negotiating parentage: the political economy of "kinship" in central Sulawesi, Indonesia (original) (raw)
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IIUM Journal of Human Sciences, 2021
There are numerous publications about the Minangkabau society in West Sumatra. Often the focus of the anthropologists is on the matrilineal social structure. Only very few researchers look at the situation of the father and the male family members. In this article, the researchers want to consider the paternal side of the family. This view is essential as there have been many changes in the past years. The researchers used a qualitative research approach that observed the village life of one community. Various open-ended interviews were conducted. Both the traditional representatives of the matrilineages and the local population were given the opportunity to express their opinions. In addition, the local publications were analysed too. In these books, traditional scholars publish their views. In the past, there were patrilineal elements, like the kingdom, within the Minangkabau society. The historical perspective shows that such patrilineal elements were important in daily life. Furthermore, it was discovered that cognates play a crucial role in certain rites and have become more influential nowadays. Nevertheless, the matrilineal concept still plays an essential role, particularly in the rules of exogamy and inheritance.
Back to Kinship II: A General Introduction (2016) by Fadwa El Guindi & Dwight W. Read
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.
FIFTEEN COMPLAINTS AGAINST THE NEW KINSHIP STUDIES
Fifteen complaints are lodged against the so-called "new kinship studies" inspired by David Schneider. The main argument of these studies, that they get at indigenous appreciations, as contrasted with pre-Schneiderian analyses, supposedly entrapped in a Eurocentric model, is shown to be without merit. On the contrary, these latter analyses, far from assuming a procreative base for kinship worldwide, regularly discovered it in the field. Schneiderian kinship studies are shown to be grossly deficient from a scholarly standpoint, and to aspire to hegemony in the academy. WARREN SHAPIRO. Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He has carried out fieldwork among the Aboriginal peoples of northeast and central Arnhem Land, Australia. He has been writing on kinship and other subjects for over four decades. Among his publications are "Social Organization in Aboriginal Australia" (Canberra, 1979) and "Denying Biology: Essays on Gender and Pseudo-Procreation" (co-edited with Uli Linke, Lanham 1996), and dozens of other articles. See also References Cited. KEY WORDS: kinship; history of anthropology; the culture of academia; scholarly responsibility; "radical" feminism [A]ll systems of social relationships recognized by anthropologists cross-culturally as kin relationships are rooted in parturition (Goodenough 2001:217). 2 [I]n many primitive tribes the terms used for the immediate members of the family are either distinguished from the same terms in the extended sense by the addition of some particle, or terms corresponding to 'own' are used. … Family is family, whatever the system of relationship … (Goldenweiser 1937:301) Although the studies which suggest that kinship in many cultures is defined not only by genealogy but also by a code of conduct, particularly conduct expressing sharing of food, land and services, may seem to challenge the anthropological conceptualization of kinship as a system of ties established through procreation, they are, in fact, parasitic upon it (Holy 1996:167). [T]he idea of Western bio-essentialized folk concepts of kinship being endlessly ethnocentrically projected onto non-Western cultures by ethnographers and kinship theorists is itself a kind of anthropological myth (Wilson 2016:6).1 Creativity is predicated on a system of rules and forms, in part determined by intrinsic human capacities. Without such constraints, we have arbitrary and random behavior, not creative acts. … [I]t would be an error to think of human freedom solely in terms of absence and constraint (Chomsky 1975:133).
