Материал: Nigel Rapport, Joanna Overing, Social and Cultural Anthropology - The Key Concepts (2000)

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anthropology have not only been highly abstract but also continued to carry the complex historical baggage of Western thought and practice. Terms such as society, community, family, kinship, descent, lineage, or structure, function, system are to be used at the peril of totally eluding another people’s understanding of what they are doing socially— which is the very raison d’être of the anthropological task.

The structural analysis of kinship terminologies: or, where are all the people?

As anthropology slowly came to realize, any ‘definitional rigour’ to be achieved through the use of any of the above analytic concepts of society is well nigh impossible. Such constructs tend to sit within particular and forceful paradigms of social order, and therefore carry all the litter of such grand narratives. Structural-functionalism was followed by structuralism, and the structural analysis of kinship terminologies was a particularly obvious case of a paradigm so mighty that its highly reductive results killed for the time being the possibility of interesting further advances being made in kinship theory, the very area where anthropology was once so creative and rich in debate.

The overwhelming attraction of the structural analyses of kinship can be ascribed to the power of their methods which wed anthropology to advances in modern linguistics, a field considered to have become the most scientific of the human sciences. The methods and models of formal analysis gave the promise of a mathematical rigour that would transform anthropology into a ‘true science’, having a definitional clarity never before achieved.Their initial success (e.g. see Lounsbury 1968) was so stupendous that they made seeming child’s play of previous attempts to provide order to the complicated structures of many ‘native’ kinship terminologies. Anthropologists were taught to be more rigorous in discerning the logical differences between systems. Such sophistication in method was greatly needed in anthropology, and for its example we can only be grateful.

However, as Overing has argued (1987), the method became confused with world-view. The logic of the method through sleight of hand became equated to the logic of terminological use, and thus also with indigenous understanding. As a result we arrived once more at the ‘universal’, to what Schneider so aptly derides as the anthropological ‘doctrine of the genealogical unity of mankind’ (Schneider 1984:122–4), or the genealogical meaning of kinship terms. Kinship is everywhere first and foremost about genealogical relatedness (see especially, Scheffler 1978), a resoundingly uninteresting conclusion to come in the wake of

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the dazzling structuralist performances. It also was a conclusion that was suspect. It appears that the method itself allowed for no other interpretation, because the meanings of terms were made to fit not only the scientific value upon logical rigour, but also Western common-sense notions about what kinship is.

The demand itself of formal analysis for logical rigour reduces the character of its elements that account for meaning to very few: affinity as well as consanguinity can be allowed, but not the complications of what such notions might possibly mean from the indigenous point of view. Many anthropologists came to the conclusion that if future study were to be dependent upon such rigorous intellectual exercise that in the end gave so little reward and said so little about the people then why go to the bother? It was the niggling doubt over this issue (Where are all the people?) that drove many anthropologists away from the technical chore of analysing kinship logics. As Alan Campbell remarks (1989), the very abstract level at which structuralist analysis operates is about the tenth remove from anything going on in daily practice and thought.

Is there hope for kinship through new key concepts?

While we can heartily agree with Schneider’s (1984) full-blown rampage against the anthropological treatment of the topic of kinship, such concordance does not entail the dismissal of the study of those social relationships, and their classifications, that were once more or less subsumed under the label of ‘kinship’. People do bear children, and there is a social framework through which they do so, and through which these children are raised to become adult members of human social groups. The members of these social groups follow particular practices in the course of which relationships that are highly significant for them are developed, as too are very interesting ways of thinking about them. With all this we can agree. The overriding question still remains—how do we understand and translate such practices, relationships and ways of thinking?

Happily, anthropologists over the past twenty years have developed a myriad of different ways to approach subjects that would formerly have been classified under the general rubric of ‘kinship’. While nowadays the topic of ‘kinship’ does not loom large in the literature, such key concepts as ‘self’, ‘agency’, ‘gender’, ‘the life of values and affect’, do. The topics of ‘personhood’, ‘emotions’ and ‘aesthetics’ are much more likely to take their place in the titles of doctoral theses than those of ‘kinship’, ‘affinity’ and ‘jural rules’. Thus we see that the ‘technical’ language of anthropology has been transformed in the wake of the

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shifts of attention away from something we once called the ‘jural— political’ domain, with its contrast to something we labelled as ‘the domestic group’, and equally away from the notions of social structure and prescriptive behaviour, and those of ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’. In their place, the idioms of equality and inequality are now being explored, and such values as nurture, sharing, pooling, generosity, and those of peace and violence. The stress is upon ambiguity, flux, the personal everyday, and the multiplicity of voices, rather than upon grand structures of mind and society, and societal rules and regulations. The emphasis tends to be upon context and the performative, and not underlying and hidden rules of practice and thought. Such shifts in direction have often been undertaken in a spirit of rebellion, by feminists but also many others, against the ethnocentrisms (e.g. the muted woman) underpinning the grand narratives of anthropology. The gain has been that anthropologists are presenting very different pictures, certainly in their richness, from those of yesterday of the ways other people view, act and experience the world of the social. These depictions in themselves are further enlightening of the previous ‘sins’ of reduction and prejudice.

