Iara Cury
Elizabeth Ewart, Week #4
9/02/2011
Kinship, Relatedness and Solidarity
The debate about the definition and applicability of the concept of kinship to non-Western
cultures has given anthropologists much to think about. Yet interestingly enough, it is a
commonly held view that family ties remain strong in developing countries whereas they
have lost ground in developed countries. One factor wholly relevant to this perception is
the trend towards smaller families that has established itself in the United States, Europe
and certain Asian countries. Due to overpopulation concerns, demographers forecast the
spread of this downsizing of reproduction across the world. Another issue to consider is
the effect of extensive regional migration and transnational mobility, possible threats to the
integrity and strength of kinship ties as traditionally conceived. We can find many
analytical reasons to question the idea that “blood is thicker than water”, some of which
will be presented in this essay. In support of that, we have motivating circumstances to
explore notions of relatedness, trust and intimacy much beyond, and without implicit
reference to, the domain of genealogical groups. Nevertheless, under the guise of kinship
anthropologists have explored the connection between biology and social relations, nature
and nurture, since the very beginning of the discipline. It is essential to understand this
historical progression of ideas before approaching a deeper analysis of kinship theories.
Anthropologists began studying non-Western peoples and cultures by focusing on what
they perceived as bounded, isolated, and simpler societies than their own. One of the
factors taken to be evidence as to the posited simplicity of these societies was the lack of
the state, which in Western nations embodied the sociopolitical organization of society.
Surveying unknown indigenous modes of organization, scholars anchored their study in
the challenge of determining the most “natural” and elementary unit of society possible as
well as investigating how these units interacted and organized themselves into larger social
entities. Ladislav Holy, in his book, Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship, sketches some
of the different models of the elementary social unit. According to Holy, M. Fortes, in
addition to many other anthropologists, believed a mother and her child to be the social
unit and basis for all human existence (1996, p.29). Radcliffe-Brown, on the other hand,
viewed the simplest unit to be a man, his wife and their child, that is, “the elementary
family” (p.32). For Levi-Strauss, however, the avunculate, or a brother, his sister, his sister’s
husband and his sister’s son is the elementary structure of society (p.36).
Yet the underlying reason for dealing so seriously with elementary units and secondary
networks of relationships was the perception that “kinship” strongly influenced people
about “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, whom to turn for
help” (Holy, 1996, p.13). Quite early on anthropologists came to the conclusion that kinship
ties, then, provided quite effective patterns of social organization. In their minds, the
universality of kinship as social organizer derived from the superposition of social
structures on biological/genealogical relationships (Schneider, 1972, p.33). Yet being as
they were social modes of organization, these modes varied from culture to culture
inasmuch as people’s imaginaries of genealogical relatedness differed widely. For
researchers such as Morgan, kinship was a social approximation of the true biological facts
of consanguinity and affinity (p.34), an approximation that proved to be a substantial pillar
of the cultures and worldviews of non-Western peoples.
From this basis sprang many complex studies involving concepts of consanguinity, descent,
affinity and alliance based on the use of extensive genealogical charts, representing “a kind
of ‘purified vision’ of the people from whom they were collected” (Holy, 1996, p.31). By
drawing relations on paper, and classifying these diverse systems of kinship, researchers
felt they were progressively elucidating the principles of social organization underlining
both simple and complex societies. On the other hand, the more the study of kinship
evolved, the more individual anthropologists questioned its usefulness and validity out of a
concern for its convolution and mushrooming jargon. As a result, in the 1960s and 70s
certain academics such as Leach and Needham embarked on a formalist endeavor, trying to
leave behind confusing categories and appealing to “purely formal criteria” to delineate the
logical possibilities structuring kinship (Needham, 1971, p.10). Needham, for his part,
distinguished six elementary modes of descent that could be used for the transmission of
rights (p.11). Yet the attempts to apply logic to the analysis of systems of social
organization, while possibly quite elegant, oftentimes missed the very dynamic processes of
kinship, that is, the building of as well as the emotional experience inherent in
relationships.
In any case, at one point anthropologists began to recognize a clash of interests, methods
and theories between those interested in social patterns and those interested in cultural
meanings. David Schneider, in contrast to Radcliffe Brown, considered the study of kinship
to belong to the cultural arena of anthropology. Being as it were a “system of symbols and
meanings”, cultures unconsciously determined the normative rules and actual practice of
any given society (1972, p.40). Schneider’s strong critique was that kinship scholars kept
trying to reduce the cultural level to the social organizational level, using kinship theories
and methods (the genealogical chart) based on ethnocentric understandings of family and
biology that by their simple application irrevocably damaged analyses (p.56). From
Schneider’s perspective, “[o]ne must take the native’s own categories…and articulation of
those categories and follow their definitions, their symbolic and meaningful division
wherever they may lead” (p.51). Leaving behind their attachment to the “indisputable and
unavoidable facts of life”, anthropologists should be able to recognize that for different
societies different facts are indisputable and unavoidable, and they may or may not agree,
wholly or in part, with the Western perception of nature, biology and reproduction. In
seeking to explain patterns of diffuse and enduring solidarity—Schneider’s own definition
of kinship (p.47)—anthropologists should only appeal to emic conceptions of social
relations, which would emerge as a symbolic structure much more coherent and fluid than
the disorderly kinship terminologies generated by previous work.
