kinship

WA R R E N S H A P I R O

What human kinship is primarily about:toward a critique of the new

kinship studies

The claims of the so-called ‘constructionist’ position in kinship studies are examined with reference to a recentarticle by Susan McKinnon. McKinnon’s analysis is shown to be deeply flawed, primarily because she pays noattention to the phenomenon of focality, now widely established in cognitive science. Instead, she is trappedin unsupportable collectivist models of human kinship. It is argued that these models are part of a misguidedcritique of the Western European Enlightenment.

Key words kinship, deconstruction, evolutionary psychology

I n t r o duc t i o n

My title and subtitle are anything but accidental. In 1972 David Schneider published‘What is kinship all about?’ (Schneider 1972), which was followed a dozen yearslater by A critique of the study of kinship (Schneider 1984). His conclusions in bothpublications have been widely taken to mean that models of procreation1 provide onlyone criterion for kin-reckoning throughout the world and are in no sense primary,as they are in the West.2 This stance has been called ‘culturalist’ or ‘constructionist’(‘social constructionist’, ‘cultural constructionist’) (Shapiro 2005a). The constructionistposition has morphed into a highly self-conscious ‘new kinship studies’ (Carsten 2000:3), which presents itself as part of a larger ‘deconstructionist’ movement in social theory(Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). Yet this larger movement is not without its critics. Nor

1 I prefer expressions like ‘models of procreation’ or ‘procreation models’ (Yeatman 1983) to‘genealogical’ (etc.) because the latter suggest the sort of extended genealogies found in the Bibleand ‘the tracing of descent’ of introductory anthropology textbooks. In fact, as I note later, suchgenealogies are relatively restricted ethnographic phenomena, whereas models of procreation areprobably universal.

2 Actually, Schneider sometimes went further, insisting that the procreative model is a constructof kinship studies, and that (other) native English-speakers employ a model in which procreativerelationships are neither sufficient nor necessary (Schneider 1968, 1972: 49–56, 1984: 92 et seq.). Iargue in the body of this paper that the former assertion is false. On the latter, see Scheffler (1976).

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2008) 16, 2 137–153. C© 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 137doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00038.x

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are the claims of the new kinship studies in particular accepted by all (see e.g. Kuper1999: 122–58; Patterson 2005; Shimizu 1991). But no one so far as I know has attempteda sustained analysis of this scholarship.3 I shall do so here, with reference to a particulararticle which, I hope to show elsewhere, is reasonably exemplary.

P ro l egomena

But first I need briefly to consider a series of phenomena sometimes dubbed ‘prototypeeffects’. Thus we call Roman Catholic priest ‘father’, but we know intuitively that heis not as central a member of the ‘father’ class as one’s genitor is. We might say that heis ‘like a father’, or fatherish, in that he is male, authoritative, and nurturant, that hisposition is likened to or modeled upon that of one’s real father.4 We might also say thatit is this latter who is the focal member of the ‘father’ class, and that membership inthis class is extended to the priest. Such structuring of semantic space has been shownto apply quite widely in human cognition, and it has been suggested that it is in thismatter that the mind constructs categories (e.g. D’Andrade 1995: 115–21; Kronenfeld1996: 147–65; Lakoff 1987; Shapiro 2005a).

I need also to note, before proceeding, that my presentation assumes no previousacquaintance on the reader’s part with kinship theory in anthropology.

Susan McK i nnon on the na t u r e o f human k i n sh i p

A recent article by Susan McKinnon (2005b) exemplifies the constructionist positionin kinship studies with remarkable clarity and expressly engages it adversarially withnotions of kinship in evolutionary psychology. This engagement appears to be onlythe first in McKinnon’s unfolding agenda, for she has more recently come out with asmall book purporting to ‘deconstruct’ evolutionary psychology as a whole (McKinnon2005a), and the ‘deconstruction’ enterprise figures heavily elsewhere in her scholarship(McKinnon 1995a, 2000, 2001; Franklin and McKinnon 2001). My concern here ismostly with her kinship piece. Here McKinnon argues that ‘the genetic calculus’ ofevolutionary psychology disrespects the nuances of human kin-reckoning, as Sahlins(1976) argued three decades ago in his critique of sociobiology. One possible retortto this charge is that present-day Darwinian scholars are concerned not with kinshipconstructs but with kinship behaviour: thus there is a statistical tendency for maternalgrandmothers to be the most investing of the four grandparents (Buss 2004: 237–40),for fathers to be far less likely physically and sexually to abuse their children thanstepfathers their stepchildren (Daly and Wilson 1988: 86–91), and for kin to be farless likely to aggress lethally against each other than nonkin (1988: 17–35) – and allthis is so quite apart from how particular kin relationships, and kinship in general, areconceptualised. But a more interesting answer is that evolutionary psychologists, whodo not pretend to be specialists in the cross-cultural study of kinship, have managed to

3 A quarter century ago I tried to do so (Shapiro 1982), but this was before the politicisation of kinshipstudies. For a more recent effort on my part, see Shapiro (1995a: 201–88).

4 This is metaphorical usage. In semantic research a distinction is often made among primary,secondary, and metaphorical members of classes, but I find it unnecessary to do this here.

