Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Family

Sharia

Rebecca Tishler — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 18:13:03 +0000

University of Oxford

Initially published 29 Nov 2020

Abstract:

Sharia is a key concept in Islam and our contemporary world. Often translated into English as ‘Islamic law’, it includes financial contracts, criminal justice, and marriage and divorce. But it also covers ritual practice, dietary prohibitions, and personal and interpersonal ethics. Indeed, the rules of sharia could, in theory, encompass all of life. Sharia thus comprises both a legal system and a rule-based approach to the challenges of living a good life more generally. Sharia ideas and discourses have been hugely important historically across the parts of the world touched by Islam. Despite their marginalization under colonial modernization projects, they remain intensely vibrant and relevant today. In the wake of the widespread failings of postcolonial secular states, sharia has become widely seen as an alternative and challenge to civil law and the liberal tradition. The violence of some of the most extreme contemporary Islamist movements has, however, contributed to an intensely negative stereotyping of sharia in the West.

Such extreme instances need to be placed in the context not only of recent and deeper history, but also the immense diversity of approaches to Islam and sharia that the world’s nearly two billion Muslims adopt today. Anthropology has made an invaluable contribution to such efforts. One key topic has been gender, and the place of sharia norms in family law. The relationship between sharia and other sets of norms has been a central case of legal pluralism within legal anthropology. Medical and economic anthropology have explored sharia’s role in responses to the challenges of new global technologies such as assisted reproduction and novel financial instruments. More broadly, as part of the wider anthropology of Islam, anthropologists have helped document the various ways in which sharia norms form part of the texture of Muslim life across the world.

Introduction

Sharia is a key concept within Islam and our contemporary world more generally. Originally an Arabic word (sharī‘a) from a root which could refer to both law and ‘a way’, it has often been translated into English as ‘Islamic law’. The sharia tradition does indeed include rules and processes dealing with financial contracts, criminal justice, and marriage and divorce, for example. But it also covers ritual practice, dietary prohibitions, and personal and interpersonal ethics. Indeed, the rules of sharia could in theory encompass all of life, laying down right, and wrong, ways of doing almost everything. One will then be judged as to one’s actions by God on Judgment Day, according to the standards He has prescribed, in the Quran and through the example of the Prophet. Sharia thus comprises both a legal system and a rule-based approach to the challenges of living a good life, in ways analogous to its Abrahamic relatives the Jewish halakha and Catholic moral theology.

Sharia ideas and discourses have been hugely important historically across the parts of the world touched by Islam, even if the extent of their practical application (which has varied) has never been as comprehensive as theory might allow. They also remain intensely vibrant and relevant today – both to questions of personal conduct, and those as to the nature of society and how it should be governed. In most of the Muslim world, colonial and postcolonial modernity brought a restriction of sharia’s role in the life of the state and its replacement by European-style civil law (or English common law). In the wake of the widespread failings of postcolonial secular states and an ‘Islamic revival’ in response, the call to restore the sharia, as a crucial part of an ‘Islamic state’ even, has become common. Sharia has come to be seen widely as an oppositional force, a challenge to secular law, and thus also a challenge to the particular system of rights and freedoms associated with the liberal tradition. The violence of the most extreme contemporary Islamist movements, such as ISIS or Boko Haram, has contributed to an already intensely negative stereotyping of sharia, focused on harsh criminal punishments and patriarchal gender norms. In a continuation of Orientalist ideas, sharia has been widely depicted by its critics as antithetical to modernity.

Such extreme instances need to be placed properly in the context not only of recent and deeper history, but also the immense diversity of approaches to Islam and sharia that the world’s nearly two billion Muslims adopt today. Unhelpful and unrealistic stereotypes about sharia need to be challenged. What sharia actually means to Muslims in practice needs to be documented. Anthropology has made an invaluable contribution to such efforts. One key topic has been gender, and the place of sharia norms in family law. The relationship between sharia and other sets of norms, in Muslim-majority and minority contexts, has been a central case of legal pluralism within legal anthropology. And medical and economic anthropology have explored sharia’s role in responses to the challenges of new global technologies such as assisted reproduction and novel financial instruments. More broadly, as part of the wider anthropology of Islam, anthropologists have helped document the various ways in which sharia norms form part of the texture of Muslim life across the world.

Sharia discourse is a complex and rich tradition. Given the sheer breadth and sophistication of this body of intellectual history, let alone the linguistic and other skills required to grapple with it, Islamic legal studies can be a forbiddingly technical discipline. But, fortunately, non-specialists can draw on widely available and accessible guides, such as Wael Hallaq’s (2009a) very substantial account, Shari‘a: theory, practice, transformations (also available in abridged form, An introduction to Islamic law [2009b]). Earlier generations of anthropologists might have left such issues to the specialists. But Talal Asad’s (1986) emphatic assertion that Islam is a discursive tradition helped inaugurate a new focus on the place of Islamic discourse, including sharia discourse, in Muslim practice – ‘a new anthropology of Islam’ (Bowen 2012). Some have worried about the dangers of going too far in this regard. That would include over-emphasising the place of religious rules in what it means to be Muslim. Even if sharia currently looms large in both Muslim and non-Muslim imaginaries of Islam, we must not forget the breadth and richness of the Islamic tradition beyond it (Ahmed 2016: 113-29).^[1]

Sharia discourse and history

Some rules are explicitly stated in the Quran, the holy text of God’s word dictated to the Prophet Muhammad in seventh century (CE) Arabia. One verse (5:6), for example, tells Muslims how they should wash before prayers: ‘You who are faithful, when you stand up for prayers, wash your faces and hands to the elbows, and wipe your heads and your feet to the ankles.’ There is room for varying interpretation even here – which direction should you wash or wipe, for example? In deciding how correctly to interpret such verses, and how to formulate rules for conduct where they are not so explicitly stated, Muslims can draw on a wider range of sources: the Quran as a whole; the Sunna – the example of the Prophet, as transmitted in the Hadith, or the accounts of what he said and did (and for the Shia, also the example of the divinely guided Imams who came after him); the consensus of the Muslim community; and forms of human reasoning. This is a complex undertaking, a human science in its own right, called fiqh, which has resulted in much debate and controversy, and a vast body of legal literature and theory. Those discussions are carried on in all the languages of Islam, even if many of their shared terms (like fiqh) are originally Arabic.

Sharia and fiqh are tightly linked concepts. But while the word sharia points to God’s divine law, fiqh – which attempts to discover that law – is a human undertaking, whose content has changed and developed over time. After the Prophet’s death (in 632 CE), religious knowledge became gradually more organised, a domain of expertise on the part of increasingly professional scholars (‘ulamā’, sing. ‘alim). From around the ninth century CE, ‘schools of law’ (madhāhib, sing. madhhab) emerged around the thought and teaching of famous predecessors. Four Sunni schools have survived: Hanafi, Hanbali, Maliki and Shafi‘i. Some are more associated with some parts of the world than others (the Maliki tradition is especially prevalent in North Africa, for instance). The Twelver Shi‘i tradition can be considered a parallel such school.

