Social Anthropology Paper SAN 2
Anthropology and Kinship
Dr. Perveez Mody & Others
2015-‘16
Michaelmas Weeks 1-8 Wednesdays, 9-10am, Mill Lane Lecture Room 1
Lectures
1) P. Mody: Lewis Henry Morgan, Schneider and the critique of kinship
2) P. Mody: Structural-functionalism, alliance theory, feminist critiques
3) P. Mody: Persons
4) P. Mody: Fixing and mixing kinship: boundaries, bodies, friendship
5) H. Diemberger: The Substances of Kinship: exploring Tibetan and
Mongolian notions of flesh-and-bone
6) H. Diemberger: Transformations in the study of kinship
7) P. Filippucci: The Time of Kinship: structure, memory and history
8) P. Filippucci: Space, Place and Kinship
General texts on kinship
These will help in defining terms and summarising theoretical issues in the study of
kinship:
David M Schneider, 1984 A critique of the study of kinship
Alan Barnard & Anthony Good, 1984 Research practices in the study of kinship
Ladislav Holy, 1996 Anthropological perspectives on kinship
Robert J Parkin, 1997 Kinship: an introduction to the basic concepts
Janet Carsten, 2004 After kinship
Readers on kinship
The following recent collections provide overviews of anthropological approaches
to kinship.
Franklin, Sarah & Susan McKinnon, 2001. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship
Studies. Duke.
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Janet Carsten (ed), 2000 Cultures of relatedness: new approaches to the study of kinship.
Cambridge: University Press.
Robert Parkin & Linda Stone (eds), 2004 Kinship and family: an anthropological reader.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Ethnographies
In addition to the weekly lectures, students are strongly advised to read from the
following ethnographies that focus on kinship:
Rita Astuti, 1995 People of the sea: identity and descent among the Vezo of Madagascar
Cecilia Busby, 2000 The performance of gender: an anthropology of everyday life in a south
Indian fishing community
JK Campbell, 1964 Honour, family and patronage; a study of institutions and moral values
in a Greek mountain community
Janet Carsten, 1997 The heat of the hearth: the process of kinship in a Malay fishing
community
E Valentine Daniel, 1984 Fluid signs: being a person the Tamil way
Jeanette Edwards, 2000 Born and bred: idioms of kinship and new reproductive technologies
in England
EE Evans-Pritchard, 1951 Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer
Anthony Good, 1991 The female bridegroom: a comparative study of life-crisis rituals in
South India and Sri Lanka
Peter Gow, 1991 Of mixed blood: kinship and history in Peruvian Amazonia
Karin Kapadia, 1995 Siva & her sisters: gender, caste, and class in rural South India
Maya Mayblin, 2010 Gender, Catholicism, and morality in Brazil: virtuous husbands,
powerful wives
Jonathan Parry, 1979 Caste and kinship in Kangra
David M Schneider 1980 (2nd edition.) American kinship: a cultural account
Marilyn Strathern, 1992 After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century
Yunxiang Yan, 2003 Private life under socialism: love, intimacy and family change in a
Chinese village 1949-1999
Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, 2002 Producing culture and capital: family firms in Italy
Reading List
Lecture 1
Lewis Henry Morgan, Schneider
and the critique of kinship
Dr. Perveez Mody
Lewis Henry Morgan is one of the most overlooked anthropological forefathers,
who is commonly dismissed for his apparent evolutionism (made famous by Engels
in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State). Nevertheless, Morgan was
a pioneer, both for anthropology and especially for the study of kinship. His
theories of “blood” turn out to be rather more complex than assumed and
particularly post-Schneider, misunderstood. And for all his unfashionable
ethnocentricism, he dedicated his book League of the Iroquois (1851) to Hasanoanda
(aka Ely S. Parker), a Seneca Indian who was his chief informant and who is
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credited with jointly having researched the book. By the same measure by which
Morgan has been caricatured by successive generations of anthropologists,
Schneider has been valorised to the extent to which he is paid homage, with little
critique. This lecture challenges both the dispatch of “kinship” as a non-subject
(Schneider) or indeed, as a newly invented one.
