Cultural systems and social systems

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DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY Inaugural Lecture and
Colloquia 31st October and 1st November
2003 Anthropology at Aberdeen - Lecture by Tim
Ingold 5 p.m. Friday October 31st, Kings
College Colloquium on the Anthropology of the
North Gisli Palsson, Piers Vitebsky, Alex King,
David Anderson 10 a.m. 1 p.m., Saturday
November 1st, Marischal Museum Colloquium on
Art, Anthropology and Visual Culture Susanne
Kuechler, Chris Gosden, Nancy Wachowich,
Elizabeth Hallam 2 5 p.m., Saturday November
1st, Marischal Museum The British Academy
Radcliffe-Brown Memorial Lecture The genealogy
of descent, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Univ of
Michigan 6 p.m., Saturday November 1st, Kings
College For further details, please contact
email anthropology_at_abdn.ac.uk
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Distinctive Features

• Idea from linguistics (phonetics) on the
  components of sounds
• Sounds are symbols
• Distinctive feature of symbols are those minimal
  bits of meaning that distinguish one from another
• Example of distinction features of familial
  spaces
• Home or -
• Work or -
• Recreation or -

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Kinship is not quite everything

• Study of relatedness in a given society
• Includes understanding what a person is.
• Difference and similarity (gender)
• Reproduction, migration, household, family

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New Kinship is about performance
Barbara Bodenhorn addresses this problem of the
performance of kinship in her article you read
last spring, on North Slope Eskimo saying things
like he used to be my cousin.
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Terminology in Strathern
Agnates - patrilateral kin (related on fathers
side) Agnatic identity - social identity derived
from father (fathers clan) Cognatic kin
bilateral both father mothers kin Teknonymy
addressing person as parent of ltchilds namegt
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Kinship reinvented

• local meanings and symbols
• No assumption that kinship is self-evident or
  natural (biological)
• Janet Carsten "although we accept that both the
  definition and the meaning of kinship are
  culturally variable .. this does not mean that we
  cannot compare both how people conceive of
  relatedness and the meaning they attribute it in
  different cultures."

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Kinship reinvented Gender
Collier and Yanagisako in introduction to 1987
collection Our goal is at once to revitalize
the study of kinship and to situate the study of
gender at the theoretical core of anthropology by
calling into question they boundary between these
two fields. In challenging the view that kinship
and gender are distinct, albeit closly linked,
domains of analysis, we hope to revew the
intellectual promise of these two fields while
reconstituting them as a whole. Repudiate false
dichotomies Domestic political-jural domains
Nature culture Reproduction
production Biology not a good explanation
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Kinship reinvented reproduction
Most often in the context of anthropology of
Europe New reproductive technologies Birth
control Abortion Adoption IVF Surrogacy
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Kinship reinvented sexuality
Gay Lesbian studies overcoming hegemonic
notions of family Sexuality and kinship
bonds Genders - how many? In what order?
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Kinship reinvented practice theory
Instead of focusing on anonymous groups or
institutions, attention moved to individual
actors and their strategies within and against
structuring structures. Agency - Pierre Bourdieu
and Anthony Giddens Bourdieus analysis of
Kabyle patrilateral parallel cousin marriage
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Bourdieus theory of Agency
If the marrying of each of a familys children
is seen as the equivalent of playing a card, then
it is clear that the value of this move (measured
by the criteria of the system) depends both on
the quality of its hand - the strenght of the
cards it has been dealt, as defined by the rules
of the game - and on theskill with which it plays
its hand. Personhood continues many problems of
the old kinship suffers from similar assumptions
of persons as individual entities and androcentric
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Kinship reinvented at home
Similarities as well as differences in kinship in
non-industrial societies. Differences between
rural and urban kinship settings. Examining
ourselves does reveal our own biases. Not
reserved for primitives or pre-moderns Althou
gh not universal in importance, there is some
kind of kinship construct in each society.
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Power, history, and the big picture

• French neo-Marxist debates of the 1970s on
  large-scale trends of domination, change, and the
  nature of the system
• Marxist attention to the relations of production
  led to kinship relations the ideological
  aspects of kinship
• From meaning to function
• instrumentalist - how kinships get used, get
  things done - includes
• social disintegration

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Functions without the Functionalism
Functionalism was about needs of groups or
individuals Moved to instrumentalism - what
gets done and how Example gender studies
examines the role of kinship in creating/mainting
gender differences (inequalities)
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ROSTAGNO, SarahGribble, Claire
Questions about registration details. Come talk
to me after lecture (now, 1 quick minute)