Seed and earth: a cultural analysis of kinship in a Bengali town
Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1976
Much of the anthropological corpus on kinship suffers from what Levi-Strauss called, in a different context, the distortion of a semantic field. Until recently, it was generally assumed that kinship deals with basic social problems such as incest, the allocation of rights over the reproductive process and its results, and the division and classification of people, groups, lineages and so on resulting from these prohibitions and allocations. It was also held that different societies solve the same basic problems in different ways, and that this diversity can be analyzed genealogically, if not universally in the same manner, at least in the particular social equivalents of genealogy. This near unanimity, here characterized in outrageously general terms, has been under fire for some time from various directions. The one that concerns us here is the most radical of current attempts to come to grips with kinship as something other than the most exact, measurable, concrete and quantifiable field in anthropology. We are referring to Schneider's studies of kinship as a cultural system in society. Lest it be thought that here is another plea for cultural relativity, we hasten to add that Schneider's work is particularly suited for cross-cultural application. In a number of well argued contributions, Schneider challenges the assumption that something called 'kinship' exists in every society as a way of classifying people and groups through consanguinity, affinity, descent, filiation and the like (Schneider 1968, 1970, 1972). Kinship in these terms is the creation of the investigator, not the property of native social systems. We add, however, that there may be domains of 'kin relations' in different societies but this is a question for research and analysis in cultural terms. It is evident that kinship is used in two senses here. The first-which assumes kinship to be a substance of social relation through descent, filiation and genealogy-we reject, with Schneider, as fallacious and an imposition of an assumed substantive system on given
Back to Kinship III: A General Introduction
Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences
Back to Kinship III is the third Special Issue of the e-journal, Structure and Dynamics sponsored by the group, Kinship Circle. Each issue is dedicated to current kinship research. The first two issues have both been very successful, as shown by the number of downloads. Back to Kinship I (Read and El Guindi 2013) has had a total of 2,696 download since it was published in 2013, which is an average of 207 downloads per article and an average of 385 downloads per year. Back to Kinship II (El Guindi and Read 2016) has had a total of 2,405 downloads since it was publication in 2016, which is an average of 172 downloads per article and an average of 601 downloads per year. These numbers reflect the ongoing intense interest in kinship research worldwide. These two issues of Back to Kinship focus on the challenges facing kinship research that began to appear in the 1970s, and on the impact these challenges have had on kinship research. As El Guindi (2020:42) puts it in her just published book, ongoing kinship research has confronted "trivializing or dismissive attempts and unfounded claims which diminish the importance of the kinship phenomenon." El Guindi continues: "The history of anthropology has shown that kinship knowledge is integral to the cultural knowledge humans acquire and generate, about what constitutes 'social universe' and what it means to be a relative. A complex notion of society and culture is unique to humans… and is irreducible to a simplistic transmission of traits or an assumed overarching tradition of nurture" (p. 42). She goes on to describe how kinship study today "involves revisiting old issues with fresh data or generating new models to provide new insights while creatively building bridges with different disciplines which would enhance the conceptualization of kinship" (p. 42).
Etudes rurales, 2009
N ANTHROPOLOGICAL USAGE, the term 'tribe' may refer to a presumptively unilineal descent group or to a politically or territorially specific entity 1. The segmentary lineage theory through which the notion of tribe was problematized by structural functionalist anthropology supposed basic dichotomies between state and stateless societies as well as egalitarian and hierarchical modes of social organisation. The persistence in anthropological literature of such polar oppositions impedes in our view arriving at any adequate sociological or political comprehension of the variegated phenomena historically and currently subsumed under the labels of 'tribe' or 'tribalism'. 2 Indeed, these dichotomies hinder identifying the gendered processes of kinship and human reproduction in transgenerational perspective. Segmentary lineage theory, however reframed by alliance theory, 3 is simply not adequate for understanding social dynamics at large in 'tribal', societal, or transsocietal settings. The renewed focus on 'tribalism', patent in both journalism and strategic planning, as well as in the social sciences, may appear Études rurales, juillet-décembre 2009, 184 : 217-248 warranted to some. Yet, it continues to imply distinguishing 'Muslims with genealogies' from those without while discarding kinship altogether. How thus, to take but one example, can emerging gendered configurations of citizenship 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]? Addressing these issues is a matter of political urgency and not solely of academic concern. Departing from the ideology of a 'clash of civilizations' between Muslims and non-Muslims, academic, military, and political actors in the United States and Northern Europe have, ever since the 1992 US intervention in Somalia, taken up the notion of tribe, purportedly founded on the principles of endogamy and descent, to legitimate a politically potent if self-deluding ideological amalgamation of close-kin marriage, Islam, and terror. We 1. We would like to thank the evaluators of this text for their insightful comments. Further, we express our gratitude to the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for their generous support. 2. L. Abu-Lughod addressed this issue as of 1989. W. Krauss [2004] presents a synthesis of English-and French-language publications on 'Islamic tribal societies'. 3. Such approaches are developed in the special issue of L'Homme 2000, 154/155 entitled 'Question de parenté'. 4. We thus designate the vast and so extraordinarily diverse expanse of territory from Sahel and Maghreb to Central Asia and North India.