Morgan 1851 League of the Iroquois or Ho-de-no-sau-nee (See especially the Preface;
Book I Chapter IV starting “Division into Tribes”.)
-1871. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. Smithsonian.
Engels, F. 1972. The origin of the family, private property and the state, in light of the
researches of Lewis H Morgan. . With an introduction and notes by Eleanor
Leacock. London: Lawrence and Wisehart.
Tooker, Elisabeth 1992 Lewis H. Morgan and his contemporaries. American
Anthropologist vol. (1): 357-75.
Schneider, David. 1968. American Kinship. Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press.
-1971. “What is kinship all about?” In. P. Reining, ed. Kinship studies in the
Morgan Centennial year. Anthropological Society of Washington. (also re-published
as Ch. 14 in Parkin, R. & Stone, L. 2007, Kinship & Family: An Anthropological
Reader, Oxford: Blackwell.)
-1984, A critique of the study of kinship. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press.
Goody, Jack (ed.) 1973. The Character of Kinship. CUP
Bouquet, Mary 1996. “Family Trees and their affinities: the visual imperative of
the genealogical diagram” in JRAI, 2: 43-66.
- 2001. “Making Kinship, with an Old Reproductive Technology” in Franklin, S.
& McKinnon, S. (eds) Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Duke.
Weston, Kath 2001. “Kinship, Controversy, and the Sharing of Substance: The
Race/Class Politics of Blood Transfusion” in Franklin, S. & McKinnon, S. (eds)
Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Duke.
McKinnon, Susan 2013. “Kinship within and beyond the “Movement of
Progressive Societies”. In McKinnon & Cannell, F. (eds) Vital Relations: Modernity
and the persistent life of kinship, Santa Fe: SAR Press, pp. 39-62
Carsten, Janet 1995. The substance of kinship and the heat of the hearth: feeding,
personhood and relatedness among Malays in Pulau Langkawi. American Ethnologist
22: 223-41.
Clarke, Morgan 2007 “The modernity of Milk Kinship,” In Social
Anthropology/Anthropologie Social 15(3): 287-304.
- 2008 “New Kinship, Islam, and the liberal tradition: sexual morality and new
reproductive technology in Lebanon.” In JRAI (NS) 14: 153-69.
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Lecture 2
Structural-functionalism, alliance theory, feminist anthropology
Dr. Perveez Mody
This lecture seeks to ask what kinship is really about. It might sound ridiculously
obvious, but nevertheless it is worth considering what anthropologists were trying
to capture in their study of kinship. What makes groups? What makes a village?
What makes a family hold together? It also looks at these questions from the
perspective of last week’s lecture: Is “biology one thing, kinship another”? How
did structural-functionalists think about descent and how was this different from
kinship? What was the place of marriage and reciprocity in structuralist models of
kinship? How did feminist anthropologists respond to the complexities of kinship
as it had been crafted thus far, gendered roles and the divisions between the public
/ private?
AR Radcliffe-Brown 1952. “The Study of Kinship Systems”. In Structure and
Function in Primitive Societies. London: Routledge
Meyer Fortes 1969. Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan.
Chicago. Aldine.
**EE Evans-Pritchard 1990 (1951) Chapter 5. In Kinship and Marriage among the
Nuer. London: Clarendon.
JR Goody and SJ Tambiah 1973. Bridewealth and Dowry. CUP
C. Murray, 1977. “High Bridewealth, Migrant Labor and the position of women in
Lesotho.” Journal of African Law 21: 79-96.
Papps, I. 1983. The role and determinants of bride-price. The case of a Palestinian
village. Current Anthropology. 24(2): 203-09.
Domains: atom of kinship – dyadic relations; political organization – lineage
relations
Who are parents? Developmental cycle – households
M. Fortes 1958. Introduction. In. J. Goody ed. The Developmental Cycle of Domestic
Groups. CUP.
Esther N Goody. 1982. Parenthood and Social Reproduction. CUP.
*Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1969. Elementary Structures of Kinship. London: Eyre &
Spottiswoode
* Kuper, Adam 1988. The Invention of Primitive Society, London: Routledge. Esp.
chapter 7.