Scholarly expertise in the sharia is in part an act of religious devotion. But it also has a practical role to play. A jurist (i.e., an Islamic legal scholar) can provide guidance to non-experts, in formal terms as a non-binding legal opinion (fatwā). In this case the scholar would be acting as a muftī (one who gives fatwas) (see Masud et al. 1996). Or, they could arbitrate in disputes, working towards an authoritative and binding resolution or judgement, as a judge (qādī, hākim) (Masud et al. 2005). This could be as an independent scholar, or it could be in the service or with the backing of the state.

The relationship between the scholarly class and the state has varied across time and space. Sharia has often been characterised as a ‘jurist’s law’, in the sense that it is the scholarly class who define the law rather than the state, even if the ruler is in theory bound by God’s law, too. Despite a hackneyed – and historically inaccurate – notion that, unlike Christianity, Islam admits no separation between religion and state, the ulama have very often worked independently of it (Lapidus 1996). Recent scholarship has, however, argued for closer attention to the transformations wrought by the Mongol invasions of the Near East in the thirteenth century. In particular, the Ottoman dynasty adopted the Hanafi school of law as its official one – coexisting with, but privileged over, others (Burak 2013). This led to a closer entangling of sharia and its scholars with state administration over the vast sweep of the Ottoman Empire, alongside other forms of secular and customary law.

Academic studies of sharia’s history have concentrated on the Near East. But sharia concepts and ideas have spread far wider, throughout the worlds touched by Islam – indeed they have arguably been vital to the formation of this wider Muslim ecumene. That did not necessarily take the form of domination. People living under modernity have become so used to the idea of law as the instrument of power and social control that they tend to forget that legal forms are also enabling. Financial instruments have been crucial to the history of global trade – and sharia has in this form played an important role in world history (e.g. Lydon 2009 on trans-Saharan trade and Bishara 2017 on the Indian Ocean). Sharia norms underpinned a vision of civilised life that spanned the world and inspired at its frontiers (Scheele 2012). They also constituted a widespread framework of property relations and social reproduction (Goody 1990: 361-82; Mundy 2013).

The encounter with European colonialism and ideas of modernity brought a dramatic rupture in this history (Hallaq 2009: 396-442). In the Near East, even before colonial occupation, ideas and institutions of education and law began to change in response to the challenges of rising European power. Technical sciences became increasingly prestigious. By the nineteenth century, sharia was more and more replaced in the administrative life of the Ottoman state by European-style civil law. Sharia discourse itself was subject to new forms of rationalization, such as codification. Similar changes occurred elsewhere, often as a colonial imposition, such as in the Dutch East Indies or British-ruled India. Generally, sharia’s purview has become heavily limited in terms of jurisdiction, often restricted to personal status, i.e. family law. As Asad (2003) has said, this would be best seen not as due to this part of sharia being especially sacred, but rather as integral to the project of secular modernity to restrict ‘religion’ to the private sphere. It has further been argued that, in the process, sharia has been not just restricted but fundamentally transformed, into a sort of ersatz ‘Islamic law’ (e.g. Hussin 2016 on British interventions in Malaya, Egypt, and India). Where sharia had been bound up in an organic, society-wide complex of education, moral exhortation, dispute resolution, and administration, the ties that unified that world of discourse have now been largely broken.

Sharia ethnography and modernity

This transition from pre-modernization sharia to state-centred law has been captured in an enduring classic of sharia ethnography, Brinkley Messick’s The calligraphic state (1992). Messick had the good ethnographic fortune that highland Yemen, at the edges of the Ottoman Empire and not subject to European colonialism, had gone through this process of legal modernization within living memory. His fieldwork in the 1970s-80s took place at ‘the end of an era of reed pens and personal seals, of handwritten books and professional copyists, of lesson circles in mosques and knowledge recited from memory, of court judgments on lengthy scrolls and scribes toiling behind slant-topped desks’ (Messick 1992: 1). This ‘calligraphic’ culture constituted a distinct form of textual domination, a political economy of knowledge rooted in a tradition of learning, which began with memorization of the Quran and depended on personalised forms of authority. Sharia discourse had an open texture, which state codification foreclosed – symbolised, following Messick’s central metaphor, by impersonal print.

In keeping with the more holistic scope of pre-modernization sharia, Messick gives an account of the knowledge economy that not only covers the work of Islamic religious professionals as both muftis and judges, but also the traditional forms of Islamic education within which they were formed (see also Mottahedeh’s [1985] evocative book on Iran, and Eickelman 1985 on Morocco). He also attends closely to the textual forms that they produced. This combination of textual analysis and ethnographic insight, taken still further in a second, resolutely historical ethnography of sharia in Yemen, has won the appreciation of Islamic studies specialists, even if ‘the anthropologist as reader’ remains a somewhat unfamiliar figure, as Messick laments (2018: 33). This level of dialogue between anthropology and Islamic legal studies is, however, hard to reproduce, and not just because of the exceptional standards Messick’s work has set. Ethnography of contemporary sharia has to wrestle with the obvious ruptures that modernity has wrought. Although many governments (and would-be governments) across the world now claim not just to be ‘Islamic’ but to be restoring the sharia to its proper place, arguably the tradition they lay claim to is an invented one (Eickelman & Piscatori 2004: 22-45). Pre-modern sharia depended on modes of authority, power, and governmentality that are not those of the modern state. An authentically Islamic state in the modern mode may thus be ‘impossible’, in Hallaq’s (2012) widely cited, if polemical, terms. Contemporary state institutions that claim some tie to the sharia – as many family law systems across the Muslim world do, for instance – are actually fundamentally different from their predecessors.

Anthropologists would wish neither to dismiss contemporary Muslim claims to authenticity, nor to espouse naively essentialist notions of Islam. They have instead documented the ways in which such claims to authenticity can be constructed in conjunction with, as well as in opposition to, the rhetoric of modernity (Deeb 2006), and the new forms of authority that mass literacy, mass higher education and mass media entail (Eickelman & Anderson 2003; Eickelman & Piscatori 2004). There are contemporary Islamic states and Islamization projects and one can conduct ethnographies of them (e.g. Feener 2013; Salomon 2016). Conversely, something of the openness and personalised authority of the pre-modern tradition still endures, even in new digital forms (Clarke 2010). Nevertheless, despite the importance of a grounding in the discursive tradition for understanding the ways in which sharia is invoked today, there is a clear danger in simply mapping the terms and concerns of classical sharia onto contemporary forms of post-modernisation ‘Islamic law’, arguably very different as we have seen (Dupret 2007).

