Kinship

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KINSHIP

KINSHIP is both a social phenomenon found in all human societies and one of the most central and contested concepts in anthropology. It is a pervasive symbolic practice of creating socially differentiated categories of people and the relationships among them, especially those relationships that concern the reproduction of people and that constitute human "being." A significant aspect of kinship relationships is that they apply not only to contemporaries, but transcend the living to include predecessors and ancestors as well as descendants and future generations.

Who is a relative and how relations of kinship are defined varies from culture to culture. But the ideas and principles underpinning these different kinships systems are often closely associated with religious ideas, addressing existential questions for all human beings, such as: What makes people humans? How do people come into the world? What constitutes a person? What happens to persons when they die? Wherein consists the continuity of social relationships that transcends generations?

The Concept

Early anthropologists noticed that the various peoples they studied differed greatly in the ways they named and categorized kin, defined appropriate behavior among kinspeople, reckoned descent, regulated marriage, and organized succession among the generations. Kinship and its diversity became the central issue in anthropology for much of the twentieth century, mainly for two reasons. First, both an explanation for the diverse systems of kinship and, in the face of such diversity, a universal definition needed to be found. This taxing issue led to most of the central debates in anthropology until quite recently. Arguments over what the term kinship designates, and what its analytical validity is, resulted in a robust reconfiguration of kinship studies since the 1970s. Second, many of the societies anthropologists studied were societies without state organization, and one of the leading questions was how social order and political structure were defined and maintained in such societies.

Kinship was considered to play the key role in providing a basic structure for the organization of the social life of stateless and, as they came to be called, as a type, "primitive" societies. Their social structure, Meyer Fortes stated in The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi, was "kinship writ large" and "kinship … is one of the irreducible principles on which their organized social life depends" (1949, p. 340). At the time, this was a progressive approach, emphasizing the rationality, functionality, and essentially human creativity of such societies. But it became untenable, both because it is too reductionist and because of the inherent evolutionist dichotomy between "primitive" and "civilized"—the former designating a more natural state of social life and the latter higher cultural development and social institutions—which suggested a great, substantive divide among all forms of human society. Rather than substantive, the differences and contrasts of sociality between societies came to be seen as relative. Although research in "civilized" societies revealed many structural similarities with "primitive" societies, reducing the social structure of more egalitarian societies to the principles of kinship disregards influential factors such as the division of labor, gender, or inequality. The link between kinship and social structure is critical in some societies, but it cannot be made at the expense of disregarding the dynamics of religious or political or economic factors.

At the same time, the ethnographic evidence across cultures does not uphold the typologies of social order proposed on the ground of a supposed correlation between kinship constructs such as descent, kinship terminology, or marriage patterns and aspects of social organization such as gender relations, social roles, the allocations of rights and obligations, or the distribution of power. In this regard, studies that combined the analysis of kinship and gender since the 1970s contributed critically to dismantling formal models that linked kinship institutions to social organization. The way kinship is conceptualized and structured in a society does not predict the totality of social life.

Kinship and the Natural

For much of the twentieth century, anthropologists defined kinship as genealogical relatedness, that is, as relationships based on consanguinity (the idea that related people share blood or biogenetic substance) and affinity (relationships forged as a result of marriage). This meant that the diverse ways in which people in different cultures define who is a relative and organize their systems of kinship relationships were explained by falling back on the notion that this diversity nevertheless must have a referent in the natural facts of life, the natural processes of human sexual reproduction. A critical distinction, between social kinship and biological kinship, was introduced. Biological relations were considered given in nature, and therefore kinship could be singled out as the primary structure ordering social relations in simple societies. The social relations of kinship were regarded as cultural constructs and representations that more or less recognized and interpreted biological ties and the given facts of life.

In the 1960s and 1970s a debate erupted concerning what kinship is all about and engendering a rethinking of the concept. It resulted in the analytical separation of physical kinship from biological kinship. The cultural notions of physical procreation and consubstantiality—how people considered themselves to be related through shared physical substance, whether it was blood, or semen, or food—should be seen as separate from true biological facts and as cultural interpretations of genealogical ties (see Holy, 1996 for a useful discussion). A major turning point in the still ongoing reconfiguration of kinship was A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984) by David Schneider, who targeted the analytical distinction between biological and social kinship, which he identified as stemming from a European and American cultural bias, from Western folk models of kinship which are embedded in what he called the "general characteristic of European culture toward what might be called 'biologistic' ways of constituting and conceiving human character, human nature, and human behavior" (1984, p. 175). Reflecting a general shift in anthropology from function to meaning, Schneider's pioneering work on kinship in American culture analyzed "the distinctive features which define the person as a relative" (1968, p. 19), examining American kinship as a symbolic system in which biological relatedness and sexual relations play a fundamental role as symbols for social relationships. In many non-European traditions, kinship relationships are not necessarily conceptualized as an elaboration of natural processes or as the tracing of genealogical connections (and where biological ideas have gained purchase in the course of the global spread of Western culture, they are often being reworked and innovatively amalgamated with existing cultural ideas). Cultural concepts of procreation may involve critical religious elements unrelated to biological processes.