Overing, J 1973. 'Endogamy and the marriage alliance: a note on continuity in
kindred-based groups', Man, 8(4): 555-570
Stephen Hugh Jones 1979. The Palm and the Pleiedes: initiation and cosmology in
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northwest Amazonia. Cambridge: University Press.
Janet Carsten & Stephen Hugh Jones eds. 1995. About the House: Lévi-Strauss and
beyond. Cambridge: University Press.
*Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, eds. 1980. Nature, Culture, and Gender
Cambridge UP.
Feminist engagement: gendering domains; interrogating the public/private
K. Sacks. 1982. Sisters and Wives: the past and future of sexual equality. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press
Kate Young, C. Wolkowitz & R. McCullagh eds. 1981. Part 2: Household politics,
the market and subordination. In. Of Marriage and the Market: women’s
subordination internationally and its lessons. London: Routledge.
Michelle Rosaldo 1974. Women, Culture & Society: a theoretical overview. In.
Women, Culture, Society. Stanford University Press
Jane Collier & Sylvia Yanagisako.
1987. Gender and Kinship: essays toward a unified analysis. Stanford UP
Sharon Hutchinson
1996 Cattle of money; cattle of blood. In. Nuer Dilemmas. Berkeley: U. Cal. P
B Bodenhorn
1994. “Public Places, private spaces”. In B. Bender (ed) Landscape: Politics
and Perspectives. Berg.
Stanley Brandes
1981. Like wounded stags In Ortner and Whitehead, eds. Sexual Meanings.
CUP.
Mark Mosko, 1998 “On “virgin birth”, comparability and anthropological method.”
Current Anthropology 35: 685-7.
Lecture 3
Persons
Dr. Perveez Mody
In this lecture, we focus on the question of who persons are and why notions of
personhood are deeply implicated in the ways kinship is both thought about and
enacted. We consider how they point to the importance of recognition, of
knowledge, and of perspective, for an understanding of personhood.
*Marcel Mauss “The Category of the Person”. In Carrithers, et al. eds. 1985. The
category of the person : anthropology, philosophy, history. CUP.
*Annette Weiner 1978 Trobriand Kinship from Another View: The Reproductive
Power of Women and Men. Man 14:328-348. (on JSTOR)
Busby, C. 1997. “Permeable and Partible Persons: A Comparative Analysis of
Gender and Body in South India and Melanesia” in JRAI (n.s.) 3:pp. 261-78.
* Bodenhorn & Vom Bruck 2006. Introduction. Anthropology of Names and Naming.
CUP. NB, chapters by Andre Iteanu,; Bodenhorn; C Humphrey; Susan
Benson
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Simon Harrison, 1990. Stealing people’s names: history and politics in a Sepik River
cosmology. Cambridge UP.
Strathern, Marilyn 2005. “Losing (out on) intellectual resources” in Kinship, Law
and the Unexpected: Relatives are always a surprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lecture 4
Fixing and mixing kinship: boundaries, bodies, friendship
Dr. Perveez Mody
Skloot, Rebecca 2010. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. London: Macmillan
Landecker, Hannah 2000 “Immortality, In Vitro: A History of the HeLa Cell Line,”
in Brodwin, P. Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics, Indiana University
Press. [Reprinted in 2010, A Reader in Medical Anthropology: Theoretical
Trajectories, Emergent Realities, Byron Good, Michael Fischer, Sarah Willen,
Mary-Jo Delvecchio-Good (eds.), pp. 353-366, Wiley-Blackwell].
P.L Chua & Jonathan Herring 2002. “Defining, assigning & designing sex” in
International Journal of law, Policy and the Family, 16 (2002), pp. 327-367
Bodenhorn, B. 2013. “On the road again: Movement, Marriage, Mestizaje, and the
Race of Kinship” in McKinnon, S. & F. Cannell Vital Relations. SAR Press, pp. 131154
Mody, Perveez 2008. The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi.
Routldge.
Benson, Susan 2008. “Mixed race children in south London: the management of an
ambiguous ethnicity” in Cambridge Anthropology, Special Issue “Boundary Crossings:
A Festschrift in memory of Sue Benson” (see also Peano).
