This is the third in a series of notes to fifteen lectures
for my class TF5005: Interdisciplinary Study
of the Family.
By the 1950s, anthropologists had almost universally given up on the totalizing
effort of people like Murdock who had thought to demonstrate that "the
family" was of universal import in any single fashion.
What Murdock had seen as
"exceptions" were now taken to be the most revealing of the underlying
processes.
Thus the interest in the Nayar as a challenge to the apparent universality
of marriage
the interest in African families in the Americas (in the Caribbean and
the United States as evidence that family structure in human societies
is not a simple affirmation of the biological facts of reproduction.
Lévi-Strauss, in the paper
on "The Family" expands on
this earlier statement about culture "transforming" nature and stresses
the malleability of the arrangements that can arise in social evolution
to deal, not only with biological reproduction and early socialization,
but also a host of other functions that can be performed at the same time.
This builds on the major theoretical argument in The elementary structures
of kinship that culture has to do with the establishment of new rules
on top of possible biological ones that become facts with major consequences
when they have been institutionalized.
It also prefigures his later interest in representational systems (myths
particularly) and later developments in theory that often present themselves
as opposed to his.
In this perspective the second part of Lévi-Strauss's paper is the
more important in that it moves our attention from
the family (in the multiplicity of its apparent forms within particular
limits)
to
the relationships
between families, and, by implication perhaps, to the practical work that
families must always engage in as their local conditions change (through
the birth, death and marriage of various members).
Lévi-Strauss himself did not directly explore the implications of
the second part of the paper and it is only recently that attention has
turned to the work that all must perform (what some have called the "turn
to practice," often with a bow to Bourdieu
that should more profitably be a bow to ethnomethodology
as some are not using it).
Anthropology itself focused more on the implications for research of the
emphasis on culturally constructed difference leading to first a radical
critique and now, possibly to a return to an interest in "households"
that may be part of a return to a new kind of empiricism focusing on commonsense
behavior
Schneider and the question of the definitional bounding of the field: the
epistemology of the question "what is 'mother'?" on the grounds that
only if we start from a point of reference privileging biology or
socialization can we even talk about "difference." Thus
Schneider suggested that the whole field of kinship studies was untenable since
we could not provide a definition of the field that did not start from a
particular cultural framework. His work parallels a rapid disinterest by
most students of the next generation in questions of family.
Schneider's critique is also directly tied to developments in feminist theory
that are still evolving and focus on the political aspects of any interest in
family matters.
In recent years, there has been a small resurgence in research in what would
have been called kinship with an attempt to recapture grounds for comparison
through a focus on "households" as the possibly universal smallest
units of sociability where most children are in fact raised--without any a
priori about the kind of relationships the members of the household might have
had prior to their coming together, or the regulation of their interaction.