What Human Kinship Is Primarily About: Toward A Critique of The New Kinship Studies

WA R R E N S H A P I R O
What human kinship is primarily about:

toward a critique of the new
kinship studies
The claims of the so-called ‘constructionist’ position in kinship studies are examined with reference to a recent
article by Susan McKinnon. McKinnon’s analysis is shown to be deeply flawed, primarily because she pays no
attention to the phenomenon of focality, now widely established in cognitive science. Instead, she is trapped
in unsupportable collectivist models of human kinship. It is argued that these models are part of a misguided
critique of the Western European Enlightenment.
Key words kinship, deconstruction, evolutionary psychology
Introduction
My title and subtitle are anything but accidental. In 1972 David Schneider published
‘What is kinship all about?’ (Schneider 1972), which was followed a dozen years
later by A critique of the study of kinship (Schneider 1984). His conclusions in both
publications have been widely taken to mean that models of procreation 1 provide only
one criterion for kin-reckoning throughout the world and are in no sense primary,
as they are in the West. 2 This stance has been called ‘culturalist’ or ‘constructionist’
(‘social constructionist’, ‘cultural constructionist’) (Shapiro 2005a). The constructionist
position has morphed into a highly self-conscious ‘new kinship studies’ (Carsten 2000:
3), which presents itself as part of a larger ‘deconstructionist’ movement in social theory
(Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). Yet this larger movement is not without its critics. Nor
1 I prefer expressions like ‘models of procreation’ or ‘procreation models’ (Yeatman 1983) to

‘genealogical’ (etc.) because the latter suggest the sort of extended genealogies found in the Bible
and ‘the tracing of descent’ of introductory anthropology textbooks. In fact, as I note later, such
genealogies are relatively restricted ethnographic phenomena, whereas models of procreation are
probably universal.
2 Actually, Schneider sometimes went further, insisting that the procreative model is a construct
of kinship studies, and that (other) native English-speakers employ a model in which procreative
relationships are neither sufficient nor necessary (Schneider 1968, 1972: 49–56, 1984: 92 et seq.). I
argue in the body of this paper that the former assertion is false. On the latter, see Scheffler (1976).
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2008) 16, 2 137–153.

C 2008 European Association of Social Anthropologists. 137
doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2008.00038.x
138 WA R R E N S H A P I R O
are the claims of the new kinship studies in particular accepted by all (see e.g. Kuper
1999: 122–58; Patterson 2005; Shimizu 1991). But no one so far as I know has attempted
a sustained analysis of this scholarship. 3 I shall do so here, with reference to a particular
article which, I hope to show elsewhere, is reasonably exemplary.
Prolegomena
But first I need briefly to consider a series of phenomena sometimes dubbed ‘prototype
effects’. Thus we call Roman Catholic priest ‘father’, but we know intuitively that he
is not as central a member of the ‘father’ class as one’s genitor is. We might say that he
is ‘like a father’, or fatherish, in that he is male, authoritative, and nurturant, that his
position is likened to or modeled upon that of one’s real father. 4 We might also say that
it is this latter who is the focal member of the ‘father’ class, and that membership in
this class is extended to the priest. Such structuring of semantic space has been shown
to apply quite widely in human cognition, and it has been suggested that it is in this
matter that the mind constructs categories (e.g. D’Andrade 1995: 115–21; Kronenfeld
1996: 147–65; Lakoff 1987; Shapiro 2005a).
I need also to note, before proceeding, that my presentation assumes no previous
acquaintance on the reader’s part with kinship theory in anthropology.
Susan McKinnon on the nature of human kinship
A recent article by Susan McKinnon (2005b) exemplifies the constructionist position

in kinship studies with remarkable clarity and expressly engages it adversarially with
notions of kinship in evolutionary psychology. This engagement appears to be only
the first in McKinnon’s unfolding agenda, for she has more recently come out with a
small book purporting to ‘deconstruct’ evolutionary psychology as a whole (McKinnon
2005a), and the ‘deconstruction’ enterprise figures heavily elsewhere in her scholarship
(McKinnon 1995a, 2000, 2001; Franklin and McKinnon 2001). My concern here is
mostly with her kinship piece. Here McKinnon argues that ‘the genetic calculus’ of
evolutionary psychology disrespects the nuances of human kin-reckoning, as Sahlins
(1976) argued three decades ago in his critique of sociobiology. One possible retort
to this charge is that present-day Darwinian scholars are concerned not with kinship
constructs but with kinship behaviour: thus there is a statistical tendency for maternal
grandmothers to be the most investing of the four grandparents (Buss 2004: 237–40),
for fathers to be far less likely physically and sexually to abuse their children than
stepfathers their stepchildren (Daly and Wilson 1988: 86–91), and for kin to be far
less likely to aggress lethally against each other than nonkin (1988: 17–35) – and all
this is so quite apart from how particular kin relationships, and kinship in general, are
conceptualised. But a more interesting answer is that evolutionary psychologists, who
do not pretend to be specialists in the cross-cultural study of kinship, have managed to
3 A quarter century ago I tried to do so (Shapiro 1982), but this was before the politicisation of kinship
studies. For a more recent effort on my part, see Shapiro (1995a: 201–88).
4 This is metaphorical usage. In semantic research a distinction is often made among primary,
secondary, and metaphorical members of classes, but I find it unnecessary to do this here.

