Structures and functions

Kinship, marriage and the family have long been the special stock-in-trade of social anthropology. As linked domains of more or less unchallenged expertise, they have served both to mark off the discipline from others and to provide an arena in which the experts themselves can engage in exclusive academic debate on a wide range of theoretical and comparative questions. Their discussions have occasionally led to bitter conflict, as widely different viewpoints are espoused and forcefully expressed about such matters as the universality of kinship, or the unilinearity of descent and the applicability of models of alliance. Yet much of the argument has taken place against a background of common understanding and assumptions which are only rarely voiced these days.

In his Radcliffe-Brown Memorial Lecture (1985), however, Jack Goody interestingly lays bare and criticises some of these assumptions. He complains that, in the field of kinship, social anthropologists have excessively, if more or less unwittingly, dichotomised both their theoretical interests and the social world itself. He points to a heavy emphasis on synchrony and system, and a related tendency to play down the activities of real live people striving to cope with their mortal lot. This has been accompanied, he argues, by the creation and maintenance of an exaggeratedly sharp boundary between a ‘primitive’ and a ‘modern’ world. Systems, whether of lineage or alliance, loom large in the first, while individuals and families seem to form the basic analytic units in the second.