2 Ethnocentric Projection and the Study of Kinship

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