ANUTA: Polynesian Lifeways for the Twenty-First Century

3. Kinship in Anutan Culture

63 Chapter 3 Kinship in Anutan Culture From the time of anthropology’s origins as an academic discipline in the late 1800s, its practitioners have devoted more time and energy to the study of kinship than just about any other topic. Kinship is widely regarded as a cross-cultural universal, which, if true, would make it possible to compare communities in terms of their kinship systems. Kinship terminology appears to vary in a fairly systematic way from one community to another. Anthropologists contend that many communities are organized in terms of kinship; therefore, in order to understand the economic, political, and religious systems, one must be grounded in the local views of kinship. And kinship reflects the way in which members of a community make sense of their universe, their understandings of what it is to be human, and the connections they perceive to exist among people as well as between people and the other beings that surround them. At a very general level, anthropologists have asked three kinds of question about kinship: How do different groups of people define kinship; how do they organize their kinship universes, particularly as this may be discerned from an examination of kinship terminology; and what relationships exist between the patterning of kin terms and other aspects of social organization? In practice, we have focused most of our attention on the second and third questions while taking 64 Chapter 3 for granted that people everywhere have systems of relationship that more or less resemble what we call kinship in the English-speaking West. It is only fairly recently that anthropologists have taken seriously and addressed systematically the first question: as David Schneider (1972) put it, “What is Kinship All About?” This chapter attempts to answer Schneider’s question with respect to the Anutans. Do they have a kinship system? If so, how do they define it and distinguish it from other cultural domains? What makes a person a relative? What are the symbols that differentiate kin from nonkin, and what are the implications of this distinction? What kinds of relatives do Anutans recognize, and how are relatives of different kinds distinguished from one another? The answers to these questions, as I show in later chapters, will help us to understand other aspects of Anutan social structure—how Anutans define the groups responsible for production and consumption and how they assign order to everyday life. On an island like Anuta, where everybody is recognized as being related to everyone else, the category “kinsperson” incorporates everyone who falls within one’s social orbit. At the same time, “kin” are subdivided into a number of “classes,” and every kinsperson must fall into one or another of those classes. In other words, one cannot simply be a relative; one must be a relative of a particular type. Finally, kin relationships are intrinsically dyadic. A relative is someone ’s relative; one is kin by virtue of having a certain kind of relationship to another person. Thus, kinship is a set of principles that hold together units at all levels of Anutan culture and society, from the most limited to the most complex. In this chapter, I delineate the nature of these principles; the remainder of this volume examines the ways in which the same principles differentiate the units into which Anutan society is divided and define the nature of their operation. What Is Kinship? To native speakers of American English, “kinship” refers above all to relationships based on genealogical ties, that is, connections we denote by the terms “blood” and “marriage.” The term “genealogy” itself is somewhat problematic, as it is used with a variety of meanings , and the same writer may be inconsistent from one occasion to the next.1 Some writers (e.g., Goodenough 1970a, 2001), use the term in a way that is sensitive to cultural differences in what we call parenthood . Most anthropologists, however, have followed the common Western view that kinship in the strict sense is primarily a matter of Kinship in Anutan Culture 65 what Schneider (1968) called “shared biogenetic substance” and, secondarily , of marriage. Should kin terms be applied in.’ the absence of such connections, it is assumed that they are being used as a kind of metaphorical extension. Therefore, terms like “fictive kinship,” “ritual kinship,” or “courtesy kinship” permeate much of the literature. This assumption is implicit in the very title of Lewis Henry Morgan ’s pathbreaking book, Systems...