Kinship Matters. Tribals, Cousins, and Citizens in Southwest Asia and Beyond Affaire De Parenté
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Études rurales 184 | 2009 La tribu à l'heure de la globalisation Kinship Matters. Tribals, Cousins, and Citizens in Southwest Asia and Beyond Affaire de parenté. gens de tribus, cousins et citoyens en Asie du Sud-Est et au- delà Édouard Conte et Saskia Walentowitz Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesrurales/10578 DOI : 10.4000/etudesrurales.10578 ISSN : 1777-537X Éditeur Éditions de l’EHESS Édition imprimée Date de publication : 7 avril 2009 Pagination : 217-250 Référence électronique Édouard Conte et Saskia Walentowitz, « Kinship Matters. », Études rurales [En ligne], 184 | 2009, mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2011, consulté le 11 février 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ etudesrurales/10578 ; DOI : 10.4000/etudesrurales.10578 © Tous droits réservés KINSHIP MATTERS. Édouard Conte and Saskia Walentowitz TRIBALS, COUSINS, AND CITIZENS IN SOUTHWEST ASIA AND BEYOND warranted to some. Yet, it continues to imply distinguishing ‘Muslims with genealogies’ from those without while discarding kinship alto- gether. How thus, to take but one example, can emerging gendered configurations of citi- zenship in Southwest Asia and beyond 4 be understood? How, further, can the theory of kinship be replaced simply by claiming that the notion of universal male dominance enables one to understand the logical and substantive articulations between the fields of kinship, reproduction, and politics at the interface of ‘family’ and ‘state’ [see Joseph ed. 2000]? N ANTHROPOLOGICAL USAGE, the term Addressing these issues is a matter of ‘tribe’ may refer to a presumptively uni- political urgency and not solely of academic lineal descent group or to a politically or concern. Departing from the ideology of a I 1 territorially specific entity . The segmentary ‘clash of civilizations’ between Muslims and lineage theory through which the notion of non-Muslims, academic, military, and political tribe was problematized by structural func- actors in the United States and Northern Europe tionalist anthropology supposed basic dicho- have, ever since the 1992 US intervention in tomies between state and stateless societies as Somalia, taken up the notion of tribe, purport- well as egalitarian and hierarchical modes of edly founded on the principles of endogamy social organisation. The persistence in anthropo- and descent, to legitimate a politically potent logical literature of such polar oppositions if self-deluding ideological amalgamation of impedes in our view arriving at any adequate close-kin marriage, Islam, and terror. We sociological or political comprehension of the variegated phenomena historically and currently 1. We would like to thank the evaluators of this text subsumed under the labels of ‘tribe’ or ‘tribal- for their insightful comments. Further, we express our ism’. 2 Indeed, these dichotomies hinder iden- gratitude to the Swiss National Science Foundation tifying the gendered processes of kinship and and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for their generous support. human reproduction in transgenerational per- spective. Segmentary lineage theory, however 2. L. Abu-Lughod addressed this issue as of 1989. 3 W. Krauss [2004] presents a synthesis of English- and reframed by alliance theory, is simply not French-language publications on ‘Islamic tribal societies’. adequate for understanding social dynamics at 3. Such approaches are developed in the special issue of large in ‘tribal’, societal, or transsocietal set- L’Homme 2000, 154/155 entitled ‘Question de parenté’. tings. The renewed focus on ‘tribalism’, pat- 4. We thus designate the vast and so extraordinarily ent in both journalism and strategic planning, diverse expanse of territory from Sahel and Maghreb to as well as in the social sciences, may appear Central Asia and North India. Études rurales, juillet-décembre 2009, 184 : 217-248 911372 DE11 16-02-10 12:07:40 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 217 Édouard Conte and Saskia Walentowitz ... 