2 Ethnocentric Projection and the Study of Kinship

2 

Ethnocentric Projection and the Study of Kinship 

Summary 

As we have already seen, kinship has been a central organizing concept within anthropology 

for most of its history as a discipline, and debates over kinship incorporate discussion of 

many general issues concerning the subjects and methods of anthropological study: the 

nature of social structure, culture, ethnocentrism, relativism, and the character and limits of 

anthropological study. Since the late 1960s, anthropologists have questioned the disciplinary 

legacy left by kinship studies, and both rejected the focus on kinship and reconceptualized 

the nature of kinship and its role in understanding cultures and society. In this chapter, I 

focus on David Schneider's influential critique of traditional kinship studies. I have two aims 

in this chapter. The first is to identify the claims at the heart of Schneider’s critique, along 

with some of the complexities in understanding and assessing those claims (sections 3-4). 

The chief of these claims is what I call the Ethnocentric Projection Thesis about Kinship. The 

second aim is to draw some conclusions for contemporary kinship studies, given the 

instrumental role that Schneider’s critique has played in the paradigm shift between 

traditional kinship studies and the “new kinship studies” (section 5). To link the two aims I 

begin with some general background on and analysis of Schneider’s critique and the new 

kinship studies (sections 1-2). I will argue that precisely what Schneider claimed about 

kinship stands in need of much clarification, and that there is a significant burden of proof 

on proponents of the Ethnocentric Projection Thesis, once some such clarification is 

offered. An aphorism that Schneider appeals to in his critique, blood is thicker than water, 

suggests much more about kinship than Schneider himself recognizes. 

kinship is like totemism, matriarchy, and the ‘matrilineal complex’. It is a non-subject. It exists in the 

minds of anthropologists but not in the cultures they study. 

David Schneider (1972:51) 

1. Rethinking Kinship within Anthropology 

I began the last chapter by noting that anthropology’s origins as a discipline, and 

much of the first hundred years of its history, are intimately tied to the study of kinship. 

Works such as Henry Maine’s Ancient Law (1861), John Ferguson McLennan’s Primitive 

Marriage (1865) and Lewis Henry Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human 

Family (1871) and Ancient Society (1877), constitute the origins of systematic anthropological 

writing about the structure and development of human societies, and all place kinship at the 

centre of the accounts that they provide of that structure and development. Maine, 

McLennan, and Morgan were all, to varying degrees, trained principally in law, using that 

training to offer general, comparative treatments of what they viewed as societies at distinct 

levels of evolutionary progress from primitiveness and savagery to advancement and 

civilization. Although there are important disagreements between the accounts that these 

early views provide, it is the collective shadow that they have caste over the development of 

ethnology within anthropology that is my starting point here. This shadow is long, even

Ethnocentric Projection and the Study of Kinship … May 2008 2 

though 20 th -century anthropologists, ranging from Malinowski and Boas early in the century, 

through to Radcliffe-Brown and Levi Strauss early in its second half, strived to define their 

own approaches to understanding large-scale social structure, difference, and change within 

and across different societies in opposition to the early focus on “primitive societies”. As 

Adam Kuper says in his broad-brush summary of this early work and its influence, 

The idea of primitive social structure that crystallized in the late nineteenth century 

was remarkably simple. Primitive society was originally an organic whole. It then 

split into two or more identical blocks, made up of exogamous, corporate descent 

groups. There were no families. Women and goods were held in common by men 

of each group. Marriage took the form of regular exchanges between them. 

Anthropologists worked on this conception for more than a century. The 

prototype of primitive society became an ideal type, which directed and ordered 

empirical studies. Finally it evolved into a model that lent itself to formal 

manipulation, particularly in the field of kinship studies. Kinship itself became the 

technical core of social anthropology. (2005, p.219) 

Calls from within anthropology to rethink kinship and its role in society have recurred 

throughout the 20 th -century. During the 1970s, such calls gathered sufficient momentum, 

overlap, and direction to constitute a distinctive challenge to the central place that kinship 

had occupied for the preceding hundred years. A condition for the success of this challenge 

was a wave of theoretical enrichment that saw the development and appropriation of a 

number of distinct substantive theories of large-scale social structure, a wave that brought 

about paradigm shifts to the whole field of cultural anthropology (see Ortner 1984). 

Included here are the development of symbolic anthropology and the corresponding 

interpretive turn within cultural anthropology in the 1960s; the appropriations of Marxist 

ideas in both structural and cultural forms in the 1970s; and the rise and evolution of 

feminist theory and the corresponding focus on gender dynamics within social structures 

throughout the past 40 years. These theoretical developments unfolded against a 

background of broader political changes in European and North American societies, as well 

as along with changes in the organization of academic units, fields, and disciplines. 