C© 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

WHAT HUMAN KINSHIP IS PRIMARILY ABOUT 139

grasp the truth more profoundly than McKinnon, who does. In most of the rest of thisarticle I shall document this surprising assertion, using McKinnon’s own examples butalso supplementing them for further and richer illustration.

A case in point is provided by the Wari Indians of southwestern Brazil. In Waritheory bodily substances can be shared in four ways: (1) through procreation, involvingparents, children, and, less directly, other less immediate consanguines; (2) throughwet-nursing; (3) through sexual intercourse between husband and wife, or betweenparamours; and (4) through killing enemies outside one’s community, in which thekiller and his victim are said to be in a father/son relationship (Conklin 2001a: 116–22;Vilaca 2000: 95). Now I shall guess that Susan McKinnon would seize upon (2), (3),and (4) especially and conclude that it is disrespectful of native views to stress (1) inanalysing Wari notions of kinship, and that these notions are very different from whatwe have in the West. And she would be wrong on both counts. For we learn that, amongthe Wari, although ‘all consanguineal kin share some body substance . . . the most directbodily connections are those . . . among parents and children . . .’ (Conklin 2001a: 118).Moreover, ‘[e]xchanges of . . . body fluids (through breast-feeding, sexual intercourse,and the killing of enemies) establish relationships that Wari recognize as being similarto, though weaker than, the consanguineal links that exist at birth’ (2001a: 118, emphasisadded). Hence the parent/child relationship provides the quintessential kin-tie for theWari, with other sorts of kin ties deemed to be, literally, substantially less.

But this is not all. The Wari have what has been called a ‘universal system of kincategorization’ (Barnard 1978) – which is to say that an individual applies kin terms toeveryone with whom he or she associates. Does this mean that everyone is consideredkin, though some are closer than others? Not at all. In fact the Wari distinguish lexicallybetween ‘true kin’ and ‘those who are like kin but are not truly related’ (Conklin 2002:215; see also Vilaca 2000: 94–5). Presumably the father/son relationship establishedbetween a killer and his victim is in the latter category, for the act of killing makesthe two only ‘like real kin’ (Conklin 2001a: 121, 2001b; Vilaca 2002: 359) – i.e. theyare likened to ‘true kin’, in a manner comparable to my rendition of a Catholic priestas ‘father’. Similarly, when he takes a life a Wari man’s abdomen is supposed to swell,and he is said to be in a state which is ‘like pregnancy’ but not one that ‘is pregnancy’(Conklin 2001b: 161, emphasis in original).

These likenings stemming from killing may at first blush seem strange to Westernminds, but a little reflection should dispel this appearance. For we have a considerablelexicon which renders sex as akin to violence, and vice versa. The polysemy of suchexpressions as to bang and to pound points in one direction, that of to cream and towhack in the other (Roscoe 1994; Shapiro 1995b). These renditions suggest parallelsbetween triumphing over an opponent and, of all posited kin relationships, the tie linkinghusband and wife. But a father/son relationship, real or metaphorical, connected withviolence is an element in the central creative act of both Judaism (Abraham’s quasi-sacrifice of Isaac) and Christianity (the Crucifixion). And, like the Wari, both religionsmake use of birthing imagery in connection with hierarchical relationships betweentwo males – specifically, Jonas’ being regurgitated by the Great Fish, after which hebecomes obedient to divine authority, to which Jesus’ Emergence from the Tomb andsimilarly enhanced spiritual state is expressly compared in Matthew 12:38–41. Finally,the Roman Catholic version of Christianity goes one better than both its Protestantform and Judaism by rendering Jesus as maternal in much medieval and early modernsymbolism (Bynum 1982) – much like the Wari warrior.


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More prosaic are the other similarities between Wari and Western kinship notions.We too entertain the fiction – and we see it as such – that everyone is kin in expressionslike ‘the brotherhood of man’ and ‘brothers and sisters in Christ’. We too have notions ofwet-nursing as establishing a secondary sort of kinship (Fildes 1988). Many Protestantchurches have wedding ceremonies in which bride and groom are said to be ‘one flesh’– this derived from Matthew 19:4–6:

And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made themat the beginning made them male and female? And said, For this cause shall a manleave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be oneflesh.

Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh.

Moreover, in her research on American marriage, Naomi Quinn found that ‘[o]ne ofthe features of the American model of marriage . . . is the general idea of sharedness,which is instantiated by different people in many different ways, including metaphorsof merging such as “We were one person now” . . . or “It wasn’t just the two of usanymore. We were a family”’ (email communication dated 25/4/06).

In a nutshell, Wari ideas about kinship, like Western notions of kinship, aregrounded in native appreciations of procreation, and from this base they extend toother areas of experience. The claim of a West/Rest dichotomy, in this instance at least,is entirely without support.

But most of McKinnon’s argument for such a dichotomy pertains not to notions ofkinship in general but to kin classes, i.e. to those categories designated by what the oldkinship studies called ‘kinship terminologies’. Her initial contention here is that, in theWest, one’s genetrix is the sole member of the mother class, whereas, among the Rest,the (only superficially comparable) class has multiple membership. This last assertion, Iargue below, is misleading, but the first is plainly and simply false. I offer the followingbits of auto-ethnography:

(1) I refer to the woman who (I am told) bore me and who (I know with certainty)nurtured me when I was young as my mother.

