2 Ethnocentric Projection and the Study of Kinship

Ethnocentric Projection and the Study of Kinship … May 2008 4
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.