Such theoretical and political changes may well have sufficed to shift the study of 

kinship from centre stage within cultural anthropology, but the resulting change here was 

also facilitated by insider reflections on the study of kinship itself. The most sustained and 

influential of these were those of David Schneider, whose influence is acknowledged in 

anthropologists’ own reflections on the shifts and changes in kinship studies (e.g., 

Yanagisako and Collier 1987, Strathern 1992, Carsten 2004). In American Kinship (1968) 

Schneider made explicit his focus on “the symbols which are American kinship” (1968:18), a 

phrase foregrounding both his emphasis on meaning and on kinship in the West. Schneider 

went on, in A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984) to offer a sweeping indictment of 

traditional anthropological studies of kinship, identifying and rejecting a putatively 

fundamental assumption underlying kinship studies, what he called the Blood is Thicker than 

Water assumption. Schneider’s rejection of this assumption was the basis for both his own 

skepticism about “kinship studies”, and for much of the work that has subsequently been 

undertaken self-consciously under the heading “rethinking kinship” (e.g., Carsten 2000, 

Collier and Yanagisako 1987, Franklin 2006, 2007, Franklin and McKinnon 2001, Strathern 

1992, 2005). 

2. The New Kinship Studies


Informative characterizations of both Schneider’s critique and the new direction to 

kinship studies can be found in novel, integrative research on kinship (e.g., Carsten 2004, 

Faubion 2001), in recent area reviews (e.g., Peletz 1995, Scheffler 2001), in explicit 

reflections on Schneider’s influence (e.g., Feinberg 1979, Feinberg and Ottenheimer 2001), 

in self-conscious locational work from researchers at the forefront of the transition to the 

new studies (e.g., Yanagisako and Collier 1987, Franklin and McKinnon 2001), and in critical 

discussions of recent books in the field (e.g., Barnes 2006, Dousset 2007, Faubion 1996, 

Goody 2005). There is much diversity within the “new study” of kinship, with discussions 

that range across a dizzying array of topics: reproductive technologies, heritability, chosen 

families, autoethnography, invented communities, artificial life, internet dating, identity 

politics, disability activism, ethnicity, and adoption practices. Yet there is also sufficient 

common ground to warrant treating such studies as marking out a new direction for 

anthropologists and other social scientists, which can be characterized by five positive features 

(reading down), each matched by a corresponding negative feature (reading across): 

Attention to cultural constructions of 

kinship. Kinship varies across societies, and 

has the significance it does because of the 

particular cultural forms it takes. 

A highlighting of the lived experiences of 

kinship. The meaning of kinship in 

particular contexts and for particular 

individuals has an impact as a kind of lived 

experience, rather than as a structure or 

system. 

The identification of kinship in novel 

domestic spaces. Kinship can be found and 

studied in various forms in Western 

societies, and has changed along with 

technological and broader social changes in 

those societies. 

An emphasis on the particularity of such 

forms of kinship. In studying these new 

forms of kinship at home, we benefit from 

attention to particular, often distinctive 

features that mark them off. 

The embrace of interdisciplinary 

approaches to kinship. The study of 

kinship is inherently interdisciplinary, 

informed by and often part of several 

disciplines, as well as multidisciplinary fields, 

such as cultural studies, gay and lesbian 

studies, science studies, family studies, and 

religious studies. 

Dismissal of biological notions of kinship. 

Kinship is not a specifically biological 

notion, and biological relations, such as 

“consanguinity” and “genealogy”, do not 

play a special role in kinship itself. 

A neglect of traditional structural and 

functional aspects of kinship. Structuralism 

and functionalism in anthropology do not 

hold the keys to an understanding of kinship. 

A reduced interest in the comparative 

treatment of the culturally exotic. Kinship 

is not uniquely or especially important in 

non-Western societies, and so the focus on 

“primitive societies” in the study of kinship 

cannot be justified. 

Skepticism of universal and totalizing 

claims about kinship. The detachment of 

kinship from its traditional biological base 

undermines the search for claims about 

kinship that generalize about societies and 

their relationships to one another vis-à-vis 

kinship. 

The rejection of kinship as a specifically 

anthropological concept. Although kinship 

has been a mainstay of anthropological study 

for much of the history of the discipline, 

there is nothing special about kinship that 

justifies this status or that gives 

anthropologists a privileged status in the 

study of kinship.


