The Current Controversy in Kinship (original) (raw)
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Kinship, 2022
The world of anthropology has witnessed a recurring rhetorical title:"What Is Kinship All About?" and now this article titles itself "What is Kinship All About? Again." Why? Whereas we have over a century's worth of ethnography and theory focusing on the centrality of kinship in human society and in anthropological theory, in 2019 a Handbook is published that names itself "Kinship" but, despite its claim and to the contrary, it is not about kinship at all. The Handbook editor explicitly states that it is about "conceiving kinship," with kinship reduced to gendered social relatedness. In response, we reaffirm the centrality of kinship as a domain universal in human societies by way of a critique of the Handbook and a comprehensive review of its contributing chapters. Countering the Handbook's denialist-or in Harold Scheffler's famous term, dismantling-position, we bring to the fore the already determined universal properties that define the boundaries of the kinship domain and the logical properties that universally define the category of kinship.
Kinship, 2022
The world of anthropology has witnessed a recurring rhetorical title:"What Is Kinship All About?" and now this article titles itself "What is Kinship All About? Again." Why? Whereas we have over a century's worth of ethnography and theory focusing on the centrality of kinship in human society and in anthropological theory, in 2019 a Handbook is published that names itself "Kinship" but, despite its claim and to the contrary, it is not about kinship at all. The Handbook editor explicitly states that it is about "conceiving kinship," with kinship reduced to gendered social relatedness. In response, we reaffirm the centrality of kinship as a domain universal in human societies by way of a critique of the Handbook and a comprehensive review of its contributing chapters. Countering the Handbook's denialist-or in Harold Scheffler's famous term, dismantling-position, we bring to the fore the already determined universal properties that define the boundaries of the kinship domain and the logical properties that universally define the category of kinship.
Cultural Approach to The Study of Kinship
CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research - Zenodo, 2021
Kinship is the essential premise of organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories. It serves as the premier universal and fundamental aspect of all human relationships and relies on blood and marriage ties. Hence, Kinship is vital to an individual and a community's well-being because different societies connote Kinship differently. They also set the rules governing Kinship, which are sometimes legally defined and sometimes implied. This paper focuses on the cultural approach to the study of Kinship. Somebody can explore the cultural approach to kinship study through David M. Schneider's powerful framework, American Kinship: A Cultural Account, published in 1968. It was a part of the more extensive debate on the nature of Kinship. It bore on the anthropological definition of Kinship, and it explains whether or not it was necessary to refer to Kinship's biological dimension. Schneider examined Kinship as a cultural system that is based on shared symbols and meanings. This type of analysis became known as the culturalist approach. He offered a two-part answer to the question of how North American culture defined a relative. The study is based on approximately 100 interviews. Two symbolic kinship orders included nature and the law. In terms of character, relatives shared natural, biogenetic substances as symbolized by the indigenous word 'blood.' In terms of regulation, relatives were persons who followed a particular code of conduct. North American Kinship involved an opposition between two sets of symbols; first being the kinship 'by blood,' which was material, permanent and inalienable, and the second one is the kinship 'by marriage,' based on a human imposed order and referring to morals, law, and custom.
What human kinship is primarily about: toward a critique of the new kinship studies
Social Anthropology, 2008
The claims of the so-called 'constructionist' position in kinship studies are examined with reference to a recent article by Susan McKinnon. McKinnon's analysis is shown to be deeply flawed, primarily because she pays no attention to the phenomenon of focality, now widely established in cognitive science. Instead, she is trapped in unsupportable collectivist models of human kinship. It is argued that these models are part of a misguided critique of the Western European Enlightenment.
