Kinship in Anthropology

Abstract

The problem of handling the topic of kinship cross-culturally and the related institutions of marriage and family is the key to understanding the historical development of a majority of anthropology's central analytic concepts, theories, and methods. Kinship theory was assumed to be the area of technical expertise through which anthropology could best defend its scientific respectability. However, in more recent years the topic of kinship as a justifiable area of study has been increasingly queried due to basic epistemic shifts within anthropology in the wake of feminism and other modes of disciplinary self inspection about the discipline's claims to knowledge. The technical language and definitional constructs of kinship theory, where the major concern was to account for the societal order and integration of ‘simple’ societies, have come into question, particularly the notion that kinship as a system can be defined as the primary source for the rules and regulations that provide for such order. The ‘technical’ language of anthropology has been displaced away from something we once called the ‘jural-political domain,’ with its contrast to the ‘domestic group,’ and removed from notions of ‘social structure’ and ‘prescriptive behavior.’ In their place, idioms of ‘equality and inequality’ are being explored, as too are the topics of ‘self’ and ‘personhood,’ ‘agency,’ ‘gender,’ and the life of values and affect. The stress is upon ambiguity, flux, the everyday, and a multiplicity of voices, rather than upon grand structures of mind and society. Such studies are unrecognizable as pertaining to the kinship and social theory of yesteryear.