Table 1 

Five Positive and Negative Features of the New Kinship Studies 

Rather than discussing each of these features in turn, and in so doing repeating much of 

what can be found in the work mentioned above, I want simply to register two points. The 

first is the separability of the members of each of these pairs of features. Although each of 

these positive-negative pairs cohere, and often have been endorsed together, one could 

accept the positive member of each pair without also accepting the corresponding negative 

member. The second is that the initial paired features above—attention to the cultural 

construction of kinship and the subsequent dismissal of biological notions of kinship—are 

the most central to the cluster of features they characterize. They also form a prominent 

part of Schneider’s critique of kinship studies. Understanding this central thread to 

Schneider’s critique, particularly his dismissal of biological notions of kinship, should shed 

light on contemporary work on kinship, and its self-conscious distancing from traditional 

studies of kinship within anthropology. 

3. Schneider on Kinship 

I have already noted that the study of kinship recurrently reoriented itself and probed 

its own foundations as it developed from the 1860s on. Yet it was only in the 1970s that the 

critical reflection here gathered sufficient sweep and momentum to constitute a challenge to 

the status of kinship within anthropology, something resulting in a Kuhnian paradigm shift 

in the field. We can distinguish two components to this challenge, one internal and one 

external to kinship studies. The first came from leading figures within kinship studies, such 

as Rodney Needham and David Schneider, and these feature prominently in the narratives 

that anthropologists have provided of the sea change in kinship studies. Schneider’s views, 

culminating in his A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), connected with the external 

component to this challenge, which included developments elsewhere within anthropology 

(e.g., the rise of symbolic anthropology) as well as in the broader academic climate (e.g., the 

emergence of feminist perspectives on gender, the family, and social structure). Some brief 

comments on Needham’s challenge should allow us to understand something of the context 

of Schneider’s, by way of contrast. 

In his “Remarks on the Analysis of Kinship and Marriage”, Needham summarized 

his briefly stated views of kinship in that paper, as he says, “bluntly”: that “there is no such 

thing as kinship, and it follows that there can be no such thing as kinship theory” (1971: 5). 

Three features of Needham’s view here are worth noting, especially in contrast with those 

that Schneider developed. First, Needham’s reasons for this conclusion were explicitly 

Wittgensteinian, appealing to the philosopher’s cautionary reminders about the search for 

essences and criterial meaning that were simply not to be found, and drawing on 

Wittgenstein’s famous examples of games and family resemblances. As such, they neither 

found nor created a context within anthropology for their reception. Second, Needham 

made no attempt to link his views here to “external” developments elsewhere in 

anthropology or academia more generally. And third, this denial of “kinship” and of 

“kinship theory” was not accompanied by methodological or practical changes in how one 

regarded either kinship or kinship theory, the message seemingly to be simply to stop the 

metatheoretical hand-wringing about kinship and continue with one’s ethnological work.


Schneider’s challenge, despite arriving at much the same conclusion as Needham, 

was posed in a way that differed in all three of these respects. It was grounded not in the 

work of a philosopher, but as part of the development of the idea that the way to investigate 

a culture or society was to understand the symbols that made up that culture, and to do so 

by revealing how those in that culture understand those symbols. Schneider became an 

important proponent of this symbolic or interpretive turn in anthropology, whose most 

influential expression is contained in Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). 

This approach spoke to, and indeed stoked, deep-seated relativist tendencies within 

anthropology motivated by the desire to avoid ethnocentrism, and also found affinities with 

broader, post-structuralist trends in the humanities and social sciences that swept through 

North American universities in the 1970s. Moreover, Schneider’s views were part of a call to 

abandon kinship studies, and although that call was not strictly heeded, it did lead to a lull in 

traditional kinship studies, as well as an announced break from the past as work gathered 

under the heading of “new kinship studies” was launched. 

As the title American Kinship suggests, Schneider shifted his focus in kinship studies 

from culturally exotic to culturally familiar locations. Schneider had completed ethnographic 

work on the Micronesian island of Yap in the late 1940s, much of which concentrated or 

touched on kinship (Schneider 1953, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1962; see also Schneider 1995). 

Schneider’s work on kinship in America had begun with his joint work with the sociologist 

George Homans (Homans and Schneider 1955, Schneider and Homans 1955), work that 

Schneider later distanced himself from (e.g., Schneider 1965a; see Feinberg 2001a:7). But it 

was in American Kinship that the critical view Schneider had adopted of traditional kinship 

studies meshed with the alternative, symbolic-interpretive view of culture and cultural 

anthropology that he saw as replacing those studies. Schneider was interested in kinship as a 

cultural system, contrasting kinship so-conceived with kinship as a result of biological facts. 

