The expression “the new kinship studies” was coined by Janet Carsten, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. It invites one to ask what these studies are newer than. Traditional kinship studies in anthropology, by general acclaim, stem from the herculean effort of the lawyer Lewis Henry Morgan, especially his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, originally published in 1871. There Morgan focused on kinship terminologies, exemplified in English by such terms as mother, father, sister, brother etc., especially their patterning in various parts of the world. Thus, to take a single example, he noted that in the Malay language the corresponding terms are generalized, so that, for example, the “mother” term is applied to all females of the parental generation. Morgan sought the social significance of such facts, and, especially in his Ancient Society, published six years later, came to the conclusion that they reflected a time in the distant past when people mated promiscuously, so that, for example, one’s father could be any man of that generation, and, given such a “community of husbands and wives,” a man could mate with his own sister.1
Morgan knew quite well that contemporary peoples with this patterning had no such marital regime, but, he reasoned, they must originally have had it. And not just this but, as well, the absence of private property and the importance of women—what one of his contemporaries dubbed “the matriarchate.” Finally, he argued that, with such communal kinship, the nuclear family was absent.
It is well worth noting that the subtitle of Ancient Society was Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization. So non-European peoples were rendered in pejorative terms (they were less “evolved”)—this in contrast to Europeans and their descendants in the Americas, who had the manifest destiny to reach an earthly paradise marked by the nuclear family, its supposedly attendant monogamous mating and private property.
I show below that such musings were substantially refuted by the first professional anthropologists in this country, so it would seem that the ideas of Morgan and his ilk deserve only a passing mention here. But what makes them of contemporary interest was their co-option by Frederick Engels, Karl Marx’s patron, in his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, revealingly subtitled According to the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. Engels accepted Morgan’s scheme whole hog but, with the important exception that the “original” communitarian scheme of mating and the absence of the nuclear family and private property, plus the elevated position of women, was soon to return through socialist revolution. I show below that his re-formulation of Morgan, in fact discredited for a century, is the single most important factor in the new kinship studies.
But first I need to summarize the response to Morgan by the first generation of professional anthropologists in this country. The key document here is Robert Lowie’s book Primitive Society, first published in 1920.2 Surveying what had been reported for the tribal world since Morgan’s day, Lowie concluded that the nuclear family is ubiquitous; that sexual relations within it, other than those between husband and wife, are universally prohibited; that “no evidence has been adduced to show that any people in the world have in recent times practiced sexual communism in a manner destructive of the individual family”; that individual ownership of property exists; and “that a genuine matriarchate is nowhere to be found.”
But neither Primitive Society nor Ancient Society deals with the supposedly communal kinship terminologies that so impressed Morgan, though the latter’s tabulations in Systems contain several examples of what later scholars would call lexical marking in such terminologies. There, for example, Morgan3 notes that among the Cree of the eastern Canadian Subarctic the term for one’s father’s brother, which according to his scheme should be the unmarked “father” term, is in fact that term plus a lexical marker. Thus, the absence of the lexical marker separates, for native Cree speakers, one’s actual father from other members of his kin class—comparable to English speakers, who write and speak of godfathers, fathers-in-law, and Father Time. The ubiquity of lexical marking was suggested by Lowie’s colleague Alexander Goldenweiser. Summarizing what had already become clear from careful linguistic study of tribal languages, Goldenweiser noted that “in many primitive tribes the terms used for the immediate members of the family are either distinguished from the same terms in the extended sense by the addition of some particle, or terms corresponding to ‘own’ are used … Family is family, whatever the system of relationship.”4
So much for the communal interpretation of kinship terminologies!
But how does Janet Carsten figure in all this? For one thing, she asserts that, in the Malay village in which she worked, there is “undivided kinship,”5 just as Morgan had claimed. But other anthropologists who have worked in Malaysia have come to different conclusions. Thus, David J. Banks draws an express parallel between Malay kinship notions and those found in the West. He tells us that “Malays recognize degrees of [kinship] … implying a branching model of relatedness through gradually weakening, thinning ties.6
Moreover, Banks notes another Malay expression which he translates as “layer,” which in a kinship context means “degree of collaterality”— i.e. of kinship distance, comparable to English “first cousin,” “second cousin,” etc. Another expression is translatable as “collateral relative,” and this is oppositionally paired with yet another, which means “real.” All this is supported by other scholars, including Bill Wilder and Judith Djamour.
