to include women as actors and speakers and not as mere passive, muted objects of men. It slowly came to be seen that women as well as men played a major role in the creation of social ties of community life.

There is by now a large amount of ethnography telling of indigenous peoples among whom the women, both ideologically and in practice, control their own labor, and the products of it (see much of the contemporary literature on Amazonia). Likewise, values—and the structures of equality and inequality linked to them—may not be so straightforward, but ambiguous, as among the Hagen of New Guinea where there is constant play between egalitarian and hierarchical principles (e.g., Strathern 1988). There are also now many ethnographic examples showing that the quality of the relations between the genders may well be subject to perspective, where females have a very different view from males of the strength of their respective roles and participation within the social life of the community (e.g., Keesing 1987). This stress in studies of gender upon the critical importance of presenting perspective and thus allowing for the ‘authorship of many’ has led to energetic debate over the epistemological foundations of anthropology, which in turn has transformed the question, the topics, and the methodology of the discipline—and in the end its own self-image as having the right of authorial privilege.

3.2 Kinship By Another Name? Networks Of Relationships And Personal Kind Terms

We find that Schneider and Needham, as pioneers in the deconstructing of key concepts of kinship theory, were merely tapping the surface of a modernist creation for which the very notion of kinship was but one aspect of a multifracteled edifice filled with assumptions about society and the social order, that in turn were tied to networks of ideas about the relation of the family to other societal institutions, and the relationship between the sexes, the private and the public, the dominant and the subordinate, all of which were implicated further by presuppositions about the nature of human existence, and its progress, which in addition were premised upon ontological notions of the priority of reason over the emotions, and so it continued through an enormous number of other dualisms and bundles of relations pertinent to the western imagery of society and the world, and the elements of which they were comprised. Our notion of kinship carried with it the interarticulations of this entire structure.

The interesting lesson that has been learned more recently through changing the types of questions anthropologists’ ask is that other people’s views of the social relationships of everyday life are as enmeshed as our own within wider networks of meaning. They also include ontological presuppositions about the nature of human existence and capabilities for sociality that are linked to bundles of relationships and arrays of ideas about the world that are as complex as our own. How do we then understand these other sets of linkages, so unlike our own? That has become a primary question. The quest for understanding their interconnections has in part required the unpeeling of our presuppositions about reproductory and biological processes, parenting, the nature of the material world, and the interconnections of all of these things to what we call Society (cf. Strathern 1992).

Overing (1985) has suggested that to understand better the complexity of indigenous social thought, we should change the label of what we have been calling ‘kinship terms’ to ‘personal kind terms.’ This involves a radical switch in perspective that concomitantly raises the conceptual status of these terms to one more closely aligned to the indigenous view and practice. As with many of our own constructs of ‘natural kinds,’ ‘personal kind terms’ are also highly abstract, philosophically important concepts that defy unitary definition. They share the open-endedness and elusiveness that is typical of all abstract terms that comprise complex relational properties. The difference is that personal kind terms do not refer to the world of nature, which is the western domain of competence, but to qualities of personal relationships, the area that indigenous people have opted for theoretical elaboration (cf. Horton 1979). We have reduced their personal kind terms to our own very weak language of kinship, one that speaks of ‘consanguinity,’ ‘affinity,’ ‘social category,’ and ‘amity,’ which is often a bad mistake. These terms, as used in everyday life, can have metaphysical weight that goes well beyond our western notions of a ‘biological’ relationship or one through marriage. Moreover, the quality of the relationship they demonstrate, as, for instance, one of nurturing, teaching, treachery, competition, or predation, may override a more ‘physical’ kind of relating. Will this man or woman work tranquilly with me, or have predatory designs that will make me ill?

Certainly in Amazonian ethnography, the emphasis today in investigations of peoples’ use of relationship terminologies is often upon the metaphysical and/or moral loading of the classifications (e.g., TeixeroPinto 1997, Viveiros de Castro 1992, Overing 1985). For instance, Kidd writes about the Enxet of Paraguay that:

Their understanding of why they act as they do centres on their concept of the waxok, an aspect of the self that is both intensely private and inherently social. They insist that their social behaviour—both appropriate and inappropriate—can be explained by the physical—or metaphysical—state of the waxok. Furthermore, because the waxok is also the centre of cognition, people can also consciously transform it so as to enable themselves to act in either a self-centred or otherregarding manner. It is an explanation that, I believe, we should take seriously if we want to understand indigenous social life and it is one that finds its root in the practice of child-raising, in the creation of ‘good beautiful’ people who have been taught not only how to think but how to feel. It is this waxok-centred combination of thinking and feeling that enables the Enxet to act appropriately and which, ultimately, guides them as they strive to generate sociality and engender tranquillity (Kidd 1999).

The peoples of Amazonia have been difficult for anthropologists to believe, and to an interesting extent still are (cf. Overing 1999). For many of these people the personal ties of parenting, nurturing, sharing, and pooling are not premised primarily on a notion of ‘biological linkage’ or a ‘linkage through blood,’ or membership within a jural group, but which instead are generated over time through consistent and processual action. As such, the personal quality of a relationship as made manifest through everyday practice is paramount to its classification. In other words, the ongoing quality of a relationship (as in the ‘growing’ of a child by a parent and child, the mutual care of brothers, or sisters, or of any other personal relation) may have generative value in a material sense that goes far beyond the minimal possibilities that are endowed through the act of sex (e.g., Gow 1991). For sure, the personal kind terms that are here being applied to their nearest and dearest, and to those further afield, are about reproductory possibilities, but it is not ‘reproduction’ in the sense that the anthropologist imagined it in traditional kinship theory.

4. Kinship Is Alive And Well!

In fact, we can say that kinship studies are as alive and well as always in anthropology, in that the personal relationships and activities of parenting, nurturing, and the processes of generating and gendering of bodies into social adulthood hold center attention. Such studies are, however, unrecognizable as pertaining to the kinship theory of yesteryear. A similar reorientation of concentration is as clear in Melanesian studies as in those of Amazonia (e.g., Strathern 1988) where personal relationships are discussed through categories very different from the former ones of prescriptive rule, roles and statuses, and social structure, and where the talk instead, as among Amazonianists, is upon the indigenous understandings of such matters as gender distinctions, the contents of the self and the mastery of them, and the construction of human bodies; it is about indigenous ambiguities over the nature of personhood and the various possibilities of agency in this world and others, and the elaborate relation of these issues to indigenous practice, the life of affect, and their metaphysics. In other words, a dialogue is being created between us, the anthropologists, and them, the peoples of New Guinea or Amazonia, over what it means to be human in this world, or female humans, male humans, or betwixt and between? What does it mean to be social beings in this world? How do we go about attaining this state? If for other people the western grand distinctions between society and nature do not hold, what other possibilities of an interesting kind are there? These are very different questions from those asked in mainstream anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s.

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