The people of the Micronesian island of Yap, for example, single out human existence as categorically different from the existence of animals such as their domestic pigs. In Yap culture, human procreation and descent involve not only bodily processes but also a spiritual component, the reincarnation of ancestral souls. Descent only exists in humans. It charts the reincarnation of ancestral souls and is distinct from reckoning parentage for the breeding of pigs. Anthropologists have always insisted that descent is a concept of social organization, referring to relatedness based on common ancestry, which may include people not related biologically and only those genealogical relationships that are socially recognized. In the Yap definition, however, descent and the relationship to ancestry is part of the process of conception.

Since Schneider's critique, anthropologists approach kinship cross-culturally, with an increased reflective sensitivity to preconceived ideas about what kinship is. As Ladislav Holy points out in Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship (1996), "the most significant development in the study of kinship has been the growing awareness of the cultural specificity of what were previously taken to be the natural facts on which all kinship systems were presumed to be built" (p. 165). The resulting challenges made kinship again one of the most innovative areas of study, connecting research across diverse disciplinary, analytical, theoretical, and ethnographic sites. Recent studies of local and specific conceptualizations of kinship foreground the questions of what kinship means and who is a relative and why, and they seek to answer them empirically rather than take them as given by definition.

Definition

If the defining moment of kinship is not referenced to biology, what kind of definition can be put forth that enables cross-cultural comparison but avoids the pitfalls of previous definitions? Current working definitions of the concept—and there is no single agreed-upon definition—tend to go back to first principles. They focus on those relationships that in any given cultural context are considered constitutive of personhood and social human being, of how people come into being, achieve personhood, and attain a socially recognized afterlife. There may be exceptions, but in most human societies these constitutive relationships are marked as distinct among all social relations. They often articulate fundamental ideas about relationality itself, about how social relationships can be forged, maintained, and properly dismantled. They also tend to articulate a temporal component so that such constitutive relationships provide a person with a past, with relationships to predecessors, such as ancestry, descent, and collective history.

Raymond C. Kelly offered a comprehensive and cross-culturally useful definition of kinship in Constructing Inequalities (1993). Significantly, he connects kinship to the concepts of the body and the person :

Kinship relations are social relations predicated upon cultural conceptions that specify the processes by which an individual comes into being and develops into a complete (i.e., mature) social person. These processes encompass the acquisition and transformation of both spiritual and corporeal components of being. Sexual reproduction and the formulation of paternal and maternal contributions are an important component of, but are not coextensive with, the relevant processes. This is due to the ethnographic fact that a full complement of spiritual components is never derived exclusively from the parents. Moreover, the sexually transmitted ingredients of corporeal substance are frequently transmitted in other ways as well. (p. 521)

These further processes of manipulating and modifying substances and spiritual components involved in attaining full personhood and in forging kin relations should not be disregarded because of a biologically based definition of kinship. As Kelly points out, "there is no analytic utility in artificially restricting the category of kin relations to relations predicated on some but not all the constitutive processes of personhood because these processes are culturally formulated as components of an integrated system" (1993, p. 522).

By dissociating the concept of kinship from biology and integrating it with the process of how persons come into being, the investigative focus shifted to ways in which kinship is embedded in the social life of people and to its connections to aspects of culture such as religion.

Kinship, Person, and Body

The approach to kinship and social organization through the concepts of the person and the body was most powerfully developed by Marilyn Strathern in The Gender of the Gift (1988), a comparison of social life across the diverse cultures of Melanesia. She generalized the Melanesian person as "a microcosm of relations" and the body as "a register, a site of … interaction … composed of the specific historical action of others" (pp. 131–132), and both concepts are keys to understanding social organization and social units such as descent, group formation, exchange, and marriage arrangements. The approach echoes well beyond that region, inspiring studies triangulating kinship, the person, and the body elsewhere, including the West. Examining kinship in conjunction with personhood also sheds new light on the structuring of rituals, particularly life-cycle rituals such as initiation, marriage, and mortuary rituals in which the body often takes center stage. As Kelly's definition suggests, life-cycle rituals modify and complement the composition of the body and the constitution of the person, which began with procreation. Death rituals often involve the dismantling of the network of relationships centered on the deceased and the final repayment of contributions towards the deceased person by others. This history of relationships, contributions, and obligations is literally embodied in the deceased person, and, with the body gone, the person and the obligations need to be discharged by the surviving kin of the deceased. Kinship and life-cycle rituals are analyzed here in a combined approach, and such rituals, which often articulate and realize religious ideas, are part of the process of attaining personhood.

