Abstract

Author(s): Shapiro, Warren | Abstract: Hal Scheffler, in arguing that native concepts about procreation provide the basis for kin reckoning universally, presented considerable evidence for his argument, in addition to the extension rules for which he is best known, This essay applies this evidence to the Navajo materials and shows that a Schefflerian analysis is correct. By contrast, the analysis of Nava-jo kinship by Gary Witherspoon, indebted to David Schneider’s ideas, is shown to be wide of the mark. Scheffler also argued, in much the same logical vein, that gender classification around the world is bipartite, that claims of a “third sex” are without merit. The argument is applied to “third sex” claims by Wesley Thomas, which claims are shown to be baseless.

Highlights

  • Introduction TheNavajo are the most ethnographically studied people in the world.1 Their ideas about kinship were relatively well known even before the publication of Gary Witherspoon’s (1975) Navajo Kinship and Marriage and his other publications.Witherspoon’s analysis rejects the idea that Navajo kinship is grounded in the procreative relations within the nuclear family

  • The foregoing analysis, I submit, is closer to Navajo understandings than Witherspoon’s is, largely because, as I have noted, Witherspoon is less dependent on these understandings than he is on what I have termed “the Schneider Narrative.”

  • This Narrative has in subsequent kinship studies been connected with an embrace of “postmodern”/”deconstructionist” argument (Feinberg 2001:11).and inadequate attention to previous scholarship, which, as we learn from Janet Carsten’s overview of these studies, are just old hat (Carsten 2004). Trendiness aside, it should be clear from my prolegominal remarks that the Schneider Narrative is plainly and false: far from being entrapped in Eurocentric assumptions, Schef*ler and ethnographers before him relied on discerning analyses of the pertinent languages, attending especially to the phenomena of lexical marking

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Summary

Introduction

Introduction TheNavajo are the most ethnographically studied people in the world. Their ideas about kinship were relatively well known (see references) even before the publication of Gary Witherspoon’s (1975) Navajo Kinship and Marriage and his other publications (see below).Witherspoon’s analysis rejects the idea that Navajo kinship is grounded in the procreative relations within the nuclear family. Navajo are the most ethnographically studied people in the world.. Navajo are the most ethnographically studied people in the world.1 Their ideas about kinship were relatively well known (see references) even before the publication of Gary Witherspoon’s (1975) Navajo Kinship and Marriage and his other publications (see below).Witherspoon’s analysis rejects the idea that Navajo kinship is grounded in the procreative relations within the nuclear family. As such it is self-consciously indebted to David Schneider’s writings.

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