KINSHIP

Kinship

Kinship

Kinship has been a major pillar of anthropology since its very existence. Whole ethnographies were based on the scrutiny of a society's kinship system (see esp. Evans-Pritchard 1951). In recent years these “given facts” have itself been the subject of anthropological scrutiny. In how far is the ethnography not an objectification of natural or observable facts and in how far a representation of the ethnographer's values, beliefs and experiences? Schneider's seminal work on creating a discourse on kinship (Schneider 1972 and 1984) reinforced the need to investigate how kinship works, how kinship ties articulate themselves in a society and to move away from the functional and structural explanations for kinship, which were previously heralded.

This move came both as a necessity to save kinship as a discipline and as a recognition for several anthropologists' work on 'new' or different forms of kinship, based on substance (Schneider 1968), practice (Bourdieu, 1972), sharing a house (Lévi-Strauss, 1982) or relatedness (Carsten, 2000). This new variety of looking at kinship broke up old structures and opened the way for new interpretations. Until then kinship had been seen as a “socio-cultural elaboration on 'natural facts' of biological and sexual reproduction” (Thomas, 1999, p.21). This view is based on a belief of passing down a form of being, an implicit and intrinsic identity, which relies on a biological relationship. This seems to stand in contrast with the aforementioned 'new' forms of kinship.

In many Western societies the prevalent ideology of kinship is one of blood ties, in which kinship is genealogically traced. This notion is endorsed by the dominance of laws, such as inheritance laws, which confine our ideas of kinship into predisposed definitions. The Western fetishism with law produced a situation, in which a genealogically related kin will always remain that, 'unto death do us part'. ...