Problematizing Family

1
Problematizing Family

• Anth 130
• Kin, Kith, Community

2
Overcoming Ethnocentrism

• We all think we know about families since we
  experience them
• Euro-American traditions imbue family with
  morality, gender politics, a discourse of
  naturalism
• Anthropological gaze influenced by tacit cultural
  assumptions

3
Overcoming Theory

• Gaze of anthropologists drawn by nature of
  society and prevailing theories of the day
• Iroquois matrilineality
• African lineages
• South American alliances
• Multigenerational Australian section systems
• Descent groups/categories
• Affinal connections
• Metaphors and symbols

4
Nostalgic Premodern notions
Families we live with
Families we live by
More complex living arrangements than now imagined
5
John Gillis historian

• Shifting family arrangements
• Differentiating class experiences, growth of
  middle-classness
• Increased importance of occasions to create
  family time
• Increased separation of ideal and experienced

6
Category or Group?
Linguistic and cognitive categories Lived
residential and interacting groups
7
Problems of Polysemy

• Trobriand Tama
• Tama levu (F e B)
• Tama lailai (F y B)

• Father
• step-father
• Father David
• Multiple meanings do not mean terms are
  meaningless

8
Biological essentialism

• Retreating to facts of nature
• Women give birth
• Women nurse
• People have elementary families
• Respond by biological reductionalism
• Respond by cultural constructionalism
• Where is the middle ground? How do we put our
  minds in our bodies back in the world? (Latour)

9
Problematic assumptions

• Focus on women as biological entities
• Focus on women as legal entities

• Are not men biological and jural?
• Survival of European reckoning of patrilineal
  or patrifocal descent

10
Genitor confusion

• Assumption that it is always harder to figure out
  the father than the mother
• Assumption that it matters
• Assumption that we now know how it works but
  other people do not

• Elementary nuclear families are not necessarily
  where family life is constructed
• Exact knowledge of biological process is not
  really necessary

11
Functional Families

• Family is the answer to the problem of
  reproduction
• Families also functions in many realms, from
  politics to economics.
• Jural and social organizational principles

• Family as concept metaphor
• Just because family is not just about biology
  does not mean biology (i.e. kinship) is
  meaningless

12
Feminist Analysis

• Interrogate our assumptions in understanding
  human biology
• Do not essentialize gender
• Not ignore biology
• Linked with social movement change
• Deconstruct in order to change ideology

13
Fashions in Kinship

• Build reputations by making and repudiating
  theory
• Think about problem for which you need to use
  kinship and choose ideas appropriately