[Xmca-l] Re: kinship

[David Kellogg]

Thanks, Greg. I found Sahlins impatient and intemperate, just as I found
him in person. But now that I am older I can see that behind all the poorly
motivated ill will and bad faith, it's not simply an enactment of the
central motif of the Gold Bough towards his erstwhile teachers, now
opponents. There is also a kind of militant idealism that takes the form of
an indignant anti-reductionism: nationalism is not reducible to
recruitment, and religion is not reducible to institutions of bricks and
mortar. And of course Marx could never ever have imagined, when he wrote of
how consumption "produces" production, that it might form kinship systems.
I wonder if Sahlins actually read Grundrisse, or did he just assume that
nobody else had?

The Bloch was a much easier read, as you guessed. I briefly thought that he
was talking about Halliday's supervisor J.R. Firth, who of course was also
a colleague of Malinowski and in his ideas about context very thoroughly
Malinowskian. But Bloch meant Raymond Firth. I guess I don't think that
emphasis on language use per se is enough to make you a Hallidayan.
Certainly I came to linguistics through a very British emphasis on use, and
contrary to what you say I was never a water-carrier for SFL: I came to it
via the road to Damascus, and in fact my own teacher, H.G. Widdowson,
always taught me to be suspicious of Halliday because he supposedly thought
that instances of language use could simply be "read off" of the system
network. What he meant by that, I learned later, was the emphasis
on analyzing grammar rather than on commentating "discourse".

Consider "Dong Fang Hong", "The East is Red".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qslfjio2vk

My wife Fang, with my brother-in-law Dong and my sister in law Hong, was
actually named after this movie. It's a national epic: an attempt to
"recruit" people to nationalism. But it's not just that: it does create a
"nation-hero", and it does that several ways, all of which include kinship,
but not in the starring role. For example, in this clip, the word "jia"
figures very significantly.

My "jia" is in the Northeast, on the Songhua River (i.e. beyond the Great
Wall, the first part of China to be occupied by the Japanese--DK)
Where there are forests and coal mines
And there are mountains and praries full of sorghum and beans

(emphasis on house and land)

My "jia" is in the Northeast, on the Songhua River
That is where my colleagues and comrades are
And there are my wrinkled mother and my weary father

(emphasis on kith and kin)

The subtitles on the clip gets the order of these elements wrong.
Interestingly, the chorus (after the disaster of the 18th of September
Japanese occupation of Manchuria) emphasizes that they are wandering "zai
guannei" (inside the passes of the Great Wall, which are visible in the
backgroun). It's not "inside the wall", which would suggest that they are
"zai jia".

I guess if I were not a linguist (say, if I were teaching film studies) I
would draw attention to the elements my teacher called "discourse"--to
the lack of a "fourth wall", to the way in which each character addresses
the audience and only incidentally other characters, and so on.

But I am a linguist, and a grammarian. What strikes me is that, just like a
Chinese name, and a Chinese address, the big picture always comes first,
whether we are talking about the verse, or the line or the
clause--the social, therefore, before the interpersonal, and the
interpersonal before the intra-personal. Even at the very end of the song,
though, the social is still there in the most intimate and intra-personal.
The word "jia" is used in a compound: "jiaxiang", which means something
like "jia-county" or "jia-neighborhood".





David Kellogg

Recent Article in *Mind, Culture, and Activity* 24 (4) 'Metaphoric,
Metonymic, Eclectic, or Dialectic? A Commentary on “Neoformation: A
Dialectical Approach to Developmental Change”'

Free e-print available (for a short time only) at

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/YAWPBtmPM8knMCNg6sS6/full


On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 9:07 AM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
wrote:

>