218 consider it essential for anthropologists to react Weiner analyses reproduction ‘not as a bio- to this ethical and substantive challenge to the logical construct, but as a cultural concept in legitimacy of their discipline [see González which the basic processes for reproducing 2009]. human beings, social relations, cosmological In the first part of this text, we will draw phenomena, and material resources are cultur- attention to the inherent ambivalence of the ally defined and structurally interconnected’ term ‘tribe’ understood as a simultaneously [1978: 183]. In this perspective, human pro- emic and etic notion 5 and, on this basis, ana- creation is shaped and entailed by diverse lyse its pivotal function in rendering credible ways of ‘being human’ in society, with all the amalgamation just described. In the second this implies for the cultural interpretation of section, we will question the division of so- its material and immaterial components. cieties in which Islam is widely recognized into A.F. Robertson [1991] takes this approach fur- tribal and non-tribal sectors. This contention ther by placing the social dynamics of human will be borne out by testing hypotheses meant reproduction at the centre of the anthropological to show how an alternative theory of kinship analysis of contemporary societies and states. and reproduction may contribute to providing He aptly stresses that the political-economic non-discriminatory and non-teleological expla- sphere is part of the social organisation of nations of processes related to the construction reproduction. To work towards this problem- of social proximity. In so doing, we will refer atic in contemporary Muslim contexts, we sug- to the key Arabic concept of nasab, and some gest focusing here on the gendered dynamics of its Berber, Persian, or other analogues, of kinship as the prism and crucible of repro- designating the diachronic continuity of patro- ductive relations beyond flawed distinctions nymics and equivalents that structures and such as private vs. public, tribe vs. state, urban validates fluctuating social identities and net- vs. rural, and indeed male vs. female. works, with all the rights, expectations, and duties thus conveyed. Nasab is understood as the constantly recreated articulation of struc- 5. ‘An emic model is one which explains the ideology tural and historical processes that retrospec- of behaviour of members of a culture according to tively guarantee the validity of claims of origin indigenous definitions. An etic model is one which is by the transgenerational articulation of sibling based on criteria from outside a particular culture. Etic models are held to be universal; emic models are culture- sets through marriage permutations as well as specific [...] A commonplace assumption about emic the recognition of individual and collective models is that they are “discovered” rather than affiliations, including paternity and citizenship. “invented” by the analyst. However, emic models, like Indeed, the social, economic, symbolic, and phonemic ones, are ultimately exogenous constructions, political processes that establish the ongoing formalized by the analyst on the basis of distinctive recognition of transgenerational continuity are features present in indigenous usage. They are not in themselves “the native model”’ [Barnard 1996: 181- encompassed by and account for the dynam- 182]. This highly useful distinction raises a host of ques- ics of human reproduction, a factor often over- tions addressed in particular in T. Headland, K. Pike and seen by political anthropologists. Annette M. Harris eds. [1990]. 911372 DE11 16-02-10 12:07:40 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 218 Kinship Matters. Tribals, Cousins, and Citizens in Southwest Asia and Beyond ... Tribes and States after Kinship ‘race’, and the (un)avowed biological essen- 219 tialism it connotes [see Gumilev 1978]. These Stopping for a moment to consider the recent serious reservations apply both to external read- semantic genealogy of the operative concept ings of indigenous usages of terms construed of ‘tribe’, we find that it well predates that, as equivalents of the English ‘tribe’ as well today taken for granted in everyday speech, of as to academic acceptations of this shorthand ‘ethnicity’. 6 This notion is a belated derivate of term behind which many analysts have been émigré Russian ethnographer Shirokogorov’s tempted to take refuge. Its use, if not analysed [1923] ‘ètnos’, a term that unwittingly struc- in its full semantic field, may easily induce a tured Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet nation- lack of vigilance, indeed an epistemological ality theory [Stalin 1954; Bromley 1974], capitulation. Nazi Rassenkunde and Volkstumsforschung With hindsight, it is clear that the percep- [Mühlmann 1941 and 1944] and, not least, the tion of ‘tribes’, as once viewed from horse- intellectual construction of apartheid [Sharp or camelback in the Khyber pass, Transjordan, 1980a; Skalník 1988]. These ‘deviations’ of the Sudan, or the ‘outback’ in general, came social theory were widely hush-hushed in the to bear indelibly on the shaping and conceptu- ever nation-focused history of science after alisation not only of contemporary terminol- 1945 and 1989, respectively [Stocking 1968]. ogy subsumed under ‘race’, ‘ethnogenesis’ or Yet, taken together, they did not contribute ‘ethnicity’, but equally of ‘modern’ nation- little to the emergence of ‘ethnicity’ and its states. State-based polities were long set in derivates as politically correct buzzwords – i.e. opposition to ‘stateless’ or