The first thought describes a metaphysics and praxis of the Wari’ (“we”) people, sometimes referred to by their colonial inscription as the Paaka Nova of Brazil. Here, anamnesis and affect are intertwined, resonating in some ways, I think, with Henri Bergson’s considerations of bodily memory, or habit-memory in relation to pure memory.3 According to the Wari’, embodied relation is the site where kin may be manifest. Reciprocal affection – reflections of affect – produces meaning as relation. We might add that this characterizes the way affinity constitutes and sustains kin. The second quote, from the mystic and socialist revolutionary Simone Weil, tells us that the affect called humiliation offers a mainline to the flesh of the material body. It shocks and stultifies, inspiring reactive modes of concealment, expressive acts of sublimation, intrigued performances of dissimulation, forced into socially suitable expressions of bodily relations. The considerations that follow will hold on to these two ideas: (a) kinship or relationality as active and (b) the vulnerability that characterizes bodily ontology makes very specific demands on relation and therefore community. In other words, what follows is a consideration of kinship as action as a critique of the family, beginning with a critical examination of the conceptual foundation of anthropology as a social science.
The Anthropological Production of Kinship
David Schneider’s Critique of the Study of Kinship marked a turning point in the discipline of anthropology.4 By interrogating the unequivocal assumption embedded in the concept of the family at the core of ethnographic research, Schneider aimed his critique at the very foundations of social science. Not only, he claimed, is there no justification for privileging the family above all other social relations, but there is no justification for assuming specific characteristics exist that accurately describe such a community across the vast plurality of human societies, practices, and histories. As the Western model of family life failed to find an analog to the social practices found in other communities, the ethnographer was forced to expand the epistemological hermeneutic indefinitely. Ethnography turned to searching for new ways to define the taboo of incest, to make sense of relations within the terms of exogamous vs. endogamous exchange, and to discern clear distinctions between consanguinity and affinity, especially when none seemed evident.
The problem, for Schneider, is that the family from this standpoint is always conceived as a privileged site of social relation defined by reproductive sexual practices. But this is clearly not always the case. By projecting this axiom onto communities that do not adhere to it, the ethnographer forces their experiences into preconceived, fixed terms of analysis. For example, Schneider points out that the 19th-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan cited Tamilian society in which “my brother’s sons and my cousin’s sons are both my sons”.5 The terms of household relations, he noted, contradict the proprietary basis for relation in modern Western family practices. Morgan notes that in “civilized society”, it would be absurd not to “privilege my own son” in considering “the inherence of my estate”.6 In other words, for Morgan, the awareness of this “most natural bond” only comes with “civilized society”, where it is recognized that kindred relations “naturally” bestow a greater, more authentic degree of cohesion than other intimate associations. Thus, along with private property and monogamous marriage – which is of course required to secure the knowledge required for maintaining patriarchal societies, through the concept of generational heritability via sexual reproduction and epistemic certitude, i.e. being able to verify kin according to some axiomatic – “civilization” provides the ideal social conditions that correspond with the concept of the consanguine. The nuclear family.
It is interesting to note that it was Morgan’s experience with the Haudenosaunee, in which kinship was matrilineal, if not matriarchal, that inspired him to send letters to missionaries across the world in order to inquire about familial relations in their respective localities.7 While today Native Scholars rightly consider Morgan’s approach to be infected with the “white savior” affliction they also, significantly point out the attributes of the Haudenosaunee identified by him were “personal dignity, equality, freedom and autonomy, fraternity, matriarchy, and the absence of poverty”.8 For Morgan this came down to their kinship configurations and familiar relations. Morgan thought of himself as a compassionate observer while still inherently insisting on the nuclear ideal in his work. This, of course, was predicated on an ideology of progress defined by a linear vision of history in which the idea of European civilization stood at the end. It was also based on the assumption that in not having a state form of political relation, something important is missing. It is a framework that can neither recognize nor withstand, for example as Pierre Clastres put it, the idea of a society against the state. Within this interpretation what would be called a pre-state form of society was promiscuous and, therefore, according to the so-called Bachofen thesis, necessarily matrilineal and consequently matriarchal.9
The tendency of matriarchy in presumably “prehistoric” or “precivilized” societies was generally accepted as an axiom in the nascent discipline of anthropology until Friedrich Engels (picking up from Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks) took up the idea as an example of – extended it as incontrovertible proof that – non-state societies, provided examples of a thriving ur-communismus.10
The anthropological discipline – which developed around the conceptualization of kinship as famulus, i.e. property, that acted as a social scientific justification for specific forms of social domination within capitalism and emerged historically from and actively sustained settler colonialism – reacted to this and several studies followed that sought to dismantle that theory. “Once Engels had endorsed it, Morgan’s theory was destined to become a casualty of the central conflict of the age”.11 Through a patriarchal, but also capitalist, commitment they sought to discount evidence of matrilineal, matriarchal, or gynocratic societies as outliers.12 Matriarchy was essentially a mistake or an instance of prematurity. Matriarchy, if it even ever existed, can only be an outlier. It could never work. It is not natural. There is no evidence. And so on.