Schneider viewed kinship in America as a cultural system structured around blood (shared 

biogenetic substance) and love (“diffuse, enduring solidarity”). This twin notions, of blood 

and love, provided the key to understanding the folk conception of kinship in American 

culture, notions that structured the corresponding cultural system of kinship. American 

Kinship provided neither quantitative ethnographic data to support Schneider’s claims, with 

Schneider content to inform the reader that the analysis rested on 6000 pages of typed 

interviews, nor ethnographic speculation about kinship as a cultural system in other locales 

beyond the statement that kinship in such “primitive and peasant societies” was less 

“differentiated” (1968: vii). No changes were made in the second edition of the book, 

published in 1980, except for the addition of a further paragraph of acknowledgements and a 

final chapter, “Twelve Years Later”. 

Schneider’s most extensive reflections on kinship and its study are contained in A 

Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984). His two concluding chapters provide capsule statements 

of two clusters of criticisms, the first applying to kinship along with other members making 

up the “quartet of kinship, economics, politics, and religion” (1984:184), “large-scale 

institutions, rubrics, or domains” that have been used to structure much work in 

anthropology. Schneider says, 

the whole notion of kinship … is embedded in a set of institutions, rubrics, or 

domains and … there is no satisfactory theory of these or any satisfactory way of 

justifying their existence or their distinction from one another, the primacy which the 

four major ones are given [sic], the assumption of boundedness, of system, or the 

assumption that they constitute anything more than a valiant attempt to use the 

constructions of European culture as tools for description, comparison, and analysis.


Much of this book has taken it for granted that kinship could be treated as a unit and 

a thing. The criticisms centered on how that unit or thing was to be understood. It 

is now time to face the fact that the very notion of kinship, like that of economics, 

religion, or politics, is essentially undefined and vacuous: it is an analytic construct 

which seems to have little justification even as an analytic construct. (1984: 184-185) 

Schneider’s point here is that, like other large-scale institutions, rubrics or domains— 

economics, politics, and religion—kinship is a category that applies at best to American or 

European cultures, and then is projected onto other cultures by social scientists who absorb the 

folk categories available in their own cultures, using these (perhaps in modified and 

precisified forms) to undertake ethnographic reconstructions of the organization of other 

cultures. The problem is that such projections are ethnocentric projections, rather than the 

discovery of existing intricacies in the “kinship structures” in place in those cultures. We can 

express this claim as follows: 

(A): There is a particular conception of kinship that is projected onto, rather 

than discovered in, non-Western cultures. 

Concern with the ethnocentricity of kinship studies comes out more explicitly in Schneider’s 

further concluding summary: 

My difficulty with the study of kinship can be summed up simply: the assumptions 

and presuppositions which the anthropologist brings to the process of understanding 

the particular culture he is studying are imposed on the situation blindly and with 

unflagging loyalty to those assumptions and little flexible appreciation of how the 

other culture is constituted, and with it a rigid refusal to attempt to understand what 

may be going on between them. The anthropologist has, as part of his culture, his 

conceptual scheme, a way of ordering his experience of another culture, a way of 

constructing the reality he believes he is encountering, and he is not easily shaken 

loose from that secure, reassuring, comfortable, well-worn common language to 

which he is committed and shares with his community of anthropologists … (pp. 

196-197) 

To understand the substance of Schneider’s critique, we need to know more about the 

particular conception of kinship that he has in mind in (A). Here we need to turn to 

Schneider’s final chapter in which he identifies “three basic axioms used in the study of 

kinship” (1984:188), all of which Schneider thinks are false, and together which are used to 

support a view that Schneider calls the Doctrine of the Genealogical Unity of Mankind: “the thesis 

that at one level all genealogies are equal to each other, or can be treated as dealing with the 

same thing and so are comparable” (1984:125). Schneider also thinks that this doctrine is 

false. The first of Schneider’s axioms elaborates directly on the points we have just seen him 

make: 

kinship is one of the four privileged institutions, domains, or rubrics of social 

science, each of which is conceived to be a natural, universal, vital component of 

society. … Furthermore, kinship is the specially privileged of the privileged 

institutions, for it is kinship alone which [sic] can serve as idiom for, is the necessary 

prerequisite to, and out of which, the other three institutions are differentiated. 

(pp.187-188) 

Here Schneider challenges both the naturalness and universality of kinship, as well as its role 

in the foundation or operation of other social institutions. This assumption of naturalness 

and universality drives traditional anthropological studies of kinship, and the falsity of that 

assumption makes the subsequent “search for kinship” a projection of Western categories 

onto non-Western societies. Schneider’s second axiom says that:


kinship has to do with the reproduction of human beings and the relations between 

human beings that are the concomitants of reproduction. The reproduction of 

human beings is formulated as a sexual and biological process. Sexual relations are 

an integral part of kinship, though sexual relations may have significance outside 

kinship and sexual relations per se are not necessarily kinship relations (p.188). 

Schneider’s statement of his second point (“kinship has to do with …”) is weaker than what 

I take him to be getting at, namely, that it has been taken for granted that kinship is 

construed primarily as a genealogical relationship, one between biological ancestor-descendant pairs 

that, over time, constitute biological ancestor-descendant chains. Sexual relations matter insofar as they 

are the biological means through which these pairs and chains are generated. In oldfashioned 

language, kinship is a matter of consanguinity, biologically construed, with alliances 

relevant insofar as they generate the resulting genealogy. Schneider thinks that this is false 

when considered as a view of kinship in general, this simply being “the American” 

conception of kinship projected onto other cultures. 

The third axiom, which Schneider calls the Blood is Thicker Than Water axiom, is the 

most important of the three, lying at the heart of Schneider’s critique, with Schneider himself 

referring to it as “the fundamental assumption” in several places (pp. 176, 177), and it being 

the only of the three axioms to be discussed in a dedicated chapter (ch.14, pp.165-177). It is 

especially unfortunate, given this, that Schneider nowhere in his Critique provides a clear 

statement of what the axiom says. Before turning to Schneider’s explicit presentation of it in 

his summary, consider three of his earlier specific references to Blood is Thicker Than Water 

(see also pp. 173, 176, 177, 189, 191, 193, 194): 

The assumption that Blood is Thicker Than Water says that whatever variable 

elements may be grafted onto kinship relations, all kinship relations are essentially 

the same and share universal features. (p.174) 

This assumption [that Blood is Thicker Than Water] makes kinship or genealogical 

relations unlike any other social bonds, for they have especially strong binding force 

and are directly constituted by, grounded in, determined by, formed by, the 

imperatives of the biological nature of human nature (p.174) 

Because “Blood is Thicker Than Water”, kinship consists in bonds on which 

kinsmen can depend and which are compelling and stronger than, and take priority 

over, other kinds of bonds. … All kinship bonds are of essentially the same kind. 

All of this is because kinship is a strong solidary [sic] bond that is largely innate, a quality of 

human nature, biologically determined, however much social or cultural overlay may also be present. 

(pp.165-166, emphasis in original) 

The first of these has the axiom saying that kinship relations are universal—what Schneider’s 

first axiom says, in part. The second has that axiom saying or implying that genealogical 

bonds are unique in strength, and that these bonds are the result of a biological imperative. 

And the third, picking up on this latter theme, characterizes the axiom as implying that 

kinship bonds are innate, part of human nature, or biologically determined, meaning that they flow 

naturally from psychological and other capacities that are part of our innate make-up. 

Universality, uniqueness, and innateness, however, are three different properties that a 

relation might possess. Perhaps Schneider intends Blood is Thicker Than Water to have all 

three of these features; here I simply register their distinctness. 

In his concluding summary, Schneider presents Blood is Thicker Than Water in the 

following way: 

sexual reproduction creates biological links between persons and these have 

important qualities apart from any social or cultural attributes which [sic] may be


attached to them. Indeed, the social and cultural attributes, though considered the 

primary subject matter of anthropologists, and of particular concern to social 

scientists, are nevertheless derivative of and of less determinate significance than the 

biological relations. These biological relations have special qualities; they create and 

constitute bonds, ties, solidary [sic] relationships proportional to the biological 

closeness of the kind … These are considered to be natural ties inherent in the 

human condition, distinct from the social or cultural. (p.188). 

Although Schneider here refers back to the naturalness or perhaps innateness of kinship 

relations with his characterization of them as “natural ties inherent in the human condition”, 

the primary pair of characterizations in this passage is of biological relations as being 

important or having significance in abstraction from any other properties and relations, including 

social or cultural attributes, and of them being determinative of such other properties and 

relations. These are yet fourth and fifth putative features of kinship relations, as they have 

been conceived within traditional kinship studies. 

So Blood is Thicker Than Water says any or all of the following of kinship relations: 

they are universal, unique in strength, innate (part of human nature, biologically determined), 

have significance in abstraction from any other properties or relations, and are determinative 

of such other properties and relations. A reading of the axiom that ascribes all five features 

to how kinship has been conceived throughout a traditional stretching 100 years would, 

however, offer little more than a caricature to that tradition, a kind of pastiche of different 

views within the tradition and an adequate characterization of none of them. Perhaps the 

most plausible way to understand just what the Blood is Thicker than Water axiom says of 

kinship relations is that there is a cluster of features ascribed to kinship, some subset or 

other of which has been drawn on by each of those who have contributed to traditional 

kinship studies. 

