The Nuer Incest Prohibition and the Nature of Kinship: Alterlogical Reckoning

Abstract

As blood relationship, if kinship is not something to take for granted, then what is? It is a cipher of our and therefore itself utterly real. In the ethnographic encounter this is sorely shaken. Kinship is brought into question so radically that the critical issue becomes not that of isolating and identifying different of kinship, but that of determining forms of what?. In other words, the study of kinship can throw us into the anthropologically pregnant state of not knowing what we are talking about. I surmise that anthropology's abiding analytical interest in the nature of kinship is rooted in-and in good part amounts to an effort to explain away-this radical question of the reality of kinship. Needless to say, answers abound. Anthropologists have construed kinship as an institution of social structure, a genealogical order, a mode of classification, a substantive code, a linguistic domain, an ideology, an ethnobiology, etc. Although each of these answers has borne fruit, I would argue that at bottom kinship is none of the above. Given the space, it could be shown that these (textbook) responses to the question of the nature of kinship reduce kinship either to some sort of material reality, as in the genealogical account of it as a bio-genetic order (cf. Schneider 1972), or to a semiotic or semantic phenomenon, as in the case of the ideological account. Either way, the answers remain locked into an epistemologically prescinding dualism, namely, that between empiricism and intellectualism.