ABSTRACT
The problems i have been considering in the preceding chapter lie at the heart of kinship studies. They arise from the very nature of social relations. Textbooks always remind us that social relations are abstractions, since they are not directly visible and tangible, as individuals and activities are, but have to be established by inference. This does not mean that social relations are not real. It is only that they are implicit and general, wrapped up, as it were, in the particular occasions in which they emerge. From the observer's point of view, these occasions are disparate and discontinuous; most social relations, by reason of their generality, emerge in action in many phenotypically distinct situations and contexts of social life. “Siblingship” is manifested in kinship words, in eating customs, in incest taboos, in jural rights and duties, in ritual activities, etc. But let us turn the matter inside out. We can then say that in order to be at the disposal of those who engage in them, social relations must become discernible, objectified. They must be bodied forth in material objects and places, in words, acts, ideas, attitudes, rules and sanctions; in short, in all the features of public meaning that custom provides. Ego knows that he is B's sibling and acts accordingly because custom, through rules of genealogical collocation and norms of status and of value codified inter alia in a kinship terminology, provides for this category of relationship. He signifies his engagement in the relationship by the nomenclature he uses towards and about B, by his attitudes, claims, and conduct in situations where it is significant. It is distinctive custom that makes a social relation signifiable by those who participate in it and cognizable by those who are external to it. This is what “recognition” of genealogical connection implies. This is what emerges, in Radcliffe-Brown's tetrad. There is ground enough here for divergence of interpretation. We can, with Radcliffe-Brown, fix our attention primarily on the social relations projected in custom, or we can follow Malinowski and give precedence to the personal and collective ends subserved by social relations and custom, or we can deny any analytical distinctions between custom and social relations and regard everything as “culture” in the manner of Tylor, Frazer, Boas, Kroeber, et al. The data of kinship, as I said before, lend themselves to different frames of interpretation, and it leads to confusion if we do not keep them apart. It is only by keeping them conceptually apart that we can fit together findings made from different analytical positions.