(2) This woman referred to another woman as my mother. I refer to this other womanas my grandmother, which designation I also use to refer to the woman referred toas my mother by the man I refer to as my father.

(3) When I was married my wife referred to a woman as my mother. I referred to heras my mother-in-law.

(4) Just before I reached puberty I was a member of a Cub Scout ‘pack’. I referred tothe woman who superintended this group as my denmother.

(5) I regard English as my mother tongue and the United States of America as mymother country.

(6) Although I am not a Roman Catholic, I have Roman Catholic friends, each of whomhas a godmother. And I know of some Roman Catholic women who are membersof religious orders superintended by Mothers Superior.

This list is hardly exhaustive, but it should suffice to show that the ‘multiplicity ofmothers’ McKinnon (2005b: 109) finds in non-Western settings can be found in theWest as well.



But of course I need to add that not all mothers are for me equally ‘motherly’. Infact, there is for me a single central or – to use a term from the old kinship studies – focalmember of this class, which is the woman described in (1). The remaining members aresuch only in a much ‘looser’ sense. Indeed, I might describe them as motherish, just as aRoman Catholic priest is ‘fatherish’: their membership in the ‘mother’ class stems fromlikening them to or modelling them on my real mother, insofar as they are (or can beconstrued as) female, nurturing, and, to varying degrees, authoritative. If I were askedsimply who my mother is, I would nominate only the woman described in (1). And Ibelieve my Roman Catholic friends would structure the ‘mother’ category in much thesame way, as would people who have stepmothers. This might not be the case for peoplewho are adopted, especially when very young, for the children of lesbian mothers, andfor people brought into being via the new reproductive technologies, for whom theexpression ‘real mother’ might have more ambiguous reference (see also Lakoff 1987:74–84).

In my own field research among the Aboriginal Australian people of northeastArnhem Land I also found ‘a multiplicity of mothers’. There one’s genetrix is calledngarndi in some dialects, ngama in others – but so is her sister, nearly all other womenwho she calls ‘sister’, all of one’s father’s wives, most of the wives of men one’s fathercalls ‘brother’, various other women, the estate and ritual objects associated with theritual group of the genetrix, and other estates and ritual objects mythically linked tothat group. But northeast Arnhem Landers distinguish between ‘full’ (dangang) and‘partial’ (marrkangga) members of the ngama class. The genetrix is without question amember of the ‘full’ ngama subclass. So are her sisters, though informants sometimesadded, when so nominating them, something like ‘but she’s not the one who bore me,the one from whose womb I emerged’. Which is to say that the membership of thegenetrix’s sisters in the ‘full’ ngama subclass is subject to qualification, to hedging, as ifit referred to a ‘grey area’ in people’s structuring of their social worlds. Also inhabitingthis area are the genetrix’s ritual group ‘sisters’, as well as a woman the genetrix calls‘sister’ whose own ritual group is not that of the genetrix but whose genetrix’s ritualgroup is that of the genetrix of the genetrix of the informant. Another woman who thegenetrix calls ‘sister’ may be said to be a ‘full’ member of the ngama class based on theconsideration that her ritual group estate and its ritual objects are mythically linked tothose of the genetrix, but such an assignment can be contested and, in any case, is likelyto be successful only if the estates in question adjoin. All other women in the ngamaclass are members of the ‘partial’ ngama subclass and are often described as ‘not reallyngama’ or ‘ngama only by virtue of kin classification’.

Moreover, asked simply ‘Who is your ngama?’ an individual invariably nominateshis/her genetrix. This of course jibes with my auto-ethnographic data. Also, northeastArnhem Landers employ bodypart symbolism to represent kin class relationships, anda woman called ngama – any such woman, not just the genetrix – may be indicatedby touching one’s nipple – as if maternal succour provided the model for all suchrelationships. Consider too the following lexemes:

ngamani = milkngama’ngama’yun = to create (-yun being a verbalising suffix)nguy-ngamatirri = to love (nguy = heart, -tirri being a verbalising suffix)


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Which is of course to say that notions of procreation and succour are conceptualised bynortheast Arnhem Landers – as well as by Westerners – as quintessentially associatedwith the biological mother.5

The application of the kin term ngama to the ritual group estate of the genetrixand its ritual objects is logically dependent upon the identification of her as the focalmember of the ngama class and is therefore a derived or secondary member of that class(cf. Scheffler and Lounsbury 1971: 60–1). The same point is made by reference to thatestate as one’s ‘milk country’. All this is remarkably comparable to my own sense thatthe United States of America is my ‘mother country’.

