Kinship after Needham. Anthropology between cultural singularity and comparison

Abstract

The departing point of this article is the enduring influence of Needham, despite the years that have passed since the publication of his critical remarks on the Anthropology of Kinship in 1971 and the diverse developments that refer to his criticism. In order to show this, I will refer to three different lectures on Needham’s work. The first one is from Fassin, who argues that Anthropology should refrain from proposing theoretical definitions of phenomena and, rather, must develop itself as a science of social usages. The second is offered by Porqueres, who follows Needham’s proposal of elucidating the native meaning of terms that we translate into our own kinship terms and placing them back into their semantic field. Finally, my own proposal, developed at the heart of the GETP that –contrarily to Needham– suggests that the theoretical domain of the Anthropology of Kinship is constituted of the sociocultural organization of the reproduction of human groups. Later, I state that these three approaches to the Anthropology of Kinship should not be analyzed as more or less proper approaches to what kinship is, but instead as proposals about Anthropologies (of Kinship) to be developed. Hence, they have to be evaluated in accordance to the adequacy of underlying assumptions and its fecundity.