On Centrism and Dualism - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

CENTRISM AND DUALISM
Roland HARDENBERG (2007) remarks that even though the weak points of the classic theories
were exposed and hence the necessity for new models and intensive research highlighted, the
anthropological field of kinship studies was shaken by this continuous and fundamental
criticism. 60 Modernization and globalization became the new anthropological focus and the
scholars were looking for alternative models. As a result, kinship studies vanished from the
anthropological curricula in many countries. In this time of rapid change, accompanied by the
expansion of bureaucratic and capitalistic cultures, the classic models of kinship studies were
refuted as representing perspectives that were too static and inflexible (ibid.: 161-162).
According to Susan GILLESPIE (GILLESPIE 2000a), the epistemological shift away from the
classic concepts of kinship studies contributed to the revelation that in many societies the
indigenous word for ‘house’ also refers to a group of people associated with some spatial
locus, one that most often includes a dwelling or other structure. In practical discourse and
action the house may represent social, economic, political and ritual relationships among
various persons, who may form a permanent or temporary collectivity (ibid.:6). As a
consequence the symbolism of domestic houses had received a fair amount of anthropological
attention (e.g. NEEDHAM 1962; CUNNINGHAM 1973 [1964]; TAMBIAH 1969; BLOCH 1971;
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BOURDIEU 1977).
BOURDIEU’S statements made with reference to his analysis of the Kabyle house, in his book
Outline of a Theory of Practice (BOURDIEU 1977), represent a paradigmatic example of how
the classic anthropological perspectives were becoming criticized on grounds of an increased
attention directed towards the house. In highlighting the significance of the house as an
indigenous concept to convey meaning, BOURDIEU questions the appropriateness of analytic
categories that were understood as universals on the one hand, and on the other hand he
emphasizes the body as an agent in the process of decoding cultural messages. With his
60 “To put it very bluntly, then, there is no such thing as kinship, and it follows that there can be no such thing as
kinship theory.” (NEEDHAM 1971: 5)
61 “In a social formation in which the absence of the symbolic-product-conserving techniques associated with
literacy retards the objectification of symbolic and particularly cultural capital, inhabited space – and above all
the house – is the principal locus for the objectification of the generative schemes; and, through the intermediary
of the divisions and hierarchies it sets up between things, persons, and practices, this tangible classifying system
continuously inculcates and reinforces the taxonomic principles underlying the arbitrary provisions of this
culture. […] This analysis of the relationship between the objectified schemes and the schemes incorporated or
being incorporated presupposes a structural analysis of the social organization of the internal space of the house
and the relation of this internal space to the external space, an analysis which is not an end in itself but which,
precisely on account of the (dangerous) affinity between objectivism and all that is already objectified, is the
only means of fully grasping the structuring structures which, remaining obscure to themselves, are revealed
only in the objects they structure. The house, an opus operatum, lends itself as such to a deciphering, but only to
a deciphering which does not forget that the “book” from which the children learn their vision of the world is
read with the body, in and through the movements and displacements which make the space within which they
are enacted as much as they are made by it.” (BOURDIEU 1977: 89-90 original italics)
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