Kinship Past, Kinship Present, and Schneider’s Critique

Abstract Part III (Chapters 7 to 10) continues Kin Matters’ general, integrative methodology, attending to insights in one pocket of the fragile sciences to fruitfully inform debates and discussions in other, often-siloed parts of those sciences. It turns more explicitly to the study of kinship, its history, how that history has been narrativized, and contemporary and future kin matters. Chapter 7 concentrates on David Schneider’s influential critique of the study of kinship, raising problems for that critique and the standard narrative of that study. According to the standard narrative, the Schneiderian critique marks a radical juncture in kinship studies dividing an ethnocentrically driven bioessentialism about kinship in anthropology from the pluralistically encompassing “new kinship studies.” Part of what is problematic about the standard narrative are the very contrasts in terms of which it is constructed, including the contrast between performative kinmaking as “cultural” and what I call The Progenerative View as “biological.”