There is, finally, the consideration that ngama, in a language entirely unrelated toEnglish, sounds much like ‘mama’. Murdock (1959) showed nearly a half century agothat this sort of phonological regularity occurs with more often than chance frequencyin parental kin terms.6

McKinnon cites several examples of such ‘a multiplicity of mothers’, but she failsutterly to appreciate their semantic structure. Thus she notes that in systems of kinclassification Lowie (1928) dubbed ‘generational’ all women of the parental generationare members of the ‘mother’ class (McKinnon 2005b: 110). This is fine, so far as it goes– but it does not go very far. As it happens, however, we have a recent detailed accountof a ‘generational’ system by Richard Feinberg (2004). Writing on the residents of thePolynesian island of Anuta, Feinberg notes that, although the genetrix is merged withother female kin of her generation at a superficial level of classification, as is the genitorwith the male kin of his, there is a special ‘parent’ term which is applied to both butwhich is not extended to others (2004: 68). Moreover, kin class reckoning depends uponparental kin class assignment: thus for example anyone who one genetrix calls ‘sister’is called ‘mother’ (2004: 74–5) – which is to say that the kin class position of sucha ‘mother’ is logically dependent upon, or derived from, that of the genetrix. Furtherstill, these people make a gross distinction among the sphere of individuals to whomkin terms are applied: some are said to be ‘true’ members of their kin classes, whilethe membership of others is ‘outside’, or ‘a lie’ (2004: 81). There is some flexibility asto the membership of these gross subclasses, but this flexibility occurs along definiteprocreative lines, such that, for example, siblings are always ‘true’ kin but first cousinsmay or may not be (2004: 81–4). And, finally, asked to nominate members of variouskin classes, people ‘usually answer as if the question were posed specifically about thegenealogically closest relative in the designated category’ (2004: 82). In Feinberg’s ownwords, ‘the basic model for assignment to kin classes is a genealogical one’ (2004: 80).7

The similarities to my own materials from northeast Arnhem Land – indeed, to theWari data and my own venture into auto-ethnography – should be clear.

McKinnon also claims that systems of kin classification that the old kinship studiesusually called ‘Omaha’ posit ‘a multiplicity of mothers’ (McKinnon 2005b: 110), andonce again the statement, though true, is misleading. In Omaha-type systems, themother’s patriline is singled out, such that the ‘mother’ and ‘mother’s brother’ terms areapplied to patrilineal descendants of the mother’s brother: for example, both his daughter

5 There are comparable – and complementary – symbolic expressions of paternal creation andnurturance (see Shapiro 1981: 16–20, 2005b: 51).

6 Most of the foregoing analysis of the semantics of ngama has appeared elsewhere (see Shapiro 1981:87–92, 2005b: 51).

7 In an earlier publication Feinberg (1981) provides examples which require modification, but notabandonment, of these conclusions.



and his son’s daughter are called ‘mother’. But even this rendition of things focuses onthe mother (and her brother) – i.e. the position of other members of the ‘mother’(and ‘mother’s brother) classes is derived from those of these two close procreativekin. That this is so is underscored by the fact that the ‘mother’ term, when appliedto other kin, is in such systems usually if not always accompanied by a lexical orother indicator of nonfocality, much like ‘godmother’ or ‘stepmother’ in English. ThusAboriginal Australian people in a part of the Cape York Peninsula, just across the Gulf ofCarpentaria from northeast Arnhem Land, refer to the daughter of the mother’s brotheras ‘little mother’ (McConvell and Alpher 2002: 163),8 whereas further west, just outsideArnhem Land itself, the same relative is rendered as ‘branch mother’ – this in contrast tothe genetrix, who is ‘trunk mother’ (2002: 171). In this latter example the trunk–branchopposition presumably suggests the base–derivative one. Among the Fox Indians ofIllinois the mother’s sister is called ‘little mother’, and it is this latter derived term, notthe ‘mother’ term simpliciter, that is applied to the mother’s brother’s daughter andother women of the mother’s patriline (Tax 1955: 252; see also Radcliffe-Brown 1941:10). Especially remarkable here is Karl Heider’s research on an Omaha-type systemamong the Grand Valley Dani of the Indonesian half of New Guinea. Much as I didin northeast Arnhem Land, and Feinberg seems to have done on Anuta, Heider (1978)asked his informants to name an individual to whom each Dani kin term is properlyapplied. Given the ‘mother’ term, nearly all informants nominated their genetrices.The only exceptions were a man whose mother had been killed early in his life, whonominated his mother’s mother, who raised him; and another man, who first named hisfather’s current wife, then his mother (Heider 1978: 238).

Similar considerations apply in those cases in which the mother’s brother is called‘mother’, put forward by McKinnon (2005b: 110) as further evidence for ‘a multiplicityof mothers’, now supposedly unconstrained even by gender. In all cases of which I amaware the mother’s brother is more fully rendered as ‘male mother’. But the genetrixis not said to be a ‘female mother’, for this would be redundant – which is to say thatthe focal member of the class is female (see e.g. Kuper 1976; Middleton 2000; Shapiro1981: 28). This is also true, for example, of the English class designated by the label‘nurse’, with the associated rubric ‘male nurse’, which, I shall guess, is deemed politicallyincorrect these days.

McKinnon (2005b: 111) points out that Inuit naming practices sometimes skewkin term relationships so that, for example, a female infant who receives the name ofher mother’s mother is called ‘mother’ by her genetrix, thus presumably showing that‘a multiplicity of mothers’ can exist not only independently of gender but, as well, ofminimal age considerations. I have not been able to access the source she cites, butsimilar practices seem to be widespread in the Inuit area. Consider the following:

Personal names could sometimes complicate a genealogy . . . If a cousin was namedafter one’s own father, for example, he could be referred to as . . . ‘father’ ratherthan by the term for the role he actually filled. Obvious anomalies of this sortcould usually be uncovered by a simple question about them. Responses would

8 It might be argued that ‘little’ is simply the opposite of ‘big’ and does not signify nonfocal status. Butthis is contrary to what we know of systems of kin classification in general (Scheffler 1987: 214–16)and, indeed, of human categorisation at large, wherein focality is usually associated with indicationsof superior size or age. Vide English ‘How tall are you?’ and ‘How old are you?’ (Kronenfeld 1996:95–7). ‘How young are you?’ is derived and an obvious sop to the elderly.


