Ladislav Holy - Anthropological Perspectives on Kinship

Anthropology, Culture and Society

Series Editors:
Dr Richard A. Wilson, University of Sussex
Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen, University of Oslo

The War of Dreams: Exercises in Ethno-Fiction
MARC AUG

Identity and Affect: Experiences of Identity in a Globalising World
Edited by JOHN R. CAMPBELL AND ALAN REW

Women of a Lesser Cost: Female Labour, Foreign Exchange and Philippine Development
SYLVIA CHANT AND CATHY MCILWAINE

Ethnicity and Nationalism
THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology
THOMAS HYLLAND ERIKSEN

Life on the Outside: The Tamil Diaspora and Long Distance Nationalism
IVIND FUGLERUD

Anthropology, Development and the Post-modern Challenge
KATY GARDNER AND DAVID LEWIS

Power and its Disguises: Anthropological Perspectives on Power
JOHN GLEDHILL

Anthropology of the Self: The Individual in Cultural Perspective
BRIAN MORRIS

New Directions in Economic Anthropology
SUSANA NAROTZKY

Anthropology and Cultural Studies
Edited by STEPHEN L. NUGENT AND CRIS SHORE

Being There: Fieldwork in Anthropology
Edited by C.W. WATSON

Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives
Edited by RICHARD A. WILSON

ANTHROPOLOGICAL
PERSPECTIVES
ON KINSHIP

Ladislav Holy

First published 1996 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

Copyright Ladislav Holy 1996

The right of Ladislav Holy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN978 0 7453 0918 7Hardback
ISBN978 0 7453 0917 0Paperback
ISBN978 1 7837 1354 7PDF eBook
ISBN978 1 7837 1356 1Kindle eBook
ISBN978 1 7837 1355 4EPUB eBook

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Holy, Ladislav,

Anthropological perspectives on kinship/Ladislav Holy,

p. cm. (Anthropology, culture and society)

ISBN 0-745309186 (hbk)

1. Kinship. I. Title. II. Series.

1098765

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed on demand and bound in the European Union by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has grown of my courses on kinship, marriage and alliance which I gave over the last few years at the University of St Andrews. I wrote it when I was a Visiting Professor in the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo in the academic year 199495. I am grateful to Signe Howell for having invited me to become a temporary member of the Institute and to all her colleagues in Oslo for their friendship, help and interest and for collectively creating an environment in which it was a real joy to work.

Over the years, many colleagues and students have helped to shape my views. It is not possible to express gratitude individually to all of them but I feel especially obliged to the students in Oslo who attended my course on kinship in 1995. The numerous points which they raised in discussion helped me to clarify a number of issues which I address. I am grateful to Richard Wilson who was kind enough to read an earlier draft of the book and provided helpful comments on numerous specific points, and to Olaf Smedal who read carefully and critically the final manuscript and whose incisive questioning of a wide range of issues helped to formulate better a number of arguments. Needless to say, although I have been helped on my way by students and colleagues, all the omissions and mistakes are solely my own.

INTRODUCTION

In 1967, Fox could justifiably say that kinship is to anthropology what logic is to philosophy or nude is to art; it is the basic discipline of the subject (1967: 10). At the time, kinship was undoubtedly the aspect of social life to which anthropologists paid most attention. Between the time when the precursors of modern kinship studies like Maine (1861), McLennan (1865) and Morgan (1871) published their works and Fox expressed his views on the centrality of kinship to anthropology, a huge body of literature on kinship and marriage had accumulated, which by the middle of this century accounted for probably more than half of the total literature of anthropology. In the first half of this century, anthropological theories on kinship and marriage definitely outnumbered theories which anthropologists formulated on other aspects of social life and there was then hardly an anthropologist of some import who did not contribute to the ongoing theoretical discussion of kinship. If there was a subject which anthropologists could have rightly claimed to be their own, it was kinship. In all other aspects of social life which anthropologists also study, they share their interest with specialists from other disciplines and they often seek their theoretical inspiration from them. In the field of kinship studies, anthropologists have traditionally been the leading theoreticians. Given their agreement on a few basic assumptions about kinship, particularly the assumption that kinship everywhere is based on attributing social significance to the natural facts of procreation, much of their theorising has often resembled exercises in formal logic rather than being concerned with solving particular problems arising from empirical observation. Much of it has been concerned with refining conceptual distinctions and with coining new latinisms for more and more elaborate classifications. The ensuing jargon put off many students on the one hand, and on the other hand created the impression of the study of kinship as a very mature and complex subject with a highly developed technical vocabulary (Fox 1967: 50).

The traditional anthropological preoccupation with kinship was not an haphazard result of peculiar interests and hobbies of several generations of anthropologists. It was logically related to the way in which anthropology came to be constituted as a specialised subject in its own right, in the early twentieth century, when the term social anthropology came to refer to the study of the social organisation of what were at that time conceived of as primitive societies. When it came to conceptualising this form of social organisation, kinship played a distinct analytical role:

At least as far as men were concerned, no one thought it was just to do with households, marriage and the family. Rather in the creation of ties through reproduction and succession, British social anthropologists saw in many of the societies that were their subject of study models of social life. Kinship, in short, played the role for the members of these societies that social theory played for the anthropologists, at once a model of and explanation for the dynamics of relationships. (Strathern 1994: 270; reference omitted, original emphasis)