1 The recent publication of four works in kinship studies [1] offers an opportunity to take stock of developments in knowledge and theoretical orientations in this prestigious social science field. Kinship studies long held an eminent position in anthropology while being almost entirely absent from sociology of the family. In the last two decades, their position in both disciplines has been reassessed. In anthropology, kinship studies as classically conceived (functionalist or structuralist) ran out of steam, [2] falling victim to a post-modernist “deconstructivist” critique just as it was gaining influence in sociology of the family, which was broadening its investigations into kinship relations and networks. These developments worked to blur the distinction between the two disciplines, and the idea that comparison was possible between kinship in the west and kinship elsewhere in the world no longer seemed absurd.

2The studies reviewed here were marked by these changed frames of understanding. But they are also indicative of further new developments. New research objects are emerging, hitherto untried analytic perspectives are being taken up in what should now more properly be called simply “kinship studies”, given how secondary the question has become of whether they are done in anthropology or sociology. Kinship studies in both France and the Anglophone world are currently attracting new interest, though this is not immediately perceptible because the “kinship” research object has been moving around under other names, becoming associated with new research issues–gender, sexuality, images of the body, ideas of “personhood”– that are in turn reshaping that object. To accurately grasp this reconfiguration, it is salutary to return to a recent moment in kinship studies and consider a work particularly unfamiliar to French researchers, written by an atypical anthropologist, David M. Schneider, whose questions and conclusions of twenty years ago have once again become intensely relevant.

David M Schneider : gravedigger or reformer ?

3David M. Schneider (1918-1995) was an important figure in North American anthropological study of kinship. His writings were discussed and debated in full in the 1970s and 1980s. He himself was an active participant in the discipline’s main controversies for a period of forty years. In France, however, his work is virtually unknown. None of his books has been published in French, and most introductory kinship study texts devote no more than a few lines to him, with the significant exception of F. Zimmerman’s Enquête sur la parenté (1993). [3] This wrong has been partly righted thanks to a new journal, Incidence, situated at the intersection of the humanities and the social sciences. [4] The journal’s first issue (October 2005) is devoted entirely to Schneider. In addition to ten articles, it offers the precious resource of three “reference texts”; i.e., French translations of excerpts from two of Schneider’s main works.

4Schneider’s first work, American Kinship: A Cultural Account, was published in 1968. The author, hardly a neophyte at the time, was known for his studies of the Yap (inhabitants of an island in the Micronesian archipelago where he did his first field work in the early 1950s), [5] of North American kinship (the terminology system [6] and sibling relations [7] ), as well as for his contribution to the debate on the nature of kinship. This debate dates back to the 1957 publication of an article by Ernest Gellner in Philosophy of Science, and it continued through 1964. It bore on the anthropological definition of kinship and whether or not it was necessary to refer to kinship’s biological dimension. Among the implicated anthropologists were R. Needham, J. A. Barnes, J. H. M. Beattie and Schneider, who was the last to take a position. [8]

5There were two conflicting options. Gellner put forward the idea that the social dimension of kinship could only be correctly studied if it was understood as a “function” of biological kinship. [9] While kinship relations should not be reduced to or confused with their physical substratum, they did refer back to that substratum regularly and systematically, either by adding to it, omitting it or distorting it. [10] Barnes and Beattie objected that social anthropology dealt exclusively with social facts, and claimed that kinship should be studied as a pure social construction. Schneider’s contribution (in the form of a response to Beattie) represented a kind of third way. He rejected Beattie’s idea that kinship was no more than an idiom for expressing political, religious or economic relations. The fact that kinship was an idiom in no way implied that it was devoid of specific content. Schneider thus recommended studying the nature of the cultural representations that make up a given kinship idiom, and put forward the following hypothesis : “Kinship as a symbol system is built on consanguineal and affinal elements” (Schneider, 1964, p. 181). He concluded his article by suggesting the relevance of examining kinship in western societies (the United States, England, France), which seemed to him for methodological reasons to offer the best observatory, since political, ritual, religious and economic functions were not as closely associated with kinship relations in those societies as in the ones traditionally studied by anthropologists.

6American Kinship, published in 1968 and extended in the second, 1980 edition, offers the results of just this investigation. In the introduction to the issue of Incidence on Schneider, Wilgaux writes : “Schneider [...] develops a symbolic approach to American kinship, grasping culture as a set of meanings and symbols” (p. 11). As C. Salazar points out in the same issue, [11] the influence of Parsons’cultural system theory is patent. [12] As a system of meanings and symbols, culture is distinct from the social structure–Schneider was breaking here with British social anthropology (which he considered mere “comparative sociology”) [13] and advocating a cultural or symbolic anthropology of kinship. In Chapter 7 of his book, added in the 1980 edition, he claimed in opposition to Clifford Geertz [14] that it was both necessary and legitimate to study culture without taking social action into account. [15]

7Schneider offered a two-part answer to the question of how North American culture defined a relative. [16] There were two symbolic kinship orders : nature and the law. In terms of nature, relatives were persons who shared natural, biogenetic substances, as symbolized by the indigenous term “blood”. In terms of law, relatives were persons who followed a certain code of conduct. North American kinship involved an opposition between two sets of symbols : kinship “by blood”, which was material, permanent and inalienable (examples being the tie between two brothers or a mother and her child) and kinship “by marriage”, based on a human-imposed order and referring to morals, law and custom. “Blood” relations were considered superior to “legal” ones; the first were in fact the model for the second. Shared biogenetic substance was of greater importance than conventions defining the content of behavior, [17] and this created an almost mystical state : “A blood relationship is a relation of identity. People who are blood relatives share a common identity, they believe. [...] [A]spects like temperament, build, physiognomy and habits are noted as signs of this shared biological makeup, this special identity of relatives with each other. A parent, particularly a mother, may speak of a child as ‘part of me’” (Schneider, 1980, p. 25, quoted in French translation in Incidence, p. 217).

8In this cultural representation of kinship, procreative sexual intercourse is central. It is the moment when love links the two aspects of kinship, the one that involves a shared substance and therefore cognatic love between parents and children, and the one pertaining to the law and norms of conduct between parents and therefore to conjugal love. The combining of these two forms of love gives rise to “enduring, diffuse solidarity” among family members, implying trust, support and cooperation. [18] Commenting on Schneider, Zimmerman rightly speaks of a “spontaneous biologism” that gives the blood tie “legislative power over our feelings and conduct” (Zimmermann, 1993, p. 185). Schneider later summed up this idea with the aphorism “Blood is thicker than water”.

9In his article for Incidence, Salazar analyzes Schneider’s move from American Kinship to his fundamental work, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984). What could still be read as biological reductionism fairly close to Gellner’s position–yet this would be a tendencious reading because the anthropologist himself was working on the ground of indigenous representations, not facts– became in 1984 a thoroughgoing critique of any and all anthropology of kinship. In 1968, Schneider thought he had demonstrated, on the basis of the North American case, that kinship had specific symbolic content. Shortly thereafter, the “enduring, diffuse solidarity” he had claimed to identify no longer appeared a specific feature of North American kinship, since most of the same symbols could also be found in connection with nationality and religion in North America (Schneider, [1969] 1987). From then on, he invested considerable energy in denying that kinship constituted a specific cultural domain in North America. Ultimately, he reached the conclusion that kinship was a “non-subject”, that it didn’t exist in American culture any more than it did in any human society. If anthropologists studied kinship, this was because they were prisoner to the naturalist presupposition (the one he had decerned and presented in American Kinship) that “blood is thicker than water”. A Critique of the Study of Kinship –this time an epistemological analysis– was meant to deal “the death-blow” (Godelier, 2004, p. 28) to the prestigious edifice of kinship studies. It is true that Schneider’s assault had been preceded by a number of stinging criticisms elicited in the context of another debate. In 1961 E. Leach in Rethinking Anthropology had sought to demonstrate that kinship was merely a language for expressing the weightiest social realities, such as relations to land and property and declared that kinship systems had no reality. Ten years later, R. Needham concluded his long introduction to Rethinking Kinship and Marriage (1971) with these words : “The term ‘kinship’ is probably fallacious and the wrong criterion for comparing social facts. It refers to no distinct category of phenomena or type of theory. It meets no requirement for competence or authority.” (Needham, 1971). [19]

10In A Critique of the Study of Kinship Schneider aimed to show that all kinship anthropology since L. H. Morgan shared the western representations brought to light in his American Kinship and that “kinship only exists in the minds of anthropologists” (Salazar in Incidence, p. 38). To develop his argument and convince the reader of the mystifying effect of the naturalist presuppositions characteristic of western culture, he criticized his own earlier studies of the Yap. He had described a dual filiation system founded on a basic social unit, the tabinau, identified as a patrilineage. Thirty years later, returning to his analyses of Yap representations of procreation, he concluded that his interpretation had been wrong : what linked tabinau members to each other was not actually kinship but rather real cooperation in working a single plot of land –and it was this work alone that was the basis for land inheritance. Schneider concluded that there was no such thing as a patrilineage in Yap. Classical descent-group theory posited the preeminence of being over doing; Schneider now believed this should be reversed. For the Yap there was no genealogical relation among members of a tabinau; a “child” inherited from his “father” because of the way he behaved toward him (respectful, obediently cooperative in work) more a matter of doing than being.

11The heart of the problem, as Schneider saw it, was that kinship theories assumed that genealogy was universal. Was there any reason to believe that ties arising from procreation and marriage had cultural significance everywhere and were therefore commensurable ? This view, which posits that kinship is first and foremost a matter of procreation, human biological reproduction, made implicit use of the western “blood is thicker than water” axiom and thereby distorted analysis of the societies in question. The idea was that from the outset anthropology of kinship had consensually accepted what Schneider called “the doctrine of the genealogical unity of mankind”, the idea that any and all kinship systems are based on a universal genealogical structure that develops out of a primal core; i.e. the nuclear family. [20] While not excluding the possibility that kinship was specific only to Euro-American culture, Schneider rejected “genealogical reasoning” [21] and called for refounding anthropology on a new basis : “The first task of anthropology, prerequisite to all others, is to understand and formulate the symbols and meanings and their configuration that a particular culture consists of” (Schneider, 1984, p. 196; quoted in French in Incidence, p. 241). Anthropology should therefore study the categories of each particular culture; it should stop proceeding as if what was different were similar, as if there were a universal vocabulary and grammar in every empirical domain. The genealogical grid could be applied from the outset; it was at best a hypothesis that had to be checked.

12If we follow Schneider, all studies on kinship had been in vain and done no more than to turn western assumptions into anthropological truths. This radical position in turn provoked several critiques; Maurice Godelier’s will be examined in detail further on, but for now we can return to Salazar’s and Porqueres I Géné’s in Incidence. Salazar points out the aporia of Schneider’s cultural conception of anthropology. Schneider maintained that nothing existed outside culture. Blood ties and nature in general had no particular existence of their own independent of how each culture defined them. This relativist approach raised problems. The work of reconstituting local symbolic systems, i.e., the particular workings of each system, made “translation” and comparison delicate, perhaps even impossible matters. Each “cultural ontology” [22] underlying reality becomes an idiosyncrasy specific to a particular society and has to be analyzed on its own terms. Those ontologies are therefore indeed incommensurable. Schneider’s stance, by its very radicalism, had shown the impasses of constructivism when it is taken to its logical extreme. Porqueres i Géné, meanwhile, shows that Schneider could not really rid himself of the biological component, especially in his writings on the incest prohibition. [23]

13Sexual prohibitions among the Yap, just like marriage between close relatives in other populations (Hawaii, ancient Egypt and Iran), [24] were justified by means of a rhetoric of blood : the first case involved an association with animality and endocannibalism; the second a concern to maintain the sacred qualities inherent “in the blood”. About the incest prohibition we can only observe that for many it is the irreducible kernel of kinship : “the presence of the biological referent–i.e., ‘consubstantiality’”: a sharing of material substance by way of transmission through filiation, sexual contact, the sharing of food– in the entire set of rights and obligations that tie individuals to each other” (Porqueres i Géné in Incidence, p. 96). [25]

14If we were to take Schneider literally, we would have to deny all heuristic value to the notion of kinship and abandon kinship studies, for all we could ever discover in other cultures are our own presuppositions. But a more moderate interpretation, allowing a margin for provocation in the author’s stance, leaves us with an entirely different image : far from digging the grave of kinship studies, Schneider was among those who renewed and reformed them. He had in fact made it clear that as soon as one begins to seriously study cultural representations of the process of conception, genealogical relations among individuals cannot be reduced to biological ones as they are understood in western culture (i.e., blood relations). Kinship does have a biological or bodily referent, but how that referent is referred to differs from one society and one culture to the next. In the 1980s and 1990s, studies of kinship centered on representations around the conception of human beings. In this respect, Schneider’s critique represented a real turning point.

Kinship as belief

15“So the death foretold did not occur !” Maurice Godelier wrote recently in Métamorphoses de la parenté (2004, p. 32). Godelier’s book of course goes far beyond this observation. At nearly 700 pages, it is both an anthropology of kinship treatise that takes into account the greater part of the classical notions and theories of the discipline [26] while providing extremely useful appendices (glossary of technical terms, cartograms of the societies mentioned, an 800-entry bibliography, diagrams and boxed key information, concept, author and society indexes), and a book with an argument to contribute to the kinship studies debate. The work can be divided into four parts : a presentation of classical kinship studies components (descent, alliance/marriage, residence, kinship terminology); an analysis of representations of how human beings are conceived and the social effects of those representations; the incest prohibition and how it has been and may be interpreted–on this point Godelier goes against Lévi-Strauss; and kinship over history, how it has changed, what its future is likely to be. In this section I am concerned exclusively with the second of these matters; the other three are discussed in the last part of the article.

16On the basis of approximately 15 case studies, Godelier explores representations of how human beings are conceived; that is, ethnobiological ideas pertaining to the body and procreation. The example of the Baruya of New Guinea is presented at length and serves as a paradigm. [27] In this patrilineal society, the understanding is that intercourse between a man and woman is required to create a child : the man’s sperm creates the child’s bones but also its flesh and blood, whereas the woman contributes nothing (nothing passes from her body to the child’s), [28] her belly being understood as a kind of receptacle which the sperm penetrates and the child’s body develops in. However, sexual intercourse is not enough. The fetus would not have a nose, eyes, mouth or fingers “if the Sun did not come and fashion all these missing organs in the woman’s belly, then adding breath to the now human body” (Godelier, 2004, p. 256). When the child is born, it only acquires a soul by acquiring a name. The father names the child, choosing from a stock of names specific to his patrilineage, thus attaching the child to its ancestors. Moreover, conception of boys is different from conception of girls. Boys are engendered twice, once by father and mother, the second time by the set of physically adult males, during male initiation rituals that start at age 9 and are spread over approximately the following ten years. The initiation ritual is carried out exclusively among men and is directed against women. The point is to rid the initiates’ bodies of anything female they might still contain. The young initiate is forced to take the penis of each of the pubescent (and virgin) [29] initiates into his mouth and to swallow their sperm. This “ritual homosexuality” ensures that semen uncontaminated by any female stain will circulate among the men from generation to generation; that semen is understood to nourish the boys and to reengender them in such a way as to make them stronger and more virile than their mere biological engendering did. The Sun is repeatedly invoked during these rituals and is understood to be continuously present. With the help of the Sun, and without women, the group of young men reengender the boys. This collective engendering is also a cosmic event. The belief in the sacredness of sperm goes together with a phobia of menstrual blood, perceived as “antisperm” capable of destroying male strength. Overall, in Baruya society, conception beliefs lift the world of men definitively above that of women and are in keeping with a fundamental component of that kinship system : patrilineality. [30]

17After presenting numerous other cases from different continents (Inuit, Trobriand, Kako of Gabon and others), Godelier draws a few general lessons. First,“in no society do a man and a woman alone suffice to create a child” (p. 325). The intervention of other agents, more powerful than humans–divinities, spirits and/or ancestors [31] – is required in order for the child to be complete, viable–human, in a word. The second is that the individual is never reduced to the bodily substances of which s/he is made. The observer must take into account, for example, one or several souls, breath, the life force–the specifics vary by case but the point is that these are non-bodily components implying the action of non-human agents. In this sense, the effect of conception beliefs is to inscribe the individual into a social and cosmic whole that exceeds the world of kinship relations. They also legitimate appropriation of the child by a group of adults and the nature of the descent principle recognized in the given society, though the two do not always correspond perfectly. [32] Third, the role of bodily substances has an imaginary character and refers back to beliefs. In agreement with Schneider on this point, Godelier claims that we cannot generalize the representation of sperm as seed to all cultures. He notes for certain societies (the Trobriand Islands, for example) [33] the important role of food, of ingesting certain dishes, and of the soil that has held these foods within it–soil fertilized by the flesh of the dead. These representations, as arbitrary as the words of a language, are taken for granted by the society’s natives. They are materialized in its institutions and practices.

18Godelier’s last point–the most fundamental, in his understanding– is that these bodily and non-bodily substances necessary to human conception create sex-specific bodies : “[They] constitute social attributes of the sexes, thereby transforming them into ‘genders’”(p. 337). The substances create fundamental inequalities that are expressed in relations of domination and subordination by individual’s sex, as seen with the Baruya. Representations of how human beings are conceived concern more than kinship relations. They are a response to social issues that go beyond kinship, issues involving the social order and reproduction of that order. Representations of human bodies, the various substances of which the body is composed, partake in the development of an order that is not only sexual but social and cosmic. “This means that the human body is at the intersection of kinship relations and politicoreligious relations, [34] relations marked by all sorts of ordinary and ritual power exerted in the spheres of public and private life” (p. 268). At the heart of kinship relations are social issues that do not originate in kinship. Rather it is by way of those kinship relations that the society can in part reproduce itself. In every society, then, a “dual metamorphosis” is at work (p. 508, pp. 528-529): social content becomes kinship content, in the sense that social relations penetrate kinship relations and subordinate them to the imperative of reproducing “themselves” (i.e., of reproducing existing social relations); whatever becomes kinship content gets imprinted on the body, determining the differences between the sexes and transforming sex into gender.

19At this stage, we can consider where Godelier stands with respect to Schneider. He agrees with Schneider that no society, however “primitive”, is founded on kinship; “kin-based societies” only exist in ethnographic accounts. However–and on this point Godelier clearly rejects Schneider’s analysis– kinship is not merely an invention of western anthropologists. It exists at the intersection of descent modes, marriage rules and representations of what a child is, and it refers back to a basis that is both biological and social, even though it is inhabited by other realities (material, political and religious), which are reproduced at the same time. The result is that, though specific, kinship relations are never and nowhere completely autonomous. The social relations they are invested with create content that varies in social terms : kinship obviously has neither the same meaning nor the same social function for a peasant with no inheritance to transmit and a lord endowed with titles, land and a glorious ancestry. Extreme caution is therefore in order when making general claims about the importance of kinship in one or another society.

20These analyses, which dispute some of the more radical aspects of Schneider’s, [35] are based on the vast amount of kinship study research done since the 1980s on representations of the person and human conception. While many of these studies claim to be in line with Schneider and his critique of “genealogical reasoning”, Godelier’s use of them is not in line with Schneider’s thinking or aims. For Godelier, analysis of cultural symbols and representations (beliefs about procreation, for example) should not be isolated from analysis of social behavior and the practical necessities that such behavior responds to. He rightly insists that representations of how human beings are conceived are invested with social issues and materials that exceed them and are related to the social order and its reproduction. This gives his analyses a materialist orientation that is diametrically opposed to Schneider’s intellectualism.

21The need to integrate analysis of representations and analysis of relations, symbols and actions is even more energetically affirmed and tackled in studies that consider kinship the fruit of socially situated practices and experiences; that is, a social process constructed (and sometimes destroyed) by means of relations among individuals.

Kinship as practice

22With Florence Weber’s study, we change worlds, turning now to kinship in the west–specifically France. Weber presents her book, Le sang, le nom, le quotidien [Blood, the name, the everyday] (2005) as “a sociology of practical kinship”. “Practical kinship” refers to the set of obligations and feelings that give meaning to official kinship ties or create other ties, and that make all those ties effective. [36] It is a sum of social experiences that exceeds the set of kinship rules (family morals, the law). “Analyzing practical kinship requires restoring each person’s words, words of experience and interaction. [...] It implies reflecting on the collective frameworks of singular experiences and interactions” (Weber, 2005, p. 16). Weber’s research focuses on the “genesis of kinship feelings” and aims to identify the “cognitive frames for interactions and exchanges” among relatives. She thus discerns diverse cognitive frames (or styles or “registers” of filiation) and diverse types of collective functioning logic; in some cases these types overlap, but they are more likely to operate alongside each other in complex ways.

23The investigation method here is an original one, based on analysis of eight cases that represent borderline family situations where nothing can be taken for granted. These cases, also related to different moments or periods in the life cycle (birth, childhood, the dependency of either sick or elderly persons, death), bring to light the complexity of kinship feelings, their relative incoherence, the tensions and conflicts among protagonists when it comes to domestic activities of caring for or organizing care for individual members, for example. They amount to natural experimentation, where things that are usually not discussed or that are often confused with each other may be sensed and identified. Each case is analyzed in careful detail. Overall, five of the six chapters are devoted to the case studies, making this a highly ethnographic work. [37] The author nonetheless draws several general conclusions, first presented within the case analyses, then for the most part recapitulated in the last two chapters. I will focus here on those general conclusions.

24Referring to conclusions reached in her earlier studies (Weber, 2002; Gramain and Weber, 2003), the author identifies three types of family membership and ways of functioning collectively, as manifested in the situations studied. These are the lineage, kindred, and the maisonnée. [38] For analytic purposes, they correspond to distinct kinship feelings. The lineage implies a feeling of symbolic affiliation (“where I come from”); kindred implies a feeling of elective affinity (“you and me”) and the maisonnée implies a feeling of everyday belonging (“at our house”). In extremely classical fashion, the lineage refers to transmission and affiliation, kindred to an egocentric network of dyadic relations. [39] The maisonnée is a more original notion.

25The term emphasizes residence or local proximity as well as the economic dimension of the group thus constituted; inspiration for it comes from 1970s and 1980s neo-Marxist economic anthropology. [40] The maisonnée designates a “collective of persons mobilized around a common cause, whatever the motive for that mobilization” (p. 150). It could be taking care of a sick or elderly member, the plan to construct a house, a young member’s education or settlement plans, etc. The maisonnée is an unstable group, because the common cause may cease to be relevant, and its contours are not fixed. Some of the individuals participating in it are tied to each other by name or blood, others only by an elective affinity relation which involves neither consanguinity or marriage (this can involve a neighbor or even someone who receives a wage, such as a regular childminder). In all these cases, the group is based on the division of domestic labor and distribution of resources among members. It incarnates a form of practical, everyday solidarity.

26Identifying these family collectives, collectives that in only very few cases correspond to the literal boundaries of the house, [41] is crucial in Weber’s understanding because it enables the researcher to fully grasp what membership in them is by analyzing domestic production and, more broadly, kinship relations. Contrary to economic models, which the author believes are likely to reduce kinship ties to mere interindividual relations, Weber is working to identify the different groups in behalf of which each individual acts, and the positions that inform their actions. This leads to a critical dialogue with economics. A well-established collaborative relationship between sociology and economics should, according to Weber, allow for more precisely and accurately explaining what individuals in a kinship situation are doing; i.e., how their relations get constructed, whether or not the groups are transformed into collectives (either episodic or enduring) and what types of social practices they produce. [42]

27To understand how these kinship collectives are constructed, Weber looks at the cognitive and moral frames that shape persons’actions. [43] These can be related to Schneider’s symbols in American Kinship and Godelier’s representations, the difference being that they are not a matter exclusively of culture, as in Schneider’s thinking, but instead bring into play extremely different aspects of the sociopolitical context (class-based position, generation, family law, social legislation, etc.) and only exceptionally constitute coherent wholes (contrary to Godelier’s representations of conception and human bodies). Weber identifies three distinct frames or “registers” of filiation” –these give the book its title. Being tied together by name represents a legal tie, instituted by the state and regulating transmission of name and property. In France this pertains to marriage or, if there is no marriage, official recognition of a child, i.e., an act of will whose effect is to inscribe the child in a kinship line, thus activating an obligation to care for needs (the same obligation that marriage activates for the two spouses’ lines). The blood tie is biological and involves feelings. It is affected by changes in biomedical knowledge and techniques (the possibility of using blood tests to determine paternity, of dissociating sexuality and reproduction through new reproductive technologies) but also by social, legal and psychological norms pertaining to kinship. [44] To these two types or styles–blood and the name, which evoke Schneider’s orders of law and nature [45] – the author adds a third, more volatile one : the everyday. This tie does not have the permanence of either an individual will guaranteed by the state or a scientifically establishable fact; it is instead a matter of co-residence, upbringing, affective and material ties (household chores or projects, care given and received, etc.). It is directly implicated in and affected by changes in roles and mores.

28The fitting together of these three types, styles or areas is what produces practical kinship. [46] Blood, the name and the everyday–which, in the golden age of the nuclear family, were thought of as perfectly overlapping– seldom overlap in the cases the author studied, whatever the life-cycle stage. This means that the individuals in question experience filiation as incoherent. And this in turn means that it is not at all clear to them what their feelings and behavior should be. Different, more or less legitimate ideas of kinship collide with each other, conflict. Who should be thought of as close ? Who should help take care of the elderly or sick member and in what proportions ? Who is the “real” father, the one whose name the child bears (and who in some cases is not his or her biological father) or the one who lives or lived with the child every day ? Who is or are the legitimate heirs ? Not only are the contours of the kin group blurred, varying by individual and individual experience, but they turn out to be shifting and malleable. Membership in a maisonnée, for example, is almost always based on including certain individuals and excluding others : certain circumstances (disease, divorce, widowhood) determine for a time the boundaries of the collective of persons working for a common cause or trying to cope with a specific difficult situation. On the other hand, this everyday kinship can be literally effaced by a death : the ties of daily life do not weigh much when official kinship, ties of blood and name, are put into the scales. Death can destroy a maisonnée. Death in any case is a guarantee of priority for official relatives over “affinity or affect” relatives.

29This is illustrated by the story of Violette. [47] Born in 1957 to Henriette and her first husband, Violette was taken in charge at 18 months by Maurice A., her mother’s second husband, whom she thought of as her father. Three years later, this second marriage led to the birth of twin girls. Then in 1982 Maurice and Henriette got divorced. Violette continued to see Maurice after the divorce. She lived in the family home in Provence where Maurice and his two daughters spent three months a year (a house where Maurice’s father and mother, his brother, married sister and her two children also lived more or less periodically, as well as Henriette’s mother on occasion). After serious quarrels in 1984, then again in 1991, Maurice threw Violette out of the house. When he died in 1998, a new conflict surfaced, this time opposing Violette and her two half-sisters on the matter of Maurice’s death and estate. After being excluded from her former household by Maurice, Violette was now excluded from the A. line by the twins. At stake in the conflict was the family home. Maurice’s funeral brought Violette’s exclusion and illegitimacy into relief. She gave a funeral speech that her twin half-sisters considered out of place and was refused any right to inherit. The more insistently Violette claimed her place as eldest daughter, the more insistently the other relatives (particularly the twins) pointed out to her that she had usurped that place : “But you’re not his daughter, you’ve never borne his name, you never got along, you never loved him” (p. 80). These cases enable us to measure the instability and vulnerability of maisonnée contours, the precedence of official kinship ties upon death, and the complexity of accounts for determining inheritance. The conflict bears on the norms for sharing and the “perimeter” of heirdom. To schematize, Violette was reasoning in “maisonnée” terms whereas her two half-sisters were reasoning in “lineage” terms.

30In an attempt to hierarchically order the three filiation registers, Weber stresses the strength of blood ties (which she had not expected to find) but specifies that this power is above all negative. The case of Violette and others in the book show that absence of a blood tie undermines the other two components of kinship, especially when they are already dissociated. Without blood ties, everyday kinship that has no legal foundation either is very weak. Conversely, if the other two dimensions are missing, the blood tie alone does not suffice to create kinship. The real difficulty, already pointed out in other studies (Le Gall and Bettahar, 2001), is having several filiations. Rather than combining or dovetailing with each other, the cognitive and moral frames conflict, intensifying the incoherence of filiation for the individuals concerned.

31The situation of kinship in western societies thus appears much more complex than the binary, static vision Schneider put forward in 1968. Prevalence of the biogenetic tie and the two symbolic orders of nature and the law do not adequately capture that situation. [48] Moreover–and here the criticism is of Godelier (though his analysis of representations of the body and human conception bears essentially on non-western societies) [49] –the coexistence of such frames in individuals’lives means that what the frames themselves are is not at all clear to them. Weber contests the idea that filiation is a coherent whole encompassing the individual’s life from birth to death, insisting, on the contrary, that it is a process constructed (and also destroyed) by successive moments in everyday life, according to events and how they are interpreted by the various protagonists. Periods of routine may be followed by periods of crisis during which filiation types or styles and contours are redefined. Transposing Bourdieu’s renowned critique of life-story narratives, Weber writes : “Like the biographical illusion, the familial illusion creates continuity out of discontinuity” (p. 254). In direct contrast to classical theories of kinship, Weber affirms that priority should be given to doing over being, to what individuals’ doing constructs rather than to what is given–precisely what Schneider did in A Critique of the Study of Kinship when he revised his analysis of the tabinau among the Yap. In this sense, Weber’s research partakes of a late-Schneiderian approach and can be considered a move in the direction of Anglophone new kinship studies. [50] We are back to the question at the heart of the extremely lively debate of the 1960s : what is the nature of kinship ?

What is kinship ?

32Schneider’s work could conceivably have laid kinship studies in their grave. But the fact that the field took on new life in the 1980s is hardly due to chance and suggests instead that his influence worked to renew it. His contributions, particularly on the issue of the relation between the biological and the social, offer an excellent means for assessing current theoretical stances in the field of kinship studies. This may be illustrated by comparing Godelier’s analyses with the new kinship studies analyses presented by J. Carsten in her latest book, After Kinship (2004). Up against the “new wave” incarnated by Carsten, Godelier cuts a neoclassical figure, renewing certain aspects of the classical edifice while remaining fundamentally loyal to it.