ANTH/WMNS 326 Cross cultural families and households

24 February: What makes kin? Knowledge? Shared substance?

Required readings: Carsten, Janet (2007) "Constitutive Knowledge: Tracing Trajectories of Information in New Contexts of Relatedness." Anthropological Quarterly. 80(2):403-426 Proquest/ABI/Inform

Weismantel, Mary (1995) "Making Kin: Kinship Theory and Zumbagua Adoptions." American Ethnologist. 22(4): 685-704. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/646380

 

What is the cross-culturally valid basis of the relationship between parents and children?

  • three theoretical positions:

  • biology

  • ideology

  • material conditions of social reproduction

    •

    - the biogenetic position:

  •  the question: how does a culture pick from biogenetic kin to form a kinship system? What is the content of the relations between different biogenetic kin?

  •  "real" versus "fictive" kin

    •

    - the ideological position:

  •  importance of David Schneider

  •  Carsten’s example:

    • - her question: how do people think about kinship and how does this affect their sense of self?

    - what does she say about the social construction of kinship?

    - the symbolic importance of biology

    - structure of some societies makes some information about adoption secret

    - information about biology is seen by members of Scottish society as central to identity

    - constitutive information - relation to identity

    - regulatory information - can constrain choice

    - note that Carsten does not see information as either constitutive or regulatory

    - demonstrates how people strategize around what to know, what not to know, what to know but conceal from others.

    - the material conditions of social reproduction position:

  • Weismantel

  •  her question: how does the role of kinship in daily and generational social reproduction affect how it is understood?

  •  argues neither biogenetic nor ideological theories explain the kinship system of the people of Zumbagua, Ecuador

  •  how does kinship work here? what makes a parent-child relationship accepted?

    •

  •  what other conditions are important in this context?

    • - poverty

    - cultural, political and economic domination

     

    lecture 9