When we think of kinship, we usually think of ties between people based upon blood
or marriage. But we also have other ways-nowadays called ‘performative’-of
establishing kinship, or hinting at kinship: many Christians have, in
addition to parents, godparents; members of a trade union may refer to each
other as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. Similar performative ties are even more
common among the so-called ‘tribal’ peoples that anthropologists have studied
and, especially in recent years, they have received considerable attention
from scholars in this field. However, these scholars tend to argue that
performative kinship in the Tribal World is semantically on a par with
kinship established through procreation and marriage. Harold Scheffler,
long-time Professor of Anthropology at Yale University, has argued, by
contrast, that procreative ties are everywhere semantically central,
i.e. focal, that they provide bases from which other kinship ties are
extended. Most of the essays in this volume illustrate the validity of
Scheffler’s position, though two contest it, and one exemplifies the
soundness of a similarly universalistic stance in gender behaviour. This book
will be of interest to everyone concerned with current controversy in kinship
and gender studies, as well as those who would know what anthropologists have
to say about human nature.
The study of kinship once ruled the discipline of anthropology, and Hal
Scheffler was one of its magisterial figures. This volumes reminds us why.
Scheffler’s powerful analyses of kinship systems often conflicted with the
views of his more relativist contemporaries. He cut through the fog of theory
to emphasise the human essentials, namely the importance of the social bonds
rooted in motherhood and fatherhood. Anthropology in its decades-long retreat
from the serious study of kinship has lost a great deal. This volume points
the way to a restoration. - Peter Wood, National Association of Scholars
