The Archaeology of Kinship: Advancing Interpretation and Contributions to Theory

1. Introduction

3 CHAPTer one Introduction Kinship research follows major theoretical trends in anthropology. evolutionism attempted to associate forms of family organization, kin terminology , technology, and subsistence to characterize unilinear stages of human development. functionalism viewed kin groups as sources of property and social support. Cognitivists focused on kinship nomenclature to understand classificatory relationships. structural functionalism sought to predict social organization and marriage practices from kin terminologies. neoevolutionism attempted to explain how normative systems of relationships, marriage, or kin terminologies emerge and transform , or to discover ecological or socioeconomic correlates. with ecological anthropology, questions were directed away from internal social relationships and kinship research became less relevant. lévi-strauss (1965, 1969) diverted attention from notions of descent to marital alliances as the intrinsic basis for kinship. Marxist frameworks viewed kinship as social relations of production. with the rise of political economic and gendered perspectives, kinship provided a framework for understanding the impacts of globally expanding capitalism on social organization , ideology, and gender status (e.g., Peletz 1995). Kinship principles and theory thus became diffused into those topical areas (sousa 2003). In general, kinship emerged as a materialistic framework for understanding contemporary topics. establishing a different trend, schneider (1968, 1984) restricted “kinship” to cultural symbolic meanings arguing that models biased by western notions of biological relatedness do not conform with practice. A resurgence in kinship research appeared at the turn of the century, either as a response to schneider’s critique (e.g., Carsten 4 chapter one 2000, 2004; Carsten and Hugh Jones 1995; feinberg and ottenheimer 2001; franklin and McKinnon 2001) or as the continuation of the neoevolutionary , marital alliance, materialist, and other frameworks (e.g., Godelier et al. 1998; faubion 2001; McKnight 2004; Parkin and stone 2004; scheffler 2001; stone 1997). A second wave in this resurgence is definitely under way, which is exemplified by several recent works on social organization, marriage, kin terminology, and ideology through multiple old and new theoretical perspectives (e.g., Godelier 2011; Jones and Milicik 2011; McConvell et al. 2013; sahlins 2011; Trautmann and whiteley 2012). Although resurfacing as a major topic in anthropology, there is a wide diversity in perspectives and interests. Kinship resiliently maintains its relevance to anthropology and should reappear in archaeology. despite the negative perceptions many archaeologists maintain about kinship, particularly after long periods of confusion and disappointment, and particularly following on the heels of an “antikinship” rhetorical period, this book justifies a return to the subject matter in archaeology. It challenges the pessimism on the potential for archaeology to identify kinship behaviors and for archaeological contributions to broader theory. This book has four objectives. The first is clarifying to an archaeological readership the concepts and their importance to archaeological theoretical issues. The second is to describe and explain “middle-range” material correlates of kinship behavior. The third is to demonstrate in a case study how those techniques can identify kinship behaviors in prehistory (although equally applicable in historical archaeology). The fourth objective is to demonstrate how archaeology can evaluate ethnologically derived hypotheses in kinship theory. Archaeology has been subjected to a wide range of misunderstandings of kinship theory and what many of the concepts actually entail. Therefore , to clarify what we are addressing when invoking kinship principles and models a significant amount of description is needed to set the record straight, so to speak. A guiding principle in the book’s preparation was to make kinship principles and theories accessible to broad audience. In so doing, I try to “demystify” kinship by transcribing the sometimes esoteric knowledge into more easily followed language. rather than attempting to address all the concepts that are relevant in one chapter, the principles are instead discussed in different sections in a topical sequence: households , descent groups, and the political economic dynamics of marriage systems. In so doing, I sought to provide the reader with not only descriptions of what the principles entail but also, very important, their relevance to past and present topics of interest to archaeologists. different avenues for interpretation are discussed, leading to a focus on methods that are independent and free of ethnological biases. other- Introduction 5 wise, we could simply end up projecting problematic hypotheses and interpretations onto the past or engaging in circular arguments (e.g., whereby ethnology informs our interpretations and then our statements on ethnology), and thereby failing to use archaeology to address broader theory. This is a problem described as the “tyranny of the ethnographic...