Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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and society. The legitimacy of the topic came under scrutiny in the 1960s in a process that has since 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 shifts is that much of received kinship theory is no longer seen as justifiable. The reasons are many.

The narrative of kinship: or 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 law courts, police or armies, and not even the market place as we know it. 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 1965:191). Everything else, a society’s morals, law, etiquette, religion, politics and education, was to be studied as but an aspect of social structure (ibid.: 195), 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 inquiry (Firth 1951:19). 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.This was seen to be the case because the kinship system became defined as the primary source for the rules and regulations providing for order and continuity of the ‘native’ society. Through such

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circular reasoning it was presumed that the status, role, rights, duties and obligations of a person in a ‘simple’ society were seen to be 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 the modern West’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 argues (1984:188), 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. The other reason so many anthropologists emphasized the underlying natural element of kinship is that this, of course, is the way we think about our own kinship relationships (where ‘blood is thicker than water’). For us, kinship has been neatly shifted out of society proper into the domain of the domestic where it can be tidily contained and isolated from the true business of civil society where all roots of humans in the natural process can be transcended.

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

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include the critical distinction between the ‘domestic’ and ‘jural’ domains of kinship. It was this separation of domains within kinship that imposed on ‘native’ peoples a similar demoted status for familial ties as found in the West, that is, the domestic being defined as that area of life that is to a large extent enacted beyond the ken of the important work of society (see Sahlins 1972). The realm of the domestic comprised relations of filiation between parents and children; it was the domain of the hearth, the family, the husband and his wife and children. In Fortes‘s 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 (comprising its ‘corporate descent groups’) were what ruled and constrained ‘primitive’ people. A man’s 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 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 asserts (1965:48), ‘unilineal institutions in some form, are almost, if not entirely, a necessity in any ordered social system’. Even Lévi-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 exchange. 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 require a rule of descent, for the groups themselves must be defined by such a ‘stable’ rule of descent (Lévi-Strauss 1969a:105). One should be aware, however, that Lévi-Strauss began his formidable attack upon the prevalent ‘descent as societal order’ view of primitive society in 1949 (Lévi-Strauss 1969a), and that his stress upon alliance (relationships through marriage) over descent as the salient ordering principle of ‘primitive society’ did not become part of mainstream debate until the 1960s (e.g. Leach 1961a; Needham 1964), but also see the earlier debate between Radcliffe-Brown (1953) and Dumont (1953) on the meaning of classificatory kinship terms. The concern of Lévi-Strauss, it is to be noted, was with creating a minimal model of society by showing the ways

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in which kinship (descent) 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 chauvinistic reductionism of the structural-functionalist and structuralist grand paradigms of society and societal ordering, where the agency of women was ignored and society itself equated with male structures of domination and subordination—to be ordered through either descent or alliance—took another couple of generations to unveil and unravel.

The question of definitional rigour

A fuller ethnographic record in itself began steadily to undermine many of these 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 became legion. It became clear that often people also followed instead cognatic, bilineal, ambilineal or double-descent principles in the ordering of various aspects of their social life (cf. Bohannan and Middleton 1968). The debate over the unitary view of unilineal descent was basically closed by the influential article by Scheffler (1966) who was able to demonstrate through ethnography by then at hand that notions of descent were used among different peoples, and even 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 intellectual purpose (e.g. see Riviere 1969; Overing Kaplan 1975). Even kinship and marriage as analytical constructs per se came under attack, especially the notion of achieving any sort of unitary definition of either (a point most energetically argued yet earlier by Leach (1961a) in his hatcheting of these sacred constructs of societal ordering). We find Rodney Needham (1971:5) flamboyantly announcing 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

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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 Rivière’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 be first 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 crossculturally as ‘marriage’ when said institutions in fact had ‘no feature in common other than that they are concerned with the conceptual roles of male and female’ (ibid.: 70). 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 Rivière’s fieldwork experience had been with indigenous peoples of Amazonia, for whom anything approaching a ‘jural’ relationship would be stretching the point, as too would be 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 were highly salient to Amazonian constructs of sociality, were more likely to be linked to a pr inciple of cognation than descent. As a consequence, the contributions of Amazonian specialists, more in line with Dumont’s reading of marriage alliance in India, has played a major part in the later reinterpretation and unravelling of both alliance theory as first formulated by Lévi-Strauss and descent theory as proposed by Fortes and Radcliffe-Brown.

It is by now obvious that we cannot achieve an analytic definition of the construct of kinship that would be both universally adequate and at the same time respectful of indigenous understandings and knowledges. 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 ter ms of

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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, system are to be used at the peril of totally eluding another people’s understanding of what they are doing socially— which is the very raison d’être of the anthropological task.

The structural analysis of kinship terminologies: or, where are all the people?

