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KINSHIP AS A CATEGORICAL CONCEPT: A CASE STUDY OF NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH SIBLINGS
| By Leonore Davidoff |
University of Essex |
The late twentieth century's post-modern culture has produced a general questioning about boundaries and categories as part of the general turning away from a "master narrative." This has been associated with growing unease about accepted hierarchies. The concepts "family" and "kinship" have been subjected to this questioning:
Is it [kinship] an empirical set of overlapping relations that are genetic, genealogical and social? Or is it the meanings of relationships that must have kin-specific content? Is it a set of symbolizing actions whose emotional charge encourages enduring and practical ends? Or is it simply a set of questions posed by Western social scientists using their own unrecognized cultural presuppositions as a basis for their models?1
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After many years of eclipse, the last decade has witnessed a renewed intellectual interest in both the family and kinship. Anthropologists in the West have begun to apply their skills and techniques to these topics within their own societies.2 Sociologists of the family as well as social psychologists have begun to incorporate issues around gender, age, "race," ethnicity, and power into what had been the low status or rather sterile "sociology of the family." |
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Why this has happened is complicated. Undoubtedly some of the revised interest stems from the radical political movements since the 1960s. Feminism, the campaigns of gays and lesbians, racial and ethnic minorities and the nationalism emerging in former colonial societies have opened narrowly-defined, static boundaries of familial and kin relations. Above all, changes in family life itself in the last part of the twentieth century—co-habitation, high divorce rates, women's massive entry into the work force, continued low birth rates, increased longevity and the impact of reproductive technologies—all have brought into question beliefs about the family and its natural foundations.3 There are now suggestions for re-conceptualising family as a process,4 as a web of lived relationships, or as categories and roles that have to be activated to be meaningful.5 |
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Meanwhile, and somewhat paradoxically, recent increased knowledge of genetics has stressed the physicality of kinship ties, a position reinforced by the claims of the now fashionable neo-evolutionists.6 The emergence of such complicated—even competing—understandings points to a recognition that kinship is basically a "categorical concept" whose content depends on beliefs and knowledge about a range of topics from physiology to the cosmos. |
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These revisions and reinterpretations apply forcibly to the issue of sibling relationships. The puzzling question of why siblings have been ignored and down-played across disciplines from demography to psychoanalysis has only now begun to be addressed. Anthropologists point out that modern Western culture with its emphasis on forward time and the notion of progress concentrates on filiation, especially the relationship of father to son, while those thought systems which understand time as cyclical might be more open to lateral linkages.7 Literary scholars among others have noted the centrality of brother and sister to a wide spectrum of creation myths from ancient Egypt to modern Latin America. Within many of these myths the themes of twins and doubling are particularly striking.8 Many of these "origin" stories use the sexual union and reproduction through brother-sister incest as the foundation of society.9 |
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