Schneider’s failure to state precisely what this third axiom says also interacts 

unfortunately with his reliance on the eponymous aphorism, since that aphorism is not 

typically used to express any of these five views. To say that blood is thicker than water, in 

common usage, doesn’t typically mean or imply that biological kin relationships 

• are everywhere and always the same (universality) 

• are the only relationships that generate strong bonds between people (uniqueness) 

• have their value as a part or direct result of human nature (innateness) 

• alone or by themselves generate strong bonds between people (abstraction) 

• are determinative of, or sufficient for, all other social relations (sufficiency) 

What the aphorism Blood is thicker than water means, in common usage, is that the bonds felt 

between people created by biological kin relationships (“blood”) are or should be, stronger 

(“thicker”) than all other kinds of bonds between people (mere “water”). It is used in two 

distinct but related ways. Descriptively, it is used to summarize, explain, or even predict, 

scenarios that involve interpersonal interactions; prescriptively, it is used, often as a reminder, 

to draw attention to the importance of one’s biological family obligations and expectations 

that are based on these familial ties. Schneider seems to forget, downplay, or ignore such 

(very common) prescriptive uses. 

To concentrate on the difficulties in pinning down just what the Blood is 

Thicker Than Water doctrine says, and the aptness of the name Schneider has chosen for it, 

however, would be to be unduly myopic, a case of missing the forest for the trees. Rather 

than approaching this doctrine analytically and compositionally, one can instead try to 

characterize the “big idea” at the heart of Schneider’s various expressions of Blood is Thicker


than Water. Adopting this approach, we might say that the central claim that Schneider is 

making as a supplement to (A) is as follows: 

(B) The particular conception of kinship that is ethnocentrically projected by 

anthropologists is one according to which biological genealogical and reproductive 

relations play asymmetrically special or distinctive roles in structuring social or 

cultural relations, and governing social or cultural practices. 

Four clarifications about (B): (i) By “biological genealogical and reproductive relations” I 

mean both relations of descent and alliance, where each is understood via the notion of 

sexual reproduction. (ii) The phrase “asymmetrically special or distinctive roles” is meant to 

encompass not only the kinds of asymmetry that Schneider has identified (universality, 

uniqueness, innateness, abstraction, and sufficiency), but any asymmetric distinctiveness that 

such biological genealogical and reproductive relations play in structuring and governing 

sociality. (iii) This phrase is not to be understood so loosely, however, as to say simply that 

biological genealogical and reproductive relations are relevant to, part of, or mentioned in 

kinship in particular cultural contexts. (iv) Although Schneider himself is emphatic about the 

distinction between social and cultural relations and practices, I deliberately bracket 

consideration of the distinction by talking of the two together here. 

Call (A) and (B) together—perhaps getting into the Schneiderian spirit—the 

Ethnocentric Projection Thesis about Kinship. Its truth would motivate the kinds of studies that 

have been undertaken in post-Schneiderian kinship studies, and even provides grounds for 

thinking that kinship “exists in the minds of anthropologists but not in the cultures they 

study” (Schneider 1972: 51). For the Ethnocentric Projection Thesis to be true, the general 

conception of kinship under consideration, one according to which genealogical relations 

play asymmetrical or distinctive roles in a society or culture, must be a misleading or 

mistaken conception, one that fails to hold beyond the culture from which it is projected. 

When this is true of a specific target culture, I will talk of kinship as failing to exist in that 

culture. 

4. The Ethnocentric Projection Thesis about Kinship 

We might contrast a number of ways in which social phenomena might fail to exist, 

in this sense, ways that I introduce and will refer to mnemonically via particular examples of 

each type of existence failure: 

The force of history. Sometimes the putative existence of something is denied because 

talk of that thing is merely the reification of a way of talking. Theorists might take 

an abstraction, such as the force of history or destiny, and start ascribing causal 

powers to “it” that treat that abstraction as an entity, a thing. Or they might collect 

together extremely different things under one term, with their invocation of that 

term imposing a unity on them that they simply do not possess: “consciousness” as 

used in contemporary consciousness studies might be one non-social example, and 

“anomie” as appropriated from Durkheim, a social example. 

Tennis. In this case, exemplified by particular recreational games such as tennis, the 

social phenomenon doesn’t occur in that particular culture at all, and it seems 

difficult to mistake something else in that culture for that particular practice or 

institution. The English play tennis, while the Yanomami do not. Moreover, there is 

nothing substantially like tennis in Yanomami society that might warrant us talking of 

tennis in discussing their culture. Here to speak of the structure or function of


tennis amongst the Yanomami, or about their conception of tennis, would be to talk 

of nothing. 

