2 Ethnocentric Projection and the Study of Kinship

Ethnocentric Projection and the Study of Kinship … May 2008 10
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.