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W H AT H U M A N K I N S H I P I S P R I M A R I LY A B O U T 139
grasp the truth more profoundly than McKinnon, who does. In most of the rest of this
article I shall document this surprising assertion, using McKinnon’s own examples but
also supplementing them for further and richer illustration.
A case in point is provided by the Wari Indians of southwestern Brazil. In Wari
theory bodily substances can be shared in four ways: (1) through procreation, involving
parents, children, and, less directly, other less immediate consanguines; (2) through
wet-nursing; (3) through sexual intercourse between husband and wife, or between
paramours; and (4) through killing enemies outside one’s community, in which the
killer and his victim are said to be in a father/son relationship (Conklin 2001a: 116–22;
Vilaca 2000: 95). Now I shall guess that Susan McKinnon would seize upon (2), (3),
and (4) especially and conclude that it is disrespectful of native views to stress (1) in
analysing Wari notions of kinship, and that these notions are very different from what
we have in the West. And she would be wrong on both counts. For we learn that, among
the Wari, although ‘all consanguineal kin share some body substance . . . the most direct
bodily connections are those . . . among parents and children . . .’ (Conklin 2001a: 118).
Moreover, ‘[e]xchanges of . . . body fluids (through breast-feeding, sexual intercourse,
and the killing of enemies) establish relationships that Wari recognize as being similar
to, though weaker than, the consanguineal links that exist at birth’ (2001a: 118, emphasis
added). Hence the parent/child relationship provides the quintessential kin-tie for the
Wari, with other sorts of kin ties deemed to be, literally, substantially less.
But this is not all. The Wari have what has been called a ‘universal system of kin
categorization’ (Barnard 1978) – which is to say that an individual applies kin terms to
everyone with whom he or she associates. Does this mean that everyone is considered
kin, though some are closer than others? Not at all. In fact the Wari distinguish lexically
between ‘true kin’ and ‘those who are like kin but are not truly related’ (Conklin 2002:
215; see also Vilaca 2000: 94–5). Presumably the father/son relationship established
between a killer and his victim is in the latter category, for the act of killing makes
the two only ‘like real kin’ (Conklin 2001a: 121, 2001b; Vilaca 2002: 359) – i.e. they
are likened to ‘true kin’, in a manner comparable to my rendition of a Catholic priest
as ‘father’. Similarly, when he takes a life a Wari man’s abdomen is supposed to swell,
and he is said to be in a state which is ‘like pregnancy’ but not one that ‘is pregnancy’
(Conklin 2001b: 161, emphasis in original).
These likenings stemming from killing may at first blush seem strange to Western
minds, but a little reflection should dispel this appearance. For we have a considerable
lexicon which renders sex as akin to violence, and vice versa. The polysemy of such
expressions as to bang and to pound points in one direction, that of to cream and to
whack in the other (Roscoe 1994; Shapiro 1995b). These renditions suggest parallels
between triumphing over an opponent and, of all posited kin relationships, the tie linking
husband and wife. But a father/son relationship, real or metaphorical, connected with
violence is an element in the central creative act of both Judaism (Abraham’s quasi-
sacrifice of Isaac) and Christianity (the Crucifixion). And, like the Wari, both religions
make use of birthing imagery in connection with hierarchical relationships between
two males – specifically, Jonas’ being regurgitated by the Great Fish, after which he
becomes obedient to divine authority, to which Jesus’ Emergence from the Tomb and
similarly enhanced spiritual state is expressly compared in Matthew 12:38–41. Finally,
the Roman Catholic version of Christianity goes one better than both its Protestant
form and Judaism by rendering Jesus as maternal in much medieval and early modern
symbolism (Bynum 1982) – much like the Wari warrior.

More prosaic are the other similarities between Wari and Western kinship notions.
We too entertain the fiction – and we see it as such – that everyone is kin in expressions
like ‘the brotherhood of man’ and ‘brothers and sisters in Christ’. We too have notions of
wet-nursing as establishing a secondary sort of kinship (Fildes 1988). Many Protestant
churches have wedding ceremonies in which bride and groom are said to be ‘one flesh’
– this derived from Matthew 19:4–6:
And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them
at the beginning made them male and female? And said, For this cause shall a man
leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one
flesh.
Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh.
Moreover, in her research on American marriage, Naomi Quinn found that ‘[o]ne of
the features of the American model of marriage . . . is the general idea of sharedness,
which is instantiated by different people in many different ways, including metaphors
of merging such as “We were one person now” . . . or “It wasn’t just the two of us
anymore. We were a family”’ (email communication dated 25/4/06).
In a nutshell, Wari ideas about kinship, like Western notions of kinship, are
grounded in native appreciations of procreation, and from this base they extend to
other areas of experience. The claim of a West/Rest dichotomy, in this instance at least,
is entirely without support.
But most of McKinnon’s argument for such a dichotomy pertains not to notions of
kinship in general but to kin classes, i.e. to those categories designated by what the old
kinship studies called ‘kinship terminologies’. Her initial contention here is that, in the
West, one’s genetrix is the sole member of the mother class, whereas, among the Rest,
the (only superficially comparable) class has multiple membership. This last assertion, I
argue below, is misleading, but the first is plainly and simply false. I offer the following
bits of auto-ethnography:
(1) I refer to the woman who (I am told) bore me and who (I know with certainty)
nurtured me when I was young as my mother.
(2) This woman referred to another woman as my mother. I refer to this other woman
as my grandmother, which designation I also use to refer to the woman referred to
as my mother by the man I refer to as my father.
(3) When I was married my wife referred to a woman as my mother. I referred to her
as my mother-in-law.
(4) Just before I reached puberty I was a member of a Cub Scout ‘pack’. I referred to
the woman who superintended this group as my denmother.
(5) I regard English as my mother tongue and the United States of America as my
mother country.
(6) Although I am not a Roman Catholic, I have Roman Catholic friends, each of whom
has a godmother. And I know of some Roman Catholic women who are members
of religious orders superintended by Mothers Superior.
This list is hardly exhaustive, but it should suffice to show that the ‘multiplicity of
mothers’ McKinnon (2005b: 109) finds in non-Western settings can be found in the
West as well.

