2 Ethnocentric Projection and the Study of Kinship

Ethnocentric Projection and the Study of Kinship … May 2008 6
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: