must read the following declarations, which created quite a stir at the time:
By this account, ‘kinship’ is certainly a thoroughly misleading term and a false criterion in the comparison of social facts. It does not denote a discriminable class of phenomena or a distinct type of theory, and it does not admit of special canons of competence and authority. Accordingly, it cannot be said that a social anthropologist is ‘good at kinship’; what he is good at is analysis. What that means depends on whatever he happens to be analysing.28
Or elsewhere: ‘To put it very bluntly, then, there is no such thing as kinship, and it follows that there can be no such thing as kinship theory.’29
In the same volume, Leach would go even further than Needham, putting the latter in the same bag as the anthropologists he had criticized: ‘All of which adds up to saying that, in my view, the utility of the study of kin-term systems as sets – which runs from Morgan to Rivers to Radcliffe-Brown to Goodenough to Lounsbury and, by a different route, to Lévi-Strauss and Rodney Needham – is pretty well worked out.’30 Provocations and paradoxes, as we can see, were Leach’s daily bread.
Needham evinces the same attitude when, having buried the concept of kinship together with any attempt to work out a general theory of kinship, he stresses in terms taken from strictly classical anthropology that, ‘the deeper the analyst goes, the more he is obliged to concentrate on singularities of cultural signification: this involves trying to put a coherent construction both on an unpredictable variety of meanings and functions that any individual term may have and on the set of terms in combination’.31
Wise words, which show that Needham’s and Leach’s rejection of the notion of kinship and their criticism of all general theories did not at the time mean a death sentence for kinship studies but the declaration, in deliberately excessive and gratifying terms, not that the study of kinship should be halted but that it should be conducted on different bases, not stopping at terminologies but going on to the links between kinship and economy, power, religion, etc.
This was no longer the case fifteen years later with the publication of David Schneider’s book Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984).32 For many, this appeared to be the final blow to the majestic edifice of kinship writings. After having described how, twenty years earlier, he had analyzed the kin system of the Yap Islanders (in Micronesia), where he had begun his fieldwork, Schneider launched into a radical self-critique of his early writings and proposed another interpretation of the same data, and particularly of the basic unit of Yap society, the tabineau. Previously he had defined it as an extended patrilocal family combined with a matrilineal kinship system. In his second version, Schneider stressed that it seemed to him that, for the Yap Islanders, what bound together the members of a tabineau was not kinship but actual cooperation in working the same piece of land, and that it was this alone which founded an individual’s right to the land. In sum, he no longer regarded the tabineau as a kin group or Yap society as kin based, but as being based on other relations (economic) and other values (religious and economic). Schneider’s auto-critique concurred with Leach’s position on kinship in Pul Elya. In spite of this convergence, though, Schneider merely mentioned it in passing, without dwelling on it, and aimed a first criticism at ‘almost all anthropologists’ who had gone before (and against himself in his former life): that of having abusively posed the principle that kinship was a universally recognized basic value in all societies. This was the very opposite of Lévi-Strauss’ view.
Schneider nevertheless decided to go on and sift through the principal definitions of kinship from Morgan to Scheffler and Lounsbury. When he had finished, he felt entitled to say that all studies on kinship, from Morgan on, had been explicitly or implicitly based on the same ethnocentric definition. For Europeans and Euro-Americans,33 kinship concerns essentially procreation, the reproduction of human beings. This reproduction is primarily a biological process, and therefore the genealogical ties between individuals are biological ties, ‘blood’ ties. For Westerners, the nuclear family is the place where the parents’ blood mingles in and is shared by the children. Finally he deemed that anthropological theories reflect the Western idea – found equally in Malinowski, Meyer Fortes or Scheffler – that, whatever cultural values and social attributes may be associated with these genealogical ties in a given society, there lies at the heart of all kinship systems a universal genealogical structure that is inescapable and indissoluble, which proceeds from the nuclear family. It is from this structure, regarded as the core of ‘primary’ kinship relations, that, by the twofold process of direct extension and unilateral reinterpretation, all of the other kin relations are derived.34 Schneider’s general conclusion that ‘the study of kinship derives directly and practically unaltered from the ethnoepistemology of European culture . . . [that] Blood is presumably Thicker than Water’35 became a pseudo-scientific postulate which he called ‘the Doctrine of the Genealogical Unity of Mankind’.36 This postulate, he conjectured, was the basis of the genealogical method, perfected by Morgan, Rivers and others, that all field anthropologists used to explore the kinship system in the society they had chosen to study. This being the case, all were doomed to failure, since, because they were using a method that incorporated Western cultural prejudices assumed to be universal sociological truths, their work could only produce results that confirmed these universal truths.
For Schneider there was only one conclusion, and it was simple and clear: from Morgan onward, kinship studies had simply gone in circles, and the objective analysis of kinship had not yet truly begun.
In the course of the present work, I will examine and reply to these criticisms one by one. Some are simply inadmissible. But I cannot pass over in silence the fact that numerous anthropologists had shown, well before Schneider, that in one or another society the kin terms people use to refer to those they regard as relatives do not correspond to ‘real’ genealogical ties but to relations between categories of individuals considered to be in the same social relationship to each other. Durkheim had already noted as much concerning Australian Aboriginal peoples – for which Schneider praised him while reproaching him for not having sought to show how this social relationship was precisely a kinship relation rather than something else. Many others had followed in Durkheim’s steps, such as Hocart, Leach and Dumont, whom Schneider does not cite.
Moreover, even in societies where informants emphasize genealogical ties between individuals, it is hard, if one takes cultural representations of procreation seriously, to reduce these genealogical ties to biological ones as they are understood in European culture, in other words, as relations that entail the sharing and mingling of the parents’ blood. Furthermore it is widely accepted that cultural representations of the role of blood in making babies are a matter not of biology (as an experimental science) but of ideology.
There is nothing mechanical about culture. It suffices to cite societies where the ‘descent rule’, as anthropologists say, is patrilineal and yet no mention is made of the possible role of sperm or blood in making a child. Furthermore, while it is true that the presence of an Iroquois-type terminology in certain societies in Africa, Oceania and America says nothing about how each of them sees the process of conceiving a child and therefore how they represent what we call motherhood, fatherhood, etc., it remains to be explained why so many societies having different cultures use kinship terminologies whose formal structure is similar. This point, too, Schneider passed over in silence, seeking as he was to imprison his colleagues in a false syllogism. Starting, on the one hand, from the real fact that one never knows in advance what kinship is in a non-European society and, on the other hand, from the fact that we know that Europeans use kinship as a set of biological and social relations which link individuals of the two sexes in the process of reproducing life and the succession of generations, Schneider contended that trying to discover how other societies thought of this process always came down to finding in others that which one already had in oneself and had transported to the other society. Anthropologists would thus merely be ‘discovering’ in other cultures pretexts for erecting mirrors in which their own image would be reflected infinitely, but garbed in the features of the other.
In sum, if for Leach
