Kinship is grounded in biological facts. It is based on the undeniable, universal reality of biological rules – a child is related to two parents of different sex – and concerned about how sociological structures – who cares for the child? – map on to this. This view of kinship as the hard science of biology for a long time had ardent supporters, Morgan and Gellner among them. The exceptions – adoption for instance – that even Morgan and Gellner admitted to this rule of ‘biology only’ soon took got the upper hand. However, alternatives were not immediately at hand. Needham and after him Schneider argued for the death of kinship as a whole while already very early Durkheim and Rivers search for a solution in a recourse to ‘social kinship’. It took another couple of decades, however, until scholars such as Bloch/Guggenheim and Clarke fully developed a repertoire for analysing social kinship in terms of for instance nurture and care. Problematic in all those accounts was merely one thing: they did not deal with the dichotomy between nature and culture, between biological and social kinship. Carstens tries to address this shortcoming with her more dynamic notion of ‘relatedness’ mapped onto Latourian networks. The final question, however, remains: are we really developing towards a ‘hybrid idea’ if kinship between biological and social relations?
What is kinship all about?
Kinship is grounded in biological facts. It is based on the undeniable, universal reality of biological rules – a child is related to two parents of different sex – and concerned about how sociological structures – who cares for the child? – map on to this. This view of kinship as the hard science of biology for a long time had ardent supporters, Morgan and Gellner among them. The exceptions – adoption for instance – that even Morgan and Gellner admitted to this rule of ‘biology only’ soon took got the upper hand. However, alternatives were not immediately at hand. Needham and after him Schneider argued for the death of kinship as a whole while already very early Durkheim and Rivers search for a solution in a recourse to ‘social kinship’. It took another couple of decades, however, until scholars such as Bloch/Guggenheim and Clarke fully developed a repertoire for analysing social kinship in terms of for instance nurture and care. Problematic in all those accounts was merely one thing: they did not deal with the dichotomy between nature and culture, between biological and social kinship. Carstens tries to address this shortcoming with her more dynamic notion of ‘relatedness’ mapped onto Latourian networks. The final question, however, remains: are we really developing towards a ‘hybrid idea’ if kinship between biological and social relations?
Kinship – what one might call a bond between people creating obligations and rights beyond friendship – is based on biology. ‘True parenthood’ has its roots in natural facts, in the facts of birth, cohabitation and blood. The early school of kinship studies, among others Morgan (1880/1997) claims that it is the ‘system of consanguinity’, of blood, which is the formal expression and recognition of these relationships. For him, kinship essentially consists of the social recognition of biological facts clearly establishing a privileged position for the ‘natural basis of life’. His conception of marriage as the ‘sexual relationship between male and female’ exemplifies this belief unequivocally. Even though already at Morgan’s time, non-biological concepts such as adoption were fairly common, this underlying basis of kinship in biology was not challenged. As Schneider recapitulates (1987:97) "biological relationship was treated as the reference point, the fixed position against which all cultural aspects take their meaning". Adoption was an exception that was always defined with reference to the norm of biology, always ‘singled out’.
Gellner (1987) is the most prominent advocate of this school until very late in the 1980s. For him, the crucial question for an anthropologist interested in kinship is "under what conditions will the anthropologist's treatment of the blip-relationship fall under the rubric of kinship structure?" (ibid.:163). The only legitimate answer for him is to be seen in the overlap with physical kinship relationships. Also he does not claim that this rule holds up for every relation (e.g. consequences of undetected infidelity, godparents) that might be defined as kinship. However, kinship and descent systems are ‘functions’ of physical kinship: "kinship structure means the manner in which a pattern of physical relationships is made use of for social purposes" (ibid.:170). Kinship is as such based on purely biological rules such as the rules governing ‘mating’. Methodologically, Gellner raises an important point as well: it is not so much about how people perceive their kin relationships; kinship should be used as a comparative-analytical category defined and applied by the anthropologist. Biological and natural truths are given to the analyst so that “sociological accounts of social relationships such as marriage involves plotting their relationships against existing physical facts” (ibid.:175). Those biological truths can not be challenged – they are universally underlying every discussion on kinship.
In a direct reply to Gellner, Rodney Needham (1974) denounces the former’s preoccupation with biological kinship as both methodologically and factually wrong. The search for generalisation and the blind belief in a positive natural-social science has to be overcome. Relating back to Leach’s ‘Rethinking Anthropology’, Needham advocates individual rather than general understanding of different cultures in their own right. For kinship studies, this has radical consequences. When he opens up the definition of kinship as the “allocation of rights and their transmission from one generation to the next" (ibid.:40) referring to rights of group membership, inheritance of property, locality of residence and type of occupation, he agrees on hollowing it out. The word is devoid of meaning; there is no such thing as kinship left if it includes such a diversity of phenomena as "segmentary organisation, section-systems, widow inheritance, polyandry, teknonymy, divorce rates" (ibid.:42). Needham in this way foreshadows Schneider. Rather than the attachment to “inappropriate conceptions of a class” possessing certain attributes (‘butterfly collecting’) and the search for sociological laws in a hard-science fashion, Needham wants anthropology to step back:
"It may be that all social anthropology will be able to do ... is to comprehend, in one case after another, the schemes in which men of different cultures have variously taken advantage of logical and psychic facilities which are the elementary resources available to all mankind in the ordering of experience" (ibid.:71)
He finds a solution in the recourse to ‘logical laws’ while – just as Leach – not defining (and demonstrating in detail) what this means. Can it, however, be a way out to loose interest in kinship altogether?
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- Johannes Lenhard (Autor), 2013, What is kinship all about?, Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/230431
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