Islamic family law and legal pluralism

One of the earliest legal anthropological studies of a Muslim court, Lawrence Rosen’s (1989) study of a provincial court in Morocco, perhaps overreached in this regard. Rosen sees law as a window onto culture, and presents the work of a judge in a low-level family law court implementing a reformed codification of Islamic legal norms as representative of Islamic legal culture generally (see Mundy’s [1991] still-instructive review). The problems with such cultural generalization notwithstanding, this helped pave the way for others to show the diversity and complexity of contemporary Islamic family law, in ways that problematise any ready essentialization.

Family law is obviously gendered, and Islamic family law – as generally understood at least – is clearly patriarchal (for global and historical surveys, see An-Na‘im 2002; Tucker 2008). According to Islamic family law, marriage is, among things, a contract granting rights to sex and fertility in exchange for a dower, or bridal gift (mahr), and maintenance (nafaqa) from the husband to the wife. A man can in theory have up to four wives where a woman can only be married to one man. A husband has an absolute right to divorce, effected by his simply pronouncing it (talaq, often translated ‘repudiation’). A wife’s right is limited: she must either persuade her husband to divorce her, even in return for a consideration (khul‘), or persuade a judge that an annulment or judicial separation be effected. Women generally receive a smaller portion of an inheritance than men.

These rules vary in their details between the different Sunni and Shi‘i schools of law, and are, like any aspect of sharia, much debated within them. The case can be made for more gender-equal visions of God’s intentions. Modernising governments in the twentieth century reformed family laws by stitching together more progressive rulings from different schools, trying to rule out polygamy or make judicial divorce against a husband’s wishes easier, for instance – although bringing women and ‘the family’ under state law arguably hardened patriarchy in other ways (Hallaq 2009: 443-99). This process of reform continues (Welchman 2007). Feminist scholarship and activism has argued that it needs to go still further, critiquing the largely male body of scholarship that has dominated the interpretation of the sharia to date (Mir-Hosseini 1999, 2006).

Anthropologists have contributed extensively to the understanding of how such systems work in practice. Ziba Mir-Hosseini, an anthropologist and activist, has provided pioneering ethnographic studies, and also made a compelling film with Kim Longinotto, Divorce Iranian style (1998), which remains one of the best ways into the subject. Her book Marriage on trial (1993) compares 1980s Shi‘i Iran, where family law had been re-Islamised after the Islamic Revolution, with Morocco, which had a more secular, reformed family legal system, based on the rules of Maliki fiqh. Although both family legal systems were nominally inspired by Islamic law, marriage dynamics play out within their constraints in very different ways, reflecting differences between Shi‘i and Maliki fiqh, aspects of local culture, and differences in the local economies – the relative access of men and women to paid labour, for example. Although post-revolutionary Iran’s system was nominally more ‘Islamic’, that did not translate into women having a necessarily worse position. In both cases, women are adept at using the resources that the system does allow them to pursue their claims.

Mir-Hosseini’s work has been joined by many others, with hundreds of articles and books across various disciplines and a number of full-length ethnographies by anthropologists of similar courts and tribunals in, for example, Kenya (Hirsch 1998), Malaysia (Peletz 2002, 2020; Daniels 2017), Indonesia (Bowen 2003), Zanzibar (Stiles 2009), Israel (Shahar 2015), Lebanon (Clarke 2018) and India (Lemons 2019), as well as less formal ‘sharia councils’ in the West (Bowen 2016 on the UK). These studies problematise simplistic stereotypes by revealing the sheer diversity in sharia discourse, as well as the shared principles that unite it, and the complexities of putting sharia into action as law (see e.g. Sonneveld & Stiles 2019 on how a single form of Islamic legal divorce, khul‘, has been interpreted very differently in different contexts). Sharia never exists in a vacuum; its social life is always shaped by a dialectic with other cultural, linguistic, and normative forms. A shared concern, however – one which Rosen (1989) picked out – is the emphasis placed on trying to repair damaged social relations, over and above pronouncing judgement. Away from the ideal of law, these studies illustrate the pragmatic strategies of the actors within the courts: wives, husbands, lawyers, court officials, and judges.

Those varied ethnographies are of settings with very different legal systems and political concerns, where sharia discourse, whether honoured or stigmatised, recognised by the state or ignored, is only one of a number of competing legal and normative systems – a key example of legal pluralism (Shahar 2008; see also Erie 2016 on China). Negotiating between such different normative systems is an important part of the legal process for litigants and defendants. But it can also be part of a wider conversation about the nature of a polity. Michael Peletz (2002) has shown how Malaysia’s sharia courts are bound up in projects of a distinctive Malaysian Islamic modernity. John Bowen (2003) has framed discussions about the relations between customary law (adat), sharia, and state law in Indonesia as an ‘anthropology of public reasoning’, to be compared with discussions of value pluralism elsewhere – as in his subsequent study of the place of Islam and sharia norms in France (Bowen 2011). There, and elsewhere, sharia can be a foil for thinking about what it means for a state to be secular as much as religious (Asad 2003; Agrama 2012; Lemons 2019). It is also a key frame of reference for notions of civility and citizenship, not just the relation between citizens and state, but also between different communities, Muslim and non-Muslim, in Muslim-majority and minority settings (Hefner 2000; Modood et al. 2006; Modood 2010; Hefner & Bagir 2021).

Global assemblages

Peletz (2013) has characterised Malaysia’s contemporary sharia courts as an eclectic ‘global assemblage’, where sharia discourse is joined with the discourses of civil and common law, corporate ‘e-governance’ and Japanese management and auditing practices. Sharia is itself globally distributed through networks of scholarship, funding, and training, with important nodes in the Middle East – not least the Arabian Peninsula and Iran – South and South-East Asia, and the West. The notion of sharia as a mobile global form that is localised in combination with others is a fertile one more broadly. Rights discourse, for instance, has become a globally recognised way of demanding recognition – one that has parallel forms in the sharia tradition, but is now invoked alongside and in contrast with it, linked to Western notions of human rights and individualism (Osanloo 2006). Sharia norms of food sourcing and preparation – ‘halal’ – have become part of global capitalist enterprise, where religious rules intersect with those of food hygiene and new notions of risk (Fischer 2011; Tayob 2016). An entire Islamic banking sector has arisen catering for new markets for religiously sanctioned versions of contemporary financial instruments (Maurer 2002; Rudnyckyj 2019).

