The primal path to kinship: a critical review of Bernard Chapais, Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society

Abstract

Like other major aspects of sociality, kinship receives distinctive treatments from biologists and anthropologists. For anthropologists, the study of kinship has traditionally been an arena for documenting cultural diversity, and about finding patterns in the midst of, and trajectories through, that diversity. Throughout most of anthropology’s disciplinary history, kinship was thought to hold at least one key to understanding human cultures, both to how those cultures are related to one another and to understanding the structure and function of other large-scale cultural institutions, such as those associated with religion or economic exchange. By contrast, mention kinship to your average biologist and you’ll likely be directed to research focused on Hymnoptera and Termita, and models addressing general evolutionary puzzles—for example, the problem of evolutionary altruism and the phenomenon of reproductive specialization—that have been applied paradigmatically to the social insects, with secondary applications to creatures more obviously like us, such as mammals in general and nonhuman primates in particular. The trans-disciplinary contrast here has been exacerbated by a recent, decidedly anti-biological turn in the study of kinship in anthropology. Influential internal critiques of the study of kinship as involving little more than the ethnocentric projection of cultural forms from the West to the Rest, such as those of David Schneider 1972; Schneider 1984, identified biological conceptions of kinship as lying at the core of such a projection: while we conceptualize our kinship structures in terms of notions of reproduction, shared biological substances, and genetic codes, this is not what one finds in other societies. On this view, the traditional claim that kinship was a universal feature of human societies that had developed over time from more primitive to contemporary forms turns out to be little more than a projective fantasy in the minds of anthropologists. This critique led to a decided lull in kinship studies that displaced the study of kinship from the centre of the