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take the form, ‘He’s not my [father] all right, he’s my . . . cousin . . .’ but I call him[father] because he is named after my father. (Burch 1975: 68–9; emphases added)

In other words, role behaviour is based upon kin classification outside of naming; andthe application of terms for close kin to others is logically dependent upon one’s closekin relationships.

McKinnon (2005b: 111) invokes an article by Waltner (1996) dealing with Chinesematerials as further evidence for ‘a multiplicity of mothers’. But Waltner’s contributionhas to do with legal and ritual notions surrounding the idea of ‘motherhood’, not withits semantic structure in the first place. Thus she cites a maxim that ‘a concubine hasno children and a concubine’s children have no mother’ (Waltner 1996: 72), whichMcKinnon quotes approvingly, without, apparently, realising that the propositionpresupposes a ‘mother’ (and a ‘child’) category independent of and logically prior toitself . A far more detailed analysis of Chinese kinship by Feng (1948) shows that thereis a handful of ‘nuclear terms’ subject to various modifiers. ‘Each nuclear term’, Feng1948: 8) notes, ‘possesses a primary meaning and one or more secondary meanings’.Predictably, he gives the primary meaning of mu as ‘mother’ (1948: 9). ‘The primarymeaning’, Feng goes on to say, ‘is assumed when the term is used independently’ (1948:8) – which, it seems to me, is entirely comparable to my own self-report, already noted,that when I speak of ‘my mother’ I mean my genetrix and not my denmother, mothercountry, etc.9

McKinnon’s final example of ‘a multiplicity of mothers’ is from her own fieldworkin the Tanimbar Islands of eastern Indonesia. Here men of differently ranked groupssometimes have a relationship designated by an expression which McKinnon rendersas ‘elder-younger brothers who treat each other well’ (2005b: 111; see also McKinnon1991: 100). And she goes on to say (McKinnon 2005b: 111), taking the perspective of achild of one of these men: ‘Because these father’s brothers are also one’s father’ – i.e. areterminologically equated with one’s father – ‘the wives of these men are therefore one’smothers’ – i.e. are terminologically equated with one’s mother. But this very statementshows that the status of these other ‘mothers’ (and ‘fathers’) is logically dependentupon their relationship to one’s father, who, I shall guess, occupies his focal positionthrough the application of a procreative model. That such a model is not foreign tothe Tanimbarese is indicated by another expression, rendered by McKinnon (1991:117) as ‘true elder-younger same-sex siblings’. This expression sometimes has a widerapplication, but, McKinnon tells us, ‘it can also be interpreted more narrowly to includeonly those who have been born of the same mother and father’ (1991: 117). Which is tosay that the wider application signals a grey area in semantic space – one presumablylike the designation of the mother’s sister as ‘mother’ in northeast Arnhem Land.

But this is not at all McKinnon’s analysis. She insists instead that ‘[t]he fact of“treating one another well” says it all: the relationship is created and maintained by actsof nurturance and solicitude that constitute the very definition of kinship’ (McKinnon2005b: 111). Rhetorical considerations aside, ‘the fact of treating one another well’ not

9 I have confirmed this analysis with two of my own Chinese-speaking informants – Louisa Schein,Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, and Ching-I Tu, Professor of AsianLanguages at the same institution. Professor Schein has carried out ethnographic fieldwork inparts of southwest China. Professor Tu is a native Mandarin speaker. He translates sheng mu, thebirth mother, who both McKinnon and Waltner treat as just another member of the mu class, as‘prototypical mother’.



only does not say it all; it does not tell us in the first place what native criteria are used inthe Tanimbar Islands to determine who gets treated how – ‘well’ or otherwise. Similarly,‘acts of nurturance and solicitude’, far from providing ‘the very definition of kinship’ inthis locale, are logically consequent upon a definition of kinship and kin classes derivedfrom other bases. It is relatively clear from McKinnon’s data, though obscured by heranalysis, that these bases are procreative among the Tanimbarese – as indeed they areprobably everywhere else.

McKinnon’s contention that adoption defies procreative models (2005b: 112–13),also indebted to Sahlins (1976), has comparable ethnographic and analytical flaws. Shecites the Inuit area and Polynesia as regions in which adoption is especially common.But in both areas they are special ‘adopted child’ and/or ‘adopting parent’ terms, madeup of the focal ‘child’ and ‘parent’ terms accompanied by a suffix or other linguisticmarker (see e.g. Burch 1975: 46; Damas 1972: 43; Guemple 1972: 68; Hooper 1970: 56;Howard et al. 1970: 43). These latter terms are thus derivates of the former, just as,say, godmother is derivative of mother. Behaviourally, moreover, procreative kinship isespecially salient in both areas, as Joan Silk has shown in several important contributions(Silk 1980, 1987a, 1987b). Here is her summary of the situation:

