Introduction: Reclaiming Paradigms Lost Mary Patterson

1-17

This introduction is a critical response to claims made about the demise and revival of the sub-discipline of kinship studies. Contemporary calls to a reclaimed and revitalised area rest, ironically, on a misplaced concentration on the preoccupations of dominant cultures, one of the grounds used to discard kinship in the past. It is argued that many of the issues debated up to the 1970s in the domain of kinship involve more general problems such as arguments about structure and process, gender and biology and the way in which indigenous categories are to be apprehended and accommodated in a genuinely comparative discipline. The case is also made that kinship’s demise is largely an Anglocentric phenomenon and that the continuing importance of many of the issues debated in the past, such as the relationship between people and land and its local ideological representations and global consequences, make knowledge of kinship’s more exotic manifestations vital to contemporary graduates. The final section introduces the papers in the volume, each of which addresses, in a contemporary and critical way, an area that was important to previous kinship

Structure and Substance: Combining ‘Classic’ and ‘Modern’ Kinship Studies in the Australian Western Desert Laurent Dousset

18-30

This paper attempts to participate in the reconciliation between ‘modern’ and cultural studies styles of approaches to kinship, and the more formal and structural analyses of the ‘classical’ type. It is argued that it is the methodological combination of these approaches that produces intelligible descriptions of social structure and process in relation to kinship. The fundamental assumption is that individual strategies play within, and to a certain extent (consciously) exploit, the structural particularities a kinship system provides. A heuristic tool is proposed from which such an analysis can be elaborated. The notion of ‘consubstantiality’ as a reflector of modes of ‘relatedness-conception’ is discussed, because such modes do exhibit interactionist processes while being framed within the structural precepts of the formal kinship system with its terminology and prescriptions.

The Dynamics of Stasis: Historical Inertia in the Evolution of the Australian Family Allon J. Uhlmann

31-46

This paper highlights the significant role the anthropological perspective with its broad comparative outlook, and its focused ethnographic observations, can play in understanding historical processes in general, and the under-theorised processes of stasis and historical inertia in particular. It does so by engaging with the history of the white Australian family. It argues that the sense of radical shifts in the family is misplaced. Conceived of as a life trajectory, the nuclear family remains overwhelmingly dominant cognitively, culturally and normatively. The recent limited changes that have emerged largely in response to the increased cost of social reproduction, do not amount to an overwhelming shift, nor do they reflect major cultural or normative transformations. The continuities in the Australian family are consistent with the broad continuity in family practice in comparable metropolitan and settler European societies for well over a millennium. These continuities demand a historical explanation. The paper shows the inevitable conservative entailments of heterodox alternatives, and the conservative effects of the powerful cultural preconditioning of social agents’ cognition. It also links the symbolic politics of family practice to the social politics of cultural and ideological production. More generally, the paper argues that stasis is no less historical, no less dynamic, and no less worthy of analysis and explanation, than are change and transformation; and, that stasis and transformation are not different processes, but rather intertwined facets of the always multi-faceted historical process.

Whose Tangle is it Anyway? The African-American Family, Poverty and United States Kinship Anthony Marcus

47-61

The comparison between United States immigrant and African-American families presented by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his 1965 report to President Lyndon Johnson remains the most popular folk model for explaining success, failure and mutual aid in poverty. Despite being savaged by social science in its first two decades and largely ignored in the last two, the Moynihan model is an enduring part of popular discourses on race, intensified by contemporary immigrant success narratives. Based on over three years of participant observation research among homeless African-American and Latino men and their families and Latin-American immigrants engaging in small business creation in New York City, I argue that Moynihan’s empirically valid claim that certain immigrant family forms are more suited to mutual aid in crisis is misused to present the African-American family as dysfunctional when its kinship norms are actually typically American.

Refusing to Sing: Gender, Kinship and Patriliny in Macedonia Violeta Schubert

62-75

The issue of whether formal kinship structures and sentiments reflect the reality of social relations was of particular concern to specialists at the height of the kinship debates in the 1960s and 1970s, as it continues to be in some contemporary studies. So too, the classifications ‘patrilineal’ or ‘matrilineal’ have clearly been shown to be problematic given that there are multiple levels of discourse and relational and ideational realities in any given society. For many contemporary kinship specialists in fact no simple correlation can be made between type of descent system and actual social relations, especially relations between men and women. However, some anthropologists continue to argue that patrilineal kinship systems are somehow indicative of control or domination by men or, put inversely, of women’s lack of power and authority. It is argued in this paper that even where the formal kinship structures and ideological discourses are dominated by agnation as appears to be the case in south Slav societies generally, and Macedonian in particular, this is not automatically mirrored in gender relations between men and women. In short, there is a long leap from patriliny to patriarchy.

