Kinship is Dead. Long Live Kinship. A Review Article

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 67-91

  Faubion, James D ^a  

^a RICE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84937273468     PISSN: 00104175     EISSN: 14752999     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417500020120     Document Type: Review

References (179)

1. Among the more noteworthy contributions to such a critique, see D. Hymes, ed., Reinventing Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1969)
2. T. Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973)
3. E. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978)
4. J. Clifford and G. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California, 1986).
5. For a particularly influential critique, see P. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, R. Nice, trans. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
6. See also J. Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, A. Bates, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 278–93.
7. See, for example, Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
8. See J. F. Collier and S. J. Yanagisako's “Introduction” to their jointly edited Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 1.
9. J. A. Barnes, “Kinship Studies: Some Impressions of the Current State of Play,” Man (n.s.), 15:2 (1980), 293–303.
10. See D. Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984).
11. J. F. Collier and S. J. Yanagisako, “Introduction,” Gender and Kinship, 1.
12. See especially D. Schneider, American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968).
13. J. Goody, Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
14. J. Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
15. Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 380.
16. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 463.
17. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 290.
18. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, xii.
19. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, xvi; see also 1 and 12.
20. Compare The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 160–1.
21. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 240; for a more extended and less forgiving commentary on Schneider's cultural particularism, see p. 238.
22. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, xii and 16.
23. See M. Bouquet, Reclaiming English Kinship: Portuguese Refractions of English Kinship Theory (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), 27.
24. Cf. Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, xi and 136.
25. Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, xvi, see also 1 and 12.
26. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 16 and passim.
27. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 25.
28. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 32.
29. On the bond between brother and sister in India and the Rakshabandhan ritual, see The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 222–5.
30. First in Production and Reproduction, 7.
31. Cf. Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, especially 99 and 115.
32. Cf. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 240–1.
33. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, (see, for example p. 339).
34. Goody reaffirms the link between women's control of property and romantic love. For another view, see M. Segalen, Love and Power in the Peasant Family: Rural France in the Nineteenth Century, S. Matthews, trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).
35. See also J. Watt, The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchâtel, 1550–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 85.
36. See Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, especially 257. Goody would appear to be at odds here with the opinions of the majority of contemporary historians of the family, not even to mention the majority of feminists, whether historians or anthropologists (or both).
37. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 286.
38. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 288.
39. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 7.
40. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, xviii, 2, and passim.
41. Goody accordingly highlights dowry inflation as a common feature of such societies. See The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 450 and also 192–3.
42. For example, the correlation between being of the upper classes and being of a joint or extended family. See Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 212.
43. For another example—the double correlation between elite status and the direct dowry and that between lower status and the indirect dowry—see The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 188, and, more generally, 367.
44. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 391, 392, and passim.
45. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 391
46. citing H. L. Levy, “Inheritance and Dowry in Classical Athens,” in J. Pitt-Rivers, ed., Mediterranean Countrymen (Paris: Mouton, 1963), 138.
47. See the concise and thorough discussion of the epiklerate in R. Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life (London: Routledge, 1989), 95–104.
48. On the ancient denial of rights to women and slaves, see E. Cantarella, Pandora's Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Creek and Roman Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 38–51.
49. On the problem of articulating everyday practice in writing and the consequent problems of written evidence, see Goody's exceptionally intelligent discussion, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 411 ff.
50. In any event, this seems to be the classical view. See Cantarella, Pandora's Daughters, 60.
51. See M. Weber, The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, R. I. Frank, trans. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1976). Weber's Agrarian Sociology is, in fact, a far more seminal precedent for The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive than Goody seems to realize.
52. The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, 36 and throughout.
53. The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, 341–54, 381, and 390–1.
54. The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, 214 ff. and 293. Goody's observation that the same terminology can be adapted to a variety of practices is indispensable. So, too, is his observation that apparently “elementary terminology may in fact disguise” complex practices.
55. The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, for example, 338, praises Bourdieu's strategic treatment of marriage in the Outline of a Theory of Practice.
56. The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations, 230.
57. Citing L. Dumont's “Marriage in India, the Present State of the Question,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 5 (October 1961), 76.
58. Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 231.
59. The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive, 458, see also 462.
60. Bestard-Camps, What's In a Relative?, 5.
61. What's In a Relative?, 73.
62. What's In a Relative?, 2.
63. What's In a Relative?, 139.
64. What's In a Relative?, 5.
65. What's In a Relative?, 5.
