DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGYInaugural Lecture and Colloquia

31st October and 1st November 2003Anthropology at Aberdeen - Lecture by Tim Ingold

5 p.m. Friday October 31st, King’s College

Colloquium on the Anthropology of the NorthGisli Palsson, Piers Vitebsky, Alex King, David Anderson

10 a.m. – 1 p.m., Saturday November 1st, Marischal Museum

Colloquium on Art, Anthropology and Visual CultureSusanne Kuechler, Chris Gosden, Nancy Wachowich, Elizabeth Hallam

2 – 5 p.m., Saturday November 1st, Marischal Museum

The British Academy Radcliffe-Brown Memorial Lecture: The genealogy of descent, Gillian Feeley-Harnik,

6 p.m., Saturday November 1st, King’s College

For further details, anthropology@abdn.ac.uk

Matriliny vs. Matriarchy

13

2 4

5

13 18

Ego

97

15

12

8

16

1110

14

6

1921

17

20

Nature and Culture

Nature is a symbol.

Culturally constructed does not mean that it doesn’t exist.

No hotline to reality. Very few would defend naïve empiricism.

Family

Natural unit - based on biological givens (couple+offspring)

Residence is a critical feature of kinship

Kinship is everything

•Kinship is the study of relatedness in a given society

•Studying kinship requires an understanding of what a person is.

•Provides us with an understanding of •social structures (relationships among persons) and •institutions (politics, economics, religion, kinship)

Key concept in Anthropology

Socialization of patently natural relations.

British Social Anthropology, kinship was more or less synonymous with anthropology

American cultural anthropology - personality & culture and kinship vied for most important

Lévi-Strauss took center-stage with his Elementary Structures of Kinship

Radcliffe-Brown, Evens-Pritchard, Fortes, Leach, Geertz, Murdock, White

Kinship does not really exist

A Critique of the Study of Kinship, 1984

Schneider’s critique: it is an artifact of the anthropologists and their culture more than it is of the subject cultures they study

By 1980 interest had already fallen off.

Two views of Yapesse society

1. Follows the assumptions that it is a kin-based society, operating in an idiom of kinship

2. Does not make any of those assumptions, looks for symbols of sociality and the meaning of those symbols from the natives’ point of view.

Blood is thicker than water

Fundamental, implicit assumption in kinship studies.

Because ‘blood is thicker than water’ kinship consists in bonds on which kinsmen can depend, are unquestionable, more compelling than other kinds of relationships.

States of being, not doing

Even Lévi-Strauss writes of “…the natural links of kinship…”

Kinship as an idiom

Depends on the idea, our assumptions of kinship

1. Simple societies can be distinguished from complex societies

2. Kinship, economics, politics, religion - all universal

3. Reproduction of human beings. - biology (blood ties)

Doctrine of the Genealogical Unity of Humanity

Biological kinship is usually distinguished sharply from social kinship

Social kinship was about social facts (following Durkheim), but biology was relegated to the background, an assumption.

Durkheim, Rivers, Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski made biological kinship either an implicit or explicitly assumption.

So what?

Kinship is about human reproduction, previous generations are replaced by new ones.

A European preoccupation - blood is thicker than water

This is not necessarily true for all people.

Now what?

Anthropology is the study of particular cultures.

The first task of anthropology is to understand and formulate the symbols and meanings and their configuration that a particular culture consists of.

The problem

First we assume that kinship, economics, politics, and religion are distinct things.

Then we describe a culture in terms one then another aspect.

All of these institutions are inextricably interrelated so that in any particular case they cannot be distinguished.

Society cannot be decomposed into constituent parts.

The solution

Take kinship as an empirical question.

Value and meaning in the total cultural configuration must be added to the investigation and analysis.

Kinship is again a key problem

Not the reigning concept anymore (identity, power, body, gender, colonialism)

Returned as the debate about the character of social structure and central to understanding embodied persons.

Schneider remains key: symbols, natives point of view, belonging

Society no longer partible

Kinship, economy, religion, political organization, etc. are not constituent parts of “a” society or “a” culture

Kinship is a system not readily demarcated from economic, religious, and governmental domains.

Kinship is certainly not something relegated to Others.

Kinship of Europe, North America, China, etc.