‘Islamic bioethics’ is another such contemporary assemblage of sharia and other forms of knowledge-power, which speaks to the ways in which sharia discourse has managed to keep up with the present pace of technological and social change (Clarke et al. 2015). Islamic legal scholars have been challenged on the rights and wrongs of biomedical innovations such as assisted reproduction and organ transplantation, in ways that bring together medical and Islamic legal knowledge in novel constellations. Sherine Hamdy (2012) has shown in exemplary detail how fatwas on the end of life and organ transplantation are produced in a dialectic with medical authority in the context of a public health and ecological disaster in Egypt. Simultaneously, the same scholars are also having to define the creation of life in response to the globalization of assisted reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilisation, as Marcia Inhorn (e.g. 2003) has tirelessly documented. Sharia discourse has thus seen its own complicated debates about the ‘new kinship’ relations that result. Is it religiously permitted to use donor gametes, for instance? Does the possibility of having more than one wife diminish fears that the use of donor eggs resembles adultery? Who then should be considered the mother: the provider of genetic material or the woman who bears the foetus? What are the consequences for family life given sharia norms on gendered modesty except with close relatives? (See, for example, Clarke 2009; Naef 2017)

In these cases, Islamic legal opinions are often not as restrictive as common stereotypes about religious rules being ‘strict’ might suggest. On the contrary, sharia discourse can also be enabling, by allowing someone to undertake a course of action with religious sanction, as well as a source of comfort and help to those faced with crucial life decisions and crises. Sharia can be the inspiration for state regulation in these morally challenging domains. But it can also be a resource for personal ethical life. Indeed its personal ethical role has arguably increased under modernity, given the restriction of the place of sharia in state law (see Messick 1996 on shifting patterns in the types of questions put to muftis).

Sharia and the anthropology of ethics

Islamic examples have thus unsurprisingly been central to the burgeoning new anthropology of ethics, which has emphasised not just socially imposed obligation, but also the ways in which people actively try to make themselves good and virtuous.^[2] Sharia norms can form part of such projects of the virtuous self. Saba Mahmood’s (2005) well-known discussion of Muslim piety among women in Cairo turns on, among other things, the way in which the fulfilment of religious obligations such as prayer or wearing a headscarf is seen to help cultivate desired virtues such as steadfastness and modesty (see also e.g. Deeb 2006). This reimagining of religious duties as a means to religious and moral fulfilment, rather than solely as constraint, has transformed the possibilities for understanding and representing what obligations like wearing modest dress might actually mean to Muslims. The insights of this new anthropology of virtue have also been helpful in revisiting some of the classic themes of Islamic legal studies. Hussein Agrama (2010) has shown how the mufti’s role can be seen not just as Islamic legal interpretation, but as a pedagogical intervention in the ethical lives of those consulting him (or, more rarely, her). Islamic scholars who work as judges in sharia courts can find themselves caught between this ethos of pedagogy and their duty to apply the impersonal rules of legal bureaucracy (Clarke 2012). Ideas of virtue and its cultivation also inflect the processes of Islamic legal scholarship and interpretation, where it is thought that a virtuous scholar is more able to interpret God’s law correctly than a less virtuous one (Nakissa 2014).

Despite the salience of sharia rules in everyday religious life for many Muslims, influential voices in the anthropology of ethics and the anthropology of Islam (Schielke 2009; Lambek 2010) have nevertheless warned against over-emphasising religious rules. One concern is ethnographic, that not all Muslims live such coherent and observant religious lives. Another is theoretical, perhaps even aesthetic, that rules per se are too flat and restrictive an ethical form to be allowed to dominate our moral imaginations. The image of the rule-obsessed ‘Salafi’ Muslim has become an archetype (among many Muslims as well as non-Muslims) of unrealistic and oppressive sharia-mindedness, although the reality of Salafi practice would bear much closer ethnographic examination (Fadil & Fernando 2015; see e.g. Inge 2016). My own position is that rule-following is an indispensable technology of the virtuous self, as well as of social coordination, but one with its own characteristic possibilities, complexities, and limitations. The use of rules would thus benefit from more nuanced analysis than it has been given in the anthropology of ethics so far (Clarke 2015). Sharia would seem an excellent place to start, as an almost-paradigmatic example of a rule-focused approach to living well, but one that can and should be seen in comparative perspective – alongside Jewish halakha, Christian casuistry, Hindu law, or secular codes of civility, for example (Clarke & Corran 2021).

Conclusion

Sharia is a prominent theme in today’s global public sphere, a source of norms that structure people’s lives in various ways across the world and an important part of religious practice for many (but not all) Muslims. Anthropologists have contributed much to challenging the lazy and often damaging stereotypes that surround it, in terms of documenting and analysing the very different ways in which sharia can be understood, invoked and practiced. Sharia also has much to offer as a topic for anthropological thought more widely, as an important legal tradition that challenges state-centric notions of law and as a quintessentially legalistic way of approaching moral and religious righteousness. Sharia indeed problematises and fractures the modern liberal distinction between law and ethics in ways that open up fundamental questions for social theory, as indeed for the world at large (Asad 2003; Hefner 2016).

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Masud, M.K., R. Peters & D. Powers (eds) 2005. Dispensing justice in Islam: qadis and their judgements. Leiden: Brill.

Maurer, B. 2002. Anthropological and accounting knowledge in Islamic banking and finance: rethinking critical accounts. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, 645-67.

Messick, B. 1992. The calligraphic state: textual domination and history in a Muslim society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

−−−−− 1996. Media muftis: radio fatwas in Yemen. In Islamic legal interpretation: muftis and their fatwas (eds) M.K. Masud, B. Messick & D. Powers, 310-20. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

−−−−− 2018. Shari‘a scripts: a historical anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press.

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−−−−− 1999. Islam and gender: the religious debate in contemporary Iran. Princeton: University Press.

−−−−− 2006. Muslim women’s quest for equality: between Islamic law and feminism. Critical Inquiry 32, 629-45.

Modood, T. 2010. Still not easy being British: struggles for a multicultural citizenship. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.

−−−−−, A. Triandafyllidou & R. Zapata-Berrero (eds) 2006. Multiculturalism, Muslims and citizenship: a European approach. Abingdon: Routledge.

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−−−−− 2013 [1988]. The family, inheritance and Islam: a re-examination of the sociology of fara’id law. In Islamic law: social and historical contexts (ed.) Al. Al-Azmeh, 1-123. London: Routledge.

Naef, S. 2017. Kinship, law and religion: an anthropological study of assisted reproductive technologies in Iran. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag.

Nakissa, A. 2014. An ethical solution to the problem of legal indeterminacy: shari‘a scholarship at Egypt’s Al-Azhar. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20, 93-112.

Osanloo, A. 2006. Islamic-civil ‘rights talk’: women, subjectivity, and law in Iranian family court. American Ethnologist 33, 191-209.

Peletz, M. 2002. Islamic modern: religious courts and cultural politics in Malaysia. Princeton: University Press.

−−−−− 2013. Malaysia’s Syariah judiciary as global assemblage: Islamization, corporatization, and other transformations in context. Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, 603-33.

−−−−− 2020. Sharia transformations: cultural politics and the rebranding of an Islamic judiciary. Oakland: University of California Press.

Rosen, L. 1989. The anthropology of justice: law as culture in Islamic society. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Rudnyckyj, D. 2019. Beyond debt: Islamic experiments in global finance. Chicago: University Press.

Salomon, N. 2016. For love of the prophet: an ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic state. Princeton: University Press.

