[Xmca-l] Re: kinship

[Greg Thompson]

Martin,​

And yes, I think that in the old kinship studies, there was indeed a
tendency to define family as child plus biological parents, but this has
changed with new kinship studies. But then again, (old) kinship studies
(e.g., Malinowski) also recognized that the nuclear family (with all its
psychodynamic explosiveness, think Freud's Oedipal Complex, well, not his,
but, you know "THE" Oedipal Complex) can sometimes be comprised
differently. Wasn't this Malinowski's contention? That the Oedipal Complex
in the Trobriand Islands was not between son and father but was between son
and mother's brother?

There is an emerging literature in anthropology on practices such as
"alloparenting", but the anthropology of childhood is a fairly
underdeveloped sub-field of anthropology.

As an example, here is a brief ethnographic excerpt from one of my
(undergraduate) students a few years back who conducted her fieldwork among
the Himba in Namibia (under supervision of a colleague, David Crandall):

"I was informally interviewing a woman I had never met before named Mukkara
as she held her
​ [sic]​
 young baby in her arms. She kissed and cooed at the baby as we spoke to
each other. The infant –about five months old –laughed as
​Mukkara
 blew air at his face. Mukkara then proceeded to breastfeed the baby, as I
asked her more about when the baby cries and what she did to calm
​him
 down. She
​listed a number of different things that she did to soothe him
. Then, just in the middle of her response, another woman came and swooped
up the child Mukkara was cuddling. Mukkara didn’t flinch when
​ this happened
, rather her attention moved to me as she passed off her baby.

I was confused as to why the other woman, now off tending a fire, took the
child. Mukkara explained that this baby was not actually her own, but
rather she was watching her friend’s child while she was away. I was very
interested to see that she knew so much about a child that was not her own,
that she breastfed the baby and that the baby did not cry or become upset
in the duration of our discussion. This data, along with further
investigation, lead me to know that multiple mothers care for Himba
children. Each mother knows her birth children, but there is a shared
motherly role for the children of another woman."

Anthropological research on alloparenting has also extended in other
directions such as the book Attachment Reconsidered by Naomi Quinn and J.
Mageo, as well as work by researchers interested on the role of
alloparenting in evolutionary time (e.g., Sarah Hrdy, Bentley & Meece).

For anyone interested in the anthropology of childhood, David Lancy has an
excellent book that deals with many of these issues - The Anthropology of
Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings. And there's also Martin's book -
wait aren't I writing to Martin? So I suspect that none of this has
answered any of your questions Martin...

-greg



On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 9:43 AM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net> wrote:

> Hi Greg,
>
> The question I initially posted was really very simple: is there a
> language that does not have a cognate to the English word ‘family’? (I
> think ‘cognate’ is the correct term; what I mean is a word that would
> generally be translated as ‘family.’)
>
> Now I’ve learned that Chinese (Mandarin?) has a word that might be best
> translated as ‘household.’ I find that interesting.
>
> The underlying interest? Yes, I’m trying to make sense of the
> anthropological literature on kinship, and also the psychological
> literature on ‘contexts of children’s development.’ In both disciplines
> there seems to be a tendency to assume a definition of family along the
> lines of child plus biological parents. That’s what I take Malinowski to
> have been proposing. There are psychologists today who still assume such a
> definition.
>
> But of course it doesn’t work! There are families where the kids are
> adopted. There are married couples where the man, for example, has a secret
> illegitimate child, so they do not form a family. There are single parent
> families. There are families in which a same-sex couple has a child who is
> not biologically related to them. There are families who had a surrogate
> mother. There are now families where the child has 3 biological parents
> (one provided mitochondrial dna). Note that in several of these kinds of
> family, there is no ‘blood’ (or genes) shared among the members.
>
> So I started to wonder if there are societies that have nothing that they
> call family!
>
> But I am also trying to figure out where anthropology is today. For
> example, is a distinction still drawn between family, clan, and tribe? If
> so, how are these defined? Sahlins moves between family and clan, for
> instance. I understand that his proposal is that kinship is at root mutual
> relations of being, the way people participate in each other’s existence.
> In that sense, you and I are kin, based on our relationship through xmca.
> But I don’t think that we are family. So what distinguishes the mutual
> relations of being that constitute a family?
>
> These are the things I’m confused about. I am rapidly coming once again to
> the conclusion that understanding nothing of the matter.  :)
>
> Martin
>
> "I may say that whenever I meet Mrs. Seligman or Dr. Lowie or discuss
> matters with Radcliffe-Brown or Kroeber, I become at once aware that my
> partner does not understand anything in the matter, and I end usually with
> the feeling that this also applies to myself” (Malinowski, 1930)
>
>
>
> > On Jan 7, 2018, at 9:55 PM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Martin,
> >
> > Yes, I agree that Sahlins didn't offer much in the way of cross-cultural
> > cognates of "family". But I'm still a little at a loss for why you are so
> > interested in this English word (e.g., why not "kin"? why not the
> preferred
> > word in some other culture that extends to a different set of
> > relationships). Without a good working definition of what you mean by
> > "family". Do the other examples that people have given "count" as
> "family",
> > e.g., sports teams, brothers-in-arms? Or are you taking the approach that
> > family=father(biological?)+mother(again, biological, and what about a
> > second father? or a second mother?)+child(biological? and today, would a
> > dog do in place of a child - e.g., a couple at the park with their dog
> who
> > refer to their grouping as a "family"?).
> >
> > I guess I'm not sure where you are going with this interest in "family"
> > (and what has it got to do with the kinship relations of this here
> family?).
> >
> > -greg
> >
> > On Sun, Jan 7, 2018 at 5:33 PM, Martin Packer <mpacker@cantab.net>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Yes, I’ve been reading Sahlins. Very interesting take on kinship, along
> >> the lines of the ‘ontological turn’ in cultural anthropology. Greg can
> >> explain that..  :)
> >>
> >> But does Sahlins define family?  (No!)
> >>
> >> Martin
> >>
> >> "I may say that whenever I meet Mrs. Seligman or Dr. Lowie or discuss
> >> matters with Radcliffe-Brown or Kroeber, I become at once aware that my
> >> partner does not understand anything in the matter, and I end usually
> with
> >> the feeling that this also applies to myself” (Malinowski, 1930)
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Jan 7, 2018, at 7:07 PM, Greg Thompson <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