A reticular approach to kinship

Douglas R. White and Michael Houseman For special issue of l’Homme 2013 Regardless of now marriage is locally defined, most people in most places marry (and/or have children with) people who are neither too close (immediate family members) nor overly distant (total strangers). As a result, many members of a given community are linked to each other by multiple direct or indirect ties of consanguinity and/or affinity. A reticular or network approach to kinship is concerned with the nature of these interconnections, they way they combine to form patterns, and how these patterns relate to other types of social phenomena: kinship terminology, residence, religious or political formations, economic transactions, and so forth. Marriage relations, however they are locally defined, are taken to play an essential role. While consanguineal ties link individuals into open-ended family trees, marriage acts not only to link these trees together, but also to relink the individuals in them to each other in a variety of additional ways. Such marriage-based connections give rise to closed circuits of kinship and marriage ties, thereby generating cohesion within the genealogical field. Members of different families can thus come to be appreciated as part of a single kinship network unfolding through time. From this point of view, a network approach to kinship builds on Lévi-Strauss’ (1967) (and Tylor’s [1889]) insight into the structural properties of affinal ties: consanguineous groups, and relatively isolated individuals, are integrated into higher order totalities through marriage. However, whereas Lévi-Strauss sought to grasp the relational properties of matrimonial alliance synchronically, by appealing to reductive “elementary” structures deriving mainly from classificatory schemes and normative precepts, a reticular approach proceeds directly from the analysis of actual marriage choices. Indeed, perhaps the most distinctive aspect of a network perspective is the emphasis it lays on the systematic treatment of empirical kinship and marriage data. A reticular approach is inherently practicebased.