Paths of Relationship: Spirals of Exchange: Imag(in)ing North Pentecost Kinship John Taylor

76-94

In Stone Men of Malekula: Vao (1942), a text that was published more than twenty-five years after he carried out long-term fieldwork in Vanuatu, John Layard introduced a new technique for rendering kinship data in diagrammatic form. Inspired in part by Gregory Bateson, his ‘circular technique’ was derived from diagrams drawn up according to the genealogical method, and was designed to overcome certain structural problems identified within these. One important implication of the ‘circular technique’ that is not made explicit in Layard’s analysis is a resonance with many of the idioms and metaphors that ni-Vanuatu evoke in talking about relationships of exchange and kinship. Where processes of birth, death, marriage and exchange are conceptualised in terms of a broad flow of departures and returns across discernible trajectories, images incorporating circles and spirals are utilised as key metaphors for understanding social relationships through space and time. Focusing on the Raga-speaking district of North Pentecost, Vanuatu, this article explores such idioms while presenting a revision of Layard’s circular technique.

Coming too Close, Going too Far: Theoretical and Cross-cultural Approaches to Incest and its Prohibitions Mary Patterson

95-115

Although interest in cultural explanations of topics like incest waned among Anglo anthropologists along with the abandonment of kinship theory in general, other paradigms provided a renewed interest in some older theories about the prohibition of incest. The approach presented in this paper gives due critical consideration to both evolutionary and ‘cultural’ explanations of incest and its prohibition suggesting their mutual involvement, but the necessity of a close analysis of the specificity of the cultural forms in which shared substance, connection, difference and nurture are expressed as reproductive ontology. Particular cases are discussed in the light of recent suggestions that the cross-cultural incidence of incest and its prohibition is to be understood via theories of dissociative disorders in the West that allegedly illuminate a wide range of practices claimed to be linked to sexual abuse in childhood.

Obituary: Mervyn Meggitt, 1924-2004 Jeremy Beckett

 116-19

Bain Attwood Right for Aborigines [Katie Glaskin]

120

Sarah Colley Uncovering Australia: Archaeology, Indigenous People and the Public [Tim Murray]

121

Kirk Dombrowski Against Culture: Development, Politics and Religion in Indian Alaska [Barry Morris]

123

Sinclair Dinnen with Anita Jowitt and Tess Newton Cain (eds) A Kind of Mending: Restorative Justice in the Pacific Islands [Ken Brown]

125

Bruce M. Knauft (ed.) Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies [Ade Peace]

128

Helen Gremillion Feeding Anorexia: Gender and Power at a Treatment Center [Megan Warin]

130

Jean Guiart Et le masque sortit de la mer: Les pays anciens de Hienghène à Témala, Gomen et Koumac [Helen Johnson]

131

Robin Hyde Pig Husbandry in New Guinea: A Literature Review and Bibliography [Paula Brown]

133

William Marzarella Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India [Philip Mar]

135

Louise Meintjes Sound of Africa: Making Music Zulu in a South African Studio [Karl Neuenfeld]

137

Sally Merry and Donald Brenneis (eds) Law and Order in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawai’i [Robert Norton]

128

Peter J. M. Nas, Gerard A. Persoon and Rivke Jaffe (eds) Framing Indonesian Realities: Essay in Symbolic Anthropology in Honour of Reiner Schefold [Andrew McWilliam]

140

Annemarie Mol The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice [Dorothy Brown]

141

Sherry B. Ortner New Jersey Dreaming: Capital, Culture and the Class of ’58 [Gretchen Poiner]

142

Thomas C. Patterson Marx’s Ghost: Conversations with Archaeologists [Tim Murray]

144

Melissa Perry and Stephen Lloyd Australian Native Title Law [Paul Burke]

145

Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Peterson (eds) Photography’s Other Histories [Jane Lydon]

147

Nigel Rapport I am Dynamite: An Alternative Anthropology of Power [Julian Lee and David Butterworth]

149

Renato Rosaldo (ed.) Cultural Citizenship in Island Southeast Asia: Nation and Belonging in the Hinterlands [Ben Kerkvliet]

150

Regina Scheyvens and Donovan Storey (eds) Development Fieldwork: A Practical Guide [Anthony Marcus]

151

David Trigger and Gareth Griffith (eds) Disputed Territories: Land, Culture and Identity in Settler Societies [Eva Mackey]

153

Cecilia van Hollen Birth on the Threshold: Childbirth and Modernity in South India [Lakshmi Ramachandar]

155