Relatedness as Transcendence: on the Renewed Debate over the Meaning of Kinship

Introduction This is an article about kinship, and more particularly the meaning of kinship, an issue that has characterized practically the whole history of anthropology from Lewis Henry Morgan’s pioneering studies, including the influential dismissals of kinship as a universal category by both Rodney Needham and David Schneider in the mid-twentieth century and the prominence given to Janet Carsten’s notion of ‘relatedness’ as part of the neo-Schneiderian revival of kinship study since the 1990s. Here I want to revisit the issues involved by bringing in notions of transcendence from religious studies, and in particular images of the transcendence of difference as a way of overcoming social division and disharmony. My starting point is that not only religion but also ideas about kinship can be used to express the internal unity of social groups or categories, often in opposition to other such groups and categories. In respect of kinship, these ideas are often expressed in terms of living, working and/or eating together, as much as genealogical connection. As a consequence, they are often seen by anthropologists as not simply modifying, but contradicting or even denying the realities of biological relations, or at least genealogical connections, between kin. What often replaces biology or genealogy is some notion of spiritual or other cosmological intervention, which in itself can be seen as a form of transcendence, to the extent that spiritual beings are typically associated with other worlds, despite their impact on the human world. There are essentially two arguments here. First, while there are transcendent representations of kinship that stress the unity of the group and that in so doing seem to play down or reject either biological realities or genealogical connections and distinctions, that does not necessarily mean that there is complete ignorance of them in the society in question. Certainly indigenous ideas will typically not reflect the western scientific view in all respects, any more than western folk models generally do, but I argue that they are more often recognizable in these terms than is sometimes claimed. One irony is that the ‘new kinship’ of the Schneiderian turn may well simultaneously expresses scepticism of the existence of