But of course I need to add that not all mothers are for me equally ‘motherly’. In
fact, there is for me a single central or – to use a term from the old kinship studies – focal
member of this class, which is the woman described in (1). The remaining members are
such only in a much ‘looser’ sense. Indeed, I might describe them as motherish, just as a
Roman Catholic priest is ‘fatherish’: their membership in the ‘mother’ class stems from
likening them to or modelling them on my real mother, insofar as they are (or can be
construed as) female, nurturing, and, to varying degrees, authoritative. If I were asked
simply who my mother is, I would nominate only the woman described in (1). And I
believe my Roman Catholic friends would structure the ‘mother’ category in much the
same way, as would people who have stepmothers. This might not be the case for people
who are adopted, especially when very young, for the children of lesbian mothers, and
for people brought into being via the new reproductive technologies, for whom the
expression ‘real mother’ might have more ambiguous reference (see also Lakoff 1987:
74–84).
In my own field research among the Aboriginal Australian people of northeast
Arnhem Land I also found ‘a multiplicity of mothers’. There one’s genetrix is called
ngarndi in some dialects, ngama in others – but so is her sister, nearly all other women
who she calls ‘sister’, all of one’s father’s wives, most of the wives of men one’s father
calls ‘brother’, various other women, the estate and ritual objects associated with the
ritual group of the genetrix, and other estates and ritual objects mythically linked to
that group. But northeast Arnhem Landers distinguish between ‘full’ (dangang) and
‘partial’ (marrkangga) members of the ngama class. The genetrix is without question a
member of the ‘full’ ngama subclass. So are her sisters, though informants sometimes
added, when so nominating them, something like ‘but she’s not the one who bore me,
the one from whose womb I emerged’. Which is to say that the membership of the
genetrix’s sisters in the ‘full’ ngama subclass is subject to qualification, to hedging, as if
it referred to a ‘grey area’ in people’s structuring of their social worlds. Also inhabiting
this area are the genetrix’s ritual group ‘sisters’, as well as a woman the genetrix calls
‘sister’ whose own ritual group is not that of the genetrix but whose genetrix’s ritual
group is that of the genetrix of the genetrix of the informant. Another woman who the
genetrix calls ‘sister’ may be said to be a ‘full’ member of the ngama class based on the
consideration that her ritual group estate and its ritual objects are mythically linked to
those of the genetrix, but such an assignment can be contested and, in any case, is likely
to be successful only if the estates in question adjoin. All other women in the ngama
class are members of the ‘partial’ ngama subclass and are often described as ‘not really
ngama’ or ‘ngama only by virtue of kin classification’.
Moreover, asked simply ‘Who is your ngama?’ an individual invariably nominates
his/her genetrix. This of course jibes with my auto-ethnographic data. Also, northeast
Arnhem Landers employ bodypart symbolism to represent kin class relationships, and
a woman called ngama – any such woman, not just the genetrix – may be indicated
by touching one’s nipple – as if maternal succour provided the model for all such
relationships. Consider too the following lexemes:
ngamani = milk
ngama’ngama’yun = to create (-yun being a verbalising suffix)
nguy-ngamatirri = to love (nguy = heart, -tirri being a verbalising suffix)

