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Dividends of Kinship: Meanings and Uses of Social Relatedness. Peter P. Schweitzer, ed. New York: Routledge, 2000. 221 pp.
New Directions in Anthropological Kinship. Linda Stone, ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001. 352 pp.
These two edited volumes discuss whether and how to study kinship after David Schneider's dismissal of the subfield in his book, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984). Both editors accept Schneider's claim that kinship studies reflect Western ideas of genealogy, but neither wants to abandon kinship as a basis for cross-cultural comparison. They differ in their diagnoses of the problem, however, and so offer different prescriptions for moving ahead. Stone argues for reviving the link between kinship and biology that she believes Schneider dismissed too hastily. She draws on Boas's four-field vision to advocate a cross-cultural study of kinship based on the universality of biological motherhood. Peter Schweitzer casts Eurocentrism as the central problem. He draws on the history of British social anthropology to suggest that even if the idea of biologically based kinship is not universal, all humans live in social groups with forms of relatedness that we can loosely translate with English kinship terms. Both editors, however, dismiss what I see as Schneider's main contribution. Because they read him as advocating extreme cultural relativism, they assume his approach precludes cross-cultural comparison. In contrast, my reading of Schneider suggests that comparison is unavoidable. As long as we write in English, we are forced to translate what others tell us. It thus behooves us to analyze the wider semantic domains of the words we choose to compare and contrast.
Both collections grew out of conferences. Stone began with papers presented by cultural anthropologists at a panel on "New Directions in Kinship Studies" held at the 1997 American Anthropological Association meeting. She later added papers to represent archaeology, primatology, and evolutionary anthropology. Because her book includes 17 papers, plus an editor's introduction, each paper is necessarily short. Most focus on a single argument advocating or exploring one "new direction." The papers in Schweitzer's collection were presented in 1996 at a meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Because his volume includes only six papers, plus the editor's introduction and concluding remarks, contributors were able to produce ethnographically rich...