Warren Shapiro: Fifteen Complaints against the New Kinship Studies
Abstract
Fifteen complaints are lodged against the so-called “new kinship studies” inspired by David Schneider. The main argument of these studies, that they get at indigenous appreciations, as contrasted with pre-Schneiderian analyses, supposedly entrapped in a Eurocentric model, is shown to be without merit. On the contrary, these latter analyses, far from assuming a procreative base for kinship worldwide, regularly discovered it in the field. Schneiderian kinship studies are shown to be grossly deficient from a scholarly standpoint, and to aspire to hegemony in the academy.
[kinship, history of anthropology, the culture of academia, scholarly responsibility, “radical” feminism]
© ANTHROPOS