Harsha, Vytla

Course code: SOC 303

Course Title: Kinship, Relatedness, Networks
End Semester Take Home Assignment

1a) Write an essay on the shifts in the concept of relatedness with reference to new
scientific and technological discoveries.

Relatedness is not a simple act of a person is relating to another person. Persons are
always made up of social context. A person contains or represents the social reality and s/he
negotiates her/his relations with other persons within that social reality. Hence, the emphasis
is, always, on the social derivation of the category of personhood. A person in sociological
terms refers as a micro unit in a society whose behaviour is conditioned and influenced by the
cultural setting of the society. Culture, David Schneider tells us, consists of the language;
that is, the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, or the words and their definitions and their
relationships to each other (Schneider, 1918: 3). Hence, the language, vocabulary, grammar
and syntax of the relationship between persons are always influenced by the cultural setting.
For Janet Carsten the term cultures of relatedness conveys a move away from a pregiven
analytical opposition between the biological and the social (Carsten 2000, 4 as cited in Nash,
2005:452).

Traditionally anthropologists considered kinship ties based on blood and other natural facts
are foundational for relatedness. Schneider informs us how scientific, particularly biogenetic,
representations are privileged in the determination of kinship relations. However, later on a
burgeoning field of cultural studies of science has made evident both the cultural context
within which scientific knowledge is created and the cultural content of scientific ideas,
theories, and practices (Franklin and McKinon, 2001). These new studies reveal a highly
diverse range of interrelated phenomena of markedly different scales from the gene to the
body, to the genetization of the biology or commercial biotechnology, to the family or
species, to the commodity form and cyberspace. Along with this, the literature on the new
reproductive technologies associated with amniocentesis, in vitro fertilization, and myriad
issues surrounding abortion, the birthing process, etc. brought significant shift to the concept
of relatedness (Peletz, 1995: 365). Due to these technological innovations, the new studies
1
provide an analytical focus and conceptual language for exploring models of reckoning
relatedness, mechanisms of classification that mark degrees of connection, and practices
through which different sorts of relatedness are enacted (Nash, 2005: 452).

Surrogate motherhood is one of the most important technological innovations of the 20 th

century. The new reproductive technologies call into question some of the long held concepts,
like marriage, sex, pregnancy and parenthood, associated with natural kinship and nature
itself, hence having profoundly subversive potential (Peltz, 1995: 365). Surrogate
motherhood, where reproduction is assisted by donation of ova or sperm or surrogacy of all
kinds, has pointed to the complexities of what counts as biological or conventionally real
relatedness. Strategies of foregrounding or under playing the significance of different
substances and sites are deployed in order to make the couple intending to be parents come
out as the socially recognized natural' parents (Nash, 2005: 453). Technological
innovations that enable new forms of relatedness are thus entangled in familiar and new
understandings of the relationships between selfhood, relatedness, ancestry and origins
(Nash, 2005: 454). One of the most radical implications of surrogacy is the fragmentation of
motherhood, particularly in gestational surrogacy, where the surrogate provides a uterus but
not an ovum. In these cases, the gestational mother is related to the child neither through
biogenetic substance nor through code for conduct in Schneiders sense. Gestation is thus
culturally ambiguous, encouraging the distinction between mere biological relatedness
and specifically biogenetic relatedness (Nash, 2005: 365).

Most importantly, in surrogacy, as Strathern points out, the capacity for nature to be seen as a
separate and distinct domain has increasingly been lost because its technological modification
in the name of consumer choice exposes its contingency: Nature as a ground for the
meaning of cultural practices can no longer be taken for granted if Nature itself is regarded as
having to be protected and promoted. Nature has been flattened and no longer provides a
model or analogy for the very idea of context (Strathern, 1992: 177 and 195 as cited in
Franklin and McKinnon, 2001).

Many contributors in Franklin and McKinnon volume also highlighted how scientific and
technological innovations transformed the concept of relatedness. For instance, Stefan
Helmreich explores how artificial life scientists read genes as information and code,
which then allows them to read the "information" and "coding" of computer programs as
equivalent to "life itself." The running of computer programs is seen by these scientists to be

2
equivalent to the evolutionary unfolding of kinship relations over time. Some of the chapters
in the volume advance our understanding of how the acceleration of scientific and medical
research into human phylogeny and disease comprises a powerful force in society, in relation
to which kinship definitions are actively reconstructed in a range of contexts.

Nash also brought to our notice how technological innovation in population genetics are
deployed by several commercial companies in the United States and Britain to market the use
of genetic tests for family history and popular genealogy (for those non-indigenous people
who wants to locate their places of origin). Along with genetic paternity tests, the com-
panies market new tests to verify clan relatedness (Nash, 2005: 456). The same techniques
are also used in forensic genetics to configure population in genetic databases. These data
bases are produced as random representatives of the total population through locally
specific sampling strategies that themselves reflect the ways in which the nation is imagined
in terms of descent, origins and relatedness (Nash, 2005: 457).

Notwithstanding their significance in altering the concept of relatedness, these scientific and
technological innovations have their own criticalities. Firstly, as Donna Haraway points out,
Ties through blood including blood recast in the coin of genes and information have
been bloody enough already (Haraway 1997: 265 as cited in Nash, 2005: 451). The shift
from discourses of 'race' to 'population' to 'genome' since the mid-twentieth-century retreat
from scientific racism, Harway argues, has resulted in the reconfiguration, but not
disappearance, of the discursive entanglements of family, kinship, gender, nation and 'race'.
Secondly, as Peletz (366) emphasises, developments in the new reproductive technologies
make nature and biology more relevant to our analytic thinking about kinship than they
have been since Morgan. Thirdly, there are clear dangers associated with population genetics
as they attempt to trace the genetic similarities and differences using a narrow prism of
techniques. The Human Genome Diversity Project notoriously collapsed because of its failure
to address the ethical problems of consent, property rights. Many projects attempt to prove or
disprove stories of origin, test historical claims of relatedness, and determine the degree of
genetic distance between national or ethnic groups. Most importantly, Population genetics
may be rejected and resisted by some indigenous groups or used strategically by others as a
resource through which collective identity, origins stories and rights to land or other forms of
collective cultural property can be affirmed. The use of molecular genetics to map human
origins and human 'diversity' have profound, but complex, implications for the ways in which
collective identities and difference are understood and enacted. Moreover, contrary to the
3
arguments of population geneticists that their work disproves the existence of genetically
discrete races, it has often ambiguous implications for the politics of race and ethnicity.
Population geneticists, while mapping human origins and difference, frequently reinstate
older racial categories in delimiting groups within their gradients of genetic difference, but
often in terms that obliquely code for race (Nash, 2005: 455-456). Nash also brought
another negative aspect of population genetics. Most of the projects associated with
population genetics are funded by pharmaceutical companies keen to develop racially
segmented or ethnic drugs on the basis of genetic differences. This very process diverts
attention away from the social causes of global and national disparities in health, including
the relationships between racism, deprivation and illness and legitimizes a new language of
racial difference (Nash, 2005: 456).

And finally, though many see surrogacy as destabilizing force for biogenetic or blood
relations, however, many criticised it for its violation of basic human rights, particularly from
the Third World womens point of view. In their view it reduces or assign women to a new
breeder class and constitutes a form of commercial baby selling (Peletz, 1995: 364).

Sources and References

Carsten J (2000). Introduction: Cultures of Relatedness in Carsten J (ed), Cultures of

Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1-36.

Franklin, Sarah & McKinnon, Susan (2001). Introduction, in Sarah Franklin & Susan
McKinnon (eds.), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham & London:Duke
University Press.

Haraway D J (1997). Modest_Witness@2Second_Millennium.

FemaleManTM_Meets_OncoMouseTM: Feminism and Techno- science. London: Routledge.