Kinship by another name? Networks of relationships and personal-kind terms

We find that Schneider and Needham, as pioneers in the deconstructing of key concepts of kinship theory, were merely tapping the surface of a modernist creation for which the very notion of kinship was but one aspect of a complicated multi-faceted edifice filled with assumptions about society and the social order. These in turn were tied to networks of ideas about the relation of the family to other societal institutions, and the relationship between the sexes, between the private and the public, between the dominant and the subordinate, all of which were implicated further by ontological assumptions about natural kinds, the nature of human existence, and its progress, which in addition were premised upon a notion of the priority of reason over the emotions. So it continued through an enormous number of other dualisms and bundles of relations pertinent to the Western imagery of society and the world, and the elements of which they were comprised. Our notion of kinship carried with it the interarticulations of this entire structure.

The interesting lesson that has been more recently learned through changing the types of questions anthropologists ask is that other people’s views of the social relationships of everyday life are as enmeshed as our own within wider networks of meaning. They also include ontological

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presuppositions about the nature of human existence and capabilities for sociality that are linked to bundles of relationships and arrays of ideas about the world that are as complex, but usually very different from, our own. It is not only we who have thought about such complexities and who have therefore developed the social theory to think about them. But how do we understand these other sets of linkages, so unlike our own? That has become a primary question. How do we understand a Bororo who says his ‘brother is a parrot’ (Crocker 1977), or a Piaroa who insists that ‘the tapir is our grandfather’ (Overing 1985c)? The quest for understanding their interconnections requires first of all an unpeeling of our own presuppositions about reproductory and biological processes, parenting, the nature of the material world and the interconnections of all of these things to what we call society (cf. Strathern 1992b). Anthropologists had been inadvertently reducing other peoples’ rich interconnections of meaning by treating them as ‘kinship relationships’, or better expressed as kinship in the way we know it— cultural constructions of biological reproduction and the relations between humans relevant to such reproduction—that is, as the least intellectually interesting element of our own prime units of society, the royal four of kinship, economics, politics and religion.

Overing has suggested (1985c) that to understand better the complexity of indigenous social thought, we should change the label of what we have been calling ‘kinship terms’ to ‘personal-kind terms’. This involves a radical switch in perspective that concomitantly raises the conceptual status of these terms to one more closely aligned to the indigenous view and practice. As with many of our scientific constructs of ‘natural kinds’, ‘personal-kind terms’ are also highly abstract, philosophically important concepts that defy unitary definition. They share the openendedness and elusiveness that is typical of all abstract terms that comprise complex relational properties.The difference is that personal-kind terms do not refer to the world of nature, which is the Western domain of competence, but to qualities of personal relationships, the area about which indigenous people have opted for theoretical elaboration (cf. Horton 1979). For instance, toward the end of achieving health, wealth and safety, Amazonian peoples aim to master, not nature, but as many as possible of their personal relationships with other beings, human or otherwise, in the world. We unfortunately have reduced their personal-kind (‘kinship’) terms to our own very weak language of kinship, one that speaks of ‘consanguinity’, ‘affinity’, ‘social category’, ‘amity’, which is often a bad mistake.

In discussing the highly flexible use of the personal-kind (‘kinship’) categories among Piaroa of the Orinoco Basin, Overing shows (1985c)

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that the meanings of these categories incorporate (what for us is) an alien world of explanation and abstract theory construction about the possibilities for difference and similarity in modes of power or agency in the cosmos. The terms, as used in everyday life, have metaphysical weight that goes well beyond our Western notions of ‘biological’ relationship or a social relation through marriage. Each term in its application carries with it possibilities of sharing or not sharing a bundle of social, moral, or metaphysical qualities, and there is no a priori guarantee which will be salient to a given case.The quality of the relationship, as for instance one of nurturing, teaching, treachery, competition or predation, often overrides a more physical sort of relating. Will this man or woman work tranquilly with me, or have predatory designs on me that will make me ill?

Certainly in Amazonian ethnography, the emphasis today in investigations of peoples’ use of relationship terminologies is often upon the metaphysical and/or moral loading of the classifications (also cf. Teixero-Pinto 1997; Viveiros de Castro 1992; Belaunde 1992). For instance Stephen Kidd writes about Enxet of Paraguay that:

Their understanding of why they act as they do centres on their concept of the waxok, an aspect of the self that is both intensely private and inherently social. They insist that their social behaviour—both appropriate and inappropriate—can be explained by the physical—or metaphysical—state of the waxok. Furthermore, because the waxok is also the centre of cognition, people can also consciously transform it so as to enable themselves to act in either a self-centred or otherregarding manner. It is an explanation that, I believe, we should take seriously if we want to understand indigenous social life and it is one that finds its root in the practice of child-raising, in the creation of ‘good/beautiful’ people who have been taught not only how to think but how to feel. It is this waxok-centred combination of thinking and feeling that enables the Enxet to act appropriately and which, ultimately, guides them as they strive to generate sociality and engender tranquillity.

(Kidd 1999: Conclusion)

For Enxet, kinship is about attaining a certain sort of affective life.These are people for whom the personal ties of parenting, nurturing, sharing and pooling are not so much based on a notion of ‘biological linkage’ or a ‘linkage through blood’, or membership within a jural group, but which instead are generated over time through consistent and processual

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