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    American Kinship: A Cultural Account
    American Kinship: A Cultural Account
    American Kinship: A Cultural Account
    Ebook222 pages3 hours

    American Kinship: A Cultural Account

    By David M. Schneider

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    American Kinship is the first attempt to deal systematically with kinship as a system of symbols and meanings, and not simply as a network of functionally interrelated familial roles. Schneider argues that the study of a highly differentiated society such as our own may be more revealing of the nature of kinship than the study of anthropologically more familiar, but less differentiated societies. He goes to the heart of the ideology of relations among relatives in America by locating the underlying features of the definition of kinship—nature vs. law, substance vs. code. One of the most significant features of American Kinship, then, is the explicit development of a theory of culture on which the analysis is based, a theory that has since proved valuable in the analysis of other cultures. For this Phoenix edition, Schneider has written a substantial new chapter, responding to his critics and recounting the charges in his thought since the book was first published in 1968.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateJun 1, 2014
    ISBN9780226227092
    American Kinship: A Cultural Account

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      American Kinship - David M. Schneider

      individually.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Introduction

      I.

      This book is concerned with American kinship as a cultural system; that is, as a system of symbols. By symbol I mean something which stands for something else, or some things else, where there is no necessary or intrinsic relationship between the symbol and that which it symbolizes.¹

      A particular culture, American culture for instance, consists of a system of units (or parts) which are defined in certain ways and which are differentiated according to certain criteria. These units define the world or the universe, the way the things in it relate to each other, and what these things should be and do.

      I have used the term unit as the widest, most general, all-purpose word possible in this context. A unit in a particular culture is simply anything that is culturally defined and distinguished as an entity. It may be a person, place, thing, feeling, state of affairs, sense of foreboding, fantasy, hallucination, hope, or idea. In American culture such units as uncle, town, blue (depressed), a mess, a hunch, the idea of progress, hope, and art are cultural units.

      But the more usual sense in which the term unit, or cultural unit, can be understood is as part of some relatively distinct, self-contained system. American government is a good example. There is national as against local government and they stand in a special relationship to each other. National government consists of an executive branch, a legislative branch, and a judicial branch—again, units defined and placed in relationship to each other. One could go on along the line noting and naming and marking each distinct, cultural entity or unit—its definition, the conception of its nature and existence, its place in some more or less systematic scheme.

      It is important to make a simple distinction between the culturally defined and differentiated unit as a cultural object itself, and any other object elsewhere in the real world which it may (or may not) represent, stand for, or correspond to.

      A ghost and a dead man may be helpful examples. The ghost of a dead man and the dead man are two cultural constructs or cultural units. Both exist in the real world as cultural constructs, culturally defined and differentiated entities. But a good deal of empirical testing has shown that at a quite different level of reality the ghost does not exist at all, though there may or may not be a dead man at a given time and place, and under given conditions. Yet at the level of their cultural definition there is no question about their existence, nor is either one any more or less real than the other.

      In one sense, of course, both ghost and dead man are ideas. They are the creations of man’s imagination or intellect, which sorts certain elements out and keeps others in, formulating from these elements a construct that can be communicated from one person to another, understood by both. Yet at that level of reality the question of whether one can actually go out and capture either a ghost or a dead man is quite irrelevant.

      It would be an error and oversimplification to say that the objective existence of the ghost is lacking, but the objective existence of a dead man can sometimes be established; in that way at least the dead man can exist but the ghost cannot. It would develop this error even further to say that ghosts cannot exist but dead men can. Even though such a statement is certainly true at one level of discourse, it misses the whole point and the whole significance of cultural constructs, cultural units, and culture in general.

      Both ghost and dead man are words, of course, and it is certainly important to note that words stand for things. As mere disturbances in the atmosphere which are heard, or as mere distortions of the otherwise placid surface of a page which are seen, they nevertheless remain words which stand for something.

      But the question is not what thing they stand for in the outside, objective, real world, although with a word such as dog, we can take that concrete animal, stand him on the ground, point to him, and say, That is a dog. The question is rather what different things does such a word stand for. The word dog certainly is a cultural construct—in one of its meanings—and it is defined in certain ways as a cultural unit. Its referent in that context, then, is not the objective animal itself, but rather the set of cultural elements or units or ideas which constitute that cultural construct.

      Insofar as a word is the name for something, and insofar as the word names—among many other things—a cultural unit or construct, one might conclude that culture consists of the language; that is, the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, or the words and their definitions and their relationships to each other.

      There is no question but that language is a major part of culture. It is certainly a system of symbols and meanings and, therefore, in that sense alone it conforms to the definition of culture which I have offered. We know immediately that ghost is a cultural construct or unit of some kind because there is a word for it, it has a name, the word has meaning, and the friendly natives can explain that meaning and define the word.

      But if language is, in one of its meanings, culture, culture is not wholly or exclusively or entirely language. Culture includes more than language because language is not the only possible system of symbols and meanings. This means that there can be and often are cultural units without simple, single words or names for them. It means that there are units which can be described in words and identified as cultural units, but which do not have names in the special sense of the single lexeme, as the name for the dog is "dog or the name for the chief executive officer of the government of the United States is President."

      I am less concerned in this book with the question of whether a cultural unit has a single name or a two-word name, or can only be designated by a series of sentences, than I am with the definition and differentiation of the cultural units themselves. It is vital to know that cultural categories or units very often have single-lexeme names and that one of the most important ways of getting started on a description of those units is to get a collection of such single-lexeme names and try to find out what they mean.

      It is equally vital to know that cultural categories and units often do not have single-lexeme names, and that the description of the cultural units is by no means exhausted when a complete list of names with their meanings has been assembled.

      It is useful to restate this in another way. The semantic analysis of a system of lexemes is not isomorphic with the description of the system of cultural units or categories, even if it remains an open question whether the semantic analysis of a single lexeme within a system of lexemes is isomorphic with the analysis or description of that single cultural unit of which that lexeme may be a part.

      This same point can be put very simply. The meanings of the names alone are not exactly the same as the meanings of the cultural units. This is necessarily so because some cultural units do not have names. Since this book is about the cultural units, and since the names are very important parts of the cultural units, this book uses them and deals with them; but the names are only one among many parts of the subject of the description, they are not the object of the description.

      Words, as names for cultural units, are one of the best ways to begin to discover what the cultural units are. But they have one fundamental characteristic which must be taken into account. A word never has a single meaning except in one, limiting set of circumstances. When a word is being used within the very narrow confines of a rigidly controlled scientific utterance where the meaning is explicitly defined in unitary terms for that particular occasion or that particular usage, any other meanings that word might have are suppressed and the defined meaning is its only meaning. But since words are seldom used in this way, and rarely if ever in natural culture, this limitation can safely be ignored while the polysemic nature of words is kept firmly in mind.

      Simply knowing that a word can have many meanings, and simply knowing which are the many meanings a word can have, are not enough. What is necessary to know is which of the many meanings applies when, and which of the many meanings does not apply or is not relevant under what circumstances; and finally, how the different meanings of the word relate to each other. This point, too, becomes rather important in the material which follows, so I have stated it in its most general terms here.

      II.

      I started with the point that a cultural unit or cultural construct must be distinguished from any other object elsewhere in the real world, and that the cultural unit or construct has a reality of its own. The ghost and the dead as cultural constructs are quite real, demonstrable elements even though, at quite another level, ghosts do not exist but dead men do. This subject soon led into the problem of the relationship between cultural units and the words which name them and to the point that a semantic account overlaps, but is not identical with, a cultural account since significant cultural categories do not always have

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