Nash, Catherine (2005). Geographies of Relatedness. Transactions of the Institute of

British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 449-462.

Peletz, Michael G (1995). Kinship Studies in Late Twentieth-Century Anthropology.

Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 24, , pp. 343-372.

4
Strathern, Marilyn (1992). After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5
2a) What is the significance of feminist and queer studies interventions in changing the
course of kinship studies?

Kinship is one of the most important concepts in the field of anthropology and sociology. LH
Morgan and his interlocutors invented the study of kinship by drawing a border around
certain aspects of human behaviour, isolating them for study and affirming that they do
indeed constitute an object, that they cohere (Trautmann, 1987: 4 as cited in Peletz, 1995:
344). Morgan and most of the early anthropologists had taken a narrow view of kinship by
attributing universality to it; they attached some genealogical unity as a foundation for all
the kinships also assumed that blood is foundation for kinship relations.

Schneider is the first one to criticize the conventional meaning of kinship as Eurocentric and
its imposition on other people is a flawed one. He questioned the so-called natural facts of
sex, procreation and parenthood as foundational basis for systems of kinship. Not nature, but
the nature-culture dualism is one of the important dimensions of Schneiders book on
American Kinship. However, though Schneider has decentred biology from the study of
kinship, yet he has not really denaturalized the study of kinship (Peletz, 1995: 348).

Schneider was not the only theorist to identify kinship as a primary site of many of
anthropology's most Eurocentric concepts. Many started questioning the foundational blocs
of kinship, i.e. genealogy, marriage, parenthood and most importantly structural
functionalism as a guiding paradigm. Similarly, the study of kinship has been broadened with
other fields such as social history, political anthropology, etc. Most importantly, Feminist
anthropologists have infused new enthusiasm into the field of kinship and have contributed to
its reconstitution (Peletz, 1995: 346). For the feminists, both kinship and gender had for too
long been presumed to be based on natural facts in a manner that was both essentialist as
well as ethnocentric. This contention directly paralleled Schneider's insistence that the
notion of a pure, pristine state of biological relationships out there in reality which is the
same for all mankind is sheer nonsense (Schneider, 1965: 97 as cited in Franklin and
McKinnon, 2001).

Since 1970s many feminists were critical of biologism of kinship studies, especially
structural functionalism. The primary objective of feminist project is to reconstitute the study
of kinship and erase the boundaries created by earlier studies between kinship and gender.
Most importantly, feminists thought that for the production of gender, power, and difference
are key concerns in the reconstituted field of kinship (Peletz, 1995: 346). Moving beyond
Schneider's normative account of biology, the feminists examined the productive effects of
biological discourse, demonstrating how inequality and hierarchy come already embedded
in symbolic systems and are elaborated through contextualized material practices
(Franklin and McKinnon, 2001). They questioned the ways in which hierarchical differences
are legitimated as natural or biological, through categories such as sex, gender, reproduction,
family and race. In this reconstitution of kinship studies, the feminists attempted to redefine
the very meaning of kinship by interpolating it with gender and religion, as Kelly has: (Kelly,
1993::521-22 as cited in Peletz, 1995: 348-49):

6
 Kinship relations are social relations predicated upon cultural conceptions
that specify the processes by which an individual comes into being and
develops into a complete (i.e. mature) social person. These processes
encompass the acquisition and transformation of both spiritual and corporeal
components of being. Sexual reproduction and the formulation of paternal
and material contributions are an important component of, but are not
coextensive with, the relevant processes. This is due to the ethnographic fact
that a full complement of spiritual components is never derived exclusively
from the parents

