Politics and Kinship

A Reader

Erdmute Alber, Tatjana Thelen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000471199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Politics and Kinship: A Reader offers a unique overview of the entanglement of these two categories in both theoretical debates and everyday practices. The two, despite many challenges, are often thought to have become separated during the process of modernisation. Tracing how this notion of separation becomes idealised and translated into various contexts, this book sheds light on its epistemological limitations. Combining otherwise-distinct lines of discussion within political anthropology and kinship studies, the selection of texts covers a broad range of intersecting topics that range from military strategy, DNA testing, and child fostering, to practices of kinning the state.

Beginning with the study of politics, the first part of this volume looks at how its separation from kinship came to be considered a 'modern' phenomenon, with significant consequences. The second part starts from kinship, showing how it was made into a separate and apolitical field – an idea that would soon travel and be translated globally into policies. The third part turns to reproductions through various transmissions and future-making projects. Overall, the volume offers a fundamental critique of the epistemological separation of politics and kinship, and its shortcomings for teaching and research. Featuring contributions from a broad range of regional, temporal and theoretical backgrounds, it allows for critical engagement with knowledge production about the entanglement of politics and kinship.

The different traditions and contemporary approaches represented make this book an essential resource for researchers, instructors and students of anthropology.

Part IStarting from politics: Partitions and boundaries

DOI: 10.4324/9781003003595-2

We begin Part I by documenting how the conceptual separation of politics and kinship, deeply rooted in European intellectual traditions, has influenced the disciplinary divide into discrete research fields. In the mid-twentieth century, the emergent sub-discipline of political anthropology parted from the study of kinship. This development has often been attributed to the publication of an edited volume, African Political Systems by Meyer Fortes and Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard in 1940. Here, we reprint short parts of their seminal introduction to illustrate how contrastive classifications of politics, such as ‘small scale’ or ‘kin based’ with ‘state based’, were related to a narrative of modern politics as purified of kinship. Following up on these conceptual and empirical partitions, the remaining chapters document the theoretical and empirical challenges of their always-blurred boundaries. Secondly, the contributions show the work these normative boundaries nonetheless do and also, finally, the work invested into their (re)production.

The text by Carol Delaney presents a feminist critique that problematises the separation of politics and kinship as naturalising gender hierarchies. It follows the argument of Susan McKinnon’s text, which takes up the seemingly neutral conceptual division between societies that separate kinship from politics and those who do not, showing its potential for political use. With the example of the United States of America, she shows how this classification played out in the stigmatisation of parts of the population, who through their specific kinship practices such as cousin marriage were deemed politically ‘backward’. The contribution, by Thomas Zitelmann, takes up this line by tracing how of this idea of societies that do not separate kinship ‘enough’ from politics or who have ‘too much kinship’ becomes applied in military strategy, where it is built into distinguishing enemies and concrete war strategies.

Despite the persuasiveness and stability of the idea of a modern separation between state and kinship, it was always also challenged in empirical research. We include an example by Max Gluckman, who highlights the double embeddedness of the ‘village headman’ in local kinship relationships as well as in colonial rule. This double embeddedness is not limited to the colonial context, as the last article in this part, written by Tatjana Thelen, André Thiemann and Duška Roth demonstrates. Researching the interactions of state-employed care workers with their elderly clients in Serbia, the authors present a relational perspective arguing that the constant mirroring of state and kinship and investment in their boundary is part of the coproduction of both. All the texts in Part I point to the productivity of the normative separation of politics and kinship for the self-descriptions of ‘modern’ societies linked to processes of othering (and thereby potentially causing and stabilising inequality and marginalisation).

Sources and acknowledgements

1. Meyer Fortes and Edwards E. Evans-Pritchard. Introduction to African Political Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute, 1940), Introduction, 1–23. © 1987. Reprinted with permission of the International African Institute.
2. Susan McKinnon. Kinship within and beyond the ‘Movement of Progressive Societies.’ Reprinted by permission from Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship, edited by Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell. © 2013 by the School of Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico. All rights reserved.
3. Thomas Zitelmann. “Kinship weaponized: Representations of kinship and binary othering in U.S. military anthropology.” In Reconnecting State and Kinship, edited by Tatjana Thelen, and Erdmute Alber, 61–86. © 2018 by University of Pennsylvania Press. Reprinted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.
4. Carol Delaney. Father State, Motherland, and the birth of modern Turkey. From: Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, edited by Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney. © 1995 by Routledge. Reproduced with permission of Taylor & Francis Group LLC (Books) US through PLSclear.
5. Max Gluckman. The village headman in British Central Africa: Introduction, pages 89–94 from Gluckman, M. (1949). The Village Headman in British Central Africa. Africa, 19(2), 89–106. © International African Institute 1949, published by Cambridge University Press.
6. Tatjana Thelen, André Thiemann and Duška Roth. State kinning and kinning the state in Serbian Elder Care Programs. In Stategraphy. Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State, edited by Tatjana Thelen, Larissa Vetters, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann. © 2018 by Berghahn. Reproduced by permission of the authors and Berghahn Books Inc.

