Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Approaches to kinship: (4) kinship practice
Classic kinship writing emphasized jural rules, but conformity to such rules was usually seen as unproblematic and explanations were sought only when they were ‘broken’. Yet obedience and disobedience are both matters of choice, so it is necessary to explain why some people adhere to the rules as well as why others ignore them. Even this takes too naive a view of the connection between rules and behaviour, however. In brief, rules do not direct (or fail to direct) behaviour; rather, they are used to interpret, explain or justify it.
The atemporal character of earlier approaches led to a downplaying of the strategic aspects of kinship behaviour. By contrast, †Bourdieu (1977) sees kinship as an open-ended set of †practices employed by individuals seeking to satisfy their material and symbolic interests. Thus, marriage choice is made in the light of one’s social situation at the time, including the options available in the form of marriageable persons and the material and symbolic capital to be gained by choosing each of them. One factor in this complex calculation is that by ‘obeying the rules’ one gains respect.
However, such rules refer to official, publiclyacknowledged kinship entities—lineages and the like—rather than the practical kinship units called into existence for specific purposes. Whereas official kin generally come to the fore in celebrating marriages, many other kinds of practical, ad hoc kinship links may be involved in setting them up.
The major determinants of kinship behaviour, therefore, are not the explicit rules themselves but people’s largely implicit knowledge about ‘how things are done’, i.e. about social practice. Explicit ideologies are manifestations rather than explanations of this practical knowledge, which Bourdieu terms †habitus. For these reasons, the study of rules alone yields a picture of kinship which is not only incomplete but also seriously misleading. For example, because anthropologists use *genealogies to depict ‘real’ relationships, they tend to forget that informants often use genealogical discourse in other ways, to support or justify particular activities and concerns.
Analyses of this kind can be criticized for reducing human motives to cynical attempts at maximizing personal, material advantage. But just as it is necessary to steer a middle course between descent theory and alliance theory, using insights from either as the situation demands it, so too this approach based on †praxis provides a necessary dynamic and inherently sociological counterweight to the somewhat asocial, atemporal insights provided by the study of emic theories of personhood.
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