Commentaries
AReection of History
ALAN BARNARD¤
Kinshipused to be, and to some extent still is,a youngperson’ s eld: ClaudeLé vi-Strauss, Sir Edmund Leach, Rodney Needham, Marshall Sahlins,and even CliffordGeertz, etc., all madecontributions to kinship studiesin their relative youth,then movedon to other matters. There areexceptions, of course, and David Schneider was one. But perhaps his placein the dissolutionof traditional kinship studies was related to this. Themain thrust of Needham’ s kinshipwork, in contrast,was not really an attackon the eld itself,but on practitioners’ misuse of models and their fuzzythinking. Isometimesfeel thatI have notcaught up withanthropological theory sincereturning from my early eldworkin the 1970s,and that this may beno bad thing. There are those who keep upwith the trends:both Leachand Sir Raymond Firth always aimed to do that. Then there are others,such as myself, whoprefer the anthropologyof their youth, just asmost people (in the West atleast) preferthe popmusic of their own youthto the popmusic their children listen too.From the pointof viewof the individual,this is called watching the worldchange orsimply growing old.From the perspectiveof the discipline,when coupledwith what the next generationare up to, it is “ agenda-hopping”(D’ Andrade1995: 4-8). Acrucialpoint in suchhistorical analysis mustbe: is all thisthat different fromwhat happened before? In otherwords, was the lossof kinship in the formit took at the timeof Needham’ s (1971)or Schneider’ s (1984)major critiquesany differentfrom the lossof its earlier manifestations? I amnot so sure. AdamKuper (1988) describes anthropology since Sir Henry Maine as basedon a “primitiveillusion” that is transformed in each generation.
¤Professor,Social Anthropology, University ofEdinburgh. E-mail: [email protected]. c KoninklijkeBrill NV, Leiden, 2003 Journal of Cognition and Culture 3.4 ° 306 COMMENTARIES
Centralto that illusion is kinship, whose existence asthe organizing principleof society Maine (1861)invoked inan attempt,among other things,to jettison “ legal ctions”in general andthe “socialcontract” inparticular. So, if in the 1860skinship replaced the seventeenth and eighteenth-century notionof the socialcontract, and kinship held its positionfor then next hundredyears, then whathas replacedkinship since the 1960s? Needham’s ownagenda changed when heapparentlybecame despon- dentwith kinship and took up classi cation (see, e.g.,Needham 1979). Lévi-Strauss before him had experienced something similar, but never gave uphis high regard for kinship as a eld –he only gave uphis early ob- sessionwith it. Schneider moved in the same direction.The difference, asPaulo Sousa suggests, is inSchneider’ s recourseto “ culture.”Needham has alwaysremained fundamentally a social anthropologist,like Maine and the Britishtradition, and like somein the American– LewisHenry Mor- ganand to some extent RobertLowie, and some trained by Englishman A.R.Radcliffe-Brown in 1930sChicago. Schneider, although a productof Chicagohimself, resurrected a Boasian“ culture”discourse quite alien to thistradition, in which culture, where it featured at all, wasmeant tobe arbitraryand unsystematic. Schneider, in distinguishing “ culturalsystem” from“ normativesystem” and giving prominence to the former,rede ned the focusof (some) kinshipstudies – forbetter or for worse. So,is there adifferencebetween Maine andSchneider? I wouldsay “yes,”but only inthe sense thattheir focal ethnographic concerns coupled withtheir respective emphases onsocial over culture (for Maine) orvice versa (forSchneider), led them andtheir anthropologies in quite different directionsin relationto what they wererejecting. For Maine, the societalist, the focuson Ancient Roman kinship led himto see the developmentof laterEuropean forms as consequential to the evolutionof the Roman pattern.However revolutionary his rejection of the socialcontract as the basisfor law, his belief in institutional fundamentals remained the same as the socialcontract theorists; he justreplaced one fundamental (the social contract)with another (the family).When hissuccessors (e.g., Durkeim and Mauss1963[1903]) substituted Australian Aboriginal society, or whatever, forRoman, it did not matter. When theirsuccessors (e.g., Radcliffe- Brown1931; Lé vi-Strauss 1969[1949]) substituted function or structure