1AFRICAN POLITICAL SYSTEMSIntroduction

Meyer Fortes and Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard

DOI: 10.4324/9781003003595-3

1. Aims of this book

One object we had in initiating this study was to provide a convenient reference book for anthropologists. We also hope that it will be a contribution to the discipline of comparative politics. We feel sure that the first object has been attained, for the societies described are representative of common types of African political systems and, taken together, they enable a student to appreciate the great variety of such types. [...] The eight systems described are widely distributed in the continent. Most of the forms described are variants of a pattern of political organization found among contiguous or neighbouring societies, so that this book covers, by implication, a very large part of Africa. We are aware that not every type of political system found in Africa is represented, but we believe that all the major principles of African political organization are brought out in these essays.

Several contributors have described the changes in the political systems they investigated which have taken place as a result of European conquest and rule. If we do not emphasize this side of the subject it is because all contributors are more interested in anthropological than in administrative problems. We do not wish to imply, however, that anthropology is indifferent to practical affairs. The policy of Indirect Rule is now generally accepted in British Africa. We would suggest that it can only prove advantageous in the long run if the principles of African political systems, such as this book deals with, are understood.

[…]

4. The two types of political system studied

It will be noted that the political systems described in this book fall into two main categories. One group, which we refer to as Group A, consists of those societies which have centralized authority, administrative machinery, and judicial institutions—in short, a government—and in which cleavages of wealth, privilege, and status correspond to the distribution of power and authority. This group comprises the Zulu, the Ngwato, the Bemba, the Banyankole, and the Kede. The other group, which we refer to as Group B, consists of those societies which lack centralized authority, administrative machinery, and constituted judicial institutions—in short which lack government—and in which there are no sharp divisions of rank, status, or wealth. This group comprises the Logoli, the Tallensi, and the Nuer. Those who consider that a state should be defined by the presence of governmental institutions will regard the first group as primitive states and the second group as stateless societies.

The kind of information related and the kind of problems discussed in a description of each society have largely depended on the category to which it belongs. Those who have studied societies of Group A are mainly concerned to describe governmental organization. They therefore give an account of the status of kings and classes, the roles of administrative officials of one kind or another, the privileges of rank, the differences in wealth and power, the regulation of tax and tribute, the territorial divisions of the state and their relation to its central authority, the rights of subjects and the obligations of rulers, and the checks on authority. Those who studied societies of Group B had no such matters to discuss and were therefore forced to consider what, in the absence of explicit forms of government, could be held to constitute the political structure of a people. This problem was simplest among the Nuer, who have very distinct territorial divisions. The difficulty was greater for the Logoli and Tallensi, who have no clear spatially-defined political units.

5. Kinship in political organization

One of the outstanding differences between the two groups is the part played by the lineage system in political structure. We must here distinguish between the set of relationships linking the individual to other persons and to particular social units through the transient, bilateral family, which we shall call the kinship system, and the segmentary system of permanent, unilateral descent groups, which we call the lineage system. Only the latter establishes corporate units with political functions. In both groups of societies kinship and domestic ties have an important role in the lives of individuals, but their relation to the political system is of a secondary order. In the societies of Group A it is the administrative organization, in societies of Group B the segmentary lineage system, which primarily regulates political relations between territorial segments.

This is clearest among the Ngwato, whose political system resembles the pattern with which we are familiar in the modern nation-state. The political unit is essentially a territorial grouping wherein the plexus of kinship ties serves merely to cement those already established by membership of the ward, district, and nation. In societies of this type the state is never the kinship system writ large, but is organized on totally different principles. In societies of Group B kinship ties appear to play a more prominent role in political organization, owing to the close association of territorial grouping with lineage grouping, but it is still only a secondary role.

It seems probable to us that three types of political system can be distinguished. Firstly, there are those very small societies, none of which are described in this book, in which even the largest, political unit embraces a group of people all of whom are united to one another by ties of kinship, so that political relations are coterminous with kinship relations and the political structure and kinship organization are completely fused. Secondly, there are societies in which a lineage structure is the framework of the political system, there being a precise co-ordination between the two, so that they are consistent with each other, though each remains distinct and autonomous in its own sphere. Thirdly, there are societies in which an administrative organization is the framework of the political structure.

The numerical and territorial range of a political system would vary according to the type to which it belongs. A kinship system would seem to be incapable of uniting such large numbers of persons into a single organization for defence and the settlement of disputes by arbitration as a lineage system and a lineage system incapable of uniting such numbers as an administrative system.

[…]

2Kinship within and beyond the “Movement of Progressive Societies”

Susan McKinnon

DOI: 10.4324/9781003003595-4

Every anthropological investigation of kinship sets out from one variant or another of the idea that kinship is somehow more important to the working of simple societies than of complex ones, and that in the course of their development complex societies have substituted something else for kinship. If Maine was not the first to come up with the idea, he gave it its motto. From status to contract might well adorn the family crest of anthropology.

—Thomas R. Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship

On September 28, 2003, John Tierney published an article in the New York Times entitled “Iraq’s Family Bonds Complicate U.S. Efforts.” Tierney painted a portrait of two worlds...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Endorsements Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITORS
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• POLITICS AND KINSHIP: AN INTRODUCTION
• PART I STARTING FROM POLITICS: PARTITIONS AND BOUNDARIES: INTRODUCTION TO PART I
• PART II STARTING FROM KINSHIP: TECHNOLOGIES AND TRAVELS: INTRODUCTION TO PART II
• PART III REPRODUCTIONS: TRANSMISSIONS AND FUTURE MAKING: INTRODUCTION TO PART III
• SUBJECT INDEX
• INDEX OF PERSONS