Some recent kinship studies reveal the importance of feeding and nurture to the process of kinship. Janet Carsten showed that while the people of Langkawi (Malaysia) regard blood as a substance with which a child is born and which differentiates kin, blood as a kinship substance is modified and transformed by breast-milk which the child ingests, and later by the food the child eats; through the daily food that was cooked on the hearth of the house and that members of a household share, they have a substance in common which has qualities similar to blood. The body of a Langkawi person undergoes a social process that reflects the relationships of commensality, the sharing of food, and cohabitation that the person maintains. One consequence of this processual conceptualization of kinship is that birth siblings and adopted siblings are not socially differentiated if they were nursed by the same woman and fed from the same hearth, because the substance that makes them related to others is considered to be the same.

The cultural understanding of procreation and personhood among Trobriand Islanders (Papua New Guinea) incorporates significant religious and relational concepts that structure social organization. Trobriand procreation not only involves bodily substance and the reincarnation of spirits, but also the creation of form. The Trobriand model of human reproduction preoccupied many observers and was debated as an instance of virgin birth, or denial of physiological paternity and sexual intercourse as a condition for procreation. This is based on a fundamental misconception of Trobriand traditional belief that conception takes place when an ancestral soul enters the womb of a woman who belongs to the same landholding descent group with which the ancestor is associated. Souls thus retain the descent and kin classification they had as living beings, and they are reincarnated into the same kin group. Sexual intercourse is critical to this process because it provides the soul with a material human form, the body, which is made from blood, a kinship substance provided by the mother, and which is shaped by the father's activities during sexual intercourse with the mother. Both the maternal and paternal contributions are vital to this process. The mother's contribution consists of providing blood (essence) and spirit, and the father's of forming the child's body, which takes an appearance that resembles the father, and of enabling the child's growth and eventual separation from the maternal body. A Trobriand father will contribute to feed and shape his child's bodily form and appearance by affectionately taking care of the child, in what is expressed by Trobrianders as paternal nurture and which remains a vital factor in the course of a person's life. The different maternal and paternal contributions to the making of a child are symbolized in the relationships between the child and wider sets of maternal and paternal kin. They also shape the relationships between different descent groups who maintain relations of paternal nurture with each other, expressed in various exchange events. These collective relationships acknowledge their mutual interdependence from each other for the regeneration of the descent group. Like an ancestral soul, they depend on paternal nurture to be able to exist in a material, bodily form.

Recent scholarship on kinship and new reproductive biotechnology, international adoption, and gay and lesbian families shows that a more flexible concept of kinship, emphasizing relationality and process, may be at work significantly in European and North American practices. At the same time, these new contexts for kinship raise new questions about how relatives, especially parents, are defined, challenging traditional Euro-American notions that human reproduction is a natural process through which the ties of kinship emerge unproblematically. The new reproductive technologies manipulate what were deemed to be natural processes so that biological relatedness no longer figures as a given ground for kin relations. Marilyn Strathern succinctly states the problem as "what is interfered with is the very idea of a natural fact" (1992, p. 41); nature assisted by technology becomes part of culture. Shared substance, rather than biology, may also be a powerful connection for members in families created through adoption. These innovative ways of making kinship suggest that, in the European tradition, the ground for relationality as it is experienced by people is no longer, or may never have been, simply biology and nature after all.

Ancestors and Descent

Ancestors are important in most kinship systems. Shared ancestry can be the basis for the classification of kin into social categories, particularly descent categories. Ancestors are, by definition, remembered kin, but not all kin are remembered as ancestors, and which kin become ancestors varies. Among some Amerindian peoples only personally known kin become ancestors, whereas in many African and Asian cultures ancestors and their relationships are remembered for many generations. In yet other cultures ancestors may be remembered as names rather than as deceased kin, but as names associated with land and people who, by bestowing the names to children, forge descent as a relationship between ancestral name, land, and kinspeople. Among the Dobu Islanders of Papua New Guinea, the physical remains of ancestors are the focus of descent. Dobuans return their dead kin to their village of origin and bury them in the center of the village. The burial mound thus symbolizes lineal descent unadulterated by affinal relations. Among Australian Aboriginals it is often the memory of the ancestors' journeys in the country, and their activities and experiences at places in the landscape, that is the content of descent and connects people to ancestors, the landscape, and their past.