Scheele, J. 2012. Rightful measures: irrigation, land, and the shari‘ah in the Algerian Touat. In Legalism: anthropology and history (eds) P. Dresch & H. Skoda, 197-227. Oxford: University Press.

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Shahar, I. 2008. Legal pluralism and the study of shari‘a courts. Islamic Law and Society 15, 112-41.

−−−−− 2015. Legal pluralism in the Holy City: competing courts, forum shopping, and institutional dynamics in Jerusalem. Farnham: Ashgate.

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Note on contributor

Morgan Clarke is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Islam and new kinship: reproductive technology and the shariah in Lebanon (Berghahn, 2009) and Islam and law in Lebanon: sharia within and without the state (Cambridge, 2018).

School of Anthropology, 51 Banbury Road, Oxford. OX2 6PE morgan.clarke@anthro.ox.ac.uk

[1] See also Schielke, S. 2018. Islam. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (available on-line: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/islam).

[2] See Laidlaw, J. 2017. Ethics/morality. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (available on-line: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/ethics-morality).

Adoption

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

Jessaca Leinaweaver

Brown University

Initially published 7 Jun 2018

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

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.

References

Allison, A. 1991. Japanese mothers and obentos: the lunch-box as ideological state apparatus. Anthropological Quarterly 64, 195-208.

Bergmann, S. 2011. Fertility tourism: circumventive routes that enable access to reproductive technologies and substances. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, 280-89.

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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).

Matriliny

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

Jessica Johnson

University of Birmingham

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

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

Abstract:

Matriliny is a way of reckoning kinship descent and belonging through the female line. This entry discusses some of the forms matrilineal kinship may take in practice before considering how anthropologists have understood matriliny since the mid-twentieth century. It looks in turn at three dominant (mis)understandings of matriliny, namely: (1) that matriliny is simply another way of structuring male authority and thus of no meaningful consequence for women; (2) that matriliny is inherently ‘puzzling’; and (3) that matriliny is doomed by its inevitable fragility in the face of economic change. In the light of more recent anthropological approaches to kinship, and increasingly nuanced attention to gender relations, all three of these approaches can be understood as very much ‘of their time’. The entry concludes by briefly introducing two more recent ethnographic accounts that signal the ongoing relevance of matriliny to the lives of men and women in parts of post-colonial Africa. While matriliny is found in many different areas of the world, this entry focuses on what has been called south-central Africa’s ‘matrilineal belt’, which extends from western Congo, through northern Zambia, central and southern Malawi, and northern Mozambique.

Introduction

‘Matriliny as a topic in anthropology is as dead as a dodo, one would think’ (Peters 1997a: 125). Thus Pauline Peters opens her Introduction to a journal special issue entitled ‘Revisiting the puzzle of matriliny in South-Central Africa’. Peters makes the case for looking again at matriliny; she is correct in identifying it as a topic that has fallen out of anthropological fashion having once been prominent within the pages of classic ethnographic works (e.g. Malinowski 2002 [1922]; Richards 1982 [1956]). Nevertheless, matriliny remains relevant to the understanding of many contemporary societies, as we shall see.

Early studies of matrilineal kinship were published in the structural-functionalist vein, when descent and lineage were key features of kinship studies and taken for granted as central organising principles. These studies include a paper by Audrey Richards (1950), an edited volume titled Matrilineal kinship (Schneider & Gough 1961), and a later contribution by Mary Douglas, printed in 1969, by which point structural-functionalist approaches were under attack. Following a lull, interest in matriliny was revived in the 1970s and 1980s as feminist anthropologists began to ask questions about gender construction, women’s roles, and family forms in different societies (see, e.g., Holy 1986; Lancaster 1974, 1976, 1981; Poewe 1981). Since then, occasional interest has been paid to matriliny within regional literatures (see, e.g., Atkinson & Errington 1990; Davison 1997; Flinn 1986). Indeed, examples of matrilineal kinship can be found on almost every continent: in parts of Asia (see, e.g., Agarwal 1994; Kelkar, Nathan & Walter 2003; Tanner & Thomas 1985), Melanesia (see, e.g., Battaglia 1990; Bolyanatz 2000; Weiner 1976, 1992), West Africa (see, e.g., Fortes 1969; Goody 1959; Oppong 1974), and the Americas (see, e.g., Brown 1975; Lévi-Strauss 1963; MacLeitch 2011; Maybury-Lewis 1979). Much of the focus of this entry, however, will be on what has been called south-central Africa’s ‘matrilineal belt’, which extends across western Congo, northern Zambia, central and southern Malawi, and northern Mozambique. It is here, specifically in Malawi, that Peters herself has worked, and from where she makes the case for reopening debates about matriliny in anthropology; it was also the locus of much of the classic anthropological work on the topic.

What is matriliny?

Matriliny is a way of reckoning descent and belonging through the female line. It is generally contrasted with patriliny, where descent and belonging are traced through the male line. Matriliny and patriliny are both referred to as unilineal kinship systems, since in both cases descent and belonging are traced through a single line. Broadly speaking, in European contexts, kinship descent and belonging are reckoned cognatically (bi-laterally), by looking to what might be called ‘both sides’ of a family. To take myself as an example, when I think about my own family and belonging, I trace it out in two directions, through my mother and my father. That gives me two parents who are of equal significance, and four grandparents (I am talking in abstract terms here, so I am leaving aside any divorces and re-marriages that may well complicate this picture, as well as the behaviour of the incumbents of these roles that might qualify them as closer or more distant in social terms, but not in terms of their position in my family tree). In abstract terms I wouldn’t distinguish between my two grandfathers or my two grandmothers as more or less related to me, and nor would I consider myself any more or less the heir of my mother or father in the case of inheritance. Similarly for my various aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces (and so on), I reckon my relatedness to them through both ‘sides’ of my family, and consider none of them more or less closely related to me on the basis that we are related through one or the other of my parents or siblings. This is obviously a simplification of actual family forms, but my point here is that it can be helpful to reflect on our own assumptions about kinship and family belonging in order to highlight what it is that is different when we look at other ways of reckoning descent and belonging.

To return to matrilineal kinship, I have said that descent and belonging are traced through the female line. This means that you trace your belonging to a larger family unit through what might otherwise be considered to be ‘one side’ of your family. Your mother, her mother, and their respective siblings are key figures in your matrilineage. While your father and his parents and siblings may play important roles in your life, they do not belong to the same matrilineage as you do. This does not mean that you are not considered ‘related’ in some way, but simply that you belong to different groups. Matrilineal belonging may affect such things as who would be involved in arrangements for your marriage, from whom you might claim access to land or resources, where you might consider your true ‘home’ to be, and where you would expect your body to be buried upon your death. David Schneider encapsulates unilineal kinship well when he explains that in a patrilineal kinship system, you are ‘related to females but not through females’ (1961: 3, original emphasis). In matrilineal kinship it is the other way around: you are related to both male and female kin, but matrilineal kinship only continues through females. Fathers thus belong to different lineages from their children, and if they hold property or titles such as chieftaincies, their likely heirs are the children of their sisters (who belong to the same matrilineage as they do). Thus, the relationship between a mother’s brother and his sister’s children is particularly significant.