Many feminists have contributed to enrich the filed by undertaking comparative studies
across the continents. For instance, Goody has reassessed conventional wisdom pertaining to
commonalities and contrasts in systems of kinship in: (a) the Orient(b) primitive
societies, and (c) the West. While comparing Asian marriage from marriage in the
economically advanced societies of the preindustrial West, Goody traces the history of
exchange and alliance, especially Levi-Strausss ideas concerning the exchange of women.
He identifies fallacies in Strauss understanding about practice of kinship and marriage in
Asian societies as Strauss completely subordinates women to kinship groups of their
husbands and their thorough dissimilation from their natal kin. Goody illustrates how women
in China, India, and the Islamic world have long retained important moral and material rights
and obligations with respect to their natal kin and how they are, carriers of property as well as
of sentiments, ties, and relationships, which may compromise unilineal hegemonies and
social arrangements in the direction of bilaterality, but which are nonetheless central to
strategies of heirship and domestic reproduction. Total assimilation of women into their
husbands kin group is thus Western fiction informed by marked metaphors and economistic
thinking. Goody concludes that while gender inequality is pervasive in the Asian societies,
women in these societies are never simply the pawn of others but are themselves players in
the game, especially as heiresses (Goody, 1990, cited in Peletz, 1995: 356-57).

Critique

But if arguing for the value of ideas of hybridity over the apparent determinism of kinship is
reduc- tive, an alternative turn to the relationality of kinship - that is the emphasis on
conceiving of persons through social relationships - as a counter- point to individualism and
genetic essentialism is similarly problematic. Marilyn Strathern's (1995b) reflections on
arguments which locate in kinship, community or family the sort of relational under-
standings that are eclipsed in popular discourses of genetic essentialism are instructive here.
These arguments pose a dilemma because though she wants to support critiques of genetic
essentialism, she also wants to resist a form of nostalgia that would overlook the ways in
which individualism is part of Euro-American kinship thinking. Kinship cannot be
7
recuperated as the place for relationality, in contrast to genetic essentialism. This is because it
involves ideas of individualism and inherited nature as much as it is flexibly delimited and
per- formed. This suggests a need to think of kinship in ways that position it neither as the
regressive ideology that must be moved beyond, nor a form of positive relational
understanding that is eroded by genetic essentialism and individualism. The point is not to
argue for or against kinship but to explore the diverse effects of kinship in practice. [458]

Conclusion

This work builds on the sustained feminist critique of biological essentialism by exploring the
continued work of nature not as immutable category but rather in terms of the complex and
often paradoxical ways in which ways in which nature and culture have becoming
increasingly isomorphic while remaining distinct (Franklin, et.al. 2000, 8, italics in original).

As this volume demonstrates, kinship studies within anthropology have been productively
reconfigured and indeed revitalized by the many critical interventions through which they
have been transformed.' Contesting some of the taken-for-granted bases of kinship study has
enabled it not only to become more flexible and mobile but also more precise. In turn, kinship
theory can address a much wider range of contexts in a more complex and multidimensional
way that is, at the same time, more rigorous as a result of being more reflexive. Kinship study
has not reawakened, like some disciplinary Sleeping Beauty waiting to be rescued: rather, it
has been steadily reinventing itself and, in the process, has undergone a substantial makeover.
[USE FOR INTRO OR CONCLUSION] Sarah

Kinship is not a preexisting thing but rather something "congealed," and all these essays ad
dress, in varying ways, the question that Weston poses at the end of her piece: "Congealed
how, for whose benefit, and from what?" Sarah

Trautmann T (1987). Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship. Berkeley: University
of California Press.

Schneider, David M (1965). Kinship and Biology. In Aspects of the Analysis of Family
Structure, edited by Ansley J. Coale. Princeton: N.J.: Princeton University Press.

8
Kelly R (1993). Constructing Inequality: A Fabrication of a Hierarchy of Virtue Among the
Etoro. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

in the Pre-Industrial Societies of Eurasia. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press 33. Goody J,
Thirsk J, Thompson EP, eds. 1976. Family and

Goody, J (1990). The Oriental, the Ancient, and the Primitive: Systems of Marriage and the
Family in the Pre-Industrial Societies of Eurasia. New York: Cambridge University Press.