[Xmca-l] Re: kinship

Mon Jan 8 07:59:11 PST 2018

This chain has me thinking about an interaction I may have mentioned here
before - a visiting Swedish speaking teacher asks an NYC preschool teacher
what community means as he can not translate this word into Swedish, and
she says “family,” meaning her classroom is a family.  I followed up on
this recently and she did not mean this metaphorically, in part because her
neighbors have been her family as raised her children with them.
I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the thousand plus comments in
response to the recent New York Times piece on estrangement.  They
are another type of discussion about, or really a creative process of
making new, families. Beth

On Monday, January 8, 2018, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com> wrote:

> Peter,
> The importance of ritual/ceremony offers another interesting way of linking
> anthropological/ethnographic research and human development. It seems that
> this has been done more explicitly in anthropology of children/development
> than has the family (which, of course, has implicitly been involved).
> Van Gennep's classic work on rites of passage have thematized this, and
> many folks through the years have looked at the role of rituals in the
> development of children. What you point to and which has been less well
> developed are questions of the experience of the ritual for the
> participant. That's a concern that people are just now starting to turn
> towards and so far, the jury is out. Some argue for Durkheimian notions of
> collective effervescence - something that needs to be wedded to
> perezhivanie, I think -  and some arguing that the experiences are much
> more diffuse and less coordinated. But I do think this would be a very
> fruitful site of research for some XMCA-ite out there.
> -greg
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 4:28 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:
>
> > I'm no expert here, but recently read Wendy James's The Ceremonial
> Animal:
> > A New Portrait of Anthropology  (https://www.booktopia.com.au/
> > the-ceremonial-animal-wendy-james/prod9780199263349.html) . The
> > ceremonial animal is the human, and this book focuses on ritual in human
> > life, which I would say has a profoundly emotional dimension.
> >
> > I've avoided perezhivanie discussions because it's become all things to
> > all people, so I've retreated to an alt-phrasing, meta-experience (the
> > experiencing of experience as a way to frame new experiences).
> > Rituals/ceremonies re-enact prior rituals in ways that many people find
> > deeply emotional, often comforting. I am not religious, but know that the
> > singing of familiar hymns can be emotionally settling for people
> > experiencing grief, trauma, etc. (I know this from testimonies of such
> > people).
> >
> > Maybe this is perezhivanie, but I've stopped caring whether that's the
> > term for my conception, since I've found one that people don't hold up to
> > their orthodoxies when I use it in writing.
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@
> > mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Rod Parker-Rees
> > Sent: Monday, January 08, 2018 4:19 AM
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: kinship
> >
> > Greg,
> >
> > I can't pretend to be au fait with the developments in anthropology
> around
> > kinship and family (but I am interested) - the connection I see between
> > understandings of family/familiarity and the work of Vygotsky is
> associated
> > with what Sahlins appears to be saying about 'people who are intrinsic to
> > one another’s existence'. If the 'shape' of the refractive lens which
> forms
> > our perezhivanie is dependent on our interactions with other people (and
> > particularly in our first years) then those people with whom we have most
> > interactions (or perhaps most formative kinds of interactions) will be
> > familiar in the strongest sense - 'mutual persons' who share and even
> > inhabit our ways of interacting with our environment - and particularly
> our
> > social environment. Our family are 'in our heads' in ways which other
> > people are not. Kinship links clearly matter because there must be some
> > chaining of this mutual influence (My mother's mother is in my head
> because
> > she is in my mother's head and my mother is in mine). 'Blood-links'  or
> > households may provide a convenient shorthand for patterns of proximity
> and
> > may therefore be built into languages but the way the terms will then be
> > used may get closer to reflecting how speakers feel about the different
> > kinds of relationships they experience.
> >
> > All the best,
> >
> > Rod
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@
> > mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Greg Thompson
> > Sent: 08 January 2018 02:16
> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: kinship
> >
> > apologies if this is a re-posting, but here is the text of the message
> > that accompanied the Sahlins text, just in case it didn't go through:
> >
> > Apologies if this is another trip round the mulberry bush (or the