Ancestors may be the focal point for the definition of kin categories and groups, in the case of lineages and clans for example, which comprise persons related through descent exclusively through either the male (patrilineal) or the female (matrilineal) line. In societies with a strongly developed patrilineal descent structure, such as the Lugbara of Uganda, different categories of patrilineal male and female ancestors are distinguished depending on their descent status and whether they contributed significantly to the polity of the descent group during their lifetime. In these societies, genealogies record effective ancestors.

In community-based religions the offices of ritual experts and access to esoteric knowledge may be organized by kinship statuses and succession through descent. Only people categorized as descendants of a particular ancestor may be permitted to have certain knowledge or the right to perform rituals. Such experts often employ this knowledge and perform rituals on behalf of the whole community or society. In many Australian Aboriginal, lowland South American, and Native American cultures of the Southwest, the kinship system involves a form of dual organization in which people are classified into moieties (halves into which the total society divides), which are part of a dual cosmology. Moiety organization is related to kinship and descent, but it is often relatively flexible and may involve multiple differentiations, which enables cooperation between the moieties. Depending on the specific system, a person may belong to one or several cross-cutting moieties. Moiety affiliation may be strictly through descent, or it may change according to the specifics of marriage exchanges or of residence. Some moieties are not linked to kinship, but are ritual moieties. Among Yolngu, an Australian Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land, there are named matrilineal and patrilineal moieties as well as ceremonial nonlineal moieties. Moieties own certain cults and rituals which they perform for the whole community, which in turn supports these services by organizing the performances.

Extending the Morality of Kinship

Many communities extend the use of kinship terms—the specific names for the different kinship relationships and those used to address kin—to refer to non-kin. This is a metaphorical or classificatory use of kinship which is significant, because it extends the morality of kinship to other people and sometimes to other beings. In Christianity, God is addressed as Father, and Jesus is addressed as the Son of God. Similarly, members of Christian faith communities and monasteries use kinship terms to express relationships within their communities. In doing so they express their separation from their families of origin and their commitment to the social relations of the community. It has also been suggested that the sharing in the Holy Spirit serves as a basis of essence for the social relationships of kinship in Spirit. From an anthropological point of view, one understands such uses in different Christian communities across the world as reflecting cultural diversity and diverse views of God as Father—depending on the way in which the role of father is culturally conceived, for example.

In some societies, kinship and ancestry is extended to animals and other beings who live together with people in the same environment. The Nayaka, a people living in the Nilgiri Hills of Tamil Nadu (South India), regard the forest in which they live as a parent. Nurit Bird-David (1999) reports that Nayaka refer to features in the forest such as hills or rocks in the same terms they use to refer to the spirits of those who were their immediate predecessors (their recently deceased ancestors)—as "big father" or "big mother"—and they refer to themselves as children. In relation to their forest they see themselves as children of the forest, and they maintain relationships of sharing. The morality of kinship, specifically the sharing morality and intimacy of the parent-child relationship, extends to the environment. As Tim Ingold notes, "the environment shares its bounty with humans just as humans share with one another, thereby integrating both human and non-human components of the world into one, all embracing 'cosmic economy of sharing'" (Ingold, 2000, p. 44).

Such use of kin terms is part of a wider phenomenon by which people attribute personhood to the beings with whom they share an environment (e.g., animals, trees, rocks, places), whether or not they address them by kin terms. Attributing personhood means that one regards other beings as capable of maintaining social relationships among themselves and with other beings. It indicates what Bird-David calls a "we-ness which absorbs differences" (1999, p. 78), and subsumes kinship, or what Roy Wagner (1977) identified among Papuan cultures as the very ground of being rather than merely of humanity, namely the innate capacity for social relationship both with those similar and with those differentiated, which renders all beings of an environment akin.

Bibliography

Bird-David, Nurit. "Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology." Current Anthropology 40, suppl. (February 1999): 67–79, 86–91.

Bloch, Maurice. "Zafimaniry Birth and Kinship Theory." Social Anthropology 1 (1993): 119–32. This concise article outlines the processual nature of kinship and marriage among Zafimaniry (Madagascar), where a couple emerges through the children they raise and the increasing solidity of the house they build over their lifetime; the house turns into a family shrine upon their death.