Sleeping and breathing. Consider activities such as breathing and sleeping. Unlike the 

above cases, in these cases the phenomenon does occur in the particular culture 

under consideration, but there is no special social or cultural significance attached to 

it. To view these activities and the relations associated with them (e.g., who is next 

to you when you are breathing) as providing the key to understanding their society or 

culture would be to fail both to understand the world from their point of view and to 

identify something fundamental about their society or culture. The Vezo of 

Madagascar breathe and sleep, like we do, but neither activities, nor their breathing 

or sleeping relations, play a special role in their society or culture, by their own lights 

or otherwise. 

Illness. Like the sleeping and breathing cases, those exemplified by illness can be found 

in the particular society being considered, but these social phenomena have some 

kind of marked significance in that society. The Nuer, like all people, get ill, and the 

phenomenon of illness is important enough to be noticed and theorized about. 

Nonetheless, Nuer ideas about illness—its causes and effects, its relationship to 

social practices, its signification—are sufficiently different from our own that it 

might be misleading to carry over our concept of illness in describing their views of 

what we call “illness” or particular illnesses. 

The Ethnocentric Projection Thesis about Kinship has assimilated kinship to each of these 

cases at various points. It is striking that Schneider’s most striking polemics (e.g., “kinship is 

like totemism, matriarchy, and the ‘matrilineal complex’. It is a non-subject. It exists in the 

minds of anthropologists but not in the cultures they study” (1972:51)), as well his three 

axioms of traditional kinship studies, assimilate kinship to either of the first two cases: it is 

either a mere theoretical abstraction, or a specific cultural form existing only in societies in 

which we are natives. Yet when focusing on aspects of kinship, such as reproduction and 

genetic relatedness, whose biological understanding is central to our own conception of 

kinship, by contrast, Schneider assimilates kinship to cases like those of sleeping and 

breathing, where the anthropological error of projection is synecdochical in nature, giving an 

aspect or part of kinship a significance greater than it has for kinship elsewhere. The same 

kinds of shift between these first three ways to understand the claim that kinship doesn’t 

exist in a target culture pervade the post-Schneiderian literature on kinship. 

One irony here is that the case most closely resembling the situation of kinship is 

surely the fourth, exemplified by illness. There is a social phenomenon that is not directed 

by what I’ll call cognitive-mediation. People get sick, they are treated, they recover; they 

reproduce, they are born, they are socially dependent in their early years. They do so whatever 

their particular conceptions of these phenomena. Yet there is cultural variation in just how these 

phenomena are construed and the significance they have for broader social arrangements, 

variation significant enough to question whether our conceptions are appropriate for capturing 

the reality of illness or kinship as it exists over there. Can we use the terms in our kinship 

system (mother, sibling, uncle) and its systematization in kinship theory (patrilineal, 

exogamous) to express adequately what kinship is in other cultural contexts And even 

supposing that this classic problem of translation or interpretation is resolved, does the 

adoption of the kinship perspective get at the heart of how social structure is lived, 

experienced, and felt in those cultural contexts The Ethnocentric Projection Thesis 

underpins negative answers to either or both of these questions.


Whether or not this is the most plausible way to understand the Ethnocentric 

Projection Thesis about Kinship, and so what lies at the core of Schneider’s critique of 

kinship, note that the Thesis implies a strong, quasi-universal claim, one about all cultures 

other than those in “the West”: none of them possess kinship, as characterized by the 

Ethocentric Projection Thesis. Thus, the Thesis goes significantly beyond the denial of the 

universality of kinship to the quasi-universal denial of its existence. As such, the Thesis 

would be refuted simply by finding one non-Western society or culture that does ascribe 

genealogical relations the kind of distinctive role they have (we are supposing) in Western 

conceptions of kinship. Thus, while consideration of particular departures from Western 

conceptions of kinship can motivate the Ethnocentric Projection Thesis, they cannot 

confirm it, unless one can generalize from such cases to all non-Western cultures. Such a 

generalization sits awkwardly with the spirit of both Schneider’s own critique of kinship and 

the general orientation of the new kinship studies. That the Thesis makes a strong claim, in 

this respect, does not imply that it cannot be true, but it does imply that the burden of proof 

on establishing it and the vulnerability to refutation are considerable. 

Whether the Thesis is true or false is, ultimately although partially, an empirical issue. 