Importantly, matrilineal societies are not all the same in every respect. Peters thus argues that it is more ‘useful to consider matriliny as a set of characteristics rather than a totality or “system”’ (1997a: 137). In this vein, Edmund Leach posited that for anthropologists the category of ‘matrilineal societies’ is about as useful as the classification of ‘blue butterflies’ is to biologists (1961: 4). We will come back to the issue of conceiving of kinship systems as bounded totalities or coherent types later, but here I want to stress the diversity of norms and practices that can be subsumed under the category of matriliny. With respect to inheritance, for example, in some cases only women hold agricultural land and they pass it on to their daughters (and not their sons); in other places men may hold property and pass it on to their sisters’ sons (i.e. their maternal nephews, but perhaps not their maternal nieces); elsewhere, both men and women may hold land and property, in which case male and female children might inherit from both their mothers and their mothers’ brothers. Quite commonly, different kinds of property and titles may be inherited in different ways, so a young woman may inherit land from her mother, for instance, while her brother inherits a chieftaincy from their maternal uncle. And clearly, such norms and practices are subject to historical change.

Matrilineal societies also differ with respect to residence patterns. The designation ‘matrilocal’ or ‘uxorilocal’ refers to post-marriage residence patterns in which men move to live with their wives upon marriage. ‘Patrilocal’ and ‘virilocal’ are terms referring to residence patterns in which wives join their husbands upon marriage. Matrilocality (uxorilocality) is often, but not always, associated with matrilineal kinship, though some degree of variation in residence patterns ought to be expected in any given locale.

Having looked at what matriliny is, I will now turn to how matriliny has been understood, and indeed misunderstood, by anthropologists since the mid-twentieth century.

Anthropological (mis)understandings of matriliny

1. Matriliny is male authority (patriarchy) in another guise

One might imagine that if matrilineal societies are distinguished by the transmission of descent and belonging through women, then women in matrilineal societies might enjoy considerable authority. However, this has not been the dominant interpretation in anthropological writings on matriliny. The view that matriliny is, at its core, a different configuration of male authority is associated with David Schneider and Kathleen Gough, and strongly articulated in their edited volume Matrilineal kinship (1961). In the introduction to the volume, Schneider writes:

The role of women as women has been defined as that of responsibility for the care of children ... the role of men as men is defined as that of having authority over women and children … Positions of highest authority within the matrilineal decent group will, therefore, ordinarily be vested in statuses occupied by men (1961: 6).

Schneider effectively reassures his readers that matrilineal societies do not entail significant female authority, it is simply that male authority rests in the hands of men as brothers and uncles, as opposed to men in their roles as fathers and husbands.

Such understandings share much with the earlier work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his book The elementary structures of kinship (1969), originally published in French in 1949, Lévi-Strauss places the exchange of women by men at the heart of what kinship means. Marriage is the key institution, because it is by means of marriage that men exchange women and thereby form alliances. Lévi-Strauss wrote:

The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, where each owes and receives something, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners between whom the exchange takes place (1969: 115).

If this is how marriage works, and how societies are held together, matriliny, and especially matrilineal kinship systems that favour matrilocal residence, could be seen as posing a fundamental threat to understandings of kinship, marriage, and alliance. Lévi-Strauss tackled this problem directly in his writing, insisting that: ‘the number of matrilineal systems which are also matrilocal is extremely small. Behind the variations in type of descent, the permanence of patrilocal residence attests to the basic asymmetrical relationship between the sexes which is characteristic of human society’ (1969: 117).

Despite the authoritative tone, however, it is not in fact the case that matrilocality is rare among matrilineal groups, and nor has the idea of necessary and universal male authority stood the test of time (see, e.g., Amadiume 1987; Butler 1990; MacCormack & Strathern 1980; Oyěwùmí 1997). It is worth noting that early understandings of matriliny in this mode were somewhat haunted by a concern with whether matriliny meant matriarchy, or rule by women. This anxiety stemmed largely from nineteenth- and early twentieth century evolutionary thinking which had suggested that matriarchy represented an early stage in social evolution. Peters argues that such fears led anthropologists to downplay the implications of matriliny for women (1997a: 133). Since the 1970s, gender relations have been looked at in a more nuanced fashion, and scholars have returned to questions about matrilineal kinship. Importantly, this work has revealed significant scope for women’s authority in matrilineal settings (see, e.g., Arnfred 2011).

2. Matriliny is puzzling

The phrase ‘the matrilineal puzzle’ comes from Audrey Richards’ contribution to the edited volume African systems of kinship and marriage (1950). Richards focused on the issue of exogamous marriage, i.e. the requirement that lineage members marry outside of their own group. As we have seen, one consequence of exogamous marriage is that men in matrilineal societies marry women from other matrilineages and thus fathers do not belong to the same lineages as the children born of their marriages. In Richards’ words:

The problem … is the difficulty of combining recognition of descent through a woman with the rule of exogamous marriage. Descent is reckoned through the mother, but by the rule of exogamy a woman who has to produce children for her matrikin must marry a man from another group. If she leaves her own group to join that of her husband, her matrikin have to contrive … to keep control of the children … The brothers must divide authority with the husband who is living elsewhere. If, on the other hand, the woman remains with her parents and her husband joins her there, she and her children remain under the control of her family, but her brothers are lost to the group since they marry brides elsewhere and they are separated from the village where they have rights of succession (1950: 246).

The problem for Richards then – and the heart of the so-called matrilineal puzzle – was that men were torn between their roles as fathers and as mothers’ brothers. By contrast, the assumption was that there was no such contradiction in patrilineal kinship where the father had authority over his children both as their father and as their lineage elder. Women’s position within patrilineal groups was given much less consideration than men’s position in matrilineal groups, seemingly because women’s authority was not of concern, and because they were thought to integrate more easily with their husbands’ kin, shedding their attachments to their own patrilineages (i.e. their fathers’ descent groups). There was never any suggestion of a ‘patrilineal puzzle’ that would have addressed the contradictions for women entailed in their dual roles as members of their fathers’ patrilineages and as mothers to children who belonged to their husbands’ patrilineages.

Why was the matrilineal puzzle so puzzling? One reason, Peters argues, is that for anthropologists influenced by the structural-functionalist tradition, it was important to identify bounded social structures, so anything that seemed ‘to divide a person’s identification with one group was assumed to create problems’ (1997a: 128). In the period since the heyday of structural functionalism, however, kinship has come to be understood in more flexible terms, open to considerable variation even within a single society. Although early writers did recognise variation between matrilineal societies, their will to construct typologies, and their concern with bounded groups, encouraged a view of matriliny as a totality, rather than a variable set of characteristics.