Bloch, Maurice, and Jonathan Parry, eds. Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge, U.K., 1982. Various excellent articles dealing with death, kinship, descent, and funeral rituals.

Carsten, Janet. The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community. Oxford, U.K., 1997. A readable and evocative ethnographic account of kinship on the island of Langkawi, Malaysia, and a grounded theoretical discussion of the nature of kinship, especially the concept of substance.

Carsten, Janet, ed. Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge, U.K., 2000. A collection of articles providing detailed ethnographic accounts of various cultural idioms of relatedness in an attempt to rethink kinship theory.

Collier, Jane Fishburne, and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, eds. Gender and Kinship: Essays toward a Unified Analysis. Stanford, Calif., 1987. A milestone in kinship studies, dismantling the idea of kinship as a separate domain of social life and putting forth the cultural construction of difference as the central issue in understanding both kinship and gender.

Desjarlais, Robert. Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths Among Nepal's Yolmo Buddhists. Berkeley, Calif., 2003. Insightful and beautifully written biographical accounts of several persons portraying the many ways kinship and religion shape a life and are closely interwoven in a person's experience of life.

Fortes, Meyer. The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi. London, 1949. A classic ethnographic monograph of kinship in the structural-functionalist mode of a culture where kinship is closely linked to ancestral authority.

Franklin, Sara, and Susan McKinnon, eds. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham, N.C., 2001. A major recent contribution towards repositioning kinship studies, particularly in response to empirical and theoretical challenges posed by international adoption, reproductive technology, and genetic projects in a globalized world.

Holy, Ladislav. Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship. London, 1996. A sensitive and well-argued introductory text on the concept of kinship and its history, and still the best available today.

Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill. London, 2000. An innovative, highly synoptic approach to understanding human culture through relationality, environment, personhood, and interaction.

Kelly, Raymond C. Constructing Inequality: The Fabrication of a Hierarchy of Virtue among the Etoro. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993.

Kuper, Adam. The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion. London and New York, 1988. A comprehensive and influential critique of the notion of the primitive, kinship-based society representing the origins of human society, discussing different theoretical traditions such as totemism, lineage theory, and alliance theory.

Middleton, John. Lugbara Religion. London, 1960; new edition, Oxford, 1999. A classic account of kinship and ancestor worship in Africa.

Mosko, Mark. "On 'Virgin Birth,' Comparability, and Anthropological Method." Current Anthropology 39, no. 5 (1998): 685–687. A short but concise discussion of Trobriand Islanders' cultural theory of conception, including relevant references.

Morphy, Howard. Ancestral Connections: Art and the Yolngu System of Knowledge. Chicago, 1991. A readable ethnography on the complex relations of ceremony, art, land, ancestry, and kinship among an Aboriginal Australian people.

Ortiz, Alfonso. The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society. Chicago, 1969. An encompassing ethnographic account of a system of dual classification, of the dynamic of its inherent division and unity, tracing its application in all aspects of culture.

Schneider, David M. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968.

Schneider, David M. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1984.

Schweitzer, Peter, ed. Dividends of Kinship: Meanings and Uses of Social Relatedness. London and New York, 2000. These articles examine kinship as a practice and explore how kinship is embedded in social life through the way people in various cultures make kinship concepts work to address specific opportunities and pursue social strategies.

Strathern, Marilyn. The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley, Calif., 1988. One of the most theoretically innovative and influential comparative works by a leading anthropologist, a synthesis addressing kinship, personhood, gender, and sociality in Melanesia.

Strathern, Marilyn. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, U.K., 1992. An account of English kinship in the context of knowledge production, assisted human reproduction, and consumer society, tracing the wider implications of producing natural ties through reproductive technology for the way human knowledge is conceptualized.

Wagner, Roy. "Are There Social Groups in the New Guinea Highlands?" In Frontiers of Anthropology, edited by Murray J. Leaf. New York, 1974. A seminal essay showing how the exchange of food substances connects with kinship substance in a New Guinea society and how kin groups are elicited temporarily through the use of named differentiations and constitute themselves in the process of such successive exchange events, rather than in a given kinship structure.

Wagner, Roy. "Scientific and Indigenous Papuan Conceptions of the Innate." In Subsistence and Survival: Rural Ecology in the Pacific, edited by Timothy P. Bayliss-Smith and Richard G. Feachem, pp. 385–410. London and New York, 1977.

Weiner, Annette. Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives on Trobriand Exchange. Austin, Tex., 1976.

Claudia Gross (2005)

Encyclopedia of Religion