It’s also fascinating watch the subterranean effect of these structures. One of my lingering projects is the literature on ‘taboo’ in Polynesia, and how history of effect of Christian readings of the old testament on treatments of that material. It took people literally centuries to figure out that women in Polynesia weren’t polluting, most of which time was recovering from ‘Western’ presuppositions. It’s a fascinating and complicated story.

Re: ‘Western’ biases built into study of kin terms. I tend to agree. And it’s fascinating to *arrive* at that realization rather than start with it. In order to get both what ‘kinship’ was for anthropology for most of the twentieth century and why it became problematic for part of it, I think one needs to read deeply and charitably in the subject. It’s also important to think about what is lost (theoretically or empirically) when it is decided that comparative kinship isn’t a tenable subject: above all, comparison goes right out the window.

http://www.amazon.com/Cultures-Relatedness-Approaches-Study-Kinship/dp/052165193X/sr=8-1/qid=1158799670/ref=sr_1_1/102-6784012-5373711?ie=UTF8&s=books

In think the idea of their being ‘kinship systems’ only seemed feasible to people who 1) were unwilling to open the black box of what ‘following a (kinship) rule’ meant 2) ignore all the things that their informants thought counted as ‘relatedness’ and privilege the biogenetic (in best Standard Average European fashion) 3) assume that ‘cultural’ concepts are atomistic in the same way that phonemes are, which was a good guess but turned out to be true.

It’s true that reinventing ‘culture’ or ‘socialization’ as ‘governmentality’ or ‘subjectification’ runs the risk of putting very old wine in shoddily made new bottles, and that all macro-actors have as their condition an ‘L’ (as Parsons might put it) of latent understandings. But I must say I do fear a retro-backlash of Good Old Fashioned Kinship. Although I do not mean to suggest that is what you are doing here, Strong.