Another factor that made the matrilineal puzzle so puzzling was the implicit assumption that the nuclear family, based on the marital relationship, constitutes the essential building block of society. As we have seen, this premise in turn relates to ‘the privileging of the male’ (Peters 1997a: 128). Thus, Audrey Richards suggested that matriliny posed a problem for the ‘sentiment attaching father to son’ (1934: 277), and invoked Bronislaw Malinowski’s work on matrilineal Trobriand Islanders, who were said to face a conflict between their legal responsibilities towards their maternal nephews and their ‘natural desire’ (1934) to favour their own sons (see Malinowski 2002 [1922]: 71–2). Strikingly, this focus on the marital relationship and the father–child bond endured despite the fact that ethnographers repeatedly noted the relative fragility of marriages in matrilineal settings, where divorce rates were often high, as well as the greater significance of relationships between siblings and between children and their maternal uncles. Alternative central foci for kinship studies, such as relationships between same or opposite sex siblings, were not given much attention. It can thus be argued that the emphasis on descent in structural-functionalist anthropology obscured the significance of siblingship for the ways in which matrilineal kinship bonds were understood and valued. This is something that anthropologists working in matrilineal areas of Southeast Asia have also pointed out; see, for example, Peletz (1988).

The above discussion suggests the significance of the assumptions brought to bear on studies of matrilineal societies. There is a pertinent quotation from an Ashanti male elder in Ghana, who, when asked by R.S. Rattray (a colonial official and anthropologist) why he had not been aware of women’s significance in Ashanti political life, replied: ‘The white man never asked us this; you have dealings with and recognise only the men; we supposed the European considered women of no account, and we know you do not recognise them as we have always done’ (1923: 84; cited by Peters 1997a: 135). There are countless other examples of early observers, more familiar with patrilineal or cognatic kinship organisation, struggling to understand matrilineal gender relations (see, e.g., Colson 1958; Mitchell 1956, 1959 [1951]; Read 1942; Rowley 1867). Surveying a number of them, Peters concludes: ‘the matrilineal puzzle was not in fact that at all but a gender puzzle’ (1997a: 141): a gender puzzle precipitated by the seeming incomprehensibility of kinship norms and practices that gave ‘greater social and political space to women’ (1997a: 133).

3. Matriliny is doomed

The question ‘is matriliny doomed?’ comes from the title of Mary Douglas’ (1971 [1969]) article in which she attempts to assess what she calls matriliny’s ‘prospects for survival in the modern world’ (1971[1969]: 123). The idea that matriliny might be doomed emerged largely from a sense that it was fragile in the face of economic change. Douglas cites several authors who argued that ‘power, property, and prestige spell doom to the matrilocal principle’ (Murdock 1949: 206-7; cited by Douglas 1971 [1969]: 123) and matrilineal descent, including the work of Jack Goody, who had suggested that ‘disparity of incomes weakens the principle of matrilineal descent’ (Douglas 1971 [1969]: 124).^{^[1]}

Indeed, over the years a range of voices has predicted matriliny’s demise. In the face of growing market economies, increasing differentiation in wealth, and the acquisition of more significant personal property, anthropologists, and other observers, expected matrilineal kinship norms to weaken and a shift towards patrilineal or cognatic kinship organisation to occur.^{^[2]} The idea was that men would strive to overcome the ‘matrilineal puzzle’ by avoiding matrilocal marriage and associated bride service (the work they might be expected to do for their wives’ kin), and favouring bridewealth (involving payment(s) on the husband’s behalf to his wife’s kin so as to secure her residence and rights to their children), all of which would enable them to favour their own sons as heirs rather than their sisters’ sons.

In this vein, Kathleen Gough titled a chapter for the 1961 volume Matrilineal kinship: ‘The modern disintegration of matrilineal descent groups’. Gough lends support to the view that matriliny is vulnerable in the face of economic advancement:

Recent literature has accumulated evidence to show that under economic changes brought about by contact with Western industrial nations, matrilineal descent groups gradually disintegrate. In their place, the elementary family eventually emerges as the key kinship group with respect to residence, economic cooperation, legal responsibility, and socialisation, with a narrow range of interpersonal kinship relationships spreading outward from it bilaterally and linking it with other elementary families … There is … great variation in the degree of change at present experienced both within and between matrilineal societies. Nevertheless, given continued exposure to the same kinds of economic processes, the directions and end products of the change seem to be essentially the same (1961: 631).

Gough was confident that this was a general trend, inevitable given the conditions of global capitalist expansion.

Douglas’ answer to the question ‘is matriliny doomed?’ is slightly different, however. In talking of situations in which matriliny is likely to give way to patriliny, she highlights not wealth inequality but scarcity of resources, arguing that ‘competition in a restricted field causes men to draw in their horns and to concentrate their responsibilities on their nearest kin’, that is, ‘to favour their sons’ (1971 [1969]: 130). It is possible to recognise some of the same assumptions that led to the ‘matrilineal puzzle’ at work in both Douglas’ and Gough’s analyses: namely, the assumption that a man’s closest kin are his children, and that there is something fundamentally salient, even ‘natural’, about the connection between fathers and sons that matrilineal norms of kinship deny.

I have already referred to Peters’ argument that we ought to consider matriliny more as an assemblage of characteristics than a totality or ‘system’. One corollary of that point is that it makes little sense to consider ‘matriliny’ – as a totality – to be more vulnerable to economic change than ‘patriliny’ or ‘cognatic’ kinship, or to consider matriliny and patriliny as bounded systems that come into contact as wholes that must clash and confront one another in such a way that one would inevitably triumph over the other.

Indeed, recent work has demonstrated the limitations that conceptions of kinship ‘systems’ as bounded wholes place on analysis. Thus, Cynthia Brantley (1997), for example, looks back at the published and unpublished work of Margaret Read from the 1930s and 1940s. Read studied patrilineal Ngoni in Northern and Central Nyasaland, now Malawi, before turning her attention to matrilineal Chewa people in neighbouring parts of the same country. Brantley is able to show the effect that Read’s earlier work with patrilineal Ngoni informants had upon the ways in which she conceived of matrilineal kinship organisation. Her article is titled ‘Through Ngoni eyes’, which succinctly sums up the way in which she argues Read was blinkered by her prior experiences.

Read argued that a slow but sure takeover of matriliny by patriliny was occurring in central Malawi as Ngoni norms and practices prevailed over matrilineal Chewa ways. Reassessing Read’s material, Brantley suggests that ‘Read’s evidence, when set in relation to other information, shows a much more complex situation of interaction and modification to mutual benefit … [people] were accommodating and borrowing from the practices of “patriliny” and “matriliny”’ (1997: 165). She concludes that Read was wrong to identify a shift from matrilineal to patrilineal marriage practices. Instead, she points to the development of what were called chitengwa marriages, whereby women moved to live with their husbands in patrilocal marriage, more typical of patrilineal societies, but their children still belonged to their matrilineages. In these marriages men tended to give token gifts to the women’s kin (something relatively new), but they did not pay significant bridewealth as per patrilineal norms. It is such examples of ‘partial accommodation and blending’ (Peters 1997a: 138) that Brantley concludes were invisible ‘through Ngoni eyes’ and, more broadly, were obscured by the pervasive master narrative of matriliny’s inevitable demise.

Contemporary ethnography

Peters has argued for the need to understand how heavily the odds have tended to be stacked against matrilineal norms and practices:

[M]atrilineal groups have been and continue to be a minority in a sea of patriliny and patriarchy. Most groups in all the African regions where matriliny is found follow patrilineal, dual or cognatic descent, and all the major influences entering over the past 200 years and more have been from strongly patrilineal or bilateral, and patriarchal groups. These include, for the Malawi case … Islamic groups, Christian missions, British colonial over-rule and plantation agriculture. The ideas and practices brought by all the former are reinforced in this ‘global’ world because major players (America, Britain, Russia, Japan, China …) all favour patrilineal or bilateral modes of organisation (1997b: 191).

She thus argues that matrilineal norms and practices ought to be seen as ‘remarkably resilient’ (Peters 1997b: 189).

Indeed, while matriliny is not a subject that has received a great deal of attention from anthropologists in recent years, the ethnographic record does allow some insight into the ways in which matrilineal kinship organisation continues to affect the texture of life in post-colonial Africa. On the basis of fieldwork in Malawi carried out in 2009–2010, Jessica Johnson (2012) has written of the significance of matriliny in shaping HIV-positive women’s efforts to rebuild their lives following the roll-out of anti-retroviral therapies. Crucially, Johnson argues that the generally high rates of divorce, and the related social acceptability of female-headed households, coupled with women’s custodianship of land inherited through the female line, profoundly shaped the options available to them as they regained their health and set about re-establishing themselves as productive members of their rural communities. Many HIV-positive women (divorced or widowed) chose, at least temporarily, to remain unmarried and to focus on providing for their children through their agricultural endeavours. They thus drew upon longstanding ‘traditional’ strategies of relative female independence, while explaining their decisions in relation to their desire to safeguard their health and exercise caution as they adjusted to the radically new possibility of living with, as opposed to dying from, HIV/AIDS.

A final example comes from James Ferguson’s Expectations of modernity (1999), a study of the Zambian Copperbelt at a time in which the copper industry had seen enormous decline. Ferguson refers to the 1989 passing of a new inheritance law, which, for the first time, gave the nuclear family legal recognition in matters of inheritance by providing for a man’s wife and children to receive a share of his property. According to Ferguson, the new law was ineffective because the belief that a man’s rightful heirs were his matrilineal relatives – as opposed to his wife and children – meant that the law was largely disregarded. Similarly, pensions awarded to the wives of deceased miners could be a source of tension: wives could be mistreated by their husbands’ matrilineal kin who believed themselves entitled to the payments. As a result, some widows requested that their payments be discontinued, while a number of living men questioned why their wives and children were the automatic beneficiaries and not their sisters’ children. For at least some workers, Ferguson points out, ‘it was not obvious that one’s primary attachment and responsibility was to one’s “own” children’ (1999: 185). He thus refers directly to Mary Douglas’ question: ‘Is matriliny doomed in Africa?”, concluding that apparently, the answer ‘is no’ (Ferguson 1999: 185).

In conclusion, this entry has introduced matriliny as an important topic in the anthropology of kinship. We have come to understand matriliny as a unilineal system of reckoning descent and belonging through the female line, and learnt that the category ‘matriliny’ contains within it significant variation in terms of, for example, patterns of residence and inheritance. The entry has surveyed three dominant anthropological approaches to the understanding of matriliny: namely, that it is simply an alternative configuration of male authority, that it is inherently puzzling, and that it is doomed. I have suggested that all three approaches are problematic, containing within them a number of unfounded, gendered assumptions. Two more recent ethnographic examples from Malawi and Zambia have signalled the ongoing significance of matrilineal norms and practices, as well as the relevance of kinship organisation to other aspects of social life, from health and wellbeing to property and pensions.

References

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Bolyanatz, A.H. 2000. Mortuary feasting on New Ireland: the activation of matriliny among the Sursurunga. London: Bergin & Garvey.

Brantley, C. 1997. Through Ngoni eyes: Margaret Read’s matrilineal interpretations from Nyasaland. Critique of Anthropology 17, 147-69.

Brown, J.K. 1975. Iroquois women: an ethnohistorical note. In Towards an anthropology of women (ed.) R. Reiter, 238-51. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Butler, J. 1990. Gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge.

Colson, E. 1958. Marriage and the family among the Plateau Tonga. Manchester: University Press.

Davison, J. 1997. Gender, lineage, and ethnicity in Southern Africa. Oxford: Westview Press.

Douglas, M. 1971 [1969]. Is matriliny doomed in Africa? In Man in Africa (eds) M. Douglas & P.M. Kaberry, 123-37. New York: Anchor Books.

Ferguson, J. 1999. Expectations of modernity: myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Flinn, J. 1986. Matriliny without conflict: the case of Pulap. Journal of Polynesian Society 95, 221-38.

Fortes, M. 1969. Kinship and the social order: the legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Goody, J. 1956. The social organization of the LoWiili. London: HMSO.

——— 1959. The mother’s brother and the sister’s son in West Africa. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 89, 61-86.

Gough, K. 1961. The modern disintegration of matrilineal descent groups. In Matrilineal kinship (eds) D.M. Schneider & K. Gough, 631-52. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Holy, L. 1986. Strategies and norms in a changing matrilineal society. Cambridge: University Press.

Johnson, J. 2012. Life with HIV: ‘stigma’ and hope in Malawi’s era of ARVs. Africa 82, 632-53.

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Lancaster, C.S. 1974. Brideservice, residence, and authority among the Goba (N. Shona) of the Zambezi Valley. Africa 44, 46-64.

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______ & K. Gough (eds) 1961. Matrilineal kinship. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Note on contributor

Jessica Johnson is a Lecturer in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. Between 2013 and 2016 she was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where she also completed her doctorate. Since 2009, Jessica has conducted more than two years of fieldwork in a matrilineal area of Malawi. Her doctoral research focused on aspirations for justice in the context of gender and martial relations, and her new project looks at 'everyday justice' in Malawi's magistrates' courts.

Jessica Johnson, Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom. j.johnson.5@bham.ac.uk

[1] The reference is to Goody (1956: 110).

[2] See, for example, Elizabeth Colson’s (1958) work on the Plateau Tonga of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia).

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Family

Sharia

Introduction

Sharia discourse and history

Sharia ethnography and modernity

Islamic family law and legal pluralism

Global assemblages

Sharia and the anthropology of ethics

Conclusion

References

Note on contributor

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

Matriliny

Introduction

What is matriliny?

Anthropological (mis)understandings of matriliny

Contemporary ethnography

References

Note on contributor

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