> > maypole?), but this is a conversation that has, as one might imagine,
> been
> > quite a big deal in anthropology. Here's a quick and brief summary.
> >
> > Initially, "kinship" in anthropology was defined as the way that it has
> > traditionally been defined in European cultures - as based on blood.
> (other
> > forms are kinship, e.g., adoption, were seen as derivative of the central
> > trope of blood relation).
> >
> > Then along came a fellow by the name of David Schneider (I attached a
> > picture, cf. David and Martin's pictures of Malinowski). Although
> Schneider
> > couldn't write his way out of a paper bag, he conducted field work on the
> > Micronesian island of Yap and published a few books on the subject that
> > forever changed the way that anthropologists' think about kinship.
> > Essentially, he challenged this blood-based notion of kinship by showing
> > how Yapese kinship formation is not blood-based (although blood based
> > relationships are still recognized, they do not hold the same sense that
> a
> > blood-based notion of "family" does).
> >
> > Following Schneider, the field of kinship studies spent a bit of time in
> a
> > relativistic malaise, shifting between those who stuck to the old view of
> > kinship and those who refused to use the concept at all.
> >
> > Then along came work that would eventually become what has come to be
> > known as "new kinship studies". This approach sought to recover the
> concept
> > of "kinship" without the concept of "kinship-as-blood". In the view of
> new
> > kinship studies, "kinship" is understood, as Rupert Stasch has put it, as
> > "intersubjective belonging" or "mutuality of being" (mentioned in the
> > Sahlins essay that is attached).
> >
> > New kinship studies have also turned their gaze back onto kinship in
> > European/Western/American culture (and indeed, Schneider's other big book
> > was titled American Kinship). These folks have noted that even in these
> > cultures, previously thought to be entirely blood-based, one can find
> lots
> > of slippage from a simple model of blood-based kinship. Janet Carsten is
> a
> > key figure in this regard and she looks at, among other things, how
> > technologies have changed kinship formation (think test-tube babies and
> > sperm extraction from deceased persons - fun stuff!).
> >
> > One of the best summaries of the new kinship studies is Marshall Sahlin's
> > essay What Kinship is? I have attached it here as it has a wonderful
> > collection of examples of how kinship is formed in various places around
> > the globe.
> >
> > I guess the more interesting question for this group is: what does this
> > have to do with Vygotsky/XMCA?
> >
> > -greg
> >
> > On Sun, Jan 7, 2018 at 7:15 PM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com
> >
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Martin,
> > >
> > > Not sure if things got garbled on the way into virtual XMCA-land, but
> > > in the end of my message about kinship studies in anthropology that
> > > accompanied the Sahlins (and which doesn't seem to appear in your
> > > reply - did the message come through with the attachment - usually it
> > > is the reverse!), I noted that Sahlins provides a nice summary of the
> > > new kinship studies that followed David Schneider.
> > >
> > > Does that help or were you looking for something else? (and, was the
> > > text of the message really missing entirely?) -greg 
> > >
> > > On Sun, Jan 7, 2018 at 6:44 PM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > >> Greg, could you say a bit about why you sent this?
> > >>
> > >> Martin
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> > On Jan 7, 2018, at 7:07 PM, Greg Thompson
> > >> > <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com
> > >> <mailto:greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>> wrote:
> > >> >
> > >> > <image.png><Sahlins, Marshall - What is Kinship.pdf>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> > > Assistant Professor
> > > Department of Anthropology
> > > 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> > > Brigham Young University
> > > Provo, UT 84602
> > > WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
> > > http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
> > >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> > Assistant Professor
> > Department of Anthropology
> > 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> > Brigham Young University
> > Provo, UT 84602
> > WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
> > http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology
> 880 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> Brigham Young University
> Provo, UT 84602
> WEBSITE: greg.a.thompson.byu.edu
> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
>

-- 
Beth Ferholt
Associate Professor
Department of Early Childhood and Art Education
Brooklyn College, City University of New York
2900 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11210-2889

Email: bferholt@brooklyn.cuny.edu
Phone: (718) 951-5205
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