The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David M. Schneider (review)

Few Academic Battlegrounds have been so littered with the ink-stained corpses of their scholarly protagonists as those surrounding kinship and cultural relativism. Few scholars have staked out a position in such stark terms, then fought and died amid such academic controversy as did David Schneider.

(Feinberg and Ottenheimer 2001:1)

Who is David Schneider that we ought be mindful of him? By most accounts he was a man who infuriated both friends and foes alike, whose mercurial demeanor caused many potential allies to fear him, who after disarming students and colleagues with charming and encouraging words would slash them to ribbons with sarcastic putdowns. He was a scholar who conjured up unfair depictions of adversaries' views so as to more easily bash them, yet who utterly ignored many who offered even the most genteel critiques of his own paradigms and perspectives. He was a professor well known for abruptly abandoning some of his graduate students at the most critical of moments and with the most flimsy of excuses. He was an author who boldly confessed that he wrote one of his most critically acclaimed books without reference to the thousands of pages of field data that his assistants had carefully collected and collated for him because he had already formulated his conclusions in advance of any data. He was a grand theoretician who rocketed to fame as an expert on kinship, only to declare later that kinship was a Western fabrication, a useless framework for anthropological enquiry. He was a husband whose own wife publicly accused him of academic dishonesty and in a bold gesture burned the scholarly work she had compiled on his behalf.

The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: the Legacy of David M. Schneider, edited by Richard Feinberg and Martin Ottenheimer, offers us the most complete picture to date of one of the giants of 20th century American anthropology. Within its pages ten scholars, most of whom had personal dealings with Schneider at some point in their professional careers, collectively pull back the layers of this complex individual, scrutinize his critical insights, experiment with his methodological propositions, and demonstrate that regardless of what one thinks of Schneider he is indeed worthy of thinking about. Despite (or perhaps because of) his social and psychological proclivities, Schneider raised important questions and forced anthropology to rethink some of the central issues of the discipline.

Richard Feinberg, one of those graduate students at the University of Chicago during the late 1960s and early 1970s who had been abruptly dumped by Schneider, opens the volume with a remarkably even-handed introduction, with only the slightest hint of the anger he must have felt at being forced to seek out a new advisor in the waning days before commencing his fieldwork on Polynesian kinship. Feinberg gives us a brief overview of the place of Cultural Relativism, cross-cultural comparison and the study of kinship within anthropology, as well Schneider's contribution to the development of Symbolic anthropology more broadly. Feinberg also provides a bit of biographical background. We see Schneider growing up in Brooklyn, New York in the 1920s, one of two sons of Eastern European immigrants who were active in the American Communist Party. We hear of young David's ambivalent relationship with his parents, his resentment of his younger brother, his early acting out in school and, as a result, his being sent away to boarding school in Connecticut. His early years in college, majoring in agricultural bacteriology at Cornell, were no less troublesome. Indeed, he performed so poorly in math and chemistry that he began taking social science courses simply to raise his grade point average and get off academic probation. His early graduate years at Yale University were marked by an intense dislike for its star anthropologist, George Peter Murdock. Later, as a direct result of intervention by Margaret Mead, Clyde Kluckhohn admitted Schneider into Harvard. We see, in encapsulated form, many of the...