Chris Knight explains the conflict that non-Western models of kinship presented for anthropologists and the dogmatism they were met with:
What is it to be a “son” or a “daughter”, a “mother” or a “niece”? Taking careful notes among his Native American informants in 1846, Lewis Henry Morgan (1871:3) discovered to his initial surprise that an Iroquois child had several “mothers”. Early in the twentieth century, Bronislaw Malinowski (1930) reacted against this idea, reshaping anthropology on the basis that it was patently absurd. No child could possibly have two mothers. Malinowski acknowledged that his Trobriand Island informants, like many other people, might systematically “distort” the true facts of kinship. Two sisters, for example, might describe themselves as “mothers” to one another’s offspring, their children correspondingly addressing both as “mother”. However, Malinowski insisted that such notions were ideological fictions, not to be taken seriously. Correctly analysed, the facts of kinship would always turn out to be (a) biological and (b) individual.13
It can be inferred from Malinowski’s demands to shoehorn the informant’s story into a portrait adhering to contemporary European family values – an instrumental concept for settler colonialism – that terms are always ultimately framed within the modern Enlightenment conception of the biological and individual.14 But this also reinforces, if not justifies, a specific form of private property, familial possession (or possession of family members, i.e. division of labor), a sexual contract and moral code, and lines of inheritance.
Schneider points out the contradiction evident in the idea that on one hand there is a relation rooted in the apparently self-evident idea of blood, which imposes a stronger bond between two people – specifically the father and son – and on the other, that it took humans thousands of years to establish a society with a shared legal, psychological, and anthropological concept that matches this bond. If it is so self-evident, Schneider asks, that I would rather give my estate to my son instead of my cousin’s sons, why do I require the evolution of juridical principles and social norms to grasp this natural fact? If knowledge is required, then are we trafficking in universals rooted in “nature” or have we moved on to a different domain of inquiry? Do we require an evolved reason to properly ground our sense of love and feeling of commitment? Or are we considering terms of legitimacy under the gaze of specific forms of authority? Or are we dealing with something else altogether? Part of the complication for anthropologists is that so many forms of relationality confronting them failed to fit into this schema.
A famous, and at the time scandalous, example comes from Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa which among other things demonstrated the idea that adolescent strife or puberty as a naturally troubled phase of youth is a myth.15 Through comparison she showed that what is taken to be an essential stage of adolescence today attributed to chemical hormones was in fact rooted in socially structured anxieties internalized by adolescent girls. She witnessed a far more fluid understanding of kinship, such that any given member of the community may have more than one father or mother, elders were important for passing down important knowledge and ancestral stories, while divorce was a day-to-day affair, open to either party simply by exiting the household. Likewise, a child could simply exit one household and enter another and in general be met with equal acceptance. In Samoan society as opposed to the supposedly “advanced” or “developed” 1920’s United States, Mead found active encouragement of promiscuity in young people prior to marriage. Rather than adolescence being a time of sexual repression, it was seen as a moment of sexual freedom and freedom from the responsibility of childcare in the home which was also in some ways the primary responsibility of children, not adults. All of this must have seemed stunning from the perspective of a citizen of the United States in the early twentieth century, and it was particularly scandalous as Mead turned what she learned from her ethnographic work in Samoa into a critique of the educational system in North America, while also questioning the generally prudish approach to sex as well as the repressive relation to death (dead bodies were for example publicly examined and at times dissected to determine the cause of illness. Children were not “protected” from this) and other restrictive and stultifying social structures.16
Two, more recent examples which can be found in Janet Carsten’s collection Cultures of Relatedness speak to the incommensurability between concepts and practices. The “Iñupiat strongly deny that ties deriving from procreation exert any overriding moral force. Whereas claims based on different contributions to productive work are described as permanent, ‘biology’ does not constitute an immutable basis for relations”.17 Another instance bears out the his...