But lurking in the background of resolution here is a dilemma for those wishing to defend 

the Thesis. Suppose that one thinks that the Ethnocentric Projection Thesis about Kinship 

is true with respect to a given target culture. In that culture, biological genealogical and 

reproductive relations do not play an asymmetrical or distinctive role in structuring or 

governing culture; rather, they conceptualize kinship differently. Yet if such an asymmetry 

or distinctive role is part of our concept of kinship, as the Thesis supposes, then the target culture 

is one in which it is not really that they conceptualize kinship differently but, rather, that they 

lack a concept of kinship altogether. It’s our concept, after all, and we have just supposed 

that the essential core of that concept, is missing. Thus, the case of kinship is not like that of 

illness, but like that of either tennis, or sleeping and breathing. This horn of the dilemma 

suggests that the critique of kinship is more radical than we have been supposing it to be. If 

there is a more general conception of kinship, however, that allows one to talk of different 

cultures conceptualizing it differently, then since those in the West can share this concept, 

the Ethnocentric Projection Thesis founders on what it claims about our conception of 

kinship. This horn of the dilemma, by contrast, softens the take-home message of the 

Ethnocentric Projection Thesis, since it neither indicts nor undermines the traditional study 

of kinship beyond suggesting that it has not been sensitive enough to all the nuances there 

are in conceptions of kinship. 

5. Back to the Future 

Insofar as a core part of the new kinship studies expands on Schneider’s native twist 

to the study of kinship, concentrating as it does on kinship at home—new reproductive 

technologies, shifting Western family demographics, the interplay between public 

representations and legal encodings of Western kinship, family disease and its medicalization, 

etc.—one might think that reflection on the Ethnocentric Projection Thesis serves merely as 

a distraction for those working in the new kinship studies. Apart from the fact that there 

remains a significant cross-cultural, ethnological strand running through the new kinship 

studies (e.g., Carsten 2004, Faubion 2001) to which the Thesis is directly relevant, there are 

several other ways in which such a view of the preceding analysis of Schneider’s critique 

would miss its relevance to work on kinship that has both been influenced by that critique 

and moved beyond it.


The first of these is that the very issues that arise in articulating and defending the 

Ethnocentric Projection Thesis also arise in considering variations in the forms that kinship 

can take on the domestic front. Although the new kinship studies can be said to focus on 

kinship in familiar places and spaces, much the same dilemma I posed above for proponents 

of the Ethnocentric Projection Thesis faces anyone exploring “kinship” that departs from 

the conception of kinship that Schneider has identified in traditional kinship studies. At least 

that is true if Schneider has, in fact, correctly identified this conception, an assumption 

motivating both the positive and negative strands to the new kinship studies depicted in 

Table 1. If an asymmetric or distinctive role for biological genealogical and reproductive 

relations lies at the core of our (Western) conception of kinship, then there is a real question 

as to whether we can explore, in familiar places and spaces, something properly called 

“kinship” in which biological genealogical and reproductive relations do not play such roles. 

On the other hand, if the Western conception of kinship is flexible enough to admit of 

kinship between neighbours, between members of an internet chat group, or between 

disability activists, then it seems that the new kinship studies simply extends traditional 

kinship studies into novel domestic sites. (And, of course, if the Western notion of kinship 

is this flexible, then, one might think, surely it is flexible enough to apply to non-Western 

societies lacking our putative fetishization of biology. Whence the ethnocentric projection) 

Thus, there would be much more continuity between the new and traditional kinship studies 

than has been suggested by much of the rhetoric fueled by Schneider’s own talk of the end 

of kinship studies. In effect, we can see something like ethnocentric projection beginning at 

home. 

The second way in which compartmentalizing the discussion of Schneider’s critique 

from contemporary kinship studies would be a mistake is that one upshot of that discussion 

is that what I characterized as the most central pair of claims for the new kinship studies— 

attention to cultural constructions of kinship and the resulting dismissal of biological notions 

of kinship—prove more difficult to defend than they might initially appear. In particular, we 

have seen that the negative member of this pair, dismissing biological notions of kinship, as 

it features in the Ethnocentric Projection Thesis, stands in need of clarification. When such 

clarification is provided, some of the complexities along the path of actually defending or 

justifying this dismissal are revealed. I have not argued that the Ethnocentric Projection 

Thesis is false, underscoring this as an empirical issue whose resolution lies beyond my 

limited aims in this chapter. But I take the preceding discussion to have shifted the burden 

of proof to proponents of the Thesis, and argued that this burden is significant. Since 

denying that biological genealogical and reproductive relations play an asymmetric or 

distinctive role is one way to dismiss biological notions of kinship, the preceding discussion 

again provides grounds for rethinking this aspect to the rethinking of kinship. 

One point made at the end of section 2 was that the positive and negative 

characterizations of the new kinship studies were separable. If that is correct, then one 

meliorative option for future directions to kinship studies would be to advocate downplaying 

those negative features. Doing so, of course, would minimize the sense of discontinuity 

between traditional and new kinship studies, something that it might be time to do anyway.

2 Ethnocentric Projection and the Study of Kinship

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