Like other major aspects of sociality, kinship receives distinctive treatments from biologists and anthropologists. For anthropologists, the study of kinship has traditionally been an arena for documenting cultural diversity, and about finding patterns in the midst of, and trajectories through, that diversity. Throughout most of anthropology's disciplinary history, kinship was thought to hold at least one key to understanding human cultures, both to how those cultures are related to one another and to understanding the structure and function of other large-scale cultural institutions, such as those associated with religion or economic exchange. By contrast, mention kinship to your average biologist and you'll likely be directed to research focused on Hymnoptera and Termita, and models addressing general evolutionary puzzles—for example, the problem of evolutionary altruism and the phenomenon of reproductive specialization—that have been applied paradigmati-cally to the social insects, with secondary applications to creatures more obviously like us, such as mammals in general and nonhuman primates in particular. The trans-disciplinary contrast here has been exacerbated by a recent, decidedly anti-biological turn in the study of kinship in anthropology. Influential internal critiques of the study of kinship as involving little more than the ethnocentric projection of cultural forms from the West to the Rest, such as those of David Schneider 1972; Schneider 1984, identified biological conceptions of kinship as lying at the core of such a projection: while we conceptualize our kinship structures in terms of notions of reproduction, shared biological substances, and genetic codes, this is not what one finds in other societies. On this view, the traditional claim that kinship was a universal feature of human societies that had developed over time from more primitive to contemporary forms turns out to be little more than a projective fantasy in the minds of anthropologists. This critique led to a decided lull in kinship studies that displaced the study of kinship from the centre of the
Back To Kinship II: A General Introduction
The two failed orientations to kinship, nurture and fitness, are transcended as this collection of original kinship work moves forward, building on the rich theoretical and ethnographic past of kinship study to a reinvigorated future of new data, reconceptualization of paradigms, fresh debates and new theory. Using kinship to anthropomorphize nonhuman primates is rejected. Contributions from 18 distinguished scholars of kinship cover the four-field, cross-cultural science of anthropology. Issues in kinship study are explored through marriage, kin terms, space, incorporation, ritual, primate studies, and contributions from Russia. This collection carries kinship study into the future.
Kinship Past, Kinship Present: Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship
In this article, I reconsider bio-essentialism in the study of kinship, centering on David Schneider's influential critique that concluded that kinship was " a non-subject " (1972:51). Schneider's critique is often taken to have shown the limitations of and problems with past views of kinship based on biology, genealogy, and reproduction, a critique that subsequently led those reworking kinship as relatedness in the new kinship studies to view their enterprise as divorced from such bio-essentialist studies. Beginning with an alternative narrative connecting kinship past and present and concluding by introducing a novel way of thinking about kinship, I have three constituent aims in this research article: (1) to reconceptualize the relationship between kinship past and kinship present; (2) to reevaluate Schneider's critique of bio-essentialism and what this implies for the contemporary study of kinship; and (3) subsequently to redirect theoretical discussion of what kinship is. This concluding discussion introduces a general view, the homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view of kinds, into anthropology, providing a theoretical framework that facilitates realization of the often-touted desideratum of the integration of biological and social features of kinship. [bio-essentialism, kinship studies, homeostatic property cluster kinds, Schneider, genealogy]
INTRODUCTION TO THE SCIENCE OF KINSHIP
Introduction to the Science of Kinship, 2021
Kinship is a human universal. Every known human society has a system of relationships that anthropologists recognize as the counterparts of their own ideas of parents and their children. Through them, each person becomes part of a wider network of kinship relations that provides the main part of their initial protection, food, shelter, and introduction to human culture and social organization. We now know what terminologies are and why the efforts to analyze them have been so confused. There are distinct sets of terms, as anthropologists recognized, but that is not what is most important. What is most important are the ideas that make up the definitions of the terms. These are systematically interrelated and have a definite logical structure. We represent this by what we call a kinship map. Our method for eliciting it is an adaptation of frame analysis that has long been used in linguistics and other fields. This is an experimental method, in exactly the same sense the methods of biology or chemistry are experimental. Second, we have a method for analyzing this logical structure, showing precisely what it is for any kinship map, and to a large extent also why it is this and not something else. We represent this logical structure by the kin term map, in contrast to the kinship map. The method for eliciting the kinship map was developed by Murray Leaf. The method for exposing and analyzing the kin term map was developed by Dwight Read.