What Kinship Is—And Is Not

Abstract

Despite proclamations to the contrary, kinship is alive andwell, as attested by recently published books focusing onkinship and by major sessions on kinship held as part of thelast several AAA meetings. Papers in these sessions havediscussed topics ranging from the connection between pastand present research on kinship to new research addressingfundamental questions regarding what constitutes kinship.ThelatteristhesubjectofthisshortbookbyMarshallSahlins.The two chapters making up the book present his takeon what kinship is and what it is not—hence the title of thebook.Theunderlyingpremiseisthatkinshipisgroundedin“mutuality of being” (p. 2), whereby “kinfolk are membersof one another, intrinsic to each other’s identity and exis-tence”(p.62).Unlikebiologicalrelations,where“relation”isourconstructusedtoexplorethebiologicalconsequencesarising from biological reproduction, mutuality of being in-vokesthewidespreadview,asevidencedbySahlinsthroughnumerous quotes, that kinship begins with the perceptionof connectedness, or mutuality of being, between persons.Sahlins directs our attention to the view expressed in manygroups that there is no fully contained, completely isolatedself. Thus, kinship, he states, does not begin with a self–otheroppositionthatassumestheselfexistsseparatelyfromthe other but, rather, with a conjoined self and other, orwhat he refers to as the “kinship I” (pp. 35–36), using anexpressionborrowedfromJorgenJohansen’s(1954)ethno-graphic account of the Maori. The “kinship I” becomes aself–other opposition (p. 33) in which the other is dividedand structured by the relations identified through a kinshipterminology (p. 29). From this perspective, the self existsin the other and exists in each of its divisions; that is, mu-tuality of being determines the domain of kinship, therebycounteringDavidSchneider’s(1972)simplisticclaimthattheontologicalsimilaritiesinAmericankinshipwithnationalismandreligionmeanthatkinshipdoes notexist(pp. 15,60).Thefirstchapterleadsustotheradicalandcontroversialconjecture,takenupinthesecondchapter,thatratherthankinshipbeingderivedfrombiologicalreproductionthroughextension and metaphor, it is the reverse: “the relations ofbirtharereflexesofthegreaterkinshiporderandareincor-porated within that order ... what is reproduced in thebirthisasystemofkinshiprelationsandcategoriesinwhichthechildisgivenaspecificpositionandpositionalvalue”(p.65). Calling what people say about reproduction “theoriesof procreation,” Sahlins says, already presumes that what isbeing said is merely their attempt to account for the bio-logical process of reproduction: “It is as if these were justsomanymistakenideasofthephysiologyofconception”(p.74). Instead, he argues, we should begin by understandingthat what is being said is not a treatise on the physiologyof conception but, rather, an account of how a child is be-ing situated in a “structured field of kinship relations” (p.74) through conception and birth. It is not the degree ofconcordance between their “theory” and our biological ac-count that we should focus on, he explains, but what theyare saying about how the biological reality of conceptionand birth is the vessel, as it were, for contents expressinghow a child becomes situated in a field of social relations.The vessel—the biological process of reproduction—doesnot engender kinship, and if we strip it away, we are leftwith the contents, namely kinship, as Sahlins quotes fromEduardo Viveiros de Castro (2009:241): “Kinship here [inAmazonia] is what you have when you ‘do without’ a bio-logicaltheoryofrelationality”(p.89).Thedistinctionbeingmade is similar to what Jane Goodale (1994) reports forthe Tiwi in her book,