Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship / Edition 1

by Ladislav Holy

Overview

Explores new developments in kinship studies in anthropology -- including the impact of new reproductive technologies and changing conceptualisations of personhood and gender.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745309170
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	12/20/1996
Series:	Anthropology, Culture and Society Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	204
Product dimensions:	5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Ladislav Holy was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews and the author of several publications including Kinship, Honour and Solidarity: Cousin Marriage in the Middle East (1989). He died in 1997.

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CHAPTER 1

FIRST PRINCIPLES

The received wisdom in anthropology is that kinship represents the very essence of being human and that in all societies, 'networks that connect individuals as relatives are apparently universally recognized and universally accorded social importance' (Keesing 1975: 14). This is an unobjectionable position as long as it is taken to mean that in all human societies some people consider themselves to be more closely related to each other than they are to other people, and that this mutual relatedness is the basis of numerous and varied interactions in which they are involved or provides legitimisation or rationalisation for them. The difference between those who see themselves as related to one another and those who are not so related underlies differentially distributed rights, duties, roles and statuses. In this sense, it is recognised as a difference that makes a difference. However, the received wisdom starts to look problematic when we consider the culturally specific reasons why people see themselves as related and the various ways in which they draw the line between those to whom they see themselves related and those to whom they do not.

PROCREATION AND NURTURE

People's own explanations as to why some of them are mutually more closely related than others differ from society to society but they are generally based on a notion of consubstantiality (Pitt-Riven 1973: 92): people see themselves as mutually related to each other because they share a common substance and they see themselves as unrelated to those with whom they do not. In different societies, people consider themselves related because they share the same blood, bone or semen. But they may consider themselves related because they have suckled the same milk or eaten the same food. Some societies thus emphasise procreation as a defining characteristic of relatedness and see some people as mutually related because they share blood, bone, semen or some other substance transmitted in the process of procreation; alternatively they assume that some of the child's substance, for example bones, was created by the child's father, and some, for example flesh, by the child's mother. Watson (1983) designates this notion of mutual relatedness as 'nature kinship'. Other societies emphasise nurturance and see some people as related because they are of the same substance created through suckling the same milk or eating the same food. Watson calls this notion of relatedness 'nurture kinship*.

One of the problems to which many anthropologists working in New Guinea have paid particular attention is the problem of the rapid and full incorporation of immigrants into groups, usually described as 'clans', whose members see themselves mutually related through the ties of kinship and consider themselves to be 'brothers' or 'sons of one father'. When considering the process through which the Bena Bena grant the status of full group members to immigrants, Langness noted that 'the sheer fact of residence in a ... group can and does determine kinship. People do not necessarily reside where they do because they are kinsmen; rather they become kinsmen because they reside there' (1964: 174; emphasis deleted). Andrew Strathem subsequently argued that food is a mediator between locality and kinship and that eating food grown on clan land creates substance which the immigrants share with other clan members:

clansmen share substance in some way through their descent from an ancestor. Another way in which they share substance is through consumption of food grown on clan land. Food builds their bodies and gives them substance just as their father's semen and mother's blood and milk give them substance in the womb and as small children. Hence it is through food that the identification of the sons of immigrants with their host group is strengthened. Food creates substance, just as procreation does, and forms an excellent symbol both for the creation of identity out of residence and for the values of nurturance, growth, comfort and solidarity which are associated primarily with parenthood. (Strathern 1973: 29)

As long as one is describing the notions about what makes people related to each other – or what constitutes kinship – in a particular society, one can resort to native or emic views of this matter. But for comparative purposes, an analytical or etic notion of kinship is needed which is valid not only for this or that culture or society, but cross-culturally. This notion was established at the very beginning of the modern scholarly study of kinship by the founding father of this branch of scholarship, Henry Lewis Morgan, who stated that kinship was based on the folk knowledge of biological consanguinity. By most modern students of kinship this idea is expressed in the definition of kinship as a system of social ties based on the acknowledgement of genealogical relations, that is, relations deriving from engendering and bearing children. But how do societies whose members stress the nurturing aspect of kinship and believe that people are kin because they suckled the same milk or were fed the same food fit into this definition? Cucchiari, who points out that kinship systems emphasise either nurturing or procreative notions of consubstantiality, maintains that kinship categories everywhere have procreative referents and that kinship systems can universally be expressed in some cultural model of procreation rather than nurturing:

That is, even where parents are defined more as the people who protect, feed and raise the child, the relationship is still expressed in genealogical idiom. Note, for example, that although the Navajo idea of motherhood is either the woman who bore or the one who raised the child, a mother can only be a woman – a person at least theoretically capable of bearing the child. One would expect that a completely nurturing model of the mother-child relation would be capable of including both men and women. (Cucchiari 1981: 35; reference omitted) So even ifnurturance can in some systems lead to the notion of shared substance created, for example, through food, the procreative notion of consubstantiality seems indispensable if the kinship system is to achieve a differentiation between those who are and who are not of the same substance, and a differentiation between those who share substance according to the amount they share. Translating all the cultural notions about shared substance into analytical terms then leads to the view of kinship as a system of genealogical relations.