As anthropology slowly came to realize, any ‘definitional rigour’ to be achieved through the use of any of the above analytic concepts of society 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 mighty 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 attraction of the 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 gave the promise of a mathematical rigour that would transform anthropology into a ‘true science’, having a definitional clarity never before achieved.Their initial success (e.g. see Lounsbury 1968) was so stupendous that they made seeming child’s play of previous attempts to provide order to the complicated structures of many ‘native’ kinship 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 only be grateful.

However, as Overing has argued (1987), 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 understanding. 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 1984:122–4), 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

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the dazzling structuralist performances. It also was a conclusion that was suspect. It appears that the method itself allowed for no other interpretation, because the meanings of terms were made to fit not only the scientific value upon logical rigour, but also Western common-sense notions about what kinship is.

The demand itself of formal analysis for logical rigour reduces the character of its elements that account for meaning to very few: affinity as well as consanguinity can be allowed, but not the complications of what such notions might possibly mean from the indigenous point of view. Many anthropologists came to the conclusion that if future study were to be dependent upon such rigorous intellectual exercise that in the end gave so little reward and said so little about the people then why go to the bother? It was the niggling doubt over this issue (Where are all the people?) that drove many anthropologists away from the technical chore of analysing kinship logics. As Alan Campbell remarks (1989), the very abstract level at which structuralist analysis operates is about the tenth remove from anything going on in daily practice and thought.

Is there hope for kinship through new key concepts?

While we can heartily agree with Schneider’s (1984) 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, anthropologists over the past twenty years have developed a myriad of different ways to approach subjects that would formerly have been classified under the general rubric of ‘kinship’. While nowadays the topic of ‘kinship’ does not loom large in the literature, such key concepts as ‘self’, ‘agency’, ‘gender’, ‘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

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shifts of attention away from something we once called the ‘jural— political’ domain, with its contrast to something we labelled as ‘the domestic group’, and equally away from the notions of social structure and prescriptive behaviour, and those of ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’. In their place, the idioms of equality and inequality are now being explored, and such values as nurture, sharing, pooling, generosity, and those of peace and violence. The stress is upon ambiguity, flux, the personal everyday, and the 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 (e.g. the muted woman) 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 and prejudice.

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 complicated multi-faceted edifice filled with assumptions about society and the social order. These in turn were tied to networks of ideas about the relation of the family to other societal institutions, and the relationship between the sexes, between the private and the public, between the dominant and the subordinate, all of which were implicated further by ontological assumptions about natural kinds, the nature of human existence, and its progress, which in addition were premised upon a notion of the priority of reason over the emotions. 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 more recently learned 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

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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, but usually very different from, our own. It is not only we who have thought about such complexities and who have therefore developed the social theory to think about them. But how do we understand these other sets of linkages, so unlike our own? That has become a primary question. How do we understand a Bororo who says his ‘brother is a parrot’ (Crocker 1977), or a Piaroa who insists that ‘the tapir is our grandfather’ (Overing 1985c)? The quest for understanding their interconnections requires first of all an unpeeling of our own 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 1992b). Anthropologists had been inadvertently reducing other peoples’ rich interconnections of meaning by treating them as ‘kinship relationships’, or better expressed as kinship in the way we know it— cultural constructions of biological reproduction and the relations between humans relevant to such reproduction—that is, as the least intellectually interesting element of our own prime units of society, the royal four of kinship, economics, politics and religion.

Overing has suggested (1985c) 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 scientific constructs of ‘natural kinds’, ‘personal-kind terms’ are also highly abstract, philosophically important concepts that defy unitary definition. They share the openendedness 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 about which indigenous people have opted for theoretical elaboration (cf. Horton 1979). For instance, toward the end of achieving health, wealth and safety, Amazonian peoples aim to master, not nature, but as many as possible of their personal relationships with other beings, human or otherwise, in the world. We unfortunately have reduced their personal-kind (‘kinship’) terms to our own very weak language of kinship, one that speaks of ‘consanguinity’, ‘affinity’, ‘social category’, ‘amity’, which is often a bad mistake.

In discussing the highly flexible use of the personal-kind (‘kinship’) categories among Piaroa of the Orinoco Basin, Overing shows (1985c)

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that the meanings of these categories incorporate (what for us is) an alien world of explanation and abstract theory construction about the possibilities for difference and similarity in modes of power or agency in the cosmos. The terms, as used in everyday life, have metaphysical weight that goes well beyond our Western notions of ‘biological’ relationship or a social relation through marriage. Each term in its application carries with it possibilities of sharing or not sharing a bundle of social, moral, or metaphysical qualities, and there is no a priori guarantee which will be salient to a given case.The quality of the relationship, as for instance one of nurturing, teaching, treachery, competition or predation, often overrides a more physical sort of relating. Will this man or woman work tranquilly with me, or have predatory designs on me 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 (also cf. Teixero-Pinto 1997; Viveiros de Castro 1992; Belaunde 1992). For instance Stephen Kidd writes about 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: Conclusion)

For Enxet, kinship is about attaining a certain sort of affective life.These are people for whom the personal ties of parenting, nurturing, sharing and pooling are not so much based 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

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