Following Schneider’s seminal article, anthropological theory was confronted by the
feminist revolution and the emergence of new reproductive technologies in the field of
medicine, which challenged traditional understandings of gender and reproduction. Given
that embryos fertilized in vitro from possibly anonymous parents could be implanted in
surrogate mothers and passed on for adoption by other couples, the “manifest destiny” of
the biological and subsequently familial bond between genitor, genetrix, and child looked
uncertain and possibly unfounded. Furthermore, recent kinship studies converging on
European and American societies brought to light the strong cultural basis for the
conceptualization of biology, science and nature in the Western mind. Accordingly,
anthropologists now recognize that not only “biology does not everywhere have the kind of
foundational function it has in the West, but…the boundaries between the biological and
the social…are distinctly blurred, if they are visible at all” (Carsten, 2000, p.3).
While freed from a not always salutary obligation to match genealogies, kinship as a
theoretical concept suffered from losing its claim to a biological framework of reference. In
Holy’s analysis, without some anchoring of the term, “virtually any relationship could be
classified as a kinship one if one so wished” (1996, p.169), and we risk unproductive
comparative work not having criteria from which to compare like to like. In the
introduction to the book, Cultures of Relatedness, Carsten’s resolution to this quandary is to
try and usher a new paradigm relying on the term relatedness. For her, the breakthrough in
kinship studies is to reposition research to the tune of the sharing of substance, space and
food and to focus on the production of relatedness through doing and being together (2000,
p.34). The hard work of maintaining relationships, the negative aspects of kinship and the
termination of kinship bonds are areas of research that appear to have been neglected
based on the previous conception of kinship being given rather than socially negotiated.
According to Carsten, the idea of relatedness opens these and other frontiers, such as the
role of material culture in kinship relations, to anthropological study.
Even so, while the notion of relatedness must encompass a breadth of phenomena to be
useful cross-culturally, it still risks losing itself in undefined generality. In an interesting
twist to the conclusion of his book, Holy presents two possible ideas to substitute for
kinship and to refine the idea of relatedness. The first, quoted from R. C. Kelly’s work, is
that of “social relations predicated upon…processes by which an individual comes into
being and develops into a complete (i.e. mature) social person” (1996, p.170). Tracing the
people who deeply contributed to one’s physical, social and spiritual formation seems like a
feasible way of defining one’s kin, once ideas of development, personhood and maturity are
well understood within each culture. In parallel to but in a slightly more specific vein than
Carsten, Holy himself proposes to concentrate on the particular set of relations deriving
from the social perception of the sharing of bodily and spiritual substances (p.171). A step
up from the traditional standard of the sharing of genetic content, a broader conception of
the significance of sharing for the development of strong social ties would be of much value
in terms of the already mentioned trends of migration and smaller families. Given the
fluidity of human social connections, it is clear that whatever roles extensive kinship
systems fulfilled in the past, these will have to be realized through new embodiments and
reenactments of intimacy and trust.
Overall, each time the controversial concept of kinship has been criticized it has taken
social anthropology much soul-searching and theoretical refashioning to produce a
reincarnation. This deeply reflective process has brought to the fore implicit and explicit
understandings of family, social and psychological connection, the divide (real or
constructed) between nature and culture and the origins of gender. Yet the renewed
significance of meaning in the study of relatedness must not overshadow the importance of
grounding it in the context of economic, political and historical factors. These are essential
for analyzing the increased movement of people, ideas and goods that threaten to
overthrow traditional conceptions of kinship everywhere. Confronted with such rapid,
global transformations and the potential for conflict and instability, our global society
depends more than ever on the sharing of responsibilities and resources and on peaceful
negotiation of action. Given any interpretation of present developments, the
anthropological interest in the phenomena of relatedness and concomitant solidarity—
especially, in Schneider’s words, long-term patterns of diffuse, enduring solidarity (1972,
p.47)—is absolutely relevant.
Bibliography
Carsten, J. 2000. Cultures of Relatedness Cambridge: CUP
Holy, L. 1996. Anthropological perspectives on kinship. London, Chicago: Pluto Press
Leach, E. R. 1961. Rethinking Anthropology London: Athlone Press
Needham, R. 1971. Rethinking Kinship and Marriage London: Tavistock
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1953. Structure and Function in Primitive Society. London: Cohen and
West.
Schneider, D. 1972 ‘What is kinship all about?’ in P. Reining (ed.) Kinship Studies in the
Morgan Centennial Year. Washington D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington