Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Kinship

Adoption

Felix Stein — Thu, 07 Jun 2018 11:20:08 +0000

Brown University

Initially published 7 Jun 2018

Abstract:

What is adoption? To answer this question is to jump directly into one of the key controversies of anthropology: anthropologists, associated for over a century with the close study of kinship relationships, are quite hesitant to privilege ‘biological kinship’ over ‘social kinship’, and the category ‘adoption’ may unwittingly do that. On the other hand, reviewing what anthropologists have learned about adoption, fostering, and child welfare reveals some important understandings of how people make families and become parents and children to one another. Those findings resonate with what the great social scientist Émile Durkheim contended more than a century ago: that kinship is social or it is nothing. Adoptions around the world demonstrate that the intentional claiming of a kinsperson or a kin group, and the everyday acts (both by ‘adopter’ and ‘adoptee’) that are associated with bringing that person more fully into that family, are not practices limited to adoption but are in fact the stuff of all kinship. Because examining ‘adoption’ reveals the processes of social kinship, it offers us a direct route into understanding the social practices that are part of how all families come to be.

After examining these larger issues, the entry considers what adoptions around the world look like and what they accomplish. The word ‘fostering’ often describes the practices of raising, training, and caring for a child. By contrast, ‘adoption’ in its early formulations, such as in Roman law from which many contemporary Western adoption policies descend, emphasised the acquiring of a legal heir and the transfer of property via inheritance. The entry concludes with a discussion of recent critiques of international adoption, which have demonstrated that adoptions may also, among the many things they accomplish, reproduce local and global inequalities.

The basic problem: critique of the study of kinship^[1]

The problem with defining ‘adoption’ for an encyclopedia of anthropology is this: on the one hand, what anthropologists know about adoption is evidence for some of our most central tenets; particularly that kinship is produced through social, linguistic, and legal practices rather than asserted through genetic codes. On the other hand, the very category ‘adoption’ unintentionally runs counter to those tenets. First, I’ll explain this central contradiction, then I’ll go on to show what anthropologists know about adoption and why it’s important – and only then will I define it.

One of the foundational principles of socio-cultural anthropology is its critique of ethnocentrism, which is the assumption that one’s own ways of doing things are superior to all other ways, leading to misunderstanding of other cultures and their norms and practices. By studying cultures around the world, anthropologists have learned that diversity is the norm. In other words, every culture has its own assumptions about what is true and what isn’t, so our job is to understand each culture in its own terms rather than imposing our own, whatever they may be.

The stated ethical incompatibility between anthropology and ethnocentrism came to a head in the 1960s and 1970s critiques of our discipline, which included as one major component a critique of kinship studies on the basis of embedded ethnocentrism.^[2] David Schneider, in a critical tone, suggested that the ‘anthropological’ notion of kinship is simply borrowed from a European one (1984: 175). As he wrote, anthropology’s generalised understanding of ‘consanguinity, of blood relationship and descent, rests on precisely…the biogenetic relationship…We have tried to impose this definition of a kind of relation on all peoples...’ (Schneider 1984: 72).

It’s easy to see how this critique can be extended to the term ‘adoption'. Vern Carroll, comparing adoption in the United States with fosterage in Eastern Oceania, asks whether it is wise ‘for anthropologists to use this term [‘adoption’] to label customs that conform only in part to adoption practices in Europe and the United States’ (1970: 4). Adoption, like kinship, has been used to describe a wide range of practices. Yet lurking within this term, it seems, is the subtext of what it means among middle classes in North America and Europe. So if, as David Schneider proposes, ‘[i]n American cultural conception, kinship is defined as biogenetic’ (1980 [1968]: 23), adoption in the U.S. will be a legal and acceptable ‘fiction’ within a larger assumption that ‘[a] son or daughter by definition shares its parents' biogenetic substance’ (1980 [1968]: 50; see also 1984: 54-55). Later, in his Critique of the study of kinship, Schneider suggests pointedly that ‘anthropologists have consistently treated adoption as something quite different from true kinship’ (1984: 171-2).

As such, by even so much as marking out a category called ‘adoption’, this encyclopedia entry runs the risk – amply critiqued by Needham (1971), Schneider, and others – of elevating biogenetic kinship to the unmarked or ‘natural’ category, and studying adoption only as something curious that deviates from the ‘norm’.

What adoption does

And yet, anthropological research on that very category of ‘adoption’ has revealed two crucially important points: adoption is neither curious in terms of rarity, nor is it curious in terms of supposed deviation from a norm that is biological kinship. Rather, adoption is widespread, and is brilliantly revelatory of the processes central to the making of all kinship.

Firstly, adoption is far from unusual – over time and across place, it has been crucial to maintaining power relations, ensuring social reproduction, and forming alliances, and it has been and continues to be numerically significant as well. For example, Elise Berman has reported that for the 250-person village in the Republic of the Marshall Islands where she worked, a quarter of children are adopted and an astonishing ‘90 percent of households include someone adopted in or out’ (2014: 579).

But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, studying adoption has helped anthropologists to demonstrate that all kinship is adoptive. In other words, no matter whether blood ties are asserted or recognised in a particular relationship, that relationship requires upkeep, assent, and intentional or matter-of-fact fostering. As Émile Durkheim wrote more than a century ago, kinship is ‘a social bond or it is nothing’ (1896: 318).^[3]

Durkheim’s discussion of adoption makes clear why adoptions are such an important piece of evidence for kinship theory. Writing of adoption in small-scale societies, Durkheim notes ‘[b]y itself, birth is not sufficient ipso facto to make an infant into an integral member of the domestic group – religious ceremonies must be superimposed. The idea of consanguinity is thus secondary… All kinship is social, consisting essentially of socially sanctioned legal and moral relations’ (1896: 318). ^[4]Another similarly pithy way to say this comes from the groundbreaking work of Kath Weston in 1980s San Francisco on gay and lesbian ‘families we choose’: groups of close friends and companions who were sometimes described by anthropologists as partaking of ‘fictive kinship’ (a term that has been part of anthropological usage at least since the nineteenth century^[5]). ‘All kinship’, Weston says, ‘is in some sense fictional’ (1991: 105).

By itself, as Durkheim proposes, birth is not sufficient to establish belonging to kin: ‘kin work’ is required. This latter phrase is Micaela di Leonardo’s; she coined it in a groundbreaking essay, where she used it to mean

the conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration of cross-household kin ties, including visits, letters, telephone calls, presents, and cards to kin; the organization of holiday gatherings; the creation and maintenance of quasi-kin relations; decisions to neglect or to intensify particular ties; the mental work of reflection about all these activities; and the creation and communication of altering images of family and kin vis-à-vis the images of others, both folk and mass media (1987: 442-3).

To di Leonardo’s useful intervention we might simply add that ‘kin work’ need not be limited to ‘cross-household kin ties’ (e.g., writing to in-laws or inviting a cousin to your house). Similar to the process of kin-work, ‘kinning’, as proposed by Signe Howell writing on transnational adoption in Norway, can indicate ‘the process by which a foetus or new-born child is brought into a significant and permanent relationship with a group of people, and the connection is expressed in a conventional kin idiom’ (2006: 8). Within one’s household, ‘kin work’ or ‘kinning’ can involve activities as wide-ranging as teaching a child manners (claiming that child as yours and representative of your household, concerned about how he or she will interact with the social world), or giving a sibling the silent treatment (withholding the normative relations of kinship from someone who, perhaps, has failed to act like a sibling is expected to act).

One form that kin work or kinning can take is verbal. Linguistic and cultural anthropologists have paid close attention to how talk can establish or attenuate kinship. An excellent example is provided in Sallie Han’s writings on ‘belly talk’. In middle-class U.S. households, fathers-to-be receive advice to ‘talk, read, and sing to the baby [that is, the foetus]’ so that they are recognised by others as expectant fathers, and so that they can be involved with their future children. Such ‘belly talk’, Han argues, ‘accomplishes important cultural work for American mothers and fathers alike...[it] socializes women and men as parents’ (2009: 312, 316). Yet speech and representation are equally mobilised to accomplish similar work in adoptive relations – for example, in Japan, Kathryn Goldfarb’s research participants often highlighted physical resemblance between foster parent and child as a way of signalling the ‘“self-evident” proof of a connection to a non-biologically related child’ (2016: 48). This is one example of a feature of many adoptions, though not all: they are often partly produced through and supported by the involvement of mediators, from the official (social workers and attorneys) to the everyday (like those Goldfarb describes, who participate in conversations about family resemblance).

The ‘kin work’ done by these individuals incorporates newcomers – children and children-to-be, parents and parents-to-be, and still other kin as well – into families. That work of incorporation, I propose, is adoption.

What is adoption?

More than a quarter of the way through this entry, I can finally come to define the topic. Adoption is, I suggest, the purposeful taking on of a kinship role, responsibility, or duty vis-à-vis another person. I’ve tried to make that definition as simple and open as I can, in part because there is a lot of variability in what anthropologists might label ‘adoption’. It could be primarily about – as seen in the earliest adoption laws in ancient Rome – formally identifying an heir. It could be, on the other hand, a kind of fostering – taking care of a young person – not focused on inheritance but instead on the acts of raising.^[6]

So, one way of answering ‘what is adoption?’ is with another question: ‘Well, it depends – what needs and expectations do people have of their families in the cultural context you are wondering about?’ In much of North America and Europe, a ‘sentimentalization’ or ‘sacralization’ of childhood (Zelizer 1985) has occurred over the course of the last century, so that what adoption is for residents of those regions today is a parent-centric institution that provides children to adults who eagerly want to love, raise, and care for a child.^[7] Marilyn Strathern, observing the cultural implications of assisted reproductive technologies (which, depending on how they are defined, can include adoption), remarks that a child in such a context embodies ‘the desire of its parents to have a child’ (1992: 32). Problems or challenges within adoption in this setting will arise when the model of parental desire for a child conflicts with other aspects of social reality: for example, if prospective parents want infants whom they can raise and mould (Leinaweaver 2013: 38-46; Stryker 2010), but the available children are toddlers or school-age.

But in other cultural contexts around the world and throughout history, adoption is something else. There are several different ‘purposes’ for which adoption happens, and it is useful to distinguish them. Raising, training, and caring for a child is one purpose – often called fostering. Acquiring a legal and spiritual heir is another – for example, for many Hindus, sons fulfill both religious and property-related roles, and adoption is one of the potential substitutes for ‘legitimate’ sons in ancient Hindu legal codes (Bharadwaj 2016: 53, 158). In the following two sections I will describe each of these categories, before moving to a broader discussion of how adoption – among the many things it accomplishes – can also reproduce local and global inequalities.

Fostering: feeding and supporting a child

The word ‘foster’ comes from Old English, and its original referents were food, nourishment, sustenance, and nursing.^[8] Anthropologists have long been attentive to food – its sharing, production, withholding – and the kinds of social relations that food facilitates. This awareness of the social significance of food has resulted in excellent analyses linking food to kinship. For example, Mary Weismantel’s essay on fostering in an indigenous community in highland Ecuador includes the wonderful line, uttered by a man about a child he had only recently brought into his household, ‘I am going to be his father...Aren’t I feeding him right now?’ (1995: 690). Weismantel’s interlocutor was saying that feeding creates kinship, over time.^[9]

The concept of ‘fostering’ or ‘fosterage’ has also been amply studied in socio-cultural anthropology, with a focus not solely on food but on the daily practices of caregiving, tending, and nurturing. Anthropologists have documented fostering, or ‘child circulation’, as a widespread phenomenon around the world from West Africa to Oceania to the Americas.^[10] The ubiquity of these fluid and flexible movements of children from one home to another, and the cross-cultural data on process and outcomes, show how effective fostering can be at bringing up children in an extensive family context while responding to structural conditions such as poverty or political upheaval.

For example, Esther Goody has studied fostering at length in West Africa, among the Gonja people of Ghana. In her analysis of fostering and adoption (1984), she aligns the uses to which fostering is put with the complexity of the political and social organization of a community. According to Goody, in a unilineal descent group (a system where relatedness is traced either through fathers or through mothers, but not both^[11]), fostering outside of the kin group is rare, being unnecessary for the child’s training, and undesirable because it would imply the descent group’s loss of a child’s labour; however, in other kinds of societies, a range of spatially dispersed relatives may have rights to a child, so depending on resources in a kin group and on existing labour needs a child might be asked to move. But the child’s movement is not only meant to serve the labour needs of dispersed kin; simultaneously, Goody explains, ‘parents arrange for their children’s training and sponsorship in the way which will place the children in the best possible position as adults with respect to those skills and resources which are required to “succeed”’ (1984: 275). As such, this kind of fostering is thought to provide opportunities to children; it is seen elsewhere in West Africa as well (Bledsoe 1990, Gottlieb 2004).

Yet fostering has other implications too, some of them quite provocative. In an essay on ‘milk-kinship’, Peter Parkes recounts epics and legends from Greek, Celtic, and other pasts to demonstrate what he calls ‘allegiance fostering’ – how, for example, medieval Irish nobles would foster their children serially, to multiple foster parents, in order to ensure the children’s education in a range of skills and arts while simultaneously strengthening adult alliances that broadened the nobles’ own political reach (2004: 599-600).^[12] And alliances between relatives are forged in everyday settings as well, as I learned from Milagros, a teenager who participated in my research on child circulation in the city of Ayacucho, in southern Peru. Milagros told me she had moved into her mother’s sister’s house at the age of nine. I observed that her mother’s sister’s family was financially better off than Milagros’s mother – who lived in a squatter settlement across town – and keeping that relationship strong and flowing would have been important for Milagros’s mother. In that context, child circulation served to ‘solidify relationships that adults rely on for day-to-day survival or backup emergency plans’ (Leinaweaver 2007: 175). It also results in a robust and culturally-appropriate form of support for young people, though it is a form that many of them express some ambivalence about. Milagros told me both that she had gotten accustomed, and that it was 'not the same' as being with her family of origin (2007: 171, 172).

Finding an heir: ensuring disposition of resources according to one’s wishes

Legal adoption is a different story, though of course legal adoption need not preclude the feeding, raising, and nurturing of a child. As Jack Goody shows, adoption laws in many Western nations today derive from principles established in ancient Rome, where ‘the institution was one whereby the great families provided themselves with heirs to their property and worship, successors to office or a political following’ (1969: 60). Property and its felicitous disposition was thus a significant motivator for early Western formulations of adoption (Hann 1998).

In Roman law, such adoptions were complete and irreversible. Adoption law in many nations today includes a provision where a child is formally, completely, and legally detached from a ‘first family’ before being incorporated into another (‘full’ or ‘plenary’ adoption). This model differs from fostering, where a child retains connections both to the ‘first family’ and to other subsequent caregivers (Goody, J. 1969: 59). It also differs from legal adoption practices in a number of other nations, including France (whose civil code permits ‘simple’, or additive adoption, where the adoptive relationship is added to, rather than replaces, existing biological relationships) and Japan, where in ‘“regular adoption” (futsu¯ yo¯shiengumi), adoptees are often children of extended family members or are adults’ (Goldfarb 2016: 49).

The implications of inheritance, permanent affiliation, and rights take on intriguing meanings in a case described by John Borneman. In the late 1990s, Borneman knew a same-sex couple in Germany – fifty-five year old Harald and thirty-five year old Dieter. Harald, knowing his death was near, wanted to adopt Dieter; in the court hearings, Dieter’s mother insisted that the men’s relationship was ‘like a marriage’. But in that period, the two men could not legally marry, and adoption was the only formal route available for Harald to effectively confer his belongings to Dieter, which in turn formalised and officialised their relation. Borneman highlights the principle of custody – in which ‘the right to inherit wealth [is made] effective through a right to care and be cared for’ (2001: 34). Harald eventually adopted Dieter, which, in its startling contrast with child adoptions, beautifully highlights the social and felt significance of formalising and materialising ties of care.

Also, in many ways far removed from ancient Rome, a Norwegian case study demonstrates the continuing importance of formally making a child into an accepted family member, even through some of the more everyday labours of ‘kin work’ or ‘kinning’. In adoption, kinning may be marked because of what Howell calls the ‘open and public nature’ (2006: 64) of the newly forming relationship or what Modell described as the self-consciousness of adoption: ‘for a parent and child to be related by arrangement, and not by nature, compels an alertness to the terms of relationship that is unusual in an American context’ (1994: 3-4). So, in Norway, one of the arenas in which kinning of transnationally adopted children occurs is through attiring them in the traditional Norwegian clothing called bunad (2006: 75). The use of clothing as a symbolic and formal way to affiliate a child from another place to a Norwegian family is the emphasis here, in contrast to the focus on caring, feeding, and raising seen in the previous section’s discussion of fostering.

Political economy of adoption and inequality

As anthropologists study adoption and kinning around the world, whether in fostering and daily acts of care or through formal alliances and the demands of property disposition, political economic inequality often turns out to be an important dimension of how adoption is experienced and understood.

In the contemporary West, adoption is a process that sometimes uncomfortably entangles child welfare services on one end (the removal of children from birth families that are found to be unsuitable) and the desire for ‘social progeny’ (Goody, J. 1969: 57) on the other.^[13] Critical adoption scholars have identified how adoption tends to reproduce a social hierarchy between deserving receiver and inadequate giver of a child (Briggs 2012, Gailey 2010, Solinger 2001). The inequalities between those who adopt and those whose children have been removed are perhaps most evident in cases of transnational adoption. Linda Seligmann observes for U.S. families that ‘the ability to pursue adoptions across borders – racially, economically, or nationally – is the consequence of geopolitical inequalities that are themselves the result of particular histories and policies that the United States has helped create’ (2013: 11).^[14] For example, Guatemala became one of the most numerically significant ‘providers’ of children in international adoption to the U.S. as a consequence of poverty, violence, and corruption traceable to U.S. involvement in Guatemala during the Cold War (Grandin 2004, Briggs 2012).

Given this unequal flow of children from less-developed to more-developed countries (Frank 1966), it’s particularly important to identify the processes through which international adoption can be narrated as wholly positive. Considering explanatory language like ‘God said one day, “…I found you a baby but you have to go to China”’, Seligmann gracefully demonstrates how many parents’ emphasis on metaphysical connections can preclude a full-on examination of geopolitical inequalities that make international adoption possible (2013: 72). Paloma Gay y Blasco analyses the writings of middle-class white Americans on their personal Internet pages, in which the prospective parents ‘portrayed their adoption as an extraordinary journey, a “wondrous adventure,” not only a particularly significant episode in their lives, but one that transformed them into or revealed them to be extraordinary people, different from those who surrounded them, forever marked as the creators of a “special” or even “miraculous” family’ (2012: 330-31). Supporting these narrations is the conceptual inheritance that Karen Dubinsky has described as ‘an adoption system premised on rescue’ (2010:19). Laura Briggs further argues that this ‘rescue’ framing effectively ‘directs attention away from structural explanations for poverty, famine, and other disasters, including international, political, military, and economic causes’ (2003: 180). In this way, international adoption not only benefits from global inequality – it can also work to foreclose critical discussions of such inequality.

This critical global political economy perspective can also be applied to both historic and on-going forms of domestic adoption that equally reproduced social hierarchies and inequalities. A famous and tragic example is the widespread practice during the mid-twentieth century in which Native American and First Nations children were removed from their homes in what was said to be their ‘best interests’, ‘rescuing’ them while forcibly extracting them from their families and communities (Jacobs 2014). And, in the 1970s and 1980s, the legal mechanism of adoption was used to disguise the criminal appropriation of the children of the disappeared and murdered in Argentina’s Dirty War (Villalta 2009). For example, in a well-documented case described by Carla Villalta, a woman and her eight-month-old infant were captured by the police in Buenos Aires; when the child’s grandmother brought the birth certificate to the police station to claim the child, her documents were challenged and she was not permitted to retrieve him. The child’s parents remain missing, while the child was, in a routine fashion, defined as ‘abandoned’ and placed in the care of a distinguished attorney and his wife, who later adopted him (Villalta 2009: 156-58).^[15] And still more recently, the overrepresentation of African-American children in the U.S. child welfare system reflects, as legal scholar Dorothy Roberts has argued, a policy choice to emphasise punishment for poverty over possibilities for family unity (2002). In each of these examples, structural racism shapes which children are declared to be legally abandoned and therefore ‘adoptable’. Of course, not all adoptions recorded by anthropologists involve such stark inequalities – recall the West African fostering that is meant to support children’s development (Goody, E. 1984; Bledsoe 1990) or Harald and Dieter’s same-sex partnership officialised through adoption in Germany (Borneman 2001). But one of the themes in recent anthropological scholarship on adoption has been how adoption, like so many other practices, expresses and confirms existing socio-political relations of inequality more than it innovates new, creative, transnational relations of ‘diffuse, enduring solidarity’ (Schneider 1980 [1968]: 52).

Conclusion

John Terrell and Judith Modell wrote in their 1994 review essay, ‘Anthropology and adoption’, that ‘adoption is about who belongs and how – a subject of immense political as well as disciplinary significance. It is also, and increasingly, about power, privilege, and poverty…’ (160). The question of who belongs and how is another angle on the question posed above about adoption, that is, ‘what needs and expectations do people have of their families?’

This is to say that, if belonging is important, the mechanisms through which that belonging occurs are going to be crucial for both anthropologists and for adopted persons and their families. But this entry has suggested that for anthropologists, adoption is not only about belonging but also about what families do – transfer property, care for children, convey identity, and more. Adoption is therefore an extremely revealing and important lens for understanding human existence, both because of what it can tell us about how families work, and because of how its use and misuse reflect the ‘power, privilege, and poverty’ Terrell and Modell point to. As Vern Carroll concluded nearly fifty years ago, ‘the answers to questions [about adoption] are the answers to the question of the nature of kinship’ (1970: 15).

Let us return, then, to those very questions about the nature of kinship, and what adoption can mean in the North American and European contexts that have shaped much of the anthropological study of adoption. David Schneider has argued that in the United States, ‘kinship is defined as biogenetic’ and ‘[a] son or daughter by definition shares its parents' biogenetic substance’ (1980[1968]: 23, 50). In these contexts, then, those who are adopted may experience a dissonance of belonging that their cultural surroundings urge them toward.

In Janet Carsten’s interviews with domestically-adopted adults who searched for their birthparents, she was told that the search was motivated by the desire ‘“to know where I came from”, “to be complete”, or “to find out who I am”’ (2000: 689).^[16] At the same time, those who had completed their searches made statements that would ‘disturb that primacy [of birth ties]…strongly assert[ing] the values of care and effort that go into the creation of kin ties’ (Carsten 2000: 691). Carsten showed that these narratives of adoptive kinship actually reveal more general British concepts of ‘personhood, time, biography, and perhaps even the process of bereavement’ (694) unrelated, or not exclusively related, to adoption.

And for Sweden, Barbara Yngvesson demonstrates the paradox at the heart of formal, legal adoption in the way it is practised in most contemporary contexts: while such plenary adoptions connect child and parent(s) in a manner that is permanent and exclusive, there are other cultural dimensions in which those ‘erased’ origins are made significant, namely for the development of the child’s ‘identity’ (2010). This is notably significant when – as is the case for many contemporary adoptions – the adoption is transracial. In such cases, adopted persons are frequently racialised through a ‘constant bombardment of questions regarding the national, regional, ethnic and racial origin of the adoptees’ (Hübinette & Tigervall 2009: 344). And white adoptive parents are asked to take seriously their ‘kin work’ of – as Christine Ward Gailey describes for U.S. transracial adoptions - ‘preparing black children for racism’ (2010: 34).

The research of these scholars, like that of several other anthropologists examining adoption in the present day (Cardarello 2012, De Graeve 2013, Frekko, Leinaweaver and Marre 2015, Goldfarb 2016, Kim 2010, Leinaweaver 2013, Lewin 2005, Modell 1994, Seligmann 2013), shows just how powerful ‘adoption’ is as a site for learning about kinship: how families are made, how belonging is experienced, how persons come to be.

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Jacobs, M.D. 2014. A generation removed: the fostering and adoption of indigenous children in the postwar world. Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press.

Kim, E.J. 2010. Adopted territory: transnational Korean adoptees and the politics of belonging. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Leinaweaver, J.B. 2007. On moving children: the social implications of Andean child circulation. American Ethnologist 34, 163-80.

———2008. The circulation of children: kinship, adoption, and morality in Andean Peru. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

———2013. Adoptive migration: raising Latinos in Spain. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

LeVine, R.A. 2004. Challenging expert knowledge: findings from an African study of infant care and development. In Advances in applied developmental psychology - childhood and adolescence: cross-cultural perspectives and applications (eds) U.P. Gielen & J. Roopnarine, 149-65. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group.

———2007. Ethnographic studies of childhood: a historical overview. American Anthropologist 109, 247-60.

Lewin, E. 2005. Family values: fatherhood and gay men in America. In Adoptive families in a diverse society (ed.) K. Wegar, 129-45. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Maine, H.J.S. 1963 [1861]. Ancient law, its connection with the early history of society, and its relation to modern ideas. Boston: Beacon.

Marre, D. 2014. Displaced children and stolen babies: state of exception, fear and public secrets in contemporary Spain. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, D.C., 6 December 2014.

Modell, J.S. 1994. Kinship with strangers: adoption and interpretations of kinship in American culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Morgan, L.H. 1870. Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the human family. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Needham, R. 1971. Remarks on the analysis of kinship and marriage. In Rethinking kinship and marriage (ed.) R. Needham, 1-34. New York: Tavistock Publications.

Oh, A. 2015. To save the children of Korea. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Parkes, P. 2004. Fosterage, kinship, and legend: when milk was thicker than blood? Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, 587-615.

Pink, S. & A.M. Perez 2006. A fitting ‘social model’: culturally locating Telemadre.com. Home Cultures 3, 63-86.

Roberts, D.E. 2002. Shattered bonds: the color of child welfare. New York: Basic Books.

Schneider, D.M. 1980 [1968]. American kinship: a cultural account. Chicago: University Press.

———1984. A critique of the study of kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Seligmann, L.J. 2013. Broken links, enduring ties: American adoption across race, class, and nation. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Seymour, S. 2004. Multiple caretaking of infants and young children: an area in critical need of a feminist psychological anthropology. Ethos 32, 538-56.

Solinger, R. 2001. Beggars and choosers: how the politics of choice shapes adoption, abortion, and welfare in the United States. New York: Hill & Wang.

Stack, C.B. 1974. All our kin: strategies for survival in a Black community. New York: Harper & Row.

Strathern, M. 1992. Reproducing the future: essays on anthropology, kinship, and the new reproductive technologies. New York: Routledge.

Strong, P.T. 2001. To forget their tongue, their name, and their whole relation: captivity, extra-tribal adoption, and the Indian Child Welfare Act. In Relative values: reconfiguring kinship studies (eds) S. Franklin & S. McKinnon, 468-93. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Stryker, R. 2010. The road to Evergreen: adoption, attachment therapy, and the promise of family. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Terrell, J. & J.S. Modell 1994. Anthropology and adoption.American Anthropologist 96, 155-61.

Villalta, C. 2009. De secuestros y adopciones: el circuito institucional de la apropiación criminal de niños en Argentina (1976-1983). Historia Crítica 38, 146-71.

Weismantel, M. 1995. Making kin: kinship theory and Zumbagua adoptions. American Ethnologist 22, 685-709.

Weston, K. 1991. Families we choose: lesbians, gays, kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

Yngvesson, B. 2010. Belonging in an adopted world: race, identity, and transnational adoption. Chicago: University Press.

Zelizer, V.A. 1985. Pricing the priceless child: the changing social value of children. Princeton: University Press.

Note on contributor

Jessaca Leinaweaver is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University. She is the author of The circulation of children: adoption, kinship, and morality in Andean Peru (2008, Duke University Press), which won the Margaret Mead Award. Her most recent book is Adoptive migration: raising Latinos in Spain (2013, Duke University Press).

Prof. Jessaca Leinaweaver, Department of Anthropology, Brown University, Box 1970, Providence, RI, United States. Jessaca_Leinaweaver@brown.edu

[1] This article draws on material I have published in overview articles on related topics: ‘Demography of adoption’ (2001) in International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (ed.) J.D. Wright 1^stvol. (Second edition) Oxford: Elsevier; ‘Foster and kinship care: historical and cultural perspectives’ (2009) in The child: an encyclopedic companion (ed.) R.A. Shweder, Chicago: University Press; and ‘Transnational adoption’ (forthcoming) in The Cambridge handbook for the anthropology of kinship (ed.) S. Bamford, Cambridge: University Press.

[2] Anthropology’s earliest beginnings over one hundred years ago were entwined with the study of kinship. The nineteenth-century American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, intrigued by historical linguistic research that showed earlier connections between now-distant groups of people, hypothesised that similarities in kinship systems among even more distant groups of people might allow researchers to push their understandings of early connections in the ‘human family’ even further back. That is, he thought that kinship systems were even more resistant to change than language (Morgan 1870).

[3] ‘Elle est un lien social ou elle n’est rien’, my translation. This, surely, is what Schneider was riffing on when he wrote that ‘it is the sociocultural attribution of meaning to the biological relationship (real or putative) which is the central conception of kinship. Without the biological relationship there is nothing’ (1984: 54).

[4] ‘Même, à elle seule, la naissance ne suffit pas ipso facto à faire de l’enfant un member integrant de la société domestique; il faut que des ceremonies religieuses s’y surajoutent. L’idée de consanguinité est donc tout à fait au second plan…toute parenté est sociale; car elle consiste essentiellement en relations juridiques et morales, sanctionnées par la société', my translation.

[5] See, for example, Maine 1963 [1861].

[6] In both these examples, it is worth noting that the active subject is the adopter – who is the one identifying an heir or taking care of a young person. And in general, though the word ‘adoption’ is often used metaphorically and outside of kinship to indicate claiming something – like technology adoption, pet adoption, adopt-a-park – I’ll limit it here to considering the human relationships altered when one ‘adopts’, or is 'adopted by', another.

[7] As Zelizer points out, nineteenth-century foster children were sometimes like apprentices; they were sentimentally appreciated but at the same time, employed (as seen in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables). Zelizer notes that in 1870, older boys were most wanted because they were useful; by 1930, cute two-year-old girls were most wanted precisely because they were not economically useful, and rather they were emotional and thus ideal for sentimental parenting (1985: 173, 179, 194).

[8] Though I won’t go into all the possible translations, I can add that the Spanish term I would use for an overlapping semantic field – criar – derives from Latin term creāre, which refers to ‘to make grow'. I would define the Spanish word as ‘to raise’, and Spain’s linguistic authority (the Real Academia Española) provides multiple examples of appropriate uses, ranging from breastfeeding to educating to producing. See http://dle.rae.es/?id=BFyuWxK (accessed 7 June 2018).

[9] For a sampling of other cases of the relationship between food and family, see Allison 1991, Carsten 1997, De Matos Viegas 2003, Pink and Perez 2006.

[10] See, for example, Berman 2014, Bledsoe 1990, Bodenhorn 2000, Carroll 1970, Carsten 1991, Fonseca 1986, E.N. Goody 1982, Guemple 1979, Leinaweaver 2008, Stack 1974, Strong 2001.

[11] For further explication, see this encyclopedia’s entry titled Matriliny.

[12] Moving among a range of foster homes is contrary to the premises of the psychological sciences’ notion of attachment theory, or the idea that a stable relationship with a key caregiver is essential in a child’s early years (Bohr 2010). However, the majority of anthropologists see attachment theory as reflective of the assumptions of Western child-rearing ideologies (e.g. LeVine 2004, LeVine 2007) and argue instead that multiple caregivers and consequent affective relationships generally support children’s development (Seymour 2004).

[13] There is a continuum here, of course: not all adopted children have been removed from their families of origin, although it must also be said that the ‘choice’ to place a child for adoption is very often circumscribed by economic and social circumstances. In the absence of such circumstances, this ‘choice’ might well have been different.

[14] The origins of international adoption are usually traced to the Korean war (Briggs & Marre 2009:6, see also Herman 2008, Kim 2010, Oh 2015). Other nations that became known as sources of children for international adoption experienced not so much war as structural violence: poverty in post-Soviet disruptions in the case of Eastern Europe; the heavy hand of state reproduction policy in the case of China; intensely uneven development in the case of African nations.

[15] Interestingly, the documents were in fact false. The child’s father had been disappeared a few months before the birth, and the mother had not registered the child’s birth right away. As Villalta explains, ‘For those who during those years of terrible political repression knew they were persecuted and lived in secret, any contact with a state authority could be signing one’s death warrant’ (‘Para quienes en esos años de feroz represión política se sabían perseguidos y vivían en la clandestinidad, cualquier contacto con una instancia estatal equivalía a ver concretada una condena de muerte’) (Villalta 2009: 157). The ‘laundering’ of disappearances through child adoption also occurred during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939-75) in Spain (Marre 2014).

[16] An intriguing analogy comes from analyses of anonymous sperm or egg donations (Bergmann 2011).

Relations

Felix Stein — Wed, 30 May 2018 12:07:48 +0000

Marilyn Strathern

Initially published 30 May 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18relations

Abstract:

To make a topic from one of anthropology’s principal means and objects of study, investigating relations through relations, is offered in the spirit of reflexive enquiry. The entry is not confined to anthropological works, touching briefly on certain philosophical dimensions and drawing in writers from other fields. However, it is organised around the way anthropologists have refined and expanded the application of relations through their diverse usages. Emphasis is thus on showing how the concept is used, rather than on prescribing particular versions. Attention is paid equally to the relations through which arguments and analysis are pursued and to the subject matter of anthropological investigation as the relational life of persons and things. The entry also notes a long-standing debate between English-speaking and continental European thinkers in the priority they give to terms (the ‘terms’ of a relation: what a relation holds together) or to the relation as an encompassing totality (of which the terms are a part). This one concept thus embraces whole different sets of assumptions about the nature of social life. Its own relations to other concepts are also relevant, as are changing emphases on what it might purport in a changing world.

Introduction

The English-language concept of relation is so ubiquitous, is entailed in such a range of applications, there might seem a good case for leaving it to commonsense to sort out what is meant on this or that occasion. But many anthropologists would also claim it as a signature concept for their discipline, and their usages have taken its potential forward in some very specific ways. Although there is no special anthropological definition, there is broad agreement about the privileged place it has both in structures of argumentation and in what are understood as social anthropology’s principal objects of study, and about the way it is often introduced into discussion to signal a critical (in the sense of probing and questioning) move. There is much to be learnt from its role in the framing of anthropological accounts.

Anthropological notions of description, analysis, and theory, above all in the distinctive terrain it has marked out as cross-cultural comparison, take for granted that one’s job is to show relations between phenomena. Thus one may demonstrate the extent to which religious precepts uphold or challenge values promulgated by the state or hypothesise correlations between new technologies and changing senses of the self. That taken for granted status is built into the way scholarly narratives are organised. Most of the time it is indistinguishable from the perception that relations inhere in the object of enquiry, and the observer is drawing them out. The commitment of twentieth century anthropology to the concepts of ‘society’ and ‘culture’ presented the world with what were above all bundles of relations. People’s actions and behaviour were to be described (analysed, theorised) in the context of the diverse relations in which they were enmeshed. Anthropologists continue to show the logical or functional relations between entities they abstract, such as religion or the state, and create new fields of enquiry by emphasising the relational nexus of phenomena, a notable case being that of personhood and the entanglements imagined between self and other, individual and collective. But at the same time, they take it as self-evident that everywhere people too are drawn into relations with the things, beings, and entities that form their environment. Above all, the specific capacity of persons to relate to one another is taken as a fundamental truth of human existence. Social life is what goes on between them.

Relations between and within

However, the Latin term relatio, from which ‘relation’ came into English, did not connote that state of ‘betweenness’, and there lies a history about what gets to be articulated. Classically, relatio referred to what was carried back (to someone) as in a reply or report; indeed, it was a substantive for a ‘motion’ (as in a proposal) or narration (producing a narrative). Medieval philosophers used relatio as an alternative for ad aliquid, an inclination ‘towards something’, a disposition, directionality, order (Brower 2015). They drew from Aristotle’s disquisition on categories (for an anthropological comment, see Allen 2000): the idea that such an inclination was a property (‘accident’) inherent in one entity in the way it pointed towards another.^[1] Their reflections addressed common linguistic differences, as in the differentiation of absolute and relative terms, the latter arising from the comparison of things. An attendant concern about the way things bore on one another, through (say) correspondence or resemblance, with respect to the role of their own intellectual activity, through (say) comparison, continued to bother European thinkers into early modern times. As for an articulation of how entities, such as intervals, might lie between other entities, it would seem that philosophical discourse lagged behind ordinary usage. It was in terms of how relations could be formally represented that ‘betweenness’ was a relative late-comer. That this might have anything to do with the scientific revolution is a matter of speculation (Strathern 2005: 33-49). But possibly an emerging worldview that rested on explaining discrete phenomena by reference to the forces, logics, or structures that held them together had found in an old term a new one – relations – for that holding together.

This worldview was not uncontested. If this is a development traceable in English, there were early modern continental thinkers who took relations in a different direction. Descombes (2014) rehearses Gottfried Leibniz’s specific objections to the definition of relations proposed in 1690 by the English philosopher, John Locke: the referring or comparing of two things to one another. The German thinker’s famous dictum,

there is no term which is so absolute or so detached that it does not involve relations and is not such that a complete analysis of it would lead to other things and indeed to all other things. Consequently we can say that “relative terms” explicitly indicate the relationship which they contain (from Leibniz, written in 1704; Descombes’ [2014: 204] emphasis)^[2]

suggests that everything participates in a turning towards another. Caught up in a debate about the real and the unreal – or mental – status of phenomena as these thinkers were, Descombes spells out the implications of their arguments for the empiricist view that social relations are exterior to individual entities and the idealist view that social relations are constitutive of individuals. The part of Locke’s thesis relevant here – the suggestion that, as a mental exercise of comparison, relations are external to phenomena – diverges from that of his German critic, which denies that there is any wholly extrinsic denomination because of the ‘real [in the above sense] connections amongst all things’ (quoted by Descombes [2014: 204]); everything combines extrinsic and intrinsic relations.

Although the distinction between external and internal relations was to have a very mixed future in philosophy, it has sometimes been taken in anthropology to reflect a truth about the priority to be given to the already existing and thus discrete nature of entities, not in essence affected by their relations, as against the view that it is only through relations that entities are constituted. These tenets become visible, for instance, in the way anthropologists organise the frameworks of their accounts and thus decide what they think needs explaining. From the perspective of modern anthropology, both positions may stimulate a stance of criticality.

First, ‘some descriptions of a thing by its [external] relations with its surrounding milieu have a real scope, [in] that they allow us to know the reality of that thing’ (Descombes 2014: 204-5). Putting things into context – seeing the larger picture, showing the implications, effects and outfalls (‘unintended consequences’) between actions, events, structures, assumptions, and so forth – was always the aim of the traditional ethnographic monograph. Thus the reality of Zande witchcraft divination was to be grasped through a relational nexus that included princely politics, how kin are connected, and the logic of cause and effect (Evans-Pritchard 1950 [1937]). Here too lies the force of imagining ‘merographic connections’ (Strathern 1992), a phrase that formalises what is commonplace in English usage: the fact that nothing is simply part of a whole insofar as another view or perspective may redescribe it as part of something else. Religion and state, for example, may be shown to relate to each other in this or that respect, while the analytical discreteness of each is retained by the fact that either may also be related to quite other segments of social life, as when mystical beliefs (or population statistics) are regarded as part of the one but not of the other.

Second, assuming relations are always and already everywhere has furnished anthropological discourse with a vocabulary that challenges the kinds of essentialist categorizations that rest precisely on the discreteness of phenomena. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of participationhas drawn Sahlins’ (2013) attention: we take it for granted ‘that beings are given beforehand and afterwards participate in this or that relation; whereas, for Lévy-Bruhl, participations are already necessary for beings to be given and exist’ (33-4). Kinship connections are Sahlins’s prime example, in which the difference between kin positions are internalised by or resolved into the mutuality of their being: a mother’s brother exists as such through the existence of his sister’s son (for an ethnographic example, see Bonnemère 2018). A distinctive theory of ‘internal relations’ has been attributed to Karl Marx: the political scientist, Ollman (1976), points to Marx’s notion that things function because of their spatio-temporal ties with other things, and to conceive of things as relations interiorises this interdependence.^[3]

Descombes (2014: 197) summarises his own view of the problematizations here by observing that a theory of external relations supposes that every change something has in its relations with other things is a change in its world, and not a change in what that thing intrinsically is, while in the case of internal relations every such change is a change that affects the thing itself. It goes without saying that sensitivity to these conceptual usages underlines the interest anthropologists have shown, though all too rarely, in other vernacular concepts of or counterparts to relations (e.g. Corsín Jiménez & Willerslev 2007).

Relations … and terms; relations … and connections

As they are articulated for analytical purposes, relations evidently occupy a conceptual field along with other substantives. This section enlarges on certain indicative usages. Perhaps it is the juncture to emphasise that I am reporting on various anthropological usages, for example between epistemic and interpersonal relations, and not filtering everything through one lens or another.

Both the apprehension of already-identifiable phenomena being brought into (external) relations with one another and that of phenomena (internally) constituted by relations may be built into the very definition of relation. Thus a relation-between may be imagined as itself composed of terms and relations (the relation only works with reference to something other, the ‘terms’ it links). Either the term or the relation can then be internally differentiated. Within the term, the conception of an entity’s self-referential ‘identity’ becomes modified when that entity is thought of ‘in respect to’ another, some degree of interdependence implied. This happens in the course of specification, for instance whether the magic one is thinking about refers to witchcraft or to oracles (all three are in the title of Evans-Pritchard’s monograph). Within the relation, there may be reason to distinguish relation from relationship, or relation from connection, as we shall see in a moment.

These manoeuvres, including imagining alternatives to the terms-plus-relation model, may be deployed with critical intent. Recently translated works of Descola (2013) and Viveiros de Castro (2014) are exemplary here. Considering identification and relationship as fundamental axes of individual and collective behaviour, Descola develops an intriguing theoretical possibility latent in the interplay between terms and relations: the very manner in which specific cosmologies privilege the one over the other. He thus offers a wide-ranging, ‘combinatory analysis of the modes of relations between existing entities’, which is how he introduces his emphasis on external relations between beings and things as opposed to the internal links that pertain between abstract concepts; his criticism of earlier models remains largely implicit. On the other hand, Viveiros de Castro deliberately writes against a formula that depends exclusively on ‘a connection or conjunction of terms’.^[4] Adopting Gilles Deleuze’s vocabulary, he states ‘that the future of the master concept of anthropology – relation – depends on how much attention the discipline will end up lending to the concepts of difference and multiplicity, becoming and disjunctive synthesis’ (2014: 170). These alternative coordinates for thinking about relations explicitly challenge the presumption that the primary values to which relations lead are those of binding ties or attachments.

So let us return to some of the ways in which relation has been differentiated. A case has been argued for distinguishing relations from ‘relationships’. Moutu (2012) wishes to get away from an obsession with epistemological understandings of relations, insofar as, in the case of persons, they occlude the ontological character of ‘relationships’. A thinker’s relational practices, such as connection, association, resemblance, comparison, do not touch on the necessity and transcendence that, in his words, give relationships the character of an infinite being.^[5] This is the lesson of his Iatmul ethnography. There is nothing contingent about how Iatmul elder brother and younger brother are related as a pair, hence the necessity of their connection; insofar as each is also the other in another form, it is their relationship that transcends both the externality of their relating (if one wants to put it that way) and their identification as self-similar beings. Such relationships never cease; this is partly because of their processual nature.^[6]

In other hands, it may seem equally crucial to split relation from ‘connection’ (here, differentiating epistemic [relations] from interpersonal [relationships] drops from view). Although, following eighteenth century English usage, anthropologists (this author included, and in this text) often use connection as a synonym for relation, the distinction yields further critical purchase. Feldman (2011) argues for a difference between relations and connections as methodological constructs in the study of global processes. Unconnected actors (not in direct communication with one another) may nonetheless be related though ‘indirect social relations’, mediated through apparatuses or some ‘variety of abstract mechanism’, such as the surveillance systems, detention centres, and statistical operations that track a migrant’s path. In other words, relations have an effect on – and pose problems for – actors far beyond the scope of their connections. Imagining an extra-terrestrial perspective on the world, one that invokes the potential of cross-world communication, may invite enquiry into a different discrimination between connection and relation. Pondering instead how people can mistake connection for relation, Battaglia (2005) draws a comparison with the envisioning of information networks so dense that they cover for the ‘work of relationality’ – singular acts of connection fantasised as instances of social exchange. In her rendering, social relations and the work they entail are set in apposition to otherwise uninflected contact or encounter, and refer to a specific order of reality.

Social relations

This phrase (social relations) is found frequently in twentieth century British social anthropology. Sometimes it is used to distinguish relations of sociability (the tenor of interactions, transactions, obligations between persons) from relations of an institutional or systemic kind: economic, political, gender relations, as when Douglas (1970) talks of ‘relating’ beliefs to dominant aspects of social structure. On other occasions it summons the totality of social life, whether it is encompassed by the concept of society or, shorn of certain connotations of society, rendered as sociality. Such relations may be imagined as in the first place relations between persons, human implied. A seminal text is Radcliffe-Brown’s homonymous 1940 address on social structure.

Radcliffe-Brown (1952: [1940]: 188-204) famously defined social structure as a network of actually existing relations. Thus he was at pains to differentiate a non-social entity, such as the ‘individual’, from the entity that could be (analytically speaking) a node in this network, the ‘person’. His reference point was the concrete human being; as a person such a being was ‘a complex of social relationships’. The person was thereby a unit of social structure. A structural point of view, he said, requires studying how social phenomena such as religion or government have direct and indirect relations to social structure, here understood as ‘relations between persons and groups of persons’.^[7]Pointing to kinship, an area anthropologists most readily cite as exemplifying internal relations,^[8]Radcliffe-Brown asserted that kinship structures consist of numbers of dyadic relations ‘as between a father and son, or a mother’s brother and his sister’s son’. These were the building blocks of society. His emphasis on the dyad, through which he focused on an interplay between two genealogical positions, was to puzzle later anthropologists precisely for its privileging of genealogical thinking, but we can see it as an attempt to clarify just how one might construct persons as the terms (here equivocally external) to a relation.

Now Radcliffe-Brown’s specification of social relations had critical purchase against what in retrospect seemed the random reporting of diverse customs, as exemplified in early twentieth century accounts. Particular instances of behaviour or practices could be put into wider contexts, such contexts invariably consisting of the way relations were organised, a procedure that had long accompanied the analysis of kin terminologies. This assumption about organization (‘structure’) fed the ability to correlate, quite explicitly, numerous dimensions of social life. Goody (1962) offered an extended example from West Africa with respect to descent group formation, inheritance, and funeral practices. West African mortuary institutions were concerned with the reallocation of rights and duties, after death, precisely insofar as a ‘social person’ is defined through the mutual expectations that constitute his or her relationships.

Finding correlations between social institutions within a society was accompanied by cross-cultural comparison between societies. Under the rubric of the latter, it was possible to compare institutions such as matriliny or witchcraft in terms of their local social configurations. Here, the notion of ‘relations between’ at once facilitated the comparison of discrete phenomena, invariably along the axes of their similarities and dissimilarities (‘differences’ in this sense), and produced as objects of study ‘societies’ and ‘cultures’ in this mould, to be criticised in turn for the presumption of discreteness. Comparison across discrete contexts – disjunctive comparison (Lazar 2012) – emerged as an anthropological practice. We may see critical purchase here being levered against arbitrary evaluations of what was or was not significant as an object of study.^[9] However, there is also a sense in which any comparative move creates the potential of a critical outcome, insofar as social or cultural phenomena being brought into conjunction with one another shifts the observer’s perspective. Comparison was elemental in Locke’s definition of a relation; for the medieval philosophers comparatio had been almost more or less synonymous with relatio.

Needless to say, a re-formulation of relations came to Lévi-Strauss’s assistance in his notable quarrel with Radcliffe-Brown, beginning in 1945 (Lévi-Strauss 1963), and its consequences for British social anthropology. Take, for example, the reversal in the visualization of descent groups. What to the latter (Radcliffe-Brownian social anthropology) may have appeared the interdependency of genealogically discrete kin groups upon one another, through marriage alliance and other relations, from a Lévi-Straussian perspective would have appeared like a description of external relations (not his term). Lévi-Strauss’s own folding of affinity within the fundamental atom of kinship was instead a way of showing how such alliances were also presupposed (internally) by the total organization of relations. ‘[A]nalysis can never consider the terms only but must, beyond the terms, apprehend their interrelations’ (Lévi-Strauss 1978: 83). The whole is given before the parts, so one must begin with the whole, that is, with the relations among the parts.^[10]

It is entirely possible to insist on linkages and the associational quality of the lives of collectives without explicit attention to the concept of relations (see Latour 2005). Indeed the ethnographic record affords numerous other ways of imagining the entailments or enrollments of all kinds of entities in one another’s circumstances. Of course the observer may gather these up as species of relations even when there is no vernacular counterpart, just as an anthropologist might use the terms ‘culture’ or ‘system’ to describe social configurations that actors conceive otherwise or do not conceive at all. It then becomes a theoretical choice, with every shade along the way, to decide whether relations are articulated in all but name or are being named because of the anthropologist’s discerning apparatus. For where anthropologists do take it as a master concept – as in those English contexts where the invocation of relations is an invocation of the facility to ‘bring together’ entities of any order – demonstrating relations is seen as probing beyond what is immediately accessible.^[11] To reveal the relational dimension of this or that can also be empirical criticism of those worldviews that cannot comprehend or else devalue the way phenomena entail one another.

The compulsion of relations

Emphasised by some present-day anthropologists more than others, the uncovering of relationality – in whatever system or circumstance – may be understood as confronting a positivism that focuses on the intrinsic nature (self-identity) of things. A critical stance is particularly obvious here. It is no surprise that scholars in general, whose business is in the narrational art of relating, deliberately pursue epistemological relations; it is not trivial to add that, for anthropologists who are also ethnographers, this is consonant with a value placed on social relations in particular, not forgetting their engagement with persons as interlocuters. A disciplinary disposition to uncover the significance of relations is thereby broader than the controversial use of cross-cultural ethnography to point up the identitarian bias built into the (Anglophone) anthropologist’s native language.^[12]

When anthropologists talk about relations, it is persons who most often come first to mind; that is, beings inevitably enmeshed in a relational world. This holds regardless of whether, in any specific social configuration, people take relations as already there or as endlessly needing to be created.^[13]In whatever manner people assume they are parts of the lives of others, they also put in relational work to support, deny, reconfigure, or transform their relations with one another. It is the transformative, or transcendental, nature of interpersonal relations that leads Pina-Cabral (2017) to suggest that they are a bad analogy for the more general condition of being-in-relation or relationality.^[14]Rather, interpersonal (‘social’) relations are a special case to the extent that they are inevitably constituted through interaction and recognition, by contrast with relations that are mere affordances.^[15] This offers, in effect, a perspective on vernacular usage.

In English ‘relation’ and its pair ‘relative’ are also colloquial terms for kin. This is an idiomatic support or crutch for the tendency of ‘relation’ to connote connection and attachment before it also embraces disconnection or detachment, just as familial ties are normatively embued with positive rather than negative affect.^[16] We have already seen that such values bear on the anthropologist’s work practices, notably strong in the positive sense of accomplishment with which relations, ‘between’ or ‘within’ phenomena, are uncovered; to accumulate relations – as in putting entities and beings of all kinds into larger contexts – is interpreted as an incremental activity. This is simply a cultural comment. We may also underscore the tendency of the English phrase ‘kin relations’, so prevalent in anthropological discourse, to elide the analytical conceptualization of relations (close to Pina-Cabra’s general relationality) with the reciprocals or reflexivity implied in interaction between kinspersons. Inevitably, different argumentative positions emphasise relations as lying between kinsfolk as discrete persons, or as pointing to their mutual self-definition, or as some mix of the two. That said, such theoretical heterogeneity may strengthen rather than weaken the force of relations as a general concept.

One argument for holding on to the anthropologists’ strong vocabulary of relations is that it joins the few languages we have, from the life sciences and elsewhere, for dealing with the present ecological mess. A new sense of the fragility of the world, as a bio-physical-social entity, accompanies a new necessity to apprehend the interdependence of entities and beings of all kinds.^[17] An appeal to ‘relations’ is crisp and all-embracing. Indeed, it is relations all the way down. And in every quarter: dispensing with the internal-external axis in which much of this account is couched, Barad (2007) argues that no phenomenon exists apart from the ‘intra-action’ of phenomena. An anthropologist might add there are still too many imagined worlds that ignore such realities, and there is much work of criticism still to be done. For, among other things, what such an appeal to relations does not do is dispatch the spectre of an underlying presumption of similarity (between terms) entailed in imagining terms to a relation. This is relevant to activist dimensions of remedial politics, anthropogenically-speaking (Danowski & Viveiros de Castro 2017). Relations so conceived fail to challenge prevailing Anglophone requirements of political action, namely that it proceed through demonstrating similarity or convergence of interests (‘connections’ in this sense) when parties are brought together. Such requirements cannot deal with those social encounters to which, of all disciplines, anthropology has specialist access, namely those based on the collective work of difference and division.^[18]The relation, observes Haraway (2003), is about significant otherness at every scale. Her conception of what relating entails is implicitly political in tenor.

Non-relations and post-relations?

This entry has indicated some of the ways anthropologists have used ‘relations’ in the course of their practice, now taken for granted, now explicitly differentiated for this or that purpose. Those ways both cross other currents in social thought and are given prominence in the discipline’s traditional concern with the collective or associational dimension of people’s lives. Attention has been paid to divergences between views, and the manner in which they recur. One thread through these usages is the critical edge that being explicit about relations has brought to debate.

A remark attributed to the twentieth century anthropologist and ecologist, Gregory Bateson, is that one cannot not relate.^[19]Interesting, therefore, is recent critical writing that challenges how relationality, in a social or interpersonal sense, appears to suffuse anthropological accounts. Two examples must serve.^[20]Candea et al. (2015) take up the positive affect attributed to relations as inevitably implying the desirability of close ties between people or the mutuality of engagement. These essays seek to re-evaluate detachment and disconnection in social life, analyzing strategies of separation and distancing – relations from another point of view – for their political and ethical interest. In different vein, Holbraad and Pederson (2017: 242-81) ask what comes after the relation. They suggest that by intensifying it beyond recognition one can develop examples of apparently ‘non-relational’ ethnographic moments to sketch what a ‘post-relational’ shift might look like. In the course of this they uncover a renewed vernacular or indigenous (in their examples, Christian) interest in the individual, a connection-cutting entity, which holds out the critical potential of modifying the concept of the relation itself, such that it is no longer ‘owned by’ or ceases ‘to be about’ social relations. As these narratives imply, there is more still to relate.

References

Allen, N.J. 2000. Categories and classifications: Maussian reflections on the social. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe half-way: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Battaglia, D. 2005. Insiders’ voices in outer spaces. In E.T. culture: anthropology in outerspaces (ed.) D. Battaglia, 1-37. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Bonnemère, P. 2018. Acting for others: relational transformations in Papua New Guinea. Chicago: HAU Books.

Brower, J. 2015. Medieval theories of relations [revised]. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (ed.) E.N. Zalta (available on-line: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relations-medieval). Accessed 4 February 2016.

Candea, M., J. Cook, C. Trundle & T. Yarrow (eds) 2015. Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking. Manchester: University Press.

Carsten, J. (ed.) 2000. Cultures of relatedness: new approaches to the study of kinship. Cambridge: University Press.

Corsín Jiménez, A. Willerslev, & R. Willerslev 2007. ‘An anthropological concept of the concept’: reversibility among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13, 527-44.

Danowski, D. & E. Viveiros de Castro 2017 [2014]. The ends of the world (trans. R. Nunes). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Descola, P. 2013 [2005]. Beyond nature and culture (trans. J. Lloyd). Chicago: University Press.

Descombes, V. 2014 [1996]. The institutions of meaning: a defense of anthropological holism (trans. S.A. Schwartz). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Douglas, M. 1970. Introduction. In Witchcraft confessions and accusations (ed.) M. Douglas, xiii-xxxviii. London: Tavistock Publications.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1950 [1937]. Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Frankenberg, R. 1957. Village on the border: a social study of religion, politics and football in a North Wales community. London: Cohen & West.

Frankenberg, R. 1982. A social anthropology for Britain. In Custom and conflict in British society (ed.) R. Frankenberg, 1-35. Manchester: University Press.

Faubion, J.D. (ed.) 2001. The ethics of kinship: ethnographic enquiries. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefeld.

Feldman, G. 2011. If ethnography is more than participant observation, then relations are more than connections: the case for non-local ethnography in a world of apparatuses. Anthropological Theory 11(4), 375-95.

Goody, J. 1962. Death, property and the ancestors: a study of the mortuary customs of the Lodagaa of West Africa. London: Tavistock Publications.

Haraway, D. 2003. The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Holbraad, M. & M.A. Pederson 2017. The ontological turn: an anthropological exposition. Cambridge: University Press.

Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the social: an introduction to Actor-network theory. Oxford: University Press.

Lazar, S. 2012. Disjunctive comparison: citizenship and trade unionism in Bolivia and Argentina. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 18(2), 349-68.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963 [1945]. Structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology. In Structural anthropology, vol. 1, (trans. C. Jacobson & B.G. Schoepf), 31-54. New York: Basic Books.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1978 [1973]. Reflections on the atom of kinship. In Structural anthropology, volume 2, (trans. M. Layton), 82-112. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Moutu, A. 2013. Names are thicker than blood: kinship and ownership amongst the Iatmul. Oxford: OUP for The British Academy.

Ollman, B. 1976 [1971] Alienation: Marx’s conception of man in capitalist society. Cambridge: University Press.

Pina-Cabral, J. de 2017. World: an anthropological examination. Chicago: HAU Books.

Rabinow, P. 2011. The accompaniment: assembling the contemporary. Chicago: University Press.

Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1952 [1940]. On social structure. In Structure and function in primitive society, 188-204. London: Cohen & West.

Sahlins, M. 2013. What kinship is – and is not. Chicago: University Press.

Strathern, M. 1992. After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century. Cambridge: University Press.

Strathern, M. 2005. Embedded science. In Kinship, law and the unexpected: relatives are always a surprise, 33-49. Cambridge: University Press.

Strathern, M. 2017. Persons and partible persons. In Schools and styles of anthropological theory (ed.) M. Candea, 236-46. London: Routledge.

Viveiros de Castro, E. 2014 [2009]. Cannibal metaphysics for a post-structural anthropology (trans. & ed. P. Skafish). Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal Publishing.

Wagner, R.1975.The invention of culture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Note on contributor

Marilyn Strathern is a former William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology, and currently Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. Her ethnographic forays are divided between Papua New Guinea and Britain. Apart from gender and kinship, she has written on reproductive technologies, intellectual and cultural property, and audit culture.

Prof. Marilyn Strathern, ms10026@cam.ac.uk.

[1] It took time before the Aristotlean conviction that one property cannot belong to more than one subject was left to the side.

[2] All terms lead to other terms, but relative terms show this explicitly: ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ are relatives terms, as are ‘parent’ and ‘child’, each implying the other. Leibniz’s overall argument was consonant with his objection to Isaac Newton’s idea of space as something in itself, within which other objects move; for Leibniz, space was simply the ‘order’ (another word for ‘relation’), in which celestial bodies move in respect of each other.

[3] Thus, ‘the relation between capital and labor is treated ... as a function of capital itself’ – capital is a (social) relation (Ollman 1976: 13).

[4] The full passage reads: ‘Multiplicity is a system defined by a modality of relational synthesis different from a connection or conjunction of terms. Deleuze calls it a disjunctive synthesis or inclusive disjunction, a relational mode that does not have similarity or identity as its (formal or final) cause, but divergence or distance; another name for this relational mode is “becoming”’ (2014: 112, emphasis ignored). Disjunctive synthesis is a difference understood as positive rather than oppositive. Deleuze’s specific debt to Leibniz is mentioned.

[5] With reference to his field material from Melanesia. Moutu’s (2012: 202) observation extends from the proposition that Melanesians take relationships as the implicit ground of being, by contrast with the Euro-American impetus to see ‘making relations / relationships’ as a matter of social agency.

[6] In some senses, this anticipates an observation from Pina-Cabral (below).

[7] Elsewhere in this address he takes ‘relations of person to person’ as simply a part of social structure, the other part being the differentiation of individuals and classes by their social role.

[8] For example, ‘[T]he terms of kinship are inherently linking terms; … they render the self in and through its relation to certain others’ (Faubion 2001: 3). (Self and other is an axis often taken as fundamental to people’s conceptualization of relations.) However, Radcliffe-Brown seems to have something more like external relations in mind (social structure as ‘actually existing relations’ that ‘link together certain human beings’ [1952: 192]).

[9] To offer just one example, Frankenberg’s (1957) focus on the politics of a Welsh village sprang from then-burgeoning interests in African village politics, a comparative agenda carried through in his posing a social anthropology for Britain (1982).

[10] As Descombes in his discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s work puts it. ‘Structural holism asks us to practice structural analysis as a form of holistic analysis, i.e., as a search for the relations that ground the system’ (Descombes 2014: 157). His own account develops the proposition that no social interaction takes place without a third term, that is, the taken for granted, instituted meanings of collective life. Thus in gift exchange between persons, the whole is given before its parts in that a ‘gift’ is already following the conventions of ‘gift giving’.

[11] Whether or not causation is involved.

[12] Controversy lies in the way that last usage is criticised in turn for the implication, from a ‘western’ perspective, that relations flourish in other, invariably ‘non-western’, places more heartily than at home.

[13] Whether of whole cultural orientations or within the dynamics of specific interactions. On the extent to which people do or do not take a relational world as having to be ‘made’, see Wagner (1975); Note v., above.

[14] Contrast the purpose Carsten (2000) has for the general term ‘relatedness’, an analytical placeholder to avoid pre-empting assumptions about the nature of kinship.

[15] Because of the ontogenetic – ever developing– character of persons. Per contra, Rabinow (2011) sees a transcendental quality in the relational interactions of ‘assemblages’, insofar as any kind of entity has the capacity to be open to another.

[16] The oppositional mode of connection / disconnection is not the same as the disjunctive synthesis noted above (Note iv.).

[17] This very phrasing is positivist, but there is some (political) advantage in it being one of the positions accommodated by a portmanteau appeal to relations. Within anthropology, it should be added, there is much present interest, from a ‘human’ perspective, on (variously) human and animal, human and nonhuman, or human and other-than-human, relations.

[18] The case is argued apropos concepts of personhood in, for example, Strathern 2017.

[19] Explicitness about present or absent relations can be evidence of relational thinking; however, an enacted relation (anthropologist speaking) emptied of engagement or attachment may be rendered as a ‘non-relation’ in the English vernacular.

[20] Both volumes point to a wave of twenty-first century arguments, stimulated by diverse theoretical perspectives, about the limits of the relation as an anthropological analytic. As the connotations of relation shifts, so do the terms around it. Thus the individual person, as a logical concept always relationally constructed with respect to other concepts, may be identified as a relational configuration socially speaking, in which individualism is a knowing strategy.

Tribe

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

David Sneath

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16tribe

Abstract:

The concept of ‘tribal society’ is one of the most prominent and popular ‘anthropological’ notions of our time, yet within western social and cultural anthropology it has been largely abandoned as a sociological category. Although the origin of the word was rooted in the ancient Roman tribus, the modern concept of tribe emerged in the era of Euroamerican colonial expansion. It became the standard term for the social units of peoples considered primitive by the colonists, and for those thought to be uncivilised in historical accounts of antiquity. In the nineteenth century, the term tribe was woven into the theories of primitive society governed by the principles of ‘kinship’ proposed by the emerging social sciences, including the anthropology of Morgan and the sociology of Durkheim. This evolutionist thinking remained central to anthropology throughout most of the twentieth century, but in the post-colonial era of the discipline, more and more doubts were raised as to the usefulness of both the category ‘tribe’, and the particular models of kinship society that had been proposed for it. By the beginning of this century ‘the tribe’ had been widely discredited as an analytical term outside some specialised fields such as theories of early state formation. It is now commonly considered an ethnographic, rather than an analytical, term by Western-trained social and cultural anthropologists; a feature of the public culture studied, and reflecting the word’s popularization and colonial heritage.

Origins

Until the latter part of the twentieth century, ‘tribal society’ was widely thought to be the primary subject of anthropological inquiry. The study of ‘modern’ industrial society was the remit of sociology, while social and cultural anthropologists specialised in ‘traditional’, ‘primitive’, pre-industrial societies that formed ‘tribes’.^[1]

Paradoxically, although the concept of the tribe has been largely discredited and abandoned among Western-trained social and cultural anthropologists, the early anthropological promotion of the term was so successful that among the non-academic public worldwide, the category ‘tribe’ remains the single most prominent and dominant popular anthropological notion for imagining and referring to human society outside bureaucratic states.

The word 'tribe' itself is derived from the Latin term tribus, the administrative divisions and voting units of ancient Rome (Cornell 1995: 117).^[2] It came to be used in biblical texts for the thirteen divisions of the early Israelites and appears with this meaning in Middle English in the thirteenth century. By the sixteenth century it was being applied to non-biblical contexts in ways that resembled concepts such as race and lineage (Murray 1926: 339).

The notion of the tribe took on a very particular role in the era of colonial expansion. It became the social unit – and characteristic life-organising social form – of peoples considered more primitive than the Euroamerican colonists. As Yapp remarks:

It was only with the sixteenth-century expansion of Europe into the Americas and Africa that the association of tribes with a more primitive order of mankind began, and only with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that this was formalized into that concept of progress which set tribal people outside the pale of civil society. It was then supposed that the natural course of human development was a progression to higher levels of social, economic and political organization, which could be equated with civilization; and that those people who remained grouped in tribes represented an earlier, lower form of life, left behind by the march of history and destined to be redeemed and refashioned by the intervention of superior forces. The epithet most commonly found in association with the word ‘tribe’ was ‘savage’ (1983: 154).

Tribe became the standard term for the political groups of those thought of as barbarians, both in colonial encounters and in historical accounts of antiquity. Early modern and Enlightenment accounts of ancient Roman history came to routinely apply the category of tribe to the societies of Gauls, Germans, and others considered barbaric by the classical authors (e.g., Gibbon 1790). But in fact, since the primary meaning of the Latin term tribus was a Roman administrative unit, the term ‘tribe’ that appeared in such modern translations and commentaries only rarely referred to what had actually been called tribus by ancient Romans themselves. When sources such as Caesar and Tacitus described Gauls and Germans, they commonly used other terms.^[3] But European colonial elites compared themselves to the patricians of ancient Rome, and the same modern vocabulary for civilised and barbaric peoples was applied to both eras.

Tribe and evolutionism

In the nineteenth century, the emerging discipline of anthropology, dominated as it was by grand theories of historical progress and social evolution, wove the term tribe into the narrative of primitive society governed by the principles of ‘kinship’. The most influential anthropological theorist of his generation, Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) created a general scheme for the evolution of human society through three broad stages, from ‘savagery,’ to ‘barbarism’, and then to ‘civilisation’. He based his scheme on his readings of classical Greek and Roman history, in particular the theory of ancient Hellenistic state formation proposed by liberal politician George Grote in his 1846–1856 history of Greece. In Morgan’s schema the ‘tribe’ (the Greek phylon) was the political unit formed by a number of kinship units called phratries each composed of several ‘clans’ (gens) composed of families sharing descent from a common ancestor.

Morgan’s scheme fitted into a broader evolutionist perspective that assumed primitive society was organised by the principles of kinship and as a result could not be really hierarchical. Morgan, Maine, Marx, and McLennan all saw extended ties of kinship as forming the basis for pre-state society, later giving way to territory as the basis for social organization in civilizations. Maine, for example, who was concerned with the colonial administration of India and who grounded his work on primitive society in studies of classical Greek and particularly Roman sources, declared ‘The history of political ideas begins, in fact, with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions’ (1861: 106). The progress from barbarism to civilization entailed the change in social organization from one based on egalitarian kinship to one structured by hierarchical and territorial administration. This theory of change became the frame in which the anthropological conception of tribe developed. As the unit of barbaric society, then, the tribe stood in contrast to the state.

Colonial rule powerfully institutionalised the term tribe as an administrative category throughout much of the colonised world, particularly in Africa. In British Africa, such tribes became indispensable features of indirect rule; local rulers were maintained, and sometime installed, as ‘chiefs’ of their respective ‘tribes’, under colonial oversight and regulation. ‘Native law and custom’ became a central category of administration and the unit to which it was attached was generally the tribe.^[4] Only the most serious crimes were dealt with by the colonial judicial system; most local disputes were to be resolved by tribal courts using ‘customary’ law.

By the early twentieth century, the key assumptions regarding the tribe in evolutionist thought, that it was a form of primitive society, and that it was a kinship unit of common descent, had become common features in anthropological treatments. So, for example, the entry on ‘Tribe’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911 first describes the meaning of the word in terms of Roman administration and then continues: ‘Its ethnological meaning has come to be any aggregate of families or small communities which are grouped together under one chief or leader, observing similar customs and social rules, and tracing their descent from one common ancestor.’^[5] No serious attempt was made to establish a common definition, however, and many anthropologists tended to use tribe as a heuristic term to indicate some level of social aggregation of the ‘primitive’ societies they studied (Ekeh 1990: 662).^[6]

However, the growing influence of Durkheimian theory in social anthropology added weight to the Morganian vision of kinship society. Durkheim, who had himself been a student of the celebrated classicist Fustel de Coulanges, also saw the tribe as ‘an aggregate of hordes or clans’ (Durkheim 2013 [1893]: 204) and built it into his account of social evolution from ‘segmentary’ society based upon mechanical solidarity to the more advanced societies based upon organic solidarity. The emergent vision of ‘segmentary kinship society’, made up of families grouped together into successively larger units on the grounds of shared descent, became widely accepted as a sort of natural form for primitive society.^[7]

Tribe and social structure

In social anthropology the tribal concept was elaborated into a distinct model inspired, in particular, by Evans-Pritchard’s account of Nuer social structure. In their seminal 1940 work African political systems, Fortes and Evans-Pritchard proposed two categories of African polities.

One group, which we refer to as Group A, consists of those societies which have centralized authority, administrative machinery, and constituted judicial institutions – in short a government – and in which cleavages of wealth, privilege, and status correspond to the distribution of power and authority … 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 distinctions of rank, status, or wealth … 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 (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940: 5).

In these ‘stateless societies’, they argued, political relations were regulated by a ‘segmentary lineage system’ (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940: 6).^[8] This segmentary system was proposed as a general model for non-state tribal societies in which the branching segments of a unilineal genealogy formed political and territorial units, composed of the descendants of common ancestors. These grouped together on the basis of their genealogical distance to create successively larger political units.^[9] This typology was enormously influential and reflected the enduring influence of Morgan and evolutionist social theory.^[10] Although crude evolutionism had been criticised by the previous generation of anthropologists such as Malinowski, Stocking notes that by 1951 the structural-functionalism presented in authoritative works such as Notes and queries on anthropology had ‘in a peculiar way … re-evolutionized’ descriptions of political authority, so that they became ranged ‘in implicit evolutionary fashion’ (2001: 194).

Indeed, evolutionist thought remained central to both social and cultural anthropology and the tribe was widely thought of as an earlier stage of political evolution. As such the notion of ‘tribal society’ continued to act as the primitive counterpoint to self-descriptions of Euroamerican ‘civilisation’, narratives dominated by the discourse of class, kinship, territory, and function; and which reflected debates surrounding the ‘state of nature’ stretching back to Hobbes and Rousseau.

Tribes occupy a position in cultural evolution. They took over from simpler hunters; they gave way to more advanced cultures we call civilisations … the contrast between tribe and civilisation is between War and Peace. A civilisation is a society specially constituted to maintain ‘law and order’; the social complexity and cultural richness of civilisations depend on institutional guarantees of Peace. Lacking these institutional means and guarantees, tribesmen live in a condition of War, and War limits the scale, complexity, and all-round richness of their culture … Expressed another way, in the language of older philosophy, the U.S. is a state, the tribe a state of nature. Or, the U.S. is a civilisation, the tribe a primitive society (Sahlins 1968: 4-5, original emphasis).

The death of the concept

However, the second half of the twentieth century saw a steadily growing disquiet with both the term ‘tribal’ and the thinking that informed it. There were a number of reasons for this. The first was the incoherence of the category of tribe as a sociological term and the persistent difficulties of devising a definition. The word was applied to social categories so radically different as to stretch any notion of common criteria to breaking point; from groups of a few hundred ‘hunter-gatherers’ like the Araweté of the Amazon (Viveiros de Castro 1992: 49) to the millions of people in Nigeria and Benin identified as Yoruba, with a long history of rival city states (Arnett 1933: 401).

The second reason was an unhappiness with early evolutionist social theory and the teleological judgements it implied. Theories of social evolution were increasingly seen to be triumphalist Euroamerican narratives that justified colonial domination and claims of superiority. The concept of ‘primitive society’, for example, was found to be increasingly inapplicable and unhelpful for the study of contemporary societies. But the theoretical inertia of concepts that had been central to so much anthropological literature meant that a common reaction to these critiques was to change the vocabulary but retain much of the content of the older terms. So in his 1968 entry on ‘Tribal society’ in the International encyclopedia of the social sciences, for example, I.M. Lewis acknowledges the ‘unnecessary moralistic overtones’ of the term ‘tribe’ and its association with ‘a primitive or backward condition’, but he argues that these can be ‘avoided or minimized by the use of the expression “tribal society” which is to be preferred to such synonyms as “primitive society”’ (1968: 146). This reflected the reluctance of many in the discipline to dispense with the established conceptual frame for ethnography.

In the post-colonial era, anthropologists became increasingly critical of the legacy of colonial ideology and its terminology. Historical examination quickly revealed the ways in which many ‘tribes’ had been constructed in the colonial era; often their names themselves were vague terms used by outsiders that later became institutionalised in administrative categories. As Southall notes with regard to the Nyamwezi and Sukuma ‘tribes’ of Tanganyika (Tanzania) and the Hausa of West Africa:

‘Hausa’ is not the proper name of this great conglomeration of medieval trading city-states, but just the Songhay term for ‘those of the East’. Exploring the East African interior in the 1850s, Richard F. Burton found three great ‘tribes’ called Sukuma, Nyamwezi and Takama, unaware that his interpreters were giving him the terms for ‘those to the North, West and South’ of wherever they happened to be; Nyamwezi and Sukuma remain, but Takama has disappeared. (Southall 1985: 569)

However they came about, however, such tribes frequently gained administrative reality under colonial rule. Ranger (1983), for example, takes John Iliffe’s description of the creation of tribes in colonial Tanganyika as typical:

The notion of the tribe lay at the heart of indirect rule in Tanganyika. Refining the racial thinking common in German times, administrators believed that every African belonged to a tribe, just as every European belonged to a nation. The idea doubtless owed much to the Old Testament, to Tacitus and Caesar, to academic distinctions between tribal societies based on status and modern societies based on contract, and to the post-war anthropologists who preferred ‘tribal’ to the more pejorative word ‘savage’. Tribes were seen as cultural units ‘possessing common language, a single social system, and an established common law’. Their political and social systems rested on kinship. Tribal membership was hereditary. Different tribes were related genealogically … As unusually well-informed officials knew, this stereotype bore little relation to Tanganyika’s kaleidoscopic history, but it was the shifting sand on which Cameron and his disciples erected indirect rule by ‘taking the tribal unit’. They had the power and they created the political geography (Ranger 1983: 250).

Critical discussion of the tribe as an analytical concept began to emerge with increasing force in the 1960s. Treatments by Fried (1966) and Southall (1970) undermined the notion of the tribe as a pre-state stage in social evolution and pointed to the incoherence of the concept. But the term was too well established to be quickly abandoned.

As it had been widely thought of as a pre-state type of political organization, the notion of tribal society was still widely seen as applicable to polities that structural-functionalist treatments had characterised as less hierarchical, less centralised and smaller in scale than ‘the state’. The problem with this position was, however, that many of the best known ‘tribes’, such as the Zulu and Yoruba, had large-scale, hierarchical, and powerful polities that resembled the entities called 'states' rather closely. The solution was the use of the term ‘chiefdom’ as a sort of ‘missing link’ between the state and its tribal ancestor. This was done most explicitly by evolutionist anthropologists such as Sahlins and Service.^[11] This thinking has remained surprisingly influential among those working on state formation in cultural anthropology and archaeology (see, e.g., Carneiro 2003; Cobb 2003; Earle 1991). But, rooted as it is in the same colonial history and primitivist theory as the tribe, the term 'chiefdom' is open to many of the same critiques.

The notion of the tribe in contradistinction to the state became increasingly problematic among anthropologists concerned with contemporary societies, partly because the characterization proposed could not be made to match the use of the term ‘tribe’ in general use. The essential distinction between tribe and state had never been entirely accepted within the discipline. Malinowski, for example, saw the two as compatible and used the term ‘tribe-state’ to describe the Trobriands (Malinowski 1944: 166).^[12]

By the 1980s it had become increasingly clear that, because the use of the word tribe was the result of colonial logic, it only reliably indicated people not considered fully civilised in that era. Elizabeth Colson notes the double standards of this ‘tribalizing’ discourse.

In terms of territory, population, wealth, bureaucratic development, social stratification, and the centralization of power, the Hausa state of Kano far surpassed many of the kingdoms of Medieval Europe. Yet most of those who referred to the Hausa as a tribe were not being facetious in the fashion of Weatherford when he wrote of the tribes of Washington … Too many social scientists, as well as the general public, use [tribe] to maintain a false distinction between us and them, those people who used to be called primitive because they did not originate within the European tradition. Tribe, then, signals something about political domination but says nothing about the social complexity or political organization, now or formerly, of those to whom it is applied who may or may not have formed a polity in the past or present. In the 17th century when English-speaking explorers and settlers dealt with Native Americans as politically independent societies, they commonly referred to them as nations, placing them thus on a par with European nations … As it became possible to ignore and inexpedient to recognize the full sovereignty of Native American rivals with whom the English settlements competed for land and political dominion, ‘nation’ gave way to ‘tribe’ which carried implications of lesser political status. Tribe thereafter became the term commonly used to distinguish among the populations being incorporated into colonial empires as these were created during the 19th century (Colson 1986: 5-6).

The other notion that had been attached to the tribe, that it was a group sharing descent from a common ancestor, proved equally problematic. Firstly, many ethnographers had failed to find an ideology of shared descent among the people they studied. In his ethnography of the Andaman Islanders, for example, Radcliffe-Brown noted ‘the tribe is fundamentally a linguistic group’ rather than a kinship unit, and describes it as ‘of very little importance in regulating the social life’ (1922: 23). Furthermore, such ‘tribes’ did not resemble Morganian kinship society because ‘[i]n the Andamans there are no clans’ (Radcliffe-Brown 1922: 53). Interestingly, however, Radcliffe-Brown assumed that the Andamans were exceptional in this regard and that something like Morgan’s kinship organization must exist among ‘the vast majority of primitive peoples’ (1922: 52).^[13] Only later did generations of scholars begin to doubt the apparently authoritative theories of kinship society.

However, even Evans-Pritchard’s own account of Nuer society failed to match the notion of a group defined strictly by common descent, as ‘persons of Dinka descent form probably at least half the population of most tribes’ (1940: 221). So the kinship-society model survived by recasting its central feature; rather than actual common descent, the members of these societies used the idiom of common descent to describe political relations. Although the segmentary lineage structure Evans-Pritchard described for the Nuer only strictly speaking applied to a small minority,^[14] it could still be seen as the central principle of social organization as all members of the society were attached to members of the dominant lineages, and so, the argument went, were part of a system of common kinship and descent in some sense.

If the structural-functionalists’ loosely Weberian political typologies had internalised the colonial notion of tribe as a political segment, Marxian evolutionary perspectives were rooted in the Morganian vision of tribal kinship society. Gluckman, for example, dismissed what he termed the ‘crude kind of social evolutionism’ (1965: 84) of the previous generation of scholars, but described the Marxian evolutionism of Leslie White and others in positive tones, based as it was on ‘far better data on the tribal peoples’ (1965: 84). Although aware of ethnography that contradicted the nineteenth century evolutionary narrative, Gluckman nevertheless retained the old paradigm, assuming that it was sound ideologically, if not literally. So when Schapera’s ethnography showed that hunter-gatherer bands were not kinship groups, thus contradicting Maine’s theory that in primitive society ‘kinship in blood is the sole possible ground for community in political functions’ (1861: 106), Gluckman defends the theorist rather than the ethnographer; stressing that the insights from Ancient Greece remained valid. He writes:

Maine’s statement is undoubtedly misleading. But he makes it clear elsewhere in the book that in classical Greece ‘strangers’ could join a political state … The alteration [from tribe to state] comes when a kinship idiom to express political association is no longer demanded: as we have already seen, the kinship idiom of tribal society in practice covers relationships directed towards various purposes (Gluckman 1965: 86).

In retrospect, however, the existence of kinship idioms that can be applied to political relations seems an unconvincing basis for a distinctive social type. Three major world religions claim universal descent from Adam and all sorts of political and religious institutions use kinship idioms for their members, including nation-states (Hobsbawm 1990: 53-4). The critique of the old tribal paradigm continued to gather pace. Fried’s (1975) monograph The notion of tribe argued that the model of pre-state tribal society was entirely fallacious and that the entities called tribes were constructed by states. Godelier saw the concept of tribe as a product of the wider problems of outdated theories of kinship society and called for a more thoroughgoing rethinking of the paradigm:

It is not enough, like Swartz or Turner, to ignore the concept of tribe by referring no longer to it; to appeal to prudence, like Steward; or to criticise its scandalous imprecision (Neiva), its theoretical sterility and fallacies (Fried) its ideological manipulation as a tool in the hands of colonial powers (Colson, Southall, Valakazi). The evil does not spring from an isolated concept but has roots in a problem which will necessarily produce similar theoretical effects as dictated by the scientific work put into it (Godelier 1977: 90).^[15]

In the 1980s classical kinship theory as a whole began to unravel in the face of critiques led by Schneider (1984), who pointed to the distorting effects of treating kinship as a privileged analytical category, and Kuper (1988) who explored the pervasive influence of primitivism in anthropology. Parts of the Morganian scheme had been in doubt for some time. The ethnographic evidence for the segmentary kinship model had always been rather slight, and this began to fade away in the light of more critical later studies (Gough 1971; Southall 1988; Verdon 1983). As Kuper pointed out, the actual local categories used to designate groups of people did not resemble those of descent theory (1988: 190-209; also see Gottlieb 1992: 46-71; Jackson 1989: 10-1). As he concludes, ‘there do not appear to be any societies in which vital political or economic activities are organized by a repetitive series of descent groups’ (Kuper 2004: 93). The structure that had been thought to typify ‘tribal society’ appears to have been a mirage.

In the mid-1980s Aidan Southall noted that ‘few Anglo-Saxon anthropologists with relevant field experience have defended the concept of tribe in the last twenty-five years’ (1985: 568). Works such as Vail’s The creation of tribalism in Southern Africa (1989) helped establish the view that tribalism was a product of colonial classification and administration, and should be approached as an ideological construct dating from that era.

Survival beyond anthropology

But outside of anthropology the term tribe continued to be widely used. In history, particularly that of the Middle East, the concept lived on in something like its original Morganian form.^[16] So Khoury and Kostiner write that ‘as ideal types, tribes represent large kin groups organized and regulated according to ties of blood or family lineage; states, by contrast, are structures that exercise the ultimate monopoly of power in a given territory’ (1990: 4). Noting that this distinction was generally far from clear in practice, they make use of another old anthropological concept to bridge the gap – the chiefdom. ‘Chiefdoms may be viewed as one type of intermediate political formation between tribes and states, incorporating some features and institutions of both’ (Khoury & Kostiner 1990: 8). However, even Khoury and Kostiner follow Tapper in conceding that some ‘tribes’ never subscribed to the ideology of common descent, and they admit that a definition of tribe is ‘virtually impossible to produce’ (1990: 5). It was not just the kinship content of the unit that was problematic; it could not be treated as an essentially non-state form since ‘there are elements of state within every tribe and of tribe within every state’ (Tapper 1990: 68).

Since that time most anthropologists have moved further away from the notion of tribal society, even as the sort of abstract conceptual model or ideal-type that Tapper and Khoury and Kostiner were left with. Aidan Southall, in his 1996 entry ‘Tribe’ in the Encyclopedia of cultural anthropology, wrote: ‘Tribe is a self-fulfilling Orientalist prophesy in which vague notions of outsiders are essentialized’ (1996: 1331). ‘Heroic attempts are made at salvaging and sanitizing the concept’, he adds, but in the end the term ‘has little precise meaning and so many different divergent definitions that a realistic conclusion would be … to accept the use of a term like ‘people’, which matches the indeterminacy of the phenomenon itself’ (Southall 1996: 1334-5).

The tribe, however, continues to survive. In some strands of evolutionist cultural anthropology, less concerned perhaps with the legacy of colonialism, the concept of the tribe has been retained with all the characteristics expected of it by evolutionist kinship theory. In his Dictionary of concepts in cultural anthropology, Winthrop, for example, defines ‘tribe’ in the following way: ‘A culturally homogenous, nonstratified society possessing a common territory, without centralized political or legal institutions, whose members are linked by extended kinship ties, ritual obligations, and mutual responsibility for the resolution of disputes’ (1991: 307). In a similar way, John H. Bodley’s textbook Cultural anthropology: tribes, states, and the global system, reprinted for the fifth time in 2011, divides all known societies into three categories of increasing complexity: tribal, imperial, and commercial ‘worlds’. Of the tribal he writes:

Most of human existence has been in the tribal world. With small societies living in an uncrowded world and a minimum of social inequality except for natural differences of age and gender, tribal people could enjoy a maximum of human freedom … there was no need for government … Everyone shared natural resources and the goods that they produced, while at the same time maintaining clear property rights (Bodley 2011: 1).