The patterns of . . . adoption in Oceania and the Arctic are strikingly similar. First,in each of these societies, natural parents who give up primary responsibilityfor raising their children typically delegate care of their offspring to closeconsanguineal kin. Second, natural parents are uniformly reluctant to give up theirchildren to others permanently, and often express regret at the necessity of doingso. Third, parental investment is not necessarily terminated when adoption . . .

arrangements have been completed. Even after children have left their households,natural parents may maintain contact with them, continue to contribute someresources to their care, and retain their rights to retrieve their offspring if they aremistreated. Fourth, natural parents are often very selective in their choice of . . .

adoptive parents; they typically prefer adults who can offer their children bettereconomic prospects than they can themselves. Finally, there is some evidence ofasymmetries in the care of natural and adoptive children, as adopted . . . childrenmay be required to work harder, may be disciplined more forcefully, or allocatedfewer familial resources than natural children. (Silk 1987b: 46)

Towards the end of the ‘multiplicity of mothers’ section of her article, McKinnonremarks that

many people do make the distinction between ‘real’ and other forms of kinship,although who counts as real kin in any particular culture is not always – or evenoften – defined genetically. Even allowing for such a distinction, however, it isclear that the patterns of nurturance, altruism, and allocation of resources followfrom specific cultural classifications of kin relations and cultural understandingsof appropriate kin behavior that are never simply reflections of genetic relations. . . (2005b: 113)

My argument so far has been that, on the contrary, ‘real’ kin/others distinctions areusually if not always defined by local notions of genetic connection. McKinnon’sfurther assertion of a correspondence between kin class and behavioural class – sothat, for example, anyone called ‘mother’ in a particular community is supposed tobe treated in much the same way as one’s genetrix – is the stuff of introductoryanthropology textbooks and communitarian fantasy, but, so far as I am aware, it


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has never been demonstrated even for a single case. But there are several counter-demonstrations (e.g. Goodenough 1951: 111–19; Kronenfeld 1975; Shapiro 1997: 204–7). Keesing (1969) makes the crucial point that the behavioural norms informants presentto anthropologists pertain to focal members of kin classes – which is to say that ‘patternsof . . . altruism’ follow less ‘from specific cultural classifications of kin relations’ and morefrom ‘genetic relation’ – the exact antithesis of McKinnon’s assertion (see also Peterson1997; Shapiro 2005b). And this in turn is still more evidence that, when informants talkabout kin categories, they have in mind close procreative kin.

In subsequent argument McKinnon deals with ‘the systems of kinship known asunilineal, in which descent is traced either through the male line to constitute patrilinealgroups, or through the female line to constitute matrilineal groups. Either way, such adelineation of groups will always entail that some genetic kin will be in other groupswhile some more distant genetic kin will be in one’s own group’ (2005b: 113–14). Herdebt, yet again, to Sahlins (1976) is duly recorded, but her presentation needs badly tobe repaired, to wit:

First, all this about ‘tracing of descent’ is mostly another example of textbook‘wisdom’, in reality confined largely to what have been called ‘segmentary lineagesystems’ in the Muslim Middle East and parts of Africa. In Aboriginal Australia,by contrast, detailed genealogical reckoning is absent and ‘the tracing of descent’ isreplaced by a This World/Other World distinction in which the right hand memberof the opposition is assigned ontological, moral, and temporal priority (Shapiro 1979:13–14). Much the same holds for the so-called ‘descent groups’ of Aboriginal NorthAmerica (Tooker 1971) and present-day or recent Amazonia (Murphy 1979). Althoughthe matter badly needs attention for other areas, this latter pattern is probably morecommon than the former.

Second, what we know about segmentation in segmentary lineage systems – thatit follows genealogical lines – is entirely consistent with genetic logic. Segmentation inother kinds of ‘descent groups’ has been much less studied, but, for northeast ArnhemLand at least, there is strong indication that the same logic is at work, though concealedby a genealogically minimising ideology (Keen 1995).

Third, whatever descent or descent-like constructs exist in a community, kinshipis nearly everywhere reckoned bilaterally, and, as I have suggested, in ways that arelargely compatible with genetic notions. Whatever the intentions, McKinnon’s wordingsuggests, quite wrongly, that effective kin reckoning in ‘unilineal’ populations is at oddswith these notions.

Fourth, it also suggests, again wrongly, that in such populations these groupingsare especially salient, whereas in fact their importance in everyday life varies veryconsiderably ethnographically. When they are nonlocalised, as they often are, they canbe said to be ‘groups’ only conceptually. Even when localised, they are never the solebasis for social action (see esp. Keesing 1971; Kuper 1982).

This last point needs to be pursued in view of McKinnon’s assertion that ‘[i]n mostsocieties around the world, marriage is governed, in the first instance, by systematicrelationships between groups . . .’ (2005b: 122). As evidence for this assertion she offersa sketchy presentation, from a secondary source, of the four and eight ‘section’ systemsof Aboriginal Australia. But the ‘sections’ are in no sociological sense ‘groups’. Theyare categories in terms of which marital and ritual obligations are sometimes expressed(Shapiro 1979: 70–2), somewhat comparable to Western astrological classes and otherconceptual schemes (1979: 72–4).



