The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

he had analyzed the kin system of the Yap Islanders (in Micronesia), where he had begun his fieldwork, Schneider launched into a radical self-critique of his early writings and proposed another interpretation of the same data, and particularly of the basic unit of Yap society, the tabineau. Previously he had defined it as an extended patrilocal family combined with a matrilineal kinship system. In his second version, Schneider stressed that it seemed to him that, for the Yap Islanders, what bound together the members of a tabineau was not kinship but actual cooperation in working the same piece of land, and that it was this alone which founded an individual’s right to the land. In sum, he no longer regarded the tabineau as a kin group or Yap society as kin based, but as being based on other relations (economic) and other values (religious and economic). Schneider’s auto-critique concurred with Leach’s position on kinship in Pul Elya. In spite of this convergence, though, Schneider merely mentioned it in passing, without dwelling on it, and aimed a first criticism at ‘almost all anthropologists’ who had gone before (and against himself in his former life): that of having abusively posed the principle that kinship was a universally recognized basic value in all societies. This was the very opposite of Lévi-Strauss’ view.

      Schneider nevertheless decided to go on and sift through the principal definitions of kinship from Morgan to Scheffler and Lounsbury. When he had finished, he felt entitled to say that all studies on kinship, from Morgan on, had been explicitly or implicitly based on the same ethnocentric definition. For Europeans and Euro-Americans,33 kinship concerns essentially procreation, the reproduction of human beings. This reproduction is primarily a biological process, and therefore the genealogical ties between individuals are biological ties, ‘blood’ ties. For Westerners, the nuclear family is the place where the parents’ blood mingles in and is shared by the children. Finally he deemed that anthropological theories reflect the Western idea – found equally in Malinowski, Meyer Fortes or Scheffler – that, whatever cultural values and social attributes may be associated with these genealogical ties in a given society, there lies at the heart of all kinship systems a universal genealogical structure that is inescapable and indissoluble, which proceeds from the nuclear family. It is from this structure, regarded as the core of ‘primary’ kinship relations, that, by the twofold process of direct extension and unilateral reinterpretation, all of the other kin relations are derived.34 Schneider’s general conclusion that ‘the study of kinship derives directly and practically unaltered from the ethnoepistemology of European culture . . . [that] Blood is presumably Thicker than Water’35 became a pseudo-scientific postulate which he called ‘the Doctrine of the Genealogical Unity of Mankind’.36 This postulate, he conjectured, was the basis of the genealogical method, perfected by Morgan, Rivers and others, that all field anthropologists used to explore the kinship system in the society they had chosen to study. This being the case, all were doomed to failure, since, because they were using a method that incorporated Western cultural prejudices assumed to be universal sociological truths, their work could only produce results that confirmed these universal truths.

      For Schneider there was only one conclusion, and it was simple and clear: from Morgan onward, kinship studies had simply gone in circles, and the objective analysis of kinship had not yet truly begun.

      In the course of the present work, I will examine and reply to these criticisms one by one. Some are simply inadmissible. But I cannot pass over in silence the fact that numerous anthropologists had shown, well before Schneider, that in one or another society the kin terms people use to refer to those they regard as relatives do not correspond to ‘real’ genealogical ties but to relations between categories of individuals considered to be in the same social relationship to each other. Durkheim had already noted as much concerning Australian Aboriginal peoples – for which Schneider praised him while reproaching him for not having sought to show how this social relationship was precisely a kinship relation rather than something else. Many others had followed in Durkheim’s steps, such as Hocart, Leach and Dumont, whom Schneider does not cite.

      Moreover, even in societies where informants emphasize genealogical ties between individuals, it is hard, if one takes cultural representations of procreation seriously, to reduce these genealogical ties to biological ones as they are understood in European culture, in other words, as relations that entail the sharing and mingling of the parents’ blood. Furthermore it is widely accepted that cultural representations of the role of blood in making babies are a matter not of biology (as an experimental science) but of ideology.

      There is nothing mechanical about culture. It suffices to cite societies where the ‘descent rule’, as anthropologists say, is patrilineal and yet no mention is made of the possible role of sperm or blood in making a child. Furthermore, while it is true that the presence of an Iroquois-type terminology in certain societies in Africa, Oceania and America says nothing about how each of them sees the process of conceiving a child and therefore how they represent what we call motherhood, fatherhood, etc., it remains to be explained why so many societies having different cultures use kinship terminologies whose formal structure is similar. This point, too, Schneider passed over in silence, seeking as he was to imprison his colleagues in a false syllogism. Starting, on the one hand, from the real fact that one never knows in advance what kinship is in a non-European society and, on the other hand, from the fact that we know that Europeans use kinship as a set of biological and social relations which link individuals of the two sexes in the process of reproducing life and the succession of generations, Schneider contended that trying to discover how other societies thought of this process always came down to finding in others that which one already had in oneself and had transported to the other society. Anthropologists would thus merely be ‘discovering’ in other cultures pretexts for erecting mirrors in which their own image would be reflected infinitely, but garbed in the features of the other.

      In sum, if for Leach and Needham the term ‘kinship’ finally did not designate a distinct class of facts or any distinct type of theory, they had nevertheless continued to study the facts of kinship and attempted to theorize them. Schneider, on the other hand, considered that there was indeed such a thing as kinship, but only in Western societies. Or more precisely, that it might exist in other societies, but that one could not postulate this existence and that any attempt to discover it was bound to fail if one counted on the genealogical-survey method. After Schneider, was it still worth spending even one hour on kinship?

      In reality things did not turn out as Schneider had predicted. Kinship had, in the meantime, become entangled with other issues and had emigrated to other sites, where its object had begun to be reshaped and enriched. Anthropologists had, for example, become increasingly interested in gender relations and in the questions of the form and foundations of male or female powers in the private and public spheres. Kinship was also increasingly being seen no longer as a separate area but as an aspect of the global process of social reproduction. Or again, at the other pole from this global approach but in complement to it, kin ties were being considered as a part of the process of constructing the person, the self.

      By shifting sites in this way, the study of kinship had finally deserted those places where it had been running in circles for decades, exhausting itself in an attempt to answer false questions to which Leach, Needham and also Schneider had the merit of drawing attention. Since the 1980s, almost no one has proposed to deduce the structure of a society from the formal analysis of its kin terminology. And vice versa, no one now explains the presence of a given kinship terminology by the existence of a particular mode of production or political system.

      So the predicted death has not occurred! And, taking a closer look, we see that today’s preferred topics of study (construction of the person, gender relations, kinship in the global functioning of a society, etc.) are not really new. What is new is first of all that these topics have moved to the forefront of research concerns. The explanation does not lie in scientific reasons alone, but also in what is going on in our societies, for example, the social struggles and pressures for greater gender equality. New, too, is the fact that in our search for answers we can no longer rely on notions that were only recently still taken for granted, such as the idea that so-called ‘primitive’ societies are ‘kin based’ or that the family is the basis of society. To these reasons we must add the fact that, in the present context of the fast-growing globalization of the capitalist economy and the inclusion of all societies in this world system, the process of the overall reproduction of each local society