ABSTRACT
In her book After Kinship, Janet Carsten (2004) lays out the aligned dualisms of the ‘old’ kinship studies that Schneider and others have criticized since the 1960s. The organizing dualism is the distinction between the west, where kinship has supposedly been reduced to the private domain of the nuclear household; and the rest, where kinship indexed a formal, jural, public and male domain that could only be opposed to the household. The related series of dualisms – west, non-west; kinship, household; jural, intimate; emotional, formal; public, private; male, female; code, substance; culture, nature – mapped on to each other all too easily in both common sense and anthropological writing. Along with Franklin and McKinnon (2001); Strathern (1988, 1992a, 1992b) and others, Carsten has practiced a new kinship studies that emphasizes how humans all around the world blend the domains that these dualisms suggest are separated. While their writings are insightful, I note that these authors have devoted
scant attention to the rise of state systems of education. Everywhere, schools are the institutions that explicitly bridge the divide between the concerns of the state (assumed to be formal, public, jural and male) and those of the household (supposedly intimate, emotional, private, nurturing and female). A study of education should have much to tell us about changing notions of kinship, in a manner that should echo the concerns of the new kinship studies. In China, the spread of formal education from the households of an elite
few to a near-universal phenomenon has been one of the most important developments of the twentieth century. Surprisingly, given the series of revolutions China has witnessed, the twentieth century march towards nine years of compulsory education for all was remarkably steady. As Thøgersen (2002) notes for Shandong, significant progress was made during the last decade of the Qing dynasty, during the Republican era, under the Japanese, during the Maoist decades and during the reform era (see also Buck 1974). During the first decade of the twenty-first century, 15 years of education is becoming increasingly common (including three years of pre-school and three years of senior middle school), with 80-90 per cent of rural Shandong children attending school for that long in many parts of the province.
