Samenvatting After Kinship – Janet Carsten
Chapter I – Introduction: After Kinship?
To what extend is kinship part of the pregiven, natural order of things and the extent to which
it is shaped by human engagement. What is “natural” and what is “cultural”?
o Kinship is often treated with a distinction between “social” and “biological” kinship.
o Technological developments are bringing this separation more and more together.
What happened to kinship? Most familiar concepts of kinship are starting to change.
o What new and sometimes bizarre development influence kinship?
o By which analytic instruments may these developments be understood?
At the same time kinship disappeared in the background in the 70’s and 80’s.
This book tries to restore the focus, as well as shift it to the dimension of the lived experience.
o Kinship is “made”, people invest their emotions and creative energy into it.
Kinship in the Mid-Twentieth Century: British descent versus French alliance
Malinowski & Fortes: nuclear family as universal social institution is necessary for childrearing.
o Domestic: intimate world of individual families.
o Politicojural: public roles ordered by wider kinship relations.
Lineage based societies where the kin group holds property power resides with the elders.
o This ties politics and religion closely to kinship and thereby to succession in office.
This caused early kinship studies to resist the intimate and emotional domestic arrangements.
o This meant that women were often excluded from anthropological studies.
They focussed on unilineal kinship systems: matrilineality or patrilineality.
o Lineage formed a central organizing feature as property-owning and jural unit.
o This approach was strictly an analytical approach, it didn’t reflect the reality.
Lévi-Strauss: a grand theory on the development of human culture through kinship.
o He mainly looked at the logic of culture instead of actual practices.
There exist social rules that determine who’s legitimately marriageable.
o That there are rules on incest is universal, but the actual content can vary.
o This puts exogamous marriage at the core, maintaining relations between groups.
Here also men are the ones that give the supreme gift of women (objectification) while in
reality women often play an important role in marriage arrangements.
With structuralism this resulted in too much focus on paired oppositions.
This created a debate between descent and alliance theories.
In both cases kinship terms were described in highly normative terms, especially about women.
Other disciplines at the same time mostly ignored kinship in Western societies, which led to a
clear anthropological distinction between “our” families and “their” kinship.
Points of departure
There is little that can be taken for granted regarding kinship. The Western model of nuclear
families, late marriage and celibacy forms a rare exception in the history of mankind.
Relations used to end often by death making marriage short-lived, and rituals focus on forgetting.
Schneider: criticized anthropological approach to kinship by focusing on social structure.
o He sees a relationship between the biological and social aspect of kinship.
o This might end kinship research or shift the focus to culture and symbolic systems.
Chapter I – Introduction: After Kinship?
To what extend is kinship part of the pregiven, natural order of things and the extent to which
it is shaped by human engagement. What is “natural” and what is “cultural”?
o Kinship is often treated with a distinction between “social” and “biological” kinship.
o Technological developments are bringing this separation more and more together.
What happened to kinship? Most familiar concepts of kinship are starting to change.
o What new and sometimes bizarre development influence kinship?
o By which analytic instruments may these developments be understood?
At the same time kinship disappeared in the background in the 70’s and 80’s.
This book tries to restore the focus, as well as shift it to the dimension of the lived experience.
o Kinship is “made”, people invest their emotions and creative energy into it.
Kinship in the Mid-Twentieth Century: British descent versus French alliance
Malinowski & Fortes: nuclear family as universal social institution is necessary for childrearing.
o Domestic: intimate world of individual families.
o Politicojural: public roles ordered by wider kinship relations.
Lineage based societies where the kin group holds property power resides with the elders.
o This ties politics and religion closely to kinship and thereby to succession in office.
This caused early kinship studies to resist the intimate and emotional domestic arrangements.
o This meant that women were often excluded from anthropological studies.
They focussed on unilineal kinship systems: matrilineality or patrilineality.
o Lineage formed a central organizing feature as property-owning and jural unit.
o This approach was strictly an analytical approach, it didn’t reflect the reality.
Lévi-Strauss: a grand theory on the development of human culture through kinship.
o He mainly looked at the logic of culture instead of actual practices.
There exist social rules that determine who’s legitimately marriageable.
o That there are rules on incest is universal, but the actual content can vary.
o This puts exogamous marriage at the core, maintaining relations between groups.
Here also men are the ones that give the supreme gift of women (objectification) while in
reality women often play an important role in marriage arrangements.
With structuralism this resulted in too much focus on paired oppositions.
This created a debate between descent and alliance theories.
In both cases kinship terms were described in highly normative terms, especially about women.
Other disciplines at the same time mostly ignored kinship in Western societies, which led to a
clear anthropological distinction between “our” families and “their” kinship.
Points of departure
There is little that can be taken for granted regarding kinship. The Western model of nuclear
families, late marriage and celibacy forms a rare exception in the history of mankind.
Relations used to end often by death making marriage short-lived, and rituals focus on forgetting.
Schneider: criticized anthropological approach to kinship by focusing on social structure.
o He sees a relationship between the biological and social aspect of kinship.
o This might end kinship research or shift the focus to culture and symbolic systems.