Cucchiari spells out quite clearly why a kinship system must be built on some cultural acknowledgement of genealogical relations deriving from procreation:

In primitive societies characterised by a pervasive general reciprocity, a kinship system based exclusively on the nurturing idea would fail clearly to mark off categories even within the nuclear unit – parents from older siblings, for example. If the defining characteristic of the category 'parent' is the one who feeds and cares for the child, even the generational distinction would be weakened as parent and grandparent cooperated in child rearing. Indeed all categories – parent, child, sibling, and spouse – would tend to be semantic domains with variable boundaries and include no fixed catalogue of relationships. It is for this reason that procreative models are essential to kinship systems in providing the discrete genealogical points that connect broad social categories – a kind of social map. (Cucchiari 1981:37; original emphasis)

Cucchiari insists on procreative models as essential to kinship systems because such models are logically necessary if we want to isolate kinship analytically from other social relations. Without this logical precondition we would simply not be able to postulate kinship as a separate domain of social relations. I quoted Cucchiari at length for he makes explicit what most kinship theorists implicitly accept, namely that the logical requirement for postulating a separate domain of kinship is to define this domain as a system of social ties deriving from the recognition of genealogical relations. Even anthropologists who noted that creating substance through food plays an important role in the way kinship is conceptualised in some cultures, saw the creation of substance through feeding as analogous to adoption – a legal fiction through which people not related biogenetically become related in social sense. For example, SchiefFelin writes of the Kaluli of the Southern Highlands of New Guinea:

A person's mother is thought less as the person who brought him into the world and more as a person who gave him food. Thus, a woman who feeds a child comes to be thought of as his mother after a time, and her children as his siblings. This becomes particularly apparent when the child gets married. Claims for a piece of the bridewealth are in part based on the contribution the person made to 'giving the child food'. After marriage, an avoidance relation is observed between a man and his wife's mother. If for some reason the girl was brought up principally by some woman other than her mother, it will be that woman to whom the avoidance is extended, even if the real mother is alive and present in the same longhouse community. In cases like this 'feeding' amounts approximately to adoption. (1976: 64; emphasis added)

This quote makes it clear that a woman who feeds the child is thought of and is treated as the child's mother. But she is not its 'real mother' just as in the Western conceptualisation an adoptive mother of the child may be thought of as its mother and treated as such but the child's 'real' mother is, nevertheless, a different woman. According to SchiefFelin, among the Kaluli, as in the West, a distinction is maintained between ties created through procreation and those created by social convention. In his critique of the study of kinship, Schneider (1984) called the notion of kinship as a system of social ties deriving from the recognition of genealogical relations the 'Doctrine of the Genealogical Unity of Mankind'. This doctrine is not the generalisation of the observable facts. It is a prerequisite for the conceptualisation of kinship and, moreover, a prerequisite which is not built on some culture-free or cross-culturally applicable logic but which is deeply rooted in Western cultural assumptions. I shall return to this point again in the last chapter.

Kinship as an analytically separate domain of social relations is much more than merely an aspect of social reality which can be conveniendy isolated from other aspects of social reality and analysed independendy of them. It has been a time-honoured adage in anthropology that to understand the kinship system of any simple society is a necessary basis for studying all social activities in that society. Kinship ties which people acknowledge and distinguish determine whom to marry, where to live, how to raise children, which ancestors to worship, how to solve disputes, which land to cultivate, which property to inherit, to whom to turn for help in pursuing common interests and many things besides. But why should this personal system of relations, typical of many simple societies which anthropologists traditionally studied, be built out of kinship relations? Why exactly should kinship, of all relations, be so tremendously important? Beattie answers this question in the following way:

[In] all human communities, even the most technologically simple ones, the categories of biological relations are available as means of identifying and ordering social relations. This is so even though some of these categories may be differendy defined in different cultures. Everywhere man is begotten by men and borne by women, and in most societies the bond of parenthood and the bonds of mutual dependency and support that it implies are acknowledged. This leads to the recognition of other links, such as those between siblings and between grandparents and their grandchildren. So even in the simplest societies kinship provides some ready-to-hand categories for distinguishing the people one is bom among and so for ordering one's relations with them. Apart from sex and age, which are also of prime importance, there is no other way of classifying people which is so 'built in' to the human condition. (Beattie 1964a: 94)

