Enric Porqueres i Gené , Individu, personne et parenté en Europe , Paris, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2015, 294 p.

Abstract

Enric Porqueres i Gene, Individu, personne et parente en Europe [Individual, person and kinship in Europe], Paris, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2015, 294 p.This chronologically organized set of studies by Enric Porqueres I Gene ranges over a wide variety of fields and approaches. Its coherence lies in power and resonance of research problem that runs through various chapters. From patristics to bioethics, from practices of Xuetes of Majorca (descendants of converted Jews, a group Porqueres has studied in depth) to Basque nationalism, this is a fascinating peregrination. We are readily convinced of validity of his overarching thesis: structuralist rigidities on hand and on other common understanding that contemporary societies are characterized by do not mean that we are through with anthropology of kinship - question now is how kinship should be understood today - let alone with kinship itself.Jack Goody, often cited here, warned against evolutionist, ethnocentric interpretations of changes in areas of family, conjugality and fertility. Understanding individualization process - a variant of the civilizing process - as a shift from absolute predominance of collective organization and logic to autonomous individual understood to be constitutive of modernity (and definitively nuclear family), prelude to a postmodern subject with absolute control over his destiny and accountable to himself alone, is simplistic. According to Porqueres, we need to surrender those broad historical categories, along with materialist reductionist concepts such as Bourdieu's marriage strategy, to concentrate on a finer-grained dialectic involving tension between two ideologies. Porqueres explains that Saint Paul (whose thinking was manipulated by Church Fathers, hostile to Roman and Jewish notions of marriage) constructed a figure of human individual as detached from community memberships by baptism, which brought him instead into universal community of believers. The cornerstone of Christian earthly city was love, a value supposedly brought to fore and transmitted to society as a whole by affection-based founded on shared sexual affinity. In response to this model, studied by French historians from Flandrin to Burguiere, a type of vertical, lineage-centred thinking developed in Middle Ages which instead emphasized ties, understood to guarantee stability and perpetuation of families, inter-family balances and, ultimately, existing hierarchies and social order. This second type of logic implies meticulous collective control over marital unions.While Pauline schema, associated with una caro doctrine (man and woman become one flesh through sexual union), constitutes foundation of Western, exogamous and cognatic kinship and a significant part of legal-social order of European states (access to citizenship, naturalization conditions, etc.), it was in continual conflict with approach, which received increasing support from temporal powers. And in early modern period genealogical reasoning and blood rhetoric came to fore, as attested by limpieza de sangre statutes (a person whose was tainted by Jewish ancestors, for example, had to be segregated from others), resulting in emergence of racial exclusion policies, Napoleon's Civil Code, and development of ethnic nationalisms. From fixation on ties came an intense preoccupation with reproductive sexuality and its future effects - we know how this kind of thinking impacted fields of medicine, biology, eugenics. Porqueres draws on social history to demonstrate power that kinship thinking had in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, extensively citing major (though not flawless, as Francois-Joseph Ruggiu has shown) research studies of David Sabean, Simon Teuscher and Gerard Delille: before various discourses (including genetics) discredited consanguinity, between first cousins was on rise. …