Banks reports yet another expression—this used “to refer to a group of all one’s blood kinsmen.” Wilder notes still another, which he translates as “near kin” and which, he also notes, is employed to distinguish those so labeled from others designated in the Malay language as “distant kinsmen.” People outside this sphere are likely to be labeled by a term which Djamour, Josiane Massard, and Robert McKinley translate as “unrelated” or “stranger.”
To be sure, there are idioms of inclusion. Thus, Massard notes an expression pertaining to a whole village, which she translates as “[T]he people here are all relatives.”7 But in the very same paragraph she tells us that “neighbors are perceived as irrevocably different from blood kin,” and she proffers a Malay expression in which neighbors are rendered as “like brothers and sisters.” Such likenings have been reported by others working in Malaysia.. It bears stressing that they appeal to a model of procreative kinship, from which they are perforce logically derived through lexical marking. Such marking, as I noted above, is ubiquitous in kinship terminologies.
In short, the nuclear family is especially recognized in both Malay and English kin reckoning: Banks makes this very point. This, moreover, reflects the actual residence patterns in Malaysia as well as the West. Thus, Michael Swift tells us that, in the village in which he carried out fieldwork “[t]he nuclear family of husband, wife, and dependent children is the most common form of domestic grouping, and also the major social unit in day-to-day living.”8 And his next paragraph begins as follows: “Husbands attempt to build their own house as soon as possible after the birth of their first child … and to establish their own family of procreation as an independent unit.” Banks provides corroborative data. “Ideally,” he notes, a newly married couple “would have a separate house of their own because of the Malay belief that a young couple should have privacy.” Maila Stivens tells us that in the village she studied “[i]n terms of day-to-day household organization the husband and wife are the preeminent unit,” and she observes more generally that “[a]ll accounts of Malay kinship agree that the elementary family has been a dominant residential grouping.”9 Carsten is alone among Malaysionists in arguing that the multi-familial house is the dominant residential unit.
She is alone as well in asserting that Malay women are “central to the political process.”10 Carsten herself provides contrary data when she tells us that
houses might be opposed to [fishing] boats, mosque, and coffee-shop. The division not only reflects the [gender] segregation of labour but also of [other] activities. The coffee shop is the main forum for informal political discussion. Women very rarely go to coffee-shops, nor do they participate more than minimally in formal political activity in the village. They rarely attend meetings; when they do so, they do not engage in public discussion.11
A few pages later there is a reproduction of a photograph captioned “Men vote at a village meeting.” Accurately enough, not a single woman can be seen.
In sum, Janet Carsten’s rendition of Malay society is hopelessly flawed. But there is another scheme with which it is remarkably consistent, namely Frederick Engels’ inversion of Lewis Henry Morgan’s “evolutionary” plan. Here it is pertinent to call attention to a particular of Carsten’s biography and “the left-wing bohemianism” of her girlhood.12Hence it should be unsurprising that both posit the absence of the nuclear family and the submersion of its components in a larger collective (“undivided kinship”), as well as the power of women, who are “central to the political process.” It bears mention that Janet Carsten is something of an academic celebrity. She is the author of several Encyclopedia Brittanica articles, the subject of a Wikipedia article, and the author of several books and articles on kinship.
But she is hardly alone in misrepresenting what we now know about kinship in the Third and Fourth Worlds. Thus we are told that the pertinent kinship terminologies posit “a multiplicity of mothers” instead of assigning motherhood to a single woman—note, as with Carsten, the appeal to collectivist notions of kinship, apparently unaware of the enormous evidence for lexical marking in these terminologies, as well as such English expressions as godmother, stepmother, and Mother Country.13 The idea, derived from nineteenth century anthropology, that Aboriginal Australians are ignorant of the male role in conception that has since been refuted,14 is resurrected in a “radical” feminist attempt to undermine the role of men in human society.15 The “community of husbands and wives” and the absence of the nuclear family are held to be alive and well in Amazonia, despite overwhelming evidence in that region for the pair-bond and rampant sexism.16
All of these efforts—and many others—draw on the attempts of David Schneider to render—to “deconstruct,” as one says these days—the idea of the primacy of nuclear family kinship as a concoction of Western anthropologists. But, as I have argued elsewhere, nothing is more of a “social construction” than the notion that Schneider was “a giant of anthropology,” as his New York Times obituary renders him.17 In particular, his skills in linguistic analysis were so sophomoric that he was unable to appreciate the enormous evidence for lexical marking in kinship terminologies, relying instead on abstract notions of kinship derived from those with superior analytical abilities.18 His lionization in the new kinship studies is testament only to the lack of such abilities by his followers.
We are told that “classical kinship” studies “universalized a heterosexual masculine perspective, derived from traditional bourgeois life.”19 By contrast, the new kinship studies are claimed to be “dismantling patriarchy.”20 Its practitioners are now in the process of doing this by denigrating men and marriage and consequently the nuclear family, and peddling such contestable ideas that gender and science are merely “social constructs.” Apparently, serious engagement with the pertinent ethnographic record, as well as the historically liberating achievements of science, are nowadays unfashionable.
So too is the idea of rational engagement with scholarly opponents. I have been a critic of the new kinship studies now for two decades and have gleaned nothing resembling reasoned debate. My position has been rendered as “arch-conservative” and as “conservative kinship,”21 thus linking me with political views I do not in fact hold but which are anathema in today’s academy, especially in anthropology. At a recent meeting of the American Anthropological Association, I attended a session on kinship staffed by Janet Carsten and other practitioners of the new kinship studies. At the end of the session I approached the panel, my identity apparent from my name tag. One of the panel participants stood up, looked at me with narrowed eyes and tensed lips, and said, “We know the kind of work you do!” refusing further conversation. If looks could kill, I’d be a dead man.
The new kinship studies, in sum, have violated academic standards by a sophomoric command of traditional kinship scholarship and an unwillingness to engage in reasoned debate.
Warren Shapiro is a professor of anthropology emeritus at Rutgers State University.
1 And, presumably, with his own mother, though Morgan never addressed this possibility.
2 Robert H. Lowie, Primitive Society (New York: Liveright, 1920).
3 Lewis H. Morgan, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1997, orig. 1871).
4 Alexander A. Goldenweiser, Anthropology: An Introduction to Primitive Culture (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1937).
5 Janet Carsten, “Houses in Langkawi: Stable Structures or Mobile Homes?” in About the House: Lévi-Strauss and Beyond, ed. Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 105–28.
6 David J. Banks, Malay Kinship (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983), 115, 60.
7 Josiane Massard, “Kinship and Exchange Practices in a Malay Village,” in Cognation and Social Organization in Southeast Asia, ed. Frans Hüsken and Jeremy Kemp (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1991), 137–47.
8 Michael G. Swift, Malay Peasant Society in Jelebu (London: Athlone Press, 1965).
9 Maila Stivens, “The Evolution of Kinship Relations in Rembau, Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia,” in Cognation and Social Organization in Southeast Asia, ed. Frans Hüsken and Jeremy Kemp (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1991), 71–88.
10 Janet Carsten, The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 18.
11 Janet Carsten, The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 136.
12 Janet Carsten, After Kinship (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
13 Susan McKinnon, “Of Kinship and Marriage: A Critique of the Genetic and Gender Calculus of Evolutionary Psychology,” in Complexities: Beyond Nature and Nurture, ed. Susan McKinnon and Sydel Silverman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 106–31.
14 Warren Shapiro, “The Quest for Purity in Anthropological Inquiry,” in Denying Biology: Essays on Gender and Pseudo-Procreation, ed. Warren Shapiro and Uli Linke (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), 167–89.
15 Carol L. Delaney, “The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth Debate,” Man (n.s.) 21 (1986): 494–513; Warren Shapiro, “Misconceptions About Conception Theory: A Critique of Carol Delaney,” Anthropos 119 (2024): 547–58.
16 Stephen Beckerman and Paul Valentine, “Introduction: The Concept of Partible Paternity among Native South Americans,” in Cultures of Multiple Fathers: The Theory and Practice of Partible Paternity in Lowland South America, ed. Stephen Beckerman and Paul Valentine (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2002), 1–13; Warren Shapiro, Partible Paternity and Anthropological Theory: The Construction of an Ethnographic Fantasy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009); Shapiro, “The Nuclear Family versus the Men’s House: A Re-examination of Mundurucu Sociality,” Anthropological Forum 21 (2011a): 57–75.
17 David M. Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984); Warren Shapiro, “The ‘Social Construction’ of David Schneider as ‘a Giant of Anthropology,’” Oceania 90 (2020): 1–17.
18 Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
19 Mary J. Weismantel, “Making Kin: Kinship Theory and Zumbagua Adoptions,” American Ethnologist 22 (1995): 685–709.
20 Carol L. Delaney, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
21 Marshall D. Sahlins, “Comment: Birth Is the Metaphor,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18 (n.s.) (2012): 673–77; Alessandra Gribaldo, “A Reflection on the Gendered Implications of What Kinship Is,” Antropologica 3 (n.d.): 11–28.
Photo by Camden & Hailey George on Unsplash