The generally accepted definition of kinship derives from this assumed universal utilisation of biological relations among people as the basis for ordering their social relations. Morgan, the founder of modern kinship studies, speculated in his Ancient Society (1877) about the earliest stage in the evolution of human social organisation in which no notion of an incest taboo existed. With the gradual introduction of the ban on marriages between parents and children, a 'consanguine family' emerged from this original stage of 'primitive promiscuity'. It was a group based on the intermarriage between brothers and sisters. In this type of marriage it could not have been known who was the actual biological father of a child and a kinship terminology, which Morgan considered to be a survival of this extinct form of human mating, reflected this fact. Morgan found such terminology in Hawaii, where all relatives of the parents' generation were called by a single term and the terminology differentiated only between males and females. This means that the same term was applied to one's father, to all his brothers and other collateral male relatives of the father's generation (like the sons of the father's parents' siblings or grandsons of his grandparents' siblings) as well as to mother's brothers and her other male collateral relatives. Similarly, not only one's own mother but also all her sisters and other collateral female relatives as well as all father's sisters and other collateral female relatives on the father's side were called by the same term. To Morgan, this suggested that if the mother's brothers were called by the same term as the father, they must have all been previously the child's fathers and that was possible only if brothers were married to their sisters and had sexual access to them. Mother's sisters were called by the same term as one's mother because they were all wives of one's fathers. The other kinship terms in the Hawaiian system supported this speculation. In Hawaii, a man called not only his own children sons and daughters but also all his nephews and nieces. This was again because, according to Morgan, all the man's sisters were his wives and they were simultaneously wives of all his brothers. If they were his wives, then logically all their children were equally his children. And according to the same logic, in one's own generation the same term as to one's own brothers and sisters applied to all one's cousins.

Van Gennep (1906) was the first to criticise the notion of the ignorance of biological paternity which, according to Morgan, must have existed in his hypothetical 'consanguine family' and he pointed out the basic difference between parenté sociale and parenté physique. In his early study of the family among the Australian aborigines, who were reported to be ignorant of physiological paternity, Malinowski clearly drew the difference between biological kinship and its social or cultural conceptualisation. He emphasised that consanguinity as a sociological concept is 'not the physical bond of common blood, it is the social acknowledgement and interpretation of it' (Malinowski 1913: 182). He made it clear that consanguinity 'is the set of relations involved by the collective ideas under which facts of procreation are viewed in a given society' (1913: 179). Schneider sees this shift of emphasis from the social recognition of biological bonds arising out of procreation to the sociocultural aspects of the real or putative biological relationships as the major modification in kinship studies since Morgan (Schneider 1984: 54). Since this shift, anthropologists have been at pains to emphasise that the genealogical relations of interest to students of kinship are not biological but social relations. As Wagner expressed it, 'the essence of kinship is interpretation of genealogy, rather than genealogy itself (1972: 611; original emphasis). Or in the words of Lévi-Strauss, '[a] kinship system does not exist in the objective ties of descent or consanguinity between individuals. It exists only in human consciousness; it is an arbitrary system of representations, not the spontaneous development of a real situation' (1963: 50).

As recently as in the late 1950s and 1960s, the question of to what extent kinship relations can be seen as based on actual genetic relationships between individuals re-emerged in the debate about the 'nature of kinship' triggered off by Gellner's consideration of the philosophical problem of the ideal, that is, fully unambiguous language. Gellner suggested that kinship terminology might provide a suitable avenue for investigation and he argued that physical and social kinship are logically distinct but, nevertheless, inextricably linked in practice of kinship theorists (Needham 1960b, Barnes 1961, 1964, Schneider 1964,1965, Beattie 1964b, Buchler 1966) who, looking at the problem of what kinship is all about from different angles and viewpoints, all agreed that Gellner's insistence upon the biological nature of kinship was entirely misplaced (for the review of the debate see Harris 1990: 27-39).

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 1996 Ladislav Holy.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: First principles
Chapter 2: Kinship, descent and marriage
Chapter 3: Kinship and the domestic domain
Chapter 4: Descent and the public domain I: lineage theory
Chapter 5: Descent and the public domain II: matrilineal and cognatic descent
Chapter 6: Marriage and alliance
Chapter 7: Universality of kinship and the current practice of kinship studies
Notes
Index

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