Rodney Needham - Remarks and Inventions

FAMILY & KINSHIP
In 7 Volumes

First published in 1967

Reprinted in 2004 by
Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, 0X14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2006

1974 Rodney Needham

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Anthropology and Ethnography. This has not been possible in every case,
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Remarks and Inventions
ISBN 9780-41533012-1

ISBN 978-1-136-53612-0 (ePub)

Miniset: Family & Kinship

Series: Routledge Library Editions Anthropology and Ethnography

Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne

First published in 1974
By Tavistock Publications Limited
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

ISBN 0 422 74360 7

Distributed in the USA by
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Andrew Lang
(18441912)

The three essays brought together in this volume deal respectively with analysis, theory, and history. The first and second are likely to have a special interest for social anthropologists; the third has nothing technical about it, and should appeal to anyone interested in the possibility of a predictive social science or in the claims of structuralism.

The remarks of the title are the discursive comments made in the opening paper. In referring to inventions, as these are in turn represented throughout the collection, I am taking wide advantage of the range of meanings permitted by the word: selection of topics or arguments, contrivance of a new method, fabrication.

The essays are skeptical in the dictionary sense that they express doubt concerning the validity of what is claimed to be knowledge in some particular department of enquiry; also, doubt as to the truth of some assertion or supposed fact. They are essays about, rather than in, kinship: that is, they are scrutinies of received ideas held in anthropology, not empirical investigations of social facts of a distinct kind.

The opening essay and the next have been published before, and are reproduced here with minor changes and additions. I am obliged to the Association of Social Anthropologists and Tavistock Publications Limited, and to the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, for their formal permission to reprint. The third essay is new, and is now printed for the first time.

I am indebted to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York, for the award of a personal grant which indirectly but materially helped towards the completion of work that is in part embodied in this book.

As constantly before, over the past twenty-five years, I am grateful to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for the munificence of its holdings, the beauty of its ambience, and the helpfulness of its staff.

The volume is dedicated to the memory of Andrew Lang, an illustrious predecessor at Oxford, where he was a Fellow of Merton from 1868 to 1875 and was elected to an honorary fellowship of his college in 1890. A very gifted man of letters, he yet made incisive theoretical contributions to what are now regarded as forbiddingly technical subjects. I hope that this new recognition accorded to his name will induce readers to turn back to his work. The present collection of essays is offered to Langs memory, also, because I think he would have liked them.

R.N.

Merton College, Oxford

The following bodies are thanked for permission to reprint.

The Royal Anthropological Institute, in respect of Map 4, reprinted from Man, 12: 145; and Map 8, reprinted from Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 18; facing page 31. Mrs. F. W. Parish, in respect of Map 6, reprinted from N. W. Thomas, Kinship Organ-isations and Group Marriage in Australia (p. 41). The American Philosophical Society, in respect of Map 7, reprinted from Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 39.

The publishers have made every effort to contact copyright holders in respect of Maps 3, 5, and 9, but have failed to locate them. They would therefore be pleased if the various bodies involved would get in touch in order that the situation may be rectified.

I

The Remarks which constitute the opening chapter are a cursory recapitulation of views gradually formed in the course of teaching at Oxford, and now composed into an informal perspective.

At the instance of the Association of Social Anthropologists, a few years ago, I found myself having to deliver a conference paper on kinship to a gathering of colleagues, not all of whom could be counted on to have an acute interest in the topic. It would be dull for them, I thought, to present yet another intensive empirical analysis of a particular system, however intriguing to me its technical character or its theoretical consequences. It is an accepted if notorious dictum that an anthropologist may be bored by ethnographic facts; but what is less well admitted is that social anthropologists may be even more bored by analysis. What anthropologists really like to hear about, apart from other anthropologists, is anthropology. So I thought I might agreeably, and perhaps usefully also, discuss analysis without actually practising analysis: that is, give my colleagues something interesting to think about, but not hamper communication by forcing a tedious confrontation with social facts. The result was the Remarks.