What We Talk About When We Talk About Kinship

In 1962, I joined the Harvard-Central Brazil Research Project directed by David Maybury-Lewis and the late Brazilian anthropologist Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira. We were a group of graduate students from Brazil and the United States following in the footsteps of the German ethnographic autodidact Curt Nimuendajú (born Curt Unkel 1883–1945), the French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b.1908), and David Maybury-Lewis who had worked extensively with two central Brazilian indigenous groups, the Xerente and Xavante, in the late 1950s. The intended goal of the Central Brazil project was a cross-cultural comparison of a small number of indigenous societies known to speak languages belonging to the Gê linguistic family, including the Bororo which is classified as Macro-Gê. Because these groups spoke cognate languages, they were thought to share a baseline common culture. Analyses of how their social structures were perceived to work, as understood by the individual field researchers, culminated in a joint comparative volume, Dialectical Societies: The Gê and Bororo of Central Brazil (Maybury-Lewis 1979).

Maybury-Lewis arranged seminars and periodic discussion groups at Harvard and elsewhere attempting to pull the group together, especially when our interpretations appeared to range far afield. Although at times frustrating, these meetings were useful and no doubt helped to hone our analytical skills. Arguments over the applicability to the Gê of such concepts as patriliny and matriliny, prescriptive marriage, and moiety organization—to mention but a few of the terms that had become problematic for us—helped stimulate a rethinking of the traditional literature on these topics. Little seemed to work out in the field the way it was supposed both from a study of the earlier literature on central Brazilian societies and from a close reading of the classic texts in social anthropology.

Members of the Gê project, immersed in the study of kinship, for many years the subject of a popular course offered by Maybury-Lewis at Harvard, began rethinking the relevance of the kind of kinship discourse that had prevailed in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. Tracking how kinship was deployed involved a closer scrutiny of all the relationships as they existed between actual persons in daily transactions. If the classic models did not work out in the field as anticipated in the classroom or as predicted in the literature, it was not because the study of kinship had lost its importance, but rather because systems of kin classification among the Gê were discovered to range beyond the expected genealogical and affinal circles to include an array of persons who have been designated by ethnographers variously as “formal friends,” or “adoptive,” “pseudo-,” “false,” and “surrogate” kinship relations.

The extension of the use of kinship terms to include unrelated persons as classificatory kin, discovered in such small-scale, stateless societies as those of the Gê, serves as a modus vivendi for the community to share its responsibilities. Those appointed to kinship roles assist their kin in a variety of ways, especially important in food getting and child-rearing activities. Kayapó (Me͂bengokre) inhabitants of the three villages (Gorotire, Kubenkranken, and Porori) where I did fieldwork in 1962, 1963, and again briefly in 1966, divided into either kin (ombikwa) or non-kin (me͂baitebm). Relationships to newly appointed ombikwa are established formally and prominently in public ceremonies in the village plaza. Persons, unrelated by either blood or marriage, but who are recognized in this manner as ombikwa, can be called upon to perform special services for their ritual kin in village-wide celebrations. These commitments and obligations are put into play at the great public ceremonies celebrating birth, the giving of special names, the initiation of boys, and the commemoration of death. At such critical moments in the Kayapó life-cycle, honorary ombikwa make gifts of food, names, or ritual positions and ornaments. Gifts such as these are presumed to bind the gift-giver and the recipient in a life-long interpersonal relationship. In thus expanding an individual’s social network beyond that of the immediate family, a larger cohort of kin is brought into action and conjoined...