During the 1950s and early 1960s a very considerable literature grew out of Levi-Strauss’ attempt to see presumed marital relationships between patrilineal groups inAboriginal Australia10 as constituting ‘elementary structures’ of sociality (Levi-Strauss1969 [1949]: 146–220). The ‘origins myth’ character of Levi-Strauss’ scheme makes itsuspect as an empirical exercise, as I have argued elsewhere (Shapiro 1998; see alsoConkey 1991). But even as ethnographic analysis, we now know that it is hopelesslyflawed. An important consideration is that these groups are not localised, as Radcliffe-Brown (1931: 4) had assumed, absent any real evidence, they were (Shapiro 1973). Thisin itself suggests their unimportance in the politics of marriage. But Hiatt’s work innorth-central Arnhem Land (Hiatt 1965: 38–44) went further and showed that primaryrights to bestow an Aboriginal girl are vested in individuals – not groups – and that theseindividuals are usually not even members of the girl’s patrilineal group. Such groups,he argued, are significant only in the distribution of ritual rights. My own subsequentresearch further east in Arnhem Land supported Hiatt’s argument in every particular(see esp. Shapiro 1981).

McKinnon’s own field materials point in a not entirely distinct direction.Tanimbarese patrilineal groups are localised and there are both enduring and ephemeralmarital relationships among them, but, as in Aboriginal Australia, individual marriagesare arranged by close kin of the bride and groom. Moreover, primary obligations to giveand receive bridewealth fall on particular kin and not groups. A man has marital rightsto the daughter of his mother’s brother – not, apparently, because she is a member of aparticular group but by virtue of his kinship position per se (McKinnon 1991: 134–62,199–258; 1995b).

So, even where unilineal groups exist, they are not necessarily the effective units inarranging marriages; indeed, as Scheffler (1973: 784–6) has argued, they are rarely if everso. Moreover, any ‘group’ rendition of Third and Fourth World marriage is even moreplainly untenable in the absence of anything resembling ‘unilineal’ reckoning, as inmuch of Amazonia and South Asia. In these areas what is called ‘cross-cousin marriage’is practised – i.e. marriage between a man and either his mother’s brother’s daughter orhis father’s sister’s daughter. Now in populations with either patrilineal or matrilinealgroups both women are members of units other than a man’s own. But in most of thesetwo regions no such groups exist. Hence McKinnon’s claim that cross-cousin marriage‘depends . . . upon a distinction between one’s own group and others’ (2005b: 123) isinvalid even without recourse to the actual politics of marriage (see e.g. Gardner 1972;Gregor 1977; Kaplan 1975; Kensinger 1995; Yalman 1962).

Hence not a single one of McKinnon’s objections to the handling of kinship inevolutionary psychology is supported by the evidence. The most that can be said isthat the genealogical skewing of unilineal descent and Omaha-type kin classificationis not predictable from Darwinian principles. But these forms of skewing exist inpopulations which otherwise act and classify in ways that accord remarkably well

10 For the sake of simplicity, I refer to Aboriginal Australian ritual groups as ‘patrilineal’, because thefather/child link is probably the single most important principle of recruitment to these groups.But the expression misleads – this for two reasons. First, within such groups there is only a verylimited ‘tracing of descent’, group unity being based on other principles (see above). Second, thislink is probably everywhere on the continent, most extraordinarily in the Western Desert (see esp.Myers 1986: 129–30), supplemented by other principles. This is also true of Tanimbarese ‘houses’(see below) – though for men the father/child link is the most favoured principle of recruitment(McKinnon 1991: 84–106, 1995b). For this reason I refer to these units as well as ‘patrilineal’.


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with these principles. The distinction between ‘a genetic . . . calculus’ and ‘a system ofsocial classification’ (McKinnon 1995b: 123), which McKinnon thinks is crucial to herargument, is in fact entirely meaningless.

Conc l u s i o n s

From all this I think a number of conclusions can be drawn about the constructionistapproach in kinship, at least as advocated by Susan McKinnon.

First, this approach – despite its claim to analyse non-Western notions of kinship‘in indigenous terms’ (Carsten 1997: 292) – is in fact remarkably disrespectful of theprinciples by which people around the world classify their kinship universes. Thisstems partly from an astonishing ignorance of focality theory. This latter is a scholarlyshortcoming of a very high order – not only because of its long history in kinshipstudies in particular (see e.g. Malinowski 1929; Scheffler and Lounsbury 1971), but, aswell, because similar results, as I noted earlier, have been demonstrated in other areasof classification.

Second, the other main factor that distances many of the new kinship scholars fromtheir own ethnographic materials is a commitment to Marxist theory, especially thehopelessly antiquated fantasies of Engels (1972[1884]) on the origin and developmentof the family. This works in concert with their ignorance of focality theory to producea grossly distorted view of Third and Fourth World sociality. Hence McKinnon’sconcoction of group motherhood, of collective childcare through this and adoption,of the pervasiveness of kinship in human relations, and of the salience of descentgroups – though this last probably owes less to Marxism than to other Victoriantheories (Kuper 1988). In any case, the fact is that kinship in our species is nothingif not individual, because the bonding that we undergo, especially as children, issocially selective (Flanagan 1999: 40–2). Attempts to collectivise it – whether in FourthWorld universal systems of kin categorisation (Shapiro 2005b) or Western communes(Brumann 2003) – have at best a very limited success.