Which is of course to say that notions of procreation and succour are conceptualised by
northeast Arnhem Landers – as well as by Westerners – as quintessentially associated
with the biological mother. 5
The application of the kin term ngama to the ritual group estate of the genetrix
and its ritual objects is logically dependent upon the identification of her as the focal
member of the ngama class and is therefore a derived or secondary member of that class
(cf. Scheffler and Lounsbury 1971: 60–1). The same point is made by reference to that
estate as one’s ‘milk country’. All this is remarkably comparable to my own sense that
the United States of America is my ‘mother country’.
There is, finally, the consideration that ngama, in a language entirely unrelated to
English, sounds much like ‘mama’. Murdock (1959) showed nearly a half century ago
that this sort of phonological regularity occurs with more often than chance frequency
in parental kin terms. 6
McKinnon cites several examples of such ‘a multiplicity of mothers’, but she fails
utterly to appreciate their semantic structure. Thus she notes that in systems of kin
classification Lowie (1928) dubbed ‘generational’ all women of the parental generation
are members of the ‘mother’ class (McKinnon 2005b: 110). This is fine, so far as it goes
– but it does not go very far. As it happens, however, we have a recent detailed account
of a ‘generational’ system by Richard Feinberg (2004). Writing on the residents of the
Polynesian island of Anuta, Feinberg notes that, although the genetrix is merged with
other female kin of her generation at a superficial level of classification, as is the genitor
with the male kin of his, there is a special ‘parent’ term which is applied to both but
which is not extended to others (2004: 68). Moreover, kin class reckoning depends upon
parental kin class assignment: thus for example anyone who one genetrix calls ‘sister’
is called ‘mother’ (2004: 74–5) – which is to say that the kin class position of such
a ‘mother’ is logically dependent upon, or derived from, that of the genetrix. Further
still, these people make a gross distinction among the sphere of individuals to whom
kin terms are applied: some are said to be ‘true’ members of their kin classes, while
the membership of others is ‘outside’, or ‘a lie’ (2004: 81). There is some flexibility as
to the membership of these gross subclasses, but this flexibility occurs along definite
procreative lines, such that, for example, siblings are always ‘true’ kin but first cousins
may or may not be (2004: 81–4). And, finally, asked to nominate members of various
kin classes, people ‘usually answer as if the question were posed specifically about the
genealogically closest relative in the designated category’ (2004: 82). In Feinberg’s own
words, ‘the basic model for assignment to kin classes is a genealogical one’ (2004: 80). 7
The similarities to my own materials from northeast Arnhem Land – indeed, to the
Wari data and my own venture into auto-ethnography – should be clear.
McKinnon also claims that systems of kin classification that the old kinship studies
usually called ‘Omaha’ posit ‘a multiplicity of mothers’ (McKinnon 2005b: 110), and
once again the statement, though true, is misleading. In Omaha-type systems, the
mother’s patriline is singled out, such that the ‘mother’ and ‘mother’s brother’ terms are
applied to patrilineal descendants of the mother’s brother: for example, both his daughter
5 There are comparable – and complementary – symbolic expressions of paternal creation and
nurturance (see Shapiro 1981: 16–20, 2005b: 51).
6 Most of the foregoing analysis of the semantics of ngama has appeared elsewhere (see Shapiro 1981:
87–92, 2005b: 51).
7 In an earlier publication Feinberg (1981) provides examples which require modification, but not
abandonment, of these conclusions.

and his son’s daughter are called ‘mother’. But even this rendition of things focuses on
the mother (and her brother) – i.e. the position of other members of the ‘mother’
(and ‘mother’s brother) classes is derived from those of these two close procreative
kin. That this is so is underscored by the fact that the ‘mother’ term, when applied
to other kin, is in such systems usually if not always accompanied by a lexical or
other indicator of nonfocality, much like ‘godmother’ or ‘stepmother’ in English. Thus
Aboriginal Australian people in a part of the Cape York Peninsula, just across the Gulf of
Carpentaria from northeast Arnhem Land, refer to the daughter of the mother’s brother
as ‘little mother’ (McConvell and Alpher 2002: 163), 8 whereas further west, just outside
Arnhem Land itself, the same relative is rendered as ‘branch mother’ – this in contrast to
the genetrix, who is ‘trunk mother’ (2002: 171). In this latter example the trunk–branch
opposition presumably suggests the base–derivative one. Among the Fox Indians of
Illinois the mother’s sister is called ‘little mother’, and it is this latter derived term, not
the ‘mother’ term simpliciter, that is applied to the mother’s brother’s daughter and
other women of the mother’s patriline (Tax 1955: 252; see also Radcliffe-Brown 1941:
10). Especially remarkable here is Karl Heider’s research on an Omaha-type system
among the Grand Valley Dani of the Indonesian half of New Guinea. Much as I did
in northeast Arnhem Land, and Feinberg seems to have done on Anuta, Heider (1978)
asked his informants to name an individual to whom each Dani kin term is properly
applied. Given the ‘mother’ term, nearly all informants nominated their genetrices.
The only exceptions were a man whose mother had been killed early in his life, who
nominated his mother’s mother, who raised him; and another man, who first named his
father’s current wife, then his mother (Heider 1978: 238).
Similar considerations apply in those cases in which the mother’s brother is called
‘mother’, put forward by McKinnon (2005b: 110) as further evidence for ‘a multiplicity
of mothers’, now supposedly unconstrained even by gender. In all cases of which I am
aware the mother’s brother is more fully rendered as ‘male mother’. But the genetrix
is not said to be a ‘female mother’, for this would be redundant – which is to say that
the focal member of the class is female (see e.g. Kuper 1976; Middleton 2000; Shapiro
1981: 28). This is also true, for example, of the English class designated by the label
‘nurse’, with the associated rubric ‘male nurse’, which, I shall guess, is deemed politically
incorrect these days.
McKinnon (2005b: 111) points out that Inuit naming practices sometimes skew
kin term relationships so that, for example, a female infant who receives the name of
her mother’s mother is called ‘mother’ by her genetrix, thus presumably showing that
‘a multiplicity of mothers’ can exist not only independently of gender but, as well, of
minimal age considerations. I have not been able to access the source she cites, but
similar practices seem to be widespread in the Inuit area. Consider the following:
Personal names could sometimes complicate a genealogy . . . If a cousin was named

after one’s own father, for example, he could be referred to as . . . ‘father’ rather
than by the term for the role he actually filled. Obvious anomalies of this sort
could usually be uncovered by a simple question about them. Responses would
8 It might be argued that ‘little’ is simply the opposite of ‘big’ and does not signify nonfocal status. But
this is contrary to what we know of systems of kin classification in general (Scheffler 1987: 214–16)
and, indeed, of human categorisation at large, wherein focality is usually associated with indications
of superior size or age. Vide English ‘How tall are you?’ and ‘How old are you?’ (Kronenfeld 1996:
95–7). ‘How young are you?’ is derived and an obvious sop to the elderly.

take the form, ‘He’s not my [father] all right, he’s my . . . cousin . . .’ but I call him
[father] because he is named after my father. (Burch 1975: 68–9; emphases added)
In other words, role behaviour is based upon kin classification outside of naming; and
the application of terms for close kin to others is logically dependent upon one’s close
kin relationships.
McKinnon (2005b: 111) invokes an article by Waltner (1996) dealing with Chinese
materials as further evidence for ‘a multiplicity of mothers’. But Waltner’s contribution
has to do with legal and ritual notions surrounding the idea of ‘motherhood’, not with
its semantic structure in the first place. Thus she cites a maxim that ‘a concubine has
no children and a concubine’s children have no mother’ (Waltner 1996: 72), which
McKinnon quotes approvingly, without, apparently, realising that the proposition
presupposes a ‘mother’ (and a ‘child’) category independent of and logically prior to
itself . A far more detailed analysis of Chinese kinship by Feng (1948) shows that there
is a handful of ‘nuclear terms’ subject to various modifiers. ‘Each nuclear term’, Feng
1948: 8) notes, ‘possesses a primary meaning and one or more secondary meanings’.
Predictably, he gives the primary meaning of mu as ‘mother’ (1948: 9). ‘The primary
meaning’, Feng goes on to say, ‘is assumed when the term is used independently’ (1948:
8) – which, it seems to me, is entirely comparable to my own self-report, already noted,
that when I speak of ‘my mother’ I mean my genetrix and not my denmother, mother
country, etc. 9
McKinnon’s final example of ‘a multiplicity of mothers’ is from her own fieldwork
in the Tanimbar Islands of eastern Indonesia. Here men of differently ranked groups
sometimes have a relationship designated by an expression which McKinnon renders
as ‘elder-younger brothers who treat each other well’ (2005b: 111; see also McKinnon
1991: 100). And she goes on to say (McKinnon 2005b: 111), taking the perspective of a
child of one of these men: ‘Because these father’s brothers are also one’s father’ – i.e. are
terminologically equated with one’s father – ‘the wives of these men are therefore one’s
mothers’ – i.e. are terminologically equated with one’s mother. But this very statement
shows that the status of these other ‘mothers’ (and ‘fathers’) is logically dependent
upon their relationship to one’s father, who, I shall guess, occupies his focal position
through the application of a procreative model. That such a model is not foreign to
the Tanimbarese is indicated by another expression, rendered by McKinnon (1991:
117) as ‘true elder-younger same-sex siblings’. This expression sometimes has a wider
application, but, McKinnon tells us, ‘it can also be interpreted more narrowly to include
only those who have been born of the same mother and father’ (1991: 117). Which is to
say that the wider application signals a grey area in semantic space – one presumably
like the designation of the mother’s sister as ‘mother’ in northeast Arnhem Land.
But this is not at all McKinnon’s analysis. She insists instead that ‘[t]he fact of
“treating one another well” says it all: the relationship is created and maintained by acts
of nurturance and solicitude that constitute the very definition of kinship’ (McKinnon
2005b: 111). Rhetorical considerations aside, ‘the fact of treating one another well’ not
9 I have confirmed this analysis with two of my own Chinese-speaking informants – Louisa Schein,
Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, and Ching-I Tu, Professor of Asian
Languages at the same institution. Professor Schein has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in
parts of southwest China. Professor Tu is a native Mandarin speaker. He translates sheng mu, the
birth mother, who both McKinnon and Waltner treat as just another member of the mu class, as
‘prototypical mother’.

only does not say it all; it does not tell us in the first place what native criteria are used in
the Tanimbar Islands to determine who gets treated how – ‘well’ or otherwise. Similarly,
‘acts of nurturance and solicitude’, far from providing ‘the very definition of kinship’ in
this locale, are logically consequent upon a definition of kinship and kin classes derived
from other bases. It is relatively clear from McKinnon’s data, though obscured by her
analysis, that these bases are procreative among the Tanimbarese – as indeed they are
probably everywhere else.
McKinnon’s contention that adoption defies procreative models (2005b: 112–13),
also indebted to Sahlins (1976), has comparable ethnographic and analytical flaws. She
cites the Inuit area and Polynesia as regions in which adoption is especially common.
But in both areas they are special ‘adopted child’ and/or ‘adopting parent’ terms, made
up of the focal ‘child’ and ‘parent’ terms accompanied by a suffix or other linguistic
marker (see e.g. Burch 1975: 46; Damas 1972: 43; Guemple 1972: 68; Hooper 1970: 56;
Howard et al. 1970: 43). These latter terms are thus derivates of the former, just as,
say, godmother is derivative of mother. Behaviourally, moreover, procreative kinship is
especially salient in both areas, as Joan Silk has shown in several important contributions
(Silk 1980, 1987a, 1987b). Here is her summary of the situation:
The patterns of . . . adoption in Oceania and the Arctic are strikingly similar. First,
in each of these societies, natural parents who give up primary responsibility
for raising their children typically delegate care of their offspring to close
consanguineal kin. Second, natural parents are uniformly reluctant to give up their
children to others permanently, and often express regret at the necessity of doing
so. Third, parental investment is not necessarily terminated when adoption . . .
arrangements have been completed. Even after children have left their households,
natural parents may maintain contact with them, continue to contribute some
resources to their care, and retain their rights to retrieve their offspring if they are
mistreated. Fourth, natural parents are often very selective in their choice of . . .
adoptive parents; they typically prefer adults who can offer their children better
economic prospects than they can themselves. Finally, there is some evidence of
asymmetries in the care of natural and adoptive children, as adopted . . . children
may be required to work harder, may be disciplined more forcefully, or allocated
fewer familial resources than natural children. (Silk 1987b: 46)
Towards the end of the ‘multiplicity of mothers’ section of her article, McKinnon
remarks that
many people do make the distinction between ‘real’ and other forms of kinship,
although who counts as real kin in any particular culture is not always – or even
often – defined genetically. Even allowing for such a distinction, however, it is
clear that the patterns of nurturance, altruism, and allocation of resources follow
from specific cultural classifications of kin relations and cultural understandings
of appropriate kin behavior that are never simply reflections of genetic relations
. . . (2005b: 113)
My argument so far has been that, on the contrary, ‘real’ kin/others distinctions are
usually if not always defined by local notions of genetic connection. McKinnon’s
further assertion of a correspondence between kin class and behavioural class – so
that, for example, anyone called ‘mother’ in a particular community is supposed to
be treated in much the same way as one’s genetrix – is the stuff of introductory
anthropology textbooks and communitarian fantasy, but, so far as I am aware, it

has never been demonstrated even for a single case. But there are several counter-
demonstrations (e.g. Goodenough 1951: 111–19; Kronenfeld 1975; Shapiro 1997: 204–
7). Keesing (1969) makes the crucial point that the behavioural norms informants present
to anthropologists pertain to focal members of kin classes – which is to say that ‘patterns
of . . . altruism’ follow less ‘from specific cultural classifications of kin relations’ and more
from ‘genetic relation’ – the exact antithesis of McKinnon’s assertion (see also Peterson
1997; Shapiro 2005b). And this in turn is still more evidence that, when informants talk
about kin categories, they have in mind close procreative kin.
In subsequent argument McKinnon deals with ‘the systems of kinship known as
unilineal, in which descent is traced either through the male line to constitute patrilineal
groups, or through the female line to constitute matrilineal groups. Either way, such a
delineation of groups will always entail that some genetic kin will be in other groups
while some more distant genetic kin will be in one’s own group’ (2005b: 113–14). Her
debt, yet again, to Sahlins (1976) is duly recorded, but her presentation needs badly to
be repaired, to wit:
First, all this about ‘tracing of descent’ is mostly another example of textbook
‘wisdom’, in reality confined largely to what have been called ‘segmentary lineage
systems’ in the Muslim Middle East and parts of Africa. In Aboriginal Australia,
by contrast, detailed genealogical reckoning is absent and ‘the tracing of descent’ is
replaced by a This World/Other World distinction in which the right hand member
of the opposition is assigned ontological, moral, and temporal priority (Shapiro 1979:
13–14). Much the same holds for the so-called ‘descent groups’ of Aboriginal North
America (Tooker 1971) and present-day or recent Amazonia (Murphy 1979). Although
the matter badly needs attention for other areas, this latter pattern is probably more
common than the former.
Second, what we know about segmentation in segmentary lineage systems – that
it follows genealogical lines – is entirely consistent with genetic logic. Segmentation in
other kinds of ‘descent groups’ has been much less studied, but, for northeast Arnhem
Land at least, there is strong indication that the same logic is at work, though concealed
by a genealogically minimising ideology (Keen 1995).
Third, whatever descent or descent-like constructs exist in a community, kinship
is nearly everywhere reckoned bilaterally, and, as I have suggested, in ways that are
largely compatible with genetic notions. Whatever the intentions, McKinnon’s wording
suggests, quite wrongly, that effective kin reckoning in ‘unilineal’ populations is at odds
with these notions.
Fourth, it also suggests, again wrongly, that in such populations these groupings
are especially salient, whereas in fact their importance in everyday life varies very
considerably ethnographically. When they are nonlocalised, as they often are, they can
be said to be ‘groups’ only conceptually. Even when localised, they are never the sole
basis for social action (see esp. Keesing 1971; Kuper 1982).
This last point needs to be pursued in view of McKinnon’s assertion that ‘[i]n most
societies around the world, marriage is governed, in the first instance, by systematic
relationships between groups . . .’ (2005b: 122). As evidence for this assertion she offers
a sketchy presentation, from a secondary source, of the four and eight ‘section’ systems
of Aboriginal Australia. But the ‘sections’ are in no sociological sense ‘groups’. They
are categories in terms of which marital and ritual obligations are sometimes expressed
(Shapiro 1979: 70–2), somewhat comparable to Western astrological classes and other
conceptual schemes (1979: 72–4).

During the 1950s and early 1960s a very considerable literature grew out of Levi-
Strauss’ attempt to see presumed marital relationships between patrilineal groups in
Aboriginal Australia 10 as constituting ‘elementary structures’ of sociality (Levi-Strauss
1969 [1949]: 146–220). The ‘origins myth’ character of Levi-Strauss’ scheme makes it
suspect as an empirical exercise, as I have argued elsewhere (Shapiro 1998; see also
Conkey 1991). But even as ethnographic analysis, we now know that it is hopelessly
flawed. An important consideration is that these groups are not localised, as Radcliffe-
Brown (1931: 4) had assumed, absent any real evidence, they were (Shapiro 1973). This
in itself suggests their unimportance in the politics of marriage. But Hiatt’s work in
north-central Arnhem Land (Hiatt 1965: 38–44) went further and showed that primary
rights to bestow an Aboriginal girl are vested in individuals – not groups – and that these
individuals are usually not even members of the girl’s patrilineal group. Such groups,
he argued, are significant only in the distribution of ritual rights. My own subsequent
research further east in Arnhem Land supported Hiatt’s argument in every particular
(see esp. Shapiro 1981).
McKinnon’s own field materials point in a not entirely distinct direction.
Tanimbarese patrilineal groups are localised and there are both enduring and ephemeral
marital relationships among them, but, as in Aboriginal Australia, individual marriages
are arranged by close kin of the bride and groom. Moreover, primary obligations to give
and receive bridewealth fall on particular kin and not groups. A man has marital rights
to the daughter of his mother’s brother – not, apparently, because she is a member of a
particular group but by virtue of his kinship position per se (McKinnon 1991: 134–62,
199–258; 1995b).
So, even where unilineal groups exist, they are not necessarily the effective units in
arranging marriages; indeed, as Scheffler (1973: 784–6) has argued, they are rarely if ever
so. Moreover, any ‘group’ rendition of Third and Fourth World marriage is even more
plainly untenable in the absence of anything resembling ‘unilineal’ reckoning, as in
much of Amazonia and South Asia. In these areas what is called ‘cross-cousin marriage’
is practised – i.e. marriage between a man and either his mother’s brother’s daughter or
his father’s sister’s daughter. Now in populations with either patrilineal or matrilineal
groups both women are members of units other than a man’s own. But in most of these
two regions no such groups exist. Hence McKinnon’s claim that cross-cousin marriage
‘depends . . . upon a distinction between one’s own group and others’ (2005b: 123) is
invalid even without recourse to the actual politics of marriage (see e.g. Gardner 1972;
Gregor 1977; Kaplan 1975; Kensinger 1995; Yalman 1962).
Hence not a single one of McKinnon’s objections to the handling of kinship in
evolutionary psychology is supported by the evidence. The most that can be said is
that the genealogical skewing of unilineal descent and Omaha-type kin classification
is not predictable from Darwinian principles. But these forms of skewing exist in
populations which otherwise act and classify in ways that accord remarkably well
10 For the sake of simplicity, I refer to Aboriginal Australian ritual groups as ‘patrilineal’, because the
father/child link is probably the single most important principle of recruitment to these groups.
But the expression misleads – this for two reasons. First, within such groups there is only a very
limited ‘tracing of descent’, group unity being based on other principles (see above). Second, this
link is probably everywhere on the continent, most extraordinarily in the Western Desert (see esp.
Myers 1986: 129–30), supplemented by other principles. This is also true of Tanimbarese ‘houses’
(see below) – though for men the father/child link is the most favoured principle of recruitment
(McKinnon 1991: 84–106, 1995b). For this reason I refer to these units as well as ‘patrilineal’.

with these principles. The distinction between ‘a genetic . . . calculus’ and ‘a system of
social classification’ (McKinnon 1995b: 123), which McKinnon thinks is crucial to her
argument, is in fact entirely meaningless.
Conclusions
From all this I think a number of conclusions can be drawn about the constructionist
approach in kinship, at least as advocated by Susan McKinnon.
First, this approach – despite its claim to analyse non-Western notions of kinship
‘in indigenous terms’ (Carsten 1997: 292) – is in fact remarkably disrespectful of the
principles by which people around the world classify their kinship universes. This
stems partly from an astonishing ignorance of focality theory. This latter is a scholarly
shortcoming of a very high order – not only because of its long history in kinship
studies in particular (see e.g. Malinowski 1929; Scheffler and Lounsbury 1971), but, as
well, because similar results, as I noted earlier, have been demonstrated in other areas
of classification.
Second, the other main factor that distances many of the new kinship scholars from
their own ethnographic materials is a commitment to Marxist theory, especially the
hopelessly antiquated fantasies of Engels (1972[1884]) on the origin and development
of the family. This works in concert with their ignorance of focality theory to produce
a grossly distorted view of Third and Fourth World sociality. Hence McKinnon’s
concoction of group motherhood, of collective childcare through this and adoption,
of the pervasiveness of kinship in human relations, and of the salience of descent
groups – though this last probably owes less to Marxism than to other Victorian
theories (Kuper 1988). In any case, the fact is that kinship in our species is nothing
if not individual, because the bonding that we undergo, especially as children, is
socially selective (Flanagan 1999: 40–2). Attempts to collectivise it – whether in Fourth
World universal systems of kin categorisation (Shapiro 2005b) or Western communes
(Brumann 2003) – have at best a very limited success.
Third, although the new kinship scholars present themselves as comparativists,
the time-honoured project of earnest cultural comparison is at best tangential to
their main project, which is the belittling of the West, especially Western science
and what is sometimes called ‘the traditional family’. These are of course familiar
targets for feminists and Marxists (see e.g. Gross and Levitt 1994: 107–48; Tobias 1997:
214–20). Especially pertinent here is McKinnon’s recurrent use of the language and
tactics of ‘deconstruction’ – not to illuminate the social conditions which encourage
particular forms of ideology or scholarship but to denigrate these forms. Thus she writes
contemptuously of ‘the middle class ideal’ of motherhood (McKinnon 2005b: 112). She
asserts that ‘[e]volutionary psychologists presuppose a restrictive understanding of
kinship . . . that is a reflection of Western upper-class concerns’ (2005b: 117). She refers
to their causal imageries 11 as ‘stories’ (McKinnon 2005a: 7) and ‘myths’ (2005a: 2) and
concludes that ‘their science is ultimately a complete fiction’ (2005a: 4). But this is far
too grave a conclusion. Whatever biographic or social considerations underlie the work
of evolutionary psychologists, they have produced a series of testable propositions
11 I borrow the useful expression ‘causal imagery’ from Stinchcombe (1968), who uses it without
explicit definition.

about human behaviour. Some of these propositions may need to be modified or even
discarded (see esp. Buller 2005), but this is true of any scientific enterprise. A far more
cogent case can be made that it is McKinnon’s social environment as an academic, with
its doctrinaire Marxism and feminism, that is projected onto ethnographic materials to
which, as I believe I have demonstrated, it is entirely foreign. The result of this projective
process is a Manichean anthropology based on the concoction of an Individualist West
versus a Collectivist Rest. 12
Fourth, and related to all three of my previous conclusions, there is a salient link
between the ignorance of focality theory and the remarkable hostility to the traditional
family in the new kinship studies. For if, as I have argued, close procreative kin are
probably everywhere distinguished, the suggestion is that these kin participate in special
relationships that are very nearly universal and not, pace Marxism, the dispensable
product of a particular socioeconomic regime. This is of course just a restatement of
conclusions reached by Malinowski (1913), Lowie (1920: 147–85), and others nearly a
century ago, but apparently the lesson needs to be relearned.
Fifth, the new kinship scholars view human affairs as part of an extrasomatic process
which has little if anything to do with Homo sapiens as a biological species. They thus
draw upon a long tradition of ‘biophobia’ in social theory (Daly and Wilson 1988).
But their view of biology is antediluvian: they equate biological causation with the
reflex arc, whereby only one outcome is predetermined, and they show no awareness
of contingency sensitivity in biological systems (e.g. Oyama 1985; Pinker 2002; Shapiro
2008). Hence McKinnon (2005b: 127) claims that evolutionary psychology insists upon
‘universal forms of behavior’ – quite unaware, apparently, that all its propositions rely
on probability calculi. And she declares that ‘the mind is a flexible and creative tool
capable of creating diverse cultural forms’ (2005b: 127) – a proposition she advances
to counter evolutionary psychology but which is in fact assumed by all Darwinian
students of human affairs with whose work I am familiar. What this latter group of
scholars seems to share is a concern with establishing the limits of this flexibility – more
particularly, with how certain elements may or may not be combined in the generation
of cultural forms. This in turn invites us to reconsider the supposed antagonism between
structure and freedom. One could cite Chomsky here, or Levi-Strauss, but, at least in
professional anthropology, the apical ancestor is A.L. Kroeber’s remarkable 1909 article,
‘Classificatory systems of relationship’ (Kroeber 1909). What Kroeber argued here is
that the human mind is capable of isolating and combining certain elements, such as
gender and collaterality, so as to generate a fairly large but finite number of systems of
kin classification, and, more, that these systems are mostly independent of institutional
influence. There is more than a passing resemblance between this piece of prescient
brilliance and the arguments presented here, as well as a very considerable corpus
of literature in both cognitive science and Darwinian anthropology (Shapiro 2008).
This being so, it is fallacious to present ‘deconstructionism’ as a freedom-promoting
alternative to ‘biological determinism’.
In recent decades we have been invited to choose between a vision of anthropology
as a science and one of it as an art form – or, more specifically, as a branch of
12 This is not to argue that Marxism has no insights into particular historical or ethnographic
situations. I wish only to highlight here its apocalyptic quality, something widely appreciated in
certain scholarly circles (see esp. Campion 1994: 425–53). Nor do I have any quarrel with the idea
that women should have equal access with men to highly-placed jobs and other life opportunities.
My quarrel here is with the blatant anti-family stance of much feminist writing.

hermeneutics. The new kinship studies suggest that a more vital choice nowadays is
between anthropology as a child of Enlightenment scepticism – and the consequent
requirement to demonstrate the truth of a proposition – on the one hand, and, on the
other, anthropology as a branch of collectivist dogma.
Acknowledgement
This essay is dedicated to the memory of my father, Charlie Shapiro, from whom I
seem to have inherited, by Darwinian and perhaps other means, an utter inability to put
up with falsity and pretence. I want also to thank Herb Damsky, Tom Gregor, Adam
Kuper, Tom Parides, and Mel Spiro for their encouraging remarks on earlier drafts of
this article, though I need to add that responsibility for it rests with me alone.
Warren Shapiro
Rutgers University
ws1369@aol.com
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What Human Kinship Is Primarily About: Toward A Critique of The New Kinship Studies

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What Human Kinship Is Primarily About: Toward A Critique of The New Kinship Studies

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What human kinship is primarily about:

Key words kinship, deconstruction, evolutionary psychology

1 I prefer expressions like ‘models of procreation’ or ‘procreation models’ (Yeatman 1983) to

Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2008) 16, 2 137–153.

Susan McKinnon on the nature of human kinship

A recent article by Susan McKinnon (2005b) exemplifies the constructionist position

Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh.

Personal names could sometimes complicate a genealogy . . . If a cousin was named

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