a distinct class of facts or any distinct type of theory, they had nevertheless continued to study the facts of kinship and attempted to theorize them. Schneider, on the other hand, considered that there was indeed such a thing as kinship, but only in Western societies. Or more precisely, that it might exist in other societies, but that one could not postulate this existence and that any attempt to discover it was bound to fail if one counted on the genealogical-survey method. After Schneider, was it still worth spending even one hour on kinship?
In reality things did not turn out as Schneider had predicted. Kinship had, in the meantime, become entangled with other issues and had emigrated to other sites, where its object had begun to be reshaped and enriched. Anthropologists had, for example, become increasingly interested in gender relations and in the questions of the form and foundations of male or female powers in the private and public spheres. Kinship was also increasingly being seen no longer as a separate area but as an aspect of the global process of social reproduction. Or again, at the other pole from this global approach but in complement to it, kin ties were being considered as a part of the process of constructing the person, the self.
By shifting sites in this way, the study of kinship had finally deserted those places where it had been running in circles for decades, exhausting itself in an attempt to answer false questions to which Leach, Needham and also Schneider had the merit of drawing attention. Since the 1980s, almost no one has proposed to deduce the structure of a society from the formal analysis of its kin terminology. And vice versa, no one now explains the presence of a given kinship terminology by the existence of a particular mode of production or political system.
So the predicted death has not occurred! And, taking a closer look, we see that today’s preferred topics of study (construction of the person, gender relations, kinship in the global functioning of a society, etc.) are not really new. What is new is first of all that these topics have moved to the forefront of research concerns. The explanation does not lie in scientific reasons alone, but also in what is going on in our societies, for example, the social struggles and pressures for greater gender equality. New, too, is the fact that in our search for answers we can no longer rely on notions that were only recently still taken for granted, such as the idea that so-called ‘primitive’ societies are ‘kin based’ or that the family is the basis of society. To these reasons we must add the fact that, in the present context of the fast-growing globalization of the capitalist economy and the inclusion of all societies in this world system, the process of the overall reproduction of each local society rests less and less on that society’s own bases, so that the kinship relations that may once have played an important role in this process now contribute increasingly less to the social reproduction of its groups and individuals.
The conclusion to be drawn from this brief overview of the transformations in kinship studies on the ground and in theory seems clear. Anthropology cannot exist as a scientific discipline unless it constantly submits its concepts, its methods and its findings to criticism and criticizes them itself, always placing this self-examination in historical context, taking in not only the history of anthropology and the social sciences, but also the history of the societies in which anthropologists learned their trade as well as that of the societies in which they later exercised it.
It is in this perspective that I am now going to revisit my own work, in order to show how I studied kinship in the field, among the Baruya, a society in New Guinea where I lived and worked for a total of more than seven years between 1967 and 1988.
CHAPTER ONE
Kinship in the Field
The Baruya of New Guinea
Analyzing and interpreting the realm and the exercise of kinship in contemporary societies is obviously not simply a matter of theories and choosing among the different hypotheses and doctrines advanced by one or another anthropologist. One must also have tried one’s hand at conducting a systematic study of the relations and representations of kinship and the family in a real society. This holds not only for anthropologists, but for sociologists and other social scientists engaged in the study of contemporary societies.
THE TOOLBOX
It is also obvious that, before undertaking such a study, anthropologists cannot clear their head of everything they have previously read, heard, learned or understood about kinship. Deliberate amnesia of this sort is impossible. What is possible, however, and even to be recommended, is to adopt a stance of critical vigilance or awareness so as to be ready, if necessary, to revise or abandon concepts one previously considered to be analytically founded or field methods one had held to ‘pay off’, etc. In the meantime, one must begin to work with the theories and methods at hand and which seem useful for doing what one has set out to do.
This was, of course, true in my own case when in 1967 I decided to study kinship relations in the Baruya society, a New Guinea Highlands population with whom I had chosen to live and ‘do fieldwork’, as we said then. How did I proceed? What results did I obtain and what shifts did my observations prompt in my theories? This is what I will now attempt to describe.
In 1967, as mentioned above, Lévi-Strauss’ theoretical work in kinship held sway in France and had already won a large following in Great Britain and the United States. To be sure, Leach had already formulated his first criticisms in Rethinking Anthropology, but the stage was still largely occupied by the debates and disputes between those for whom descent was the primordial axis of kinship relations and those for whom this role fell to alliance, in short: between Meyer Fortes, Evans-Pritchard, Jack Goody, etc., on one side, and Lévi-Strauss, Rodney Needham, Louis Dumont, Leach, etc., on the other. Of course, some in each camp had already begun to point out that there was no commonly agreed definition of family, marriage, incest, etc., and, above all, none that applied to all societies. But no one at the time seriously doubted that such institutions as descent, filiation, marriage, the family, transmission of names and ranks, relations with the ancestors, dowry, and exchange of women belonged to the field of kinship and its exercise.
Everyone was also familiar with Murdock’s categories of kinship terminologies: ‘Hawaiian’, ‘Sudanese’, ‘Eskimo’ and so on, whose construction rules and formal structures had been isolated and therefore could be identified in the field. And finally, although it was already well known (since Hocart at least)1 that in many societies in Australia, Oceania, Asia and America kin terms designated not only (or not at all) a person’s genealogical position with respect to another taken as a reference (an abstract male or female Ego), but (often) relations between ‘categories’ of individuals who were related to each other in the same way without necessarily having a genealogical tie, no one in France, by 1959, had yet formulated a radical criticism of the use of the genealogical method for the study of kinship. Novice anthropologists were merely advised not to force their informants to invent genealogies simply to please the ethnographer and to be aware that informants may have all sorts of reasons for manipulating the genealogies they recite – reasons that may be motivated by self-interest and therefore are interesting for anthropologists, as long as they realize this and can discover why.
In short, it was with this theoretical baggage and critical advice – shared by the other young anthropologists of the time – that I set out in October 1966 for New Guinea. I arrived in 1967, having stopped off in Australia to learn Melanesia Pidgin in the University of Canberra’s language laboratory, run by A. Wurm. Robert Glasse, Andrew Strathern and others had alerted me to the importance of Pidgin for anyone travelling in New Guinea. But why New Guinea? And why the Baruya, with whom, a few months later, I would decide to live and work?
WHY NEW GUINEA?
It was on the advice of Claude Lévi-Strauss that I finally chose this country for some ‘real’ fieldwork. After having studied philosophy and then economics, I had decided to become an anthropologist and to look into an as yet little-developed domain: the economic systems of