66. What's In a Relative?, 162–74.
67. What's In a Relative?, 166.
68. What's In a Relative?, 6.
69. What's In a Relative?, 92.
70. What's In a Relative?, 134 and passim.
71. See Bestard-Camps, What's In a Relative?, 134, on the decline of communal participation in rituals such as baptism. It is worth remarking that, with Goody, Peter Laslett, and a growing legion of European historians, Bestard-Camps does not view the elementary or nuclear family as distinctly modern. He demonstrates that, at least in Formentera past, it is instead a moment, frequent enough, in the domestic cycle of the traditional estate.
72. See What's In a Relative?, 71.
73. What's In a Relative?, 6.
74. What's In a Relative?
75. What's In a Relative?, 27.
76. What's In a Relative?, 152.
77. What's In a Relative?, 143.
78. What's In a Relative?, 196.
79. What's In a Relative?, 11
80. What's In a Relative?, 15.
81. What's In a Relative?
82. What's In a Relative?, 4.
83. What's In a Relative?, 59.
84. What's In a Relative?, 137.
85. What's In a Relative?, 196.
86. Particularly bizarre is Sant Cassia's claim that “even among the contemporary Athenian intellectual elite religion is inconceivable without interaction with icons” (The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 208). But it is not unique.
87. See, for example, Sant Cassia's remarks on the alleged “absence of class sentiments” in twentieth-century Greece (p. 9).
88. Sant Cassia, The Making of the Modern Greek Family, pp. 178 ff.
89. The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 19.
90. The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 123.
91. The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 84. The phrase is borrowed from Simmel. See also p. 135 and p. 234.
92. On the arkhontes, see Sant Cassia, The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 23 ff.; on the nikokirei, 13, and passim.
93. The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 31; cf. also 58.
94. The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 60.
95. The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 34–47.
96. The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 69.
97. See, for example, the essays collected in P. Loizos and E. Papataxiarchis, eds., Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in Modern Greece (Princeton: Princeton University, 1991).
98. See, e.g., P. S. Allen, “Positive Aspects of Greek Urbanization: The Case of Athens by 1980,” Ekistics, 54:318–9 (1986), 187–94.
99. Cf. Sant Cassia, The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 230.
100. The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 218–19.
101. The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 221.
102. Sant Cassia, The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 234.
103. Cf. The Making of the Modern Greek Family, 250.
104. Bomeman, Belonging in the Two Berlins, 30.
105. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 5.
106. Cf. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 76.
107. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 76.
108. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 77.
109. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 19.
110. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 32.
111. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 78.
112. Belonging in the Two Berlins
113. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 79.
114. Belonging in the Two Berlins.
115. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 85.
116. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 86. On the still powerful role of the Catholic church, see p. 87.
117. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 86. Italics in original.
118. Belonging in the Two Berlins.
119. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 86; see also 81.
120. Cf. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 121.
121. Cf. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 188.
122. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 229.
123. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 256 and passim.
124. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 277.
125. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 267.
126. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 194–5.
127. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 248.
128. On “mixed clubs,” see Belonging in the Two Berlins, 270; on orgies, cf. 249.
129. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 215.
130. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 274.
131. Cf. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 132; see also 253.
132. Cf. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 263.
133. Belonging in the Two Berlins.
134. Cf. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 283.
135. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 250.
136. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 208, cf. 211.
137. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 214–6.
138. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 318.
139. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 332.
140. Belonging in the Two Berlins, 333.
141. Marilyn Strathem, Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon, A Village in North-West Essex, in the 1960s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
142. Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon, A Village in North-West Essex, in the 1960s, 3.
143. Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon, A Village in North-West Essex, in the 1960s, 4.
144. Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon, A Village in North-West Essex, in the 1960s, 3, cf. 11.
145. Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon, A Village in North-West Essex, in the 1960s, 73, cf. 132.
146. Cf. Kinship at the Core: An Anthropology of Elmdon, A Village in North-West Essex, in the 1960s, 83.
147. See, e.g., M. Bouquet, Reclaiming English Kinship, p. 16 and passim.
148. Strathern, After Nature, pp. 91–106
149. the diagnosis relies on Gillian Beer's insights in Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth Century Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
150. Strathern, After Nature, p. 189.
151. Cf. R. Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975).
152. Strathern, After Nature, especially 101–2.
153. Cf. Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, The Civilizing Process, vol. I (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
154. Strathern, After Nature, 103–5; and cf. 130 ff.
155. After Nature, 14.
156. After Nature, 22.
157. After Nature, 53.
158. Cf., Strathern's discussion of New Guinean notions of self and kin and the social, After Nature, 69 ff.
159. After Nature, 3.
160. After Nature, 3, 11, and passim.
161. After Nature, 136.
162. After Nature, 130.
163. After Nature, 150.
164. After Nature, 152.
165. After Nature, 133.
166. After Nature, 136.
167. After Nature, 144.
168. After Nature, 150.
169. After Nature, 36.
170. After Nature, 150.
171. After Nature, 39.
172. Cf. After Nature, 5.
173. After Nature, 195.
174. Cf. After Nature, 197.
175. Cf. After Nature, 166.
176. After Nature, 41.
177. After Nature, 196.
178. After Nature, 198.
179. See L. Althusser, For Marx, translated by B. Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1969), 32–33.