Boellstorff, Tom 2008. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the
Virtually Human. Princeton.
Baumann, Gerd 1996. Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London.
CUP.
Bonaccorso, M. 2009. Conceiving Kinship: Assisted Conception, Procreation and Family in
Southern Europe. Berghahn.
Das, Veena 2007. “The Figure of the Abducted Woman: the citizen as sexed”. In
Life and Words: violence and the descent into the ordinary. Berkeley: U California Press.
Simpson, Robert 1994 “Bringing the 'unclear' family into focus: divorce and
remarriage in contemporary Britain”, In Man 29: 830-51.
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Boissevain, Jeremy 1968. “The Place of Non-Groups in the Social Sciences” in
Man New Series, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Dec., 1968), pp. 542-556
Lecture 5
The Substances of Kinship: exploring Tibetan and Mongolian notions of fleshand-bone
Dr. Hildegaard Diemberger
This lecture explores some of the issues that emerge when we look at kinship
comparatively. Why notions referring to the human body, bodily substances and
human reproduction seem to be often highly significant in the conceptualization of
kinship relations? Are kinship relations qualitatively different from other relations?
We shall explore these questions in the light of concrete ethnographic cases.
Looking at Tibetan and Mongolian kinship as specific cases of kinship
conceptualized in terms of “flesh/blood and bone”-a system of notions that is
widespread all over Asia, we will focus on the relationship between kinship and the
way that the human body is thought of, as well as on how children are attributed to
their parents and to kin-groups by using terms referring to their bodily substances,
i.e. the bones inherited from the father that link the child to its patrilateral kin
group and the flesh or blood inherited from the mother that links the child to its
matrilateral kin group. In this lecture we will also compare and contrast the idiom
of “blood” as used in Tibetan “flesh/blood” and “bone” kinship and the idiom of
“blood” used in Euro-American kinship as described by David Schneider. Finally
we look at some of the ways in which Tibetan forms of marriage challenge common
assumptions about parenthood.
Readings
Diemberger, H. (1993) "Blood, Sperm, Soul and the Mountain -Gender relations,
kinship and cosmovision among the Khumbo (N.E. Nepal)" in T. Del Valle (ed.),
Gendered Anthropology. London and New York: Routledge
Leach, Edmund R. 1955. “Poliandry, Inheritance and the Definition of Marriage”.
Man 55:182-186
Levine N. (1988) The Dynamics of Polyandry. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press,
Levine, N. (1994) "The Demise of Marriage in Purang, Tibet: 1959-1990". In P.
Kvaerne (ed.) Tibetan Studies. Oslo: TheInstitute of Comparative Research in
Human Culture (available as photocopy in Room G3)
Levi-Strauss (1969) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press
(chapters on peripheral systems/Tibetan kinship and “bone and flesh”)
Meyer-Fortes (1953) "The structure of unilineal descent groups."
American Anthropologist 55:17-41
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Schneider, D (1980 [1968]) American Kinship: A Cultural Account.
Chicago:University of Chicago Press
Lecture 6
Transformations in the study of kinship
Dr. Hildegaard Diemberger
Building on the ethnography of the previous lecture and looking closely at
Godelier’s study of kinship and the body among the Baruya of Papua New Guinea,
this lecture addresses a wider anthropological debate on the nature of kinship.
David Schneider radical critique of kinship as a subject of anthropological study
prompted a wide range of responses, some building on his approach others refuting
it sharply. In this lecture we are going to look at Carsten’s suggestion that the
notion of ‘kinship’ could be substituted with that of ‘relatedness’ as a way of
overcoming the limitation of ‘kinship’ understood as a discrete domain and the
assumption that ties deriving from procreation exert an overriding moral force. We
will also look at the way in which other anthropologists have sought to re-think
‘kinship’ against the background of debates on the nature of kinship and
relatedness: from Goderlier’s “metamorphoses of kinship” to Marshall Sahlin’s
“mutuality of being” as defining element in kinship relations.
Bloch, M (2013) “What kind of ‘is’ is Sahlins’ ‘is’?” review of M. Sahlins’ What
Kinship is – and is not in Hau
http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau3.2.014
Bodenhorn, B (2000) “‘He used to be my relative’: exploring the bases of
relatedness among Iñupiat of northern Alaska” in J. Carsten (ed.) Cultures of
Relatedness,
Cambridge:Cambridge University Press
Carsten, J (2000) “Introduction: Cultures of Relatedness” in J. Carsten (ed.)
Cultures of Relatedness,Cambridge:Cambridge University Press
Godelier, M (1986) The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power Among the
New Guinea Baruya, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Godelier, M (2012) The Metamorphoses of Kinship. New York and London:Verso
Edwards, J and Strathern,M (2000) “Including our own” in J. Carsten (ed.)
Cultures of Relatedness, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press
Sahlins, M (2013) What Kinship is – and is not. Chicago:University of Chicago Press
Schneider, D (1984) A Critique of the Study of Kinship. The University of Michigan
Press
Strathern, M. (1992) "Parts and wholes-Refiguring relationship in a post-plural
world". In A. Kuper (ed.), Conceptualizing Societies. London: Routledge
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Lecture 7
Kinship Time & Space & Lecture 8 - Space, Place and Kinship
Dr P. Filippucci
These two lectures consider the role of time and of space in forming the ‘substance’
of kinship. Lecture 7, ‘The Time of Kinship: structure, memory and history’ moves
from classic accounts that consider kinship as abstract and timeless ‘structure’ to
showing that time is an inherent dimension of kinship relations, personhood and
sentiment cross-culturally. The example of war is then used to consider how
historical events shape and infuse kinship through the symbolic and moral
challenges that they pose to the transmission and reproduction of identities, persons
and relations. Lecture 8, ‘Space, Place and Kinship’ considers how anthropologists
have modelled the relationship between kinship and space, critically examining the
notions of ‘household’ and ‘house’ in relation to ‘family’ and ‘kinship’, and
discussing the role and power of space and place in the making of kinned persons
and relations cross-culturally as a principle of both unity and division.
Selected readings:
M. Fortes 1971 Introduction. In Goody, J. (ed.) The Developmental Cycle in Domestic
Groups. CUP
J. Carsten 2000 ”Knowing where you’ve come from”: ruptures and continuities of
time and kinship in narratives of adoption reunions. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute N.S. 6: 687-703
S. Feuchtwang 2005 ‘Mythical moments in national and other family histories.’
History Workshop Journal 59: 179-193
Leach, E. 1961 ‘Kinship in its place’ in J. Laidlaw and S. Hugh-Jones (eds.) The
Essential Edmund Leach. Vol. 1, pp. 267-279
O. Harris 1981 'Households as natural units' in K. Young, C. Wolkowitz & R.
McCullock (eds.) Of Marriage and the Market. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
J. Carsten and S. Hugh-Jones (eds.) 1995 About the House Cambridge: CUP
M. Ferme, 2001 The Underneath of Things Berkeley: University of California Press
(ch. 4)
Potential Supervision Questions:
1) The study of kinship both illuminates and is illuminated by the study of non-kin
relations. Discuss.
2)
What, if anything at all, is added to our understanding of kinship by calling
it a cultural system? OR Do you agree with Schneider that there is no such thing
as kinship?
3)
Has the term “relatedness” simply contracted, expanded or supplanted
kinship?
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4)
Why did Strathern find it necessary to introduce the concept of ‘dividual’
into a description of Melanesian kinship? OR ‘In English kinship, individuals
reproduce individuals’ What does Strathern mean by such an assertion?
5)
If kinship ensures the continuity of the person, what happens to it when
historical events rupture that continuity?
6)
The study of kinship is as much about rupture as it is about connection.
Discuss.
7)
Can kinship time and historical time be separated?
8)
Drawing on either the notion of domains and/or the notion of the
developmental cycle of domestic groups, evaluate some of the ways that postFortesian anthropologists have engaged with these models.
9)
Why has the notion of the person attracted more analytical attention by
anthropologists working in the field of kinship than in other anthropological
arenas? OR, more simply, why has the concept of the person attracted so much
anthropological attention?
10)
‘It’s all a matter of perspective.’ Explore this statement with reference to two
anthropologists of your choice.
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