This theoretically possible, but entirely speculative, vision of the distant past exemplifies the longevity of the mythology of primitive society so thoroughly critiqued by Kuper (1988).

Despite its survival in some schools of thought, however, the tribe has become a term of largely historical interest within most of social and cultural anthropology, seen as an artefact of older theories.^[17] In his 1996 article ‘Tribe’ in The social sciences encyclopedia, John Sharp, for example, writes a suitable memorial to the heyday of the tribe as an analytical concept:

Early ethnographers … speculated that ‘primitive’ groups were recruited by ascription, on the basis of status. Evidence that kinship played some part in constituting these social groups led them to conclude that tribes were ascriptive groups based solely on kinship. This was patently untrue, but it allowed people in the west to believe that primitive and civilized worlds were fundamentally different (Sharp 1996: 883).

References

Arnett, E. 1933. The census of Nigeria, 1931. Journal of the Royal African Society 32, 398-404.

Bodley, J.H. 2011. Cultural anthropology: tribes, states, and the global system. Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press.

Carneiro, R. 2003. Evolutionism in cultural anthropology: a critical history. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Cobb, C. 2003. Mississippian chiefdoms: how complex? Annual Review of Anthropology 32, 63-84.

Colson, E. 1986. Political organization in tribal societies: a cross-cultural comparison. American Indian Quarterly 10, 5-19.

Cornell, T. 1995. The beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars. London & New York: Routledge.

Durkheim, E. 2013 [1893]. The division of labour in society. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Earle, T. (ed.) 1991. Chiefdoms: power, economy, and ideology. Cambridge: University Press.

Ekeh, P. 1990. Social anthropology and two contrasting uses of tribalism in Africa. Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, 660-700.

Evans-Pritchard, E. 1940. The Nuer: a description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Niliotic people. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

——— 1951. Social anthropology. London: Cohen & West.

Fortes, M. & E. Evans-Pritchard (eds) 1940. African political systems. Oxford: University Press.

Fried, M. 1966. On the concepts of ‘tribe’ and ‘tribal society’. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences 28, 527-40.

——— 1975. The notion of tribe. Menlo Park, Calif.: Cummings.

Gibbon, E. 1790. Mr. Gibbon’s History of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, abridged. London: Strahan & Cadell.

Gluckman, M. 1965. Politics, law and ritual in tribal society. Chicago: Aldine.

Godelier, M. 1977. Perspectives in Marxist anthropology. Cambridge: University Press.

Gottlieb, A. 1992. Under the Kapok tree: identity and difference in Beng thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Gough, K. 1971. Nuer kinship: a reexamination. In The translation of culture: essays to E.E. Evans-Pritchard (ed.) T. Beidelman. London: Tavistock.

Hobsbawm, E.J. 1990. Nations and nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality. Cambridge: University Press.

Howell, P.P. 1954. A manual of Nuer law. Oxford: University Press.

Jackson, M. 1989. Paths toward a clearing: radical empiricism and ethnographical inquiry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Khoury, P. & J. Kostiner 1990. Introduction: tribes and the complexities of and state formation in the Middle East. In Tribes and state formation in the Middle East (eds) P. Khoury & J. Kostiner, 1-22. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kuper, A. 1988. The invention of primitive society: transformations of an illusion. London & New York: Routledge.

——— 2004. Lineage theory: a critical retrospect. In Kinship and family: an anthropological reader (eds) R. Parkin & L. Stone, 79-96. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.

Lewin, J. 1938. The recognition of native law and custom in British Africa. Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law 20, 16-23.

Lewis, I.M. 1968. Tribal society. In The international encyclopedia of the social sciences 16, 146-51. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Macmillan Company & The Free Press.

Malinowski, B. 1932 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: an account of native enterprise and adventure in the archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: George Routledge & Sons.

——— 1944. A scientific theory of culture and other essays. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

MacMichael, H.A. 1910. The Kababish: some remarks on the ethnology of a Sudan Arab tribe. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 40, 215-31.

Maine, H. 1861. Ancient law: its connection with the early history of society and its relation to modern ideas. London: John Murray.

Morgan, L.H. 1964 [1877]. Ancient society: researches in the lines of human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilisation. New York: Holt.

Murray, J. 1926. A new English dictionary on historical principles: founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological Society 10(1). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Paul, J. 2011. Mongol aristocrats and beyliks in Anatolia: a study of Astarabadi’s Bazm va Razm. Eurasian Studies 9, 103-56.

Peacock, A. 2013. From the Balkhan-Kuhiyan to the Nawakiya: nomadic polities and the foundations of Seljuk rule in Anatolia. In Nomad aristocrats in a world of empires (ed.) J. Paul, 55-80. Wiesbaden: Verlag.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. 1922. The Andaman islanders; a study in social anthropology. Cambridge: University Press.

——— 1952. Structure and function in primitive societies. London: Cohen & West.

Ranger, T. 1983. The invention of tradition in Colonial Africa. In The invention of tradition (eds) E. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger, 211-62. Cambridge: University Press.

Rives, J. 1999. Tacitus: Germania. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Sahlins, M. 1968. Tribesmen. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Schneider, D. 1984. A critique of the study of kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Sharp, J. 1996. Tribe. In The social sciences encyclopedia, second edition (eds) A. Kuper & J. Kuper. London & New York: Routledge.

Smith, C.J. 2006. The Roman clan: the gens from ancient ideology to modern anthropology. Cambridge: University Press.

Sneath, D. 2007. The headless state: aristocratic orders, kinship society, and misrepresentations of Inner Asia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Southall, A. 1970. The illusion of the tribe. In The passing of tribal man in Africa (ed.) P. Gutkind, 28-50. Leiden: Brill.

——— 1985. Review: The ethnic heart of anthropology (Le cœur ethnique de l'anthropologie). Cahiers d'Études Africaines 25, 567-72.

——— 1988. The segmentary state in Africa and Asia. Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, 52-82.

——— 1996. Tribe. In Encyclopedia of cultural anthropology (eds) D. Levinson & M. Ember, 1329-36. New York: Henry Holt.

Stocking, G. 2001. Delimiting anthropology: occasional essays and reflections. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Tapper, R. 1990. Anthropologists, historians, and tribespeople on tribe and state formation in the Middle East. In Tribes and state formation in the Middle East (eds) P. Khoury & J. Kostiner, 48-73. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Vail, L. 1989. The creation of tribalism in Southern Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Verdon, M. 1983. The Abutia Ewe of West Africa: a chiefdom that never was. Berlin: Mouton.

Viveiros de Castro, E. 1992. From the enemy's point of view: humanity and divinity in an Amazonian society. Chicago: University Press.

Winthrop, R. 1991. Dictionary of concepts in cultural anthropology. New York: Greenwood Press.

Wolfram, H. 1988. History of the Goths. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Yapp, M. 1983. Tribes and states in the Khyber 1838–42. In The conflict of tribe and state in Iran and Afghanistan (ed.) R. Tapper. London: Croom Helm.

Note on contributor

Dr. David Sneath is Reader in the Anthropology of Political Economy at the Division of Social Anthropology and Director of the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, Cambridge University. He is an editor of the Brill journal Inner Asia and a Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

Dr David Sneath, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. ds114@cam.ac.uk

[1] Evans-Pritchard, for example, writes ‘Social Anthropology can therefore be regarded as a branch of sociological studies, that branch which chiefly devotes itself to primitive societies’ (1951: 11), and Radcliffe-Brown describes the subject as ‘the study of what are called primitive or backward peoples’ (1952: 2).

[2] As Cornell notes, there is no evidence that Roman tribes were kinship units (1995: 116). They were ‘artificial units deliberately instituted for administrative and political purposes’ (Cornell 1995: 117).

[3] Gauls and Germans were commonly described using the terms civitas (‘state’), natio (‘nation’, ‘race’, ‘people’) and gens – the term translated as ‘clan’ by Morgan but that has been subject to debate and its precise meaning remains unclear (Rives 1999: 119-53; Smith 2006: 1-14; Wolfram 1988: 6).

[4] See, for example, Lewin (1938).

[5] See Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911, Vol. 27: 262). It is worth noting that the entry describes the ‘ethnological meaning’ of the term separately because, as an administrative unit, the original Roman tribe bore little resemblance to the understanding of the term used by anthropologists or colonial administrators.

[6] See, for example, MacMichael, who wrote ‘[t]he word tribe as commonly used generally implies among other things a closely homogeneous collection of families or individuals living together under a hereditary or elective sheikhship, and largely distinct by race from other such communities’ (1910: 215).

[7] Morgan described these kinship structures and their units as natural phenomena (1964 [1877]: 302-4).

[8] See Kuper for a discussion of these models (1988: 190-209). See also Sneath (2007: 40-9, 132-4).

[9] In his textbook Tribesmen, for example, Sahlins wrote: ‘The tribe presents itself as a pyramid of social groups, technically speaking as a “segmentary hierarchy” … The smallest units, such as households, are segments of more inclusive units such as lineages, the lineages in turn segments of larger groups, and so on’ (1968: 15).

[10] The Group A and Group B distinctions are reminiscent of Morgan’s position that ‘all forms of government are reducible to two general plans … The first, in the order of time, is founded upon persons, and upon relations purely personal, and may be distinguished as a society (societas). The gens [clan] is the unit of organisation … The second is founded upon territory and upon property, and may be distinguished as a state (civitas)’ (Morgan 1964 [1877]: 13-14).

[11] Sahlins writes ‘[t]ribes present a notable range of evolutionary developments … in its most developed expression, the chiefdom, tribal culture anticipates statehood in its complexities. Here are regional political regimes organised under powerful chiefs and primitive nobilities’ (1968: 20). The distinguishing feature of ‘primitive nobilities’ was, needless to say, the circular notion that they existed in chiefdoms or ‘primitive states’. As an evolutionist concept, the chiefdom had to conform with the theory of change from egalitarian kinship society towards impersonal class society. It was said to be made up of descent groups that were simultaneously communities, and therefore could not be fully stratified, as that was thought to be a characteristic of a later stage.

[12] He described the Trobriands as having a ‘tribe-state’, which he thought of as the ‘executive committee’ of the wider society, with political organisation, a military class, and arms as instruments of power (Malinowski 1944: 166).

[13] Even in cases where ethnographers described the descent groups they encountered as clans, they might not share a common ancestor. The Trobriand kumila ‘clans’ and dala ‘sub-clans’ described by Malinowski, for example, each had different female ancestors. See Malinowski (1932 [1922]: 63).

[14] As Howell explains, ‘[w]ithin each tribe only a small proportion of the people has the genuine right to claim direct descent from the original ancestor from whom the tribal name is derived. The majority are descended from later immigrants from other parts of Nuerland, or from Dinka accretions absorbed by the fiction of adoption into Nuer society. Genuine descendants are termed diel’ (1954: 18). Evans-Pritchard notes: ‘[t]he diel are an aristocratic clan, numerically swamped in the tribe by strangers and Dinka, but providing a lineage structure on which the tribal organization is built up’ (1940: 220).

[15] He adds ‘[t]he most surprising thing in the history of this concept is that it has varied little in basic meaning since Lewis H. Morgan (1877). The innumerable discoveries in the field since have only aggravated and accentuated the imprecision and difficulties without leading to any radical critique, still less to its expulsion from the field of anthropology’ (Godelier 1977: 89-90).

[16] More recent scholarship, however, has questioned the evidential basis for the application of the tribal model to historical societies in Anatolia, for example (Paul 2011; Peacock 2013).

[17] As Gingrich writes in his 2001 entry on ‘Tribe’ in the International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences, ‘[m]ost scholars … would agree that the concept [of tribe] is obsolete as a general comparative category outside particular areas’ (Gingrich 2001: 15908).

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Kinship

Adoption

The basic problem: critique of the study of kinship[1]

What adoption does

What is adoption?

Fostering: feeding and supporting a child

Finding an heir: ensuring disposition of resources according to one’s wishes

Political economy of adoption and inequality

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

Relations

Introduction

Relations between and within

Relations … and terms; relations … and connections

Social relations

The compulsion of relations

Non-relations and post-relations?

References

Note on contributor

Tribe

Origins

Tribe and evolutionism

Tribe and social structure

The death of the concept

Survival beyond anthropology

References

Note on contributor

The basic problem: critique of the study of kinship^[1]