I have been intending to keep my kinship course moving between contemporary concerns and classic theory. We have been carefully tracking kinship theory from its beginnings in Morgan (19th century) to its apotheosis in a text dedicated to him (Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures). A question remains: How does this stuff relate to debates in the world today?
Our reading this week spotlights concerns that feminist anthropologists have articulated in relation to gender and especially gender inequality. Today, debates the world over swirl around relations between men and women in neoliberal (yep!) and/or postcolonial contexts. For example, ‘kinship’ or ‘domestic relations’ are often seen to be the locus classicus of ‘tradition’ in rapidly modernizing societies. New found freedoms for women often run up against calls to maintain tradition in particular ways, calls that are not infrequently resisted by those who are subject to them. How are women ideologically positioned (often) as embodying tradition? What do they say about that?
I am highlighting two themes for going forward:
1) “Choice” / “Agency”
Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of alliance challenges ‘enlightenment’ or ‘liberal’ views of the human subject: Is the subject a person who is author of his/her own actions, as one who ‘owns’ oneself? The challenge presented by prescriptive marriage systems for those of us raised in Euro-American cultures is precisely to imagine a version of humanity in which the exercise of agency is not necessarily equated with ‘choice.’ Do people make their social worlds (author them) or are they made by those worlds?
2) “Nature” / “Substance”
Lineage theory relates ‘natural’ relations (genealogy) to political structure. Putatively ancestral relations give form to political disputes and their resolution. In large part, lineage theory was motivated by the attempt to find state-like regulative functions in societies without states. Can this theory and its interests be re-applied to our understandings of government in places like Europe or North America? Segmentation can be abstracted to talk about alliances between political units in broad contexts. More concrete, perhaps, are the ways in which familial metaphors and notions of ancestry give form to the imagination of ‘nations.’ One can think about lineage theory in the context of nationalism and ethnicity for example (and see Horowitz or Lakoff).
These issues come together in contemporary debates about reproductive technologies and reproductive rights. Finland is presently debating legal limits on artificial insemination. To whom should this technology be made available? Single women? Lesbian couples? How are debates about its legality framed? I suggest that ‘nature’ and ‘marriage’ as they are conceived and critiqued in anthropological kinship theory can be brought to bear on these questions. Debates about alternative family forms often rest on notions of what is naturally human, spiraling nature from the question of bodily relations of particular (as modified by technology) kinds up into the domain of the putative structures that allow for the emergence of ‘culture’ (or Culture).
Separately, I am sure that I wasn’t the only one who noticed the recent New York Times piece on minghun marriages in China. Here we have questions of tradition, gender norms, and religious practice played out in an ‘exotic’ context. A link is here.
The ‘modernity of kinship’ (cf. the modernity of witchcraft) is found in debates about ‘ghost marriages.’ Society is reordered. But are the ancestors?
I see a parallel which is implied by your link to the minghun article. The challenge that L-S poses to our naive post-Enlightenment idea of the subject strikes me as being a bit like the idea of the social agency of ancestors (or ghosts, demons, gods).
It’s uncomfortable for Euroamerican liberals to try and understand the motivations of someone whose choices are strictly limited by a social structure (arranged marriages, say) – don’t they chafe under the yoke? Don’t they secretly want something else? Similarly, with the agency of non-human actors, why do people care what the ancestors feel – when they’re not tangible?
I think the answer that anthropology generally offers is that people will do difficult things to maintain social order (and since our own order requires rather different kinds of maintenance, these choices seem peculiar at first blush). As for providing psychological insights into the individual experience of these difficulties, I’d say anthropology isn’t much better at that now than it was in 1938 when Sapir famously said it “need[ed] a psychiatrist”.
Thanks, Toby. I might add that misfortune is in many instances tangible: it takes the form of emptied bank accounts, broken axels, and cancerous tumors in the body. These examples I take from my own fieldwork in an ancestrally-focused place, highland PNG. Folks who I work with practice various forms of ‘double burial,’ in which present social disorder is traced back to the (bodily) discomfort of a recently buried relative. The corpse is dug up, cleaned, and reburied in an attempt to assuage the ghost’s discomfort. But I am not personally aware of any particular emphasis on ‘marrying’ the deceased as the NYT article suggests.
Speaking of psychiatry, well, of psychoanalysis, one of the texts I have recently revisited is Rubin’s truly amazing “The Traffick in Women,” which articulates in a speculative, prescient, and brilliant fashion most of what has been said about gender identity, inequality, and sexuality in the last 30 years — and the essay is really funny! Much of the current trendiness of Lacanian analysis in certain critical circles was anticipated by Rubin way-back-when.
Strong writes,
Random comments.
1. “Double burial” is a long-established custom in southern China as well. It may, at times, become a source of negotiation and/or conflict, since the feng shui of the grave will, it is believed, have different effects on descendants in different lines.
2. The generic problem addressed by minghun marriages is the frequent lack of fit between ideal forms of kinship and marriage and demographic realities. In the Chinese case, any deceased individual who is not worshipped as an ancestor becomes a hungry ghost, who may then afflict relatives with misfortune until steps are taken to remedy the problem.
3. Similar issues may arise when individuals change lineages when reborn. A fairly common diagnosis of what’s wrong with an infant who constantly cries and seems unable to sleep at night is that his parents from a previous life are unwilling to let go.
Re Toby’s remark that,
I note only that conflict between romantic desire and social obligation is a common plot device in Chinese and Japanese literature. The notion that those involved in arranged marriages have no reservations about them is, on the face of it, as unlikely as the notion that the parties most intimately involved must, ipso facto, rebel against them.