[Xmca-l] Re: kinship

[Martin Packer]

On Jan 8, 2018, at 12:15 AM, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> And just to give a little sense for the intellectual terrain that I'm in,
> I'm arguing against what in anthropology is called a "functionalist"
> approach - one in which everything (including all forms of semiosis) could
> be explained in terms of how it is adaptive for the long-term survival of a
> group of people. And actually I'm normally arguing for the usefulness of a
> functional approach b.c. I find anthropologists these days to be far too
> dismissive of what is a very useful approach.

Hi Greg,

An alternative to trying to define ‘family’ (not just the word, but the entity that it is supposed to refer to) in terms of its constituents (X generations, Y persons with ‘blood’ connections, etc.) is to try to define it in terms of its functions. The function typically attributed to the family is called ‘socialization,’  which is a term I greatly dislike, so lets call it ‘child care’ instead. I think this functional approach is not without its problems: for example, today there are other institutions that also function to care for children, and increasingly younger ones, though we wouldn’t want to call them ‘family'; and equally, at the other end of human history, in the hunter-gatherer past that Michael was referring to the ‘family group’ had many others functions in addition to child care. But it seems worthwhile to try a functional approach. For example, the “two mothers” in a lovely fieldnotes you shared are, presumably, both ‘mothers’ because they are each caring for the infant, even though only one was involved in procreation.

Which side of the fence regarding functional explanations - pro or con - do you come down on? 

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)