ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, we have provided ethnographic accounts from many different parts of the world. Our aim was not to be encyclopedic, but to be comparative whenever appropriate. There are many different approaches in the study of kinship, from David Schneider’s culturalist and deconstructive mode of analysis to correlational studies of patterns of custom (see, e.g., Pasternak, Ember, and Ember 1997), to studies of historical change and continuity (e.g., Cohen 2005 on China), or studies of gender, social change, and legal issues (e.g., Griffiths 1997 on divorce in Botswana, or Simpson 1998 on “unclear families” (e.g., p. 24) resulting from divorce and separation), to the secondary study of overall “styles” in the study of kinship by anthropologists (exemplified by Barnes 1971 on the writings of George Peter Murdock, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Meyer Fortes). Our own overall approach in the present volume bears a resemblance to that found in Fox (1967), Keesing (1975), Holy (1996), and Stone (2000), although in our choice of examples we have drawn on our own fieldwork-based knowledge as well as our own general regional interests and analytical concerns. Our analytical orientation has been toward the study of processes in social life rather than simply the elucidation of structural forms. At the same time, processes always take place within certain guiding constraints. Good earlier work was done in this vein by the Manchester school of anthropologists, whose research was mainly carried out in Africa. Van Velsen, for example, studying the lakeside Tonga of Malawi, discussed in great detail the topic of the “social manipulation” of kin relations; but he related these manipulations to certain ethnographic anchorings, for example, in a social context where matrilineal descent was practiced, “the hopeful expectation on the part of every Tonga [man] that perhaps one day he will be the founder and leader of an independent dominant lineage with its own village” (1964: 148). Van Velsen relates the conflicts that impede such an aim “to the inherent contradictions of virilocal marriage and matrilineal descent as the accepted principle of organization” (1964: 181). His formulation here exactly parallels that of Victor Turner on the Ndembu of Zambia, which Turner further parlayed into his notable analyses of sickness and redressive rituals among the Ndembu (Turner 1957, 1967). These classic studies stressed the interplay of process and structure in local contexts and their emergence as historical trajectories of change. We have found a similar approach useful in considering Euro-American patterns of kinship: for example, the interplay between partible inheritance, the idea of the household and family, and economic change in Neckarhausen as studied by David Sabean (1990).