Third, although the new kinship scholars present themselves as comparativists,the time-honoured project of earnest cultural comparison is at best tangential totheir main project, which is the belittling of the West, especially Western scienceand what is sometimes called ‘the traditional family’. These are of course familiartargets for feminists and Marxists (see e.g. Gross and Levitt 1994: 107–48; Tobias 1997:214–20). Especially pertinent here is McKinnon’s recurrent use of the language andtactics of ‘deconstruction’ – not to illuminate the social conditions which encourageparticular forms of ideology or scholarship but to denigrate these forms. Thus she writescontemptuously of ‘the middle class ideal’ of motherhood (McKinnon 2005b: 112). Sheasserts that ‘[e]volutionary psychologists presuppose a restrictive understanding ofkinship . . . that is a reflection of Western upper-class concerns’ (2005b: 117). She refersto their causal imageries11 as ‘stories’ (McKinnon 2005a: 7) and ‘myths’ (2005a: 2) andconcludes that ‘their science is ultimately a complete fiction’ (2005a: 4). But this is fartoo grave a conclusion. Whatever biographic or social considerations underlie the workof evolutionary psychologists, they have produced a series of testable propositions

11 I borrow the useful expression ‘causal imagery’ from Stinchcombe (1968), who uses it withoutexplicit definition.



about human behaviour. Some of these propositions may need to be modified or evendiscarded (see esp. Buller 2005), but this is true of any scientific enterprise. A far morecogent case can be made that it is McKinnon’s social environment as an academic, withits doctrinaire Marxism and feminism, that is projected onto ethnographic materials towhich, as I believe I have demonstrated, it is entirely foreign. The result of this projectiveprocess is a Manichean anthropology based on the concoction of an Individualist Westversus a Collectivist Rest.12

Fourth, and related to all three of my previous conclusions, there is a salient linkbetween the ignorance of focality theory and the remarkable hostility to the traditionalfamily in the new kinship studies. For if, as I have argued, close procreative kin areprobably everywhere distinguished, the suggestion is that these kin participate in specialrelationships that are very nearly universal and not, pace Marxism, the dispensableproduct of a particular socioeconomic regime. This is of course just a restatement ofconclusions reached by Malinowski (1913), Lowie (1920: 147–85), and others nearly acentury ago, but apparently the lesson needs to be relearned.

Fifth, the new kinship scholars view human affairs as part of an extrasomatic processwhich has little if anything to do with Homo sapiens as a biological species. They thusdraw upon a long tradition of ‘biophobia’ in social theory (Daly and Wilson 1988).But their view of biology is antediluvian: they equate biological causation with thereflex arc, whereby only one outcome is predetermined, and they show no awarenessof contingency sensitivity in biological systems (e.g. Oyama 1985; Pinker 2002; Shapiro2008). Hence McKinnon (2005b: 127) claims that evolutionary psychology insists upon‘universal forms of behavior’ – quite unaware, apparently, that all its propositions relyon probability calculi. And she declares that ‘the mind is a flexible and creative toolcapable of creating diverse cultural forms’ (2005b: 127) – a proposition she advancesto counter evolutionary psychology but which is in fact assumed by all Darwinianstudents of human affairs with whose work I am familiar. What this latter group ofscholars seems to share is a concern with establishing the limits of this flexibility – moreparticularly, with how certain elements may or may not be combined in the generationof cultural forms. This in turn invites us to reconsider the supposed antagonism betweenstructure and freedom. One could cite Chomsky here, or Levi-Strauss, but, at least inprofessional anthropology, the apical ancestor is A.L. Kroeber’s remarkable 1909 article,‘Classificatory systems of relationship’ (Kroeber 1909). What Kroeber argued here isthat the human mind is capable of isolating and combining certain elements, such asgender and collaterality, so as to generate a fairly large but finite number of systems ofkin classification, and, more, that these systems are mostly independent of institutionalinfluence. There is more than a passing resemblance between this piece of prescientbrilliance and the arguments presented here, as well as a very considerable corpusof literature in both cognitive science and Darwinian anthropology (Shapiro 2008).This being so, it is fallacious to present ‘deconstructionism’ as a freedom-promotingalternative to ‘biological determinism’.

In recent decades we have been invited to choose between a vision of anthropologyas a science and one of it as an art form – or, more specifically, as a branch of

12 This is not to argue that Marxism has no insights into particular historical or ethnographicsituations. I wish only to highlight here its apocalyptic quality, something widely appreciated incertain scholarly circles (see esp. Campion 1994: 425–53). Nor do I have any quarrel with the ideathat women should have equal access with men to highly-placed jobs and other life opportunities.My quarrel here is with the blatant anti-family stance of much feminist writing.


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hermeneutics. The new kinship studies suggest that a more vital choice nowadays isbetween anthropology as a child of Enlightenment scepticism – and the consequentrequirement to demonstrate the truth of a proposition – on the one hand, and, on theother, anthropology as a branch of collectivist dogma.

Acknow l edgemen t

This essay is dedicated to the memory of my father, Charlie Shapiro, from whom Iseem to have inherited, by Darwinian and perhaps other means, an utter inability to putup with falsity and pretence. I want also to thank Herb Damsky, Tom Gregor, AdamKuper, Tom Parides, and Mel Spiro for their encouraging remarks on earlier drafts ofthis article, though I need to add that responsibility for it rests with me alone.

Warren ShapiroRutgers [email protected]

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