[Xmca-l] Re: kinship

[Rod Parker-Rees]

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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