Communities of Kinship: Antebellum Families and the Settlement of the Cotton Frontier (review)

Billingsley wants kinship to be treated as a category of analysis in historical studies in the same way that race, class, and gender are. Her goal is to expand the contextualization of events within history to include the contextualization of individuals within their families; applying anthropology's symbolic definition of kinship to the world of southerners thereby demonstrates the pivotal role of family in southern life (153). Billingsley makes good use of her genealogical and historical records (censuses, maps, probate and land records, oral history, etc.) to trace one branch of the Keesee family from the early nineteenth century to the early postbellum period and from Alabama to Arkansas to Texas, and sometimes back again in ever-changing subsets of a fluid kin structure. Billingsley concludes that "the overwhelming majority [of southerners] migrated in family groups," that kinship remained the organizing principle and provided social capital for southern migrants, and that genealogical methods are necessary to achieve these insights.

Billingsley has assumed a sizable task by attempting to combine a humanities discipline, a social-science discipline, and a nonacademic pursuit that she clearly feels to lack appreciation. Her use of genealogical methods is nearly flawless. However, she understates the use of genealogical methods by anthropologists and historians, for example in constructing kin networks and in reconstructing families. Kinship has always been at the heart of such studies, not as an end in itself, as it is in genealogy, but as a pivot to understanding relations of power. Moreover, longitudinal studies that have not been able to use family reconstruction methods—particularly the reconstruction of marriage and in-law ties—have also demonstrated that people migrate in family groups and that kinship provides structure and social capital.

Billingsley takes from anthropology the idea that relatedness is fluid, important, universal, and useful. Family membership does not necessarily rely on blood, and blood is not always thicker than fiction. The study of kinship in anthropology, however, entails a search for causal models and, as such, requires functional relationships. Kinship theory developed in the study of people for whom kinship was the basis of social organization, in contrast to those for whom law (or the social contract) formed that basis. The United States clearly falls into the latter category. Kinship is one attribute through which individuals interact with the social contract; so is gender, race, place of origin, and other characteristics loosely, and wrongly, called "categories of analysis."

Billingsley uses kinship as a category of description but not of analysis. Relatedness describes what the Keesees do, not why they do it. Relatedness itself is assumed to be sufficient cause. How the kin role "son-in-law" results in a man moving himself and his family to an unknown place is not elucidated in Billingsley's work. Lastly, what she describes is a frontier, not a southern, phenomenon. The social processes discussed in Communities of Kinship also played out on the wheat frontier of the Great Plains, the industrial frontier of Massachusetts, and the frontiers that persons displaced by colonialism encountered—the subjects of much anthropological kinship theorizing.

No matter. Communities of Kinship does not particularly advance theory or interdisciplinarity. Billingsley's work is an interesting case study reminding us that kinship is important as it contributes to the scholarly literature on family and frontier migration.