What Really Happenedto Kinship andKinship Studies

ADAM KUPER¤

PauloSousa gives avery goodaccount of the fall ofkinship, but the highly focussedintellectualist perspective that he adoptsleaves outtoo much. Abroadercontext and a historicalperspective are required if we are to make sense ofwhat happened to kinship studies. And we have tolook beyondanthropology. The modernorthodoxy on kinship in anthropology waspart of a commonparadigm of kinship, marriage and the family withinthe socialsciences. And it collapsed, as the broaderparadigm collapsed,in part because of internal problems – theoreticalweaknesses, ethnographiccontradictions – butmore directly as a resultof social and politicaldevelopments inthe outsideworld. JohnBarnes has remarkedthat the three key texts inthe modern anthropologyof kinship were all publishedin 1949: The Web ofKinship among the Tallensi ,byMeyer Fortes, Lesstructures é lementaires de la parenté, byClaude Lé vi-Strauss, and SocialStructure byGeorge Peter Murdock. These booksbecame sacred texts ofrival schools of thought. In the 1960s,Barnes set himself the task ofdrawing out common themes fora uniŽed theory of kinship. The bookhe eventually published(Barnes 1971) wasunŽ nished, the Žnal synthesis unaccomplished,but it seems obvious enoughin retrospect that the three competinganthropological paradigms ofthe daydid have agreatdeal in common. And these commonideas werebroadly shared by the contemporaryclassic account of the American kinshipsystem byTalcott Parsons (1955). Accordingto the mid-centuryorthodoxies, primitive societies were orderedby descent groups, repetitive marriage alliances andkinship terminologies.In traditionalsocieties, large extended familiesprovided the

¤Professor,Social Anthropology, Brunel University. E-mail:[email protected]. c KoninklijkeBrill NV, Leiden, 2003 Journal of Cognition and Culture 3.4 ° 330 COMMENTARIES socialcore. Following the leadof Westermarck, Malinowski, Radcliffe- Brownand Lowie, anthropologists agreed that the nuclearfamily was presentin all societies,however ‘ primitive.’The general viewwas that inpre-modern societies the nuclearfamily was typically subordinatedto largerand more enduring kinship corporations, although it turnedout that the nuclearfamily was often very importantin hunter-gatherer societies, andin 1965 the Man the Huntersymposium rooted the very originof the divisionof labour by sex, betweenmale huntersand female gatherers, inthe nuclearfamily (Lee andDevore 1968). Nevertheless, primitiveand traditionalsocieties were contrasted to the individualistmodern society inwhich kinship was reduced to the nuclearfamily and the ego-focused kindred,and had shed its political and economic functions. For Parsons, the nuclearfamily was above all the essential engine-roomof socialisation. In retrospectit is easy toignore the contemporarychallenges tothis orthodoxy,but Malinowski had attacked it head on, when itwas in its infancy,in an articlepublished in Man in1930, in whichhe declaredthat an impassehad been reachedin kinship studies. And he hadno doubt aboutthe natureof the problem.It was due: Tothe inheritance offalse problemsfrom anthropological tradition. We are still enmeshed inthe questionas towhether kinship inits originswas collective orindividual, based on the familyof the clan : : : Another false problemis that ofthe originsand signiŽ cance ofclassiŽ catory systems ofnomenclature. (Malinowski 1930:21) He concluded,in a Žery deconstrutionistconclusion that foreshadowed the polemicsof Leach, Needham andSchneider: Imay say that whenever Imeet Mrs Seligmanor DrLowieor discuss matters with Radcliffe-Brownor Kroeber, I becomeat once awarethat my partner doesnot understand anything inthe matter,and I endusually with the feeling that this appliesto myself. This refers alsoto all ourwritings onkinship, and isfully reciprocal.(Malinowski 1930:28) Malinowski’s ownaccount of Trobriand kinship started from the individ- ualactor playing for advantage, bending the ruleson cousin marriage, inheritanceand residence, producing a statisticalrather than anormative structure.And the ideology– suchas the beliefthat sexual intercoursehad norole in procreation– wasinterpreted as serving the socialarrangements, inthis case the matrilinealrules of inheritanceand succession.