Kinship Is Thicker than Blood

We already know (from chapter 1) that in many societies the genealogical relations of reproduction are in diverse ways matched— if they are not completely ignored— as sources of kinship by postnatal considerations of mutuality of being. Here I offer further examples specifically concerned with the subordination of birth relations to performative and pragmatic kinship. In this connection, it will be worthwhile first to revisit the reproductive complex of the Ku Waru (Nebilyer Valley, New Guinea).

As documented by Francesca Merlan and Alan Rumsey, for Ku Waru people the reproductive transmission of substance has no privilege over substantive connections established by social action, inasmuch as the source of both is the same: the soil, whence comes the “grease” (kopong) that is “the essential matter of living organisms, both animal and vegetable” (1991, 42). Such grease enters into the conception of the child through the father’s sperm and mother’s milk, both of which are also called kopong. But as kopong is also present in sweet potatoes and pork, the same kind of substantial connection to other persons can be achieved nutritively, as by sharing food or eating from the same land. In this way, children or grandchildren of immigrants may be fully integrated with local people as kinsmen; and for that matter, the offspring of two brothers are as much related because they were sustained by the same soil as because their fathers were born of the same parents. Merlan and Rumsey comment:

In Western ideologies ‘real’ siblingship is determined entirely by prenatal influences: by the fact that the corporeal existence of each sibling began with an event of conception at which genetic substance was contributed by the same two individuals. . . . Ku Waru discourse about reproduction appears not to entail any such notion of genetic substance. Rather, kopong figures at every stage in the reproductive process as a kind of nutritive substance, whether extracted directly from the gardens, channeled through a man’s reproductive organs, woman’s breast, or stored and consumed in the flesh of a pig. In contrast to the western one, there is in this view no essential difference between pre-natal and post-natal influences in their power to make us what we are. (43; emphasis in original)

Birth here is not simply a human genetic process, and insofar as the soil that is the source of kinship connections is clan land, the “extension” of kin terms beyond so-called primary relatives is always already built into the relations of reproduction. The schematics of human births reference the kinship matrix of the individual they compose. Here, then, is another modality of a fundamental argument of this chapter, to which I will repeatedly return: that kinship is the a priori of birth rather than the sequitur. Referencing the kinship matrix of the individual they compose, the relations of reproduction issue in children whose destiny as social beings was present from the creation.

Besides the common means of establishing kinship in life rather than in utero— such as co-residence, commensality, living off the same land, friendship, etc.— such practices of participation in one another’s existence are indefinitely many, inasmuch as they are culturally relative. One may be kin to another by being born on the same day (Inuit), by following the same tabus (Araweté), by surviving a trial at sea (Truk) or on the ice (Inuit), even by mutually suffering from ringworm (Kaluli). Somewhat more widely distributed is kinship through name-sharing between living persons, whereby the name-receiver takes on the personage and relationships of the name-giver, whether or not they were kin before. Not to be confused with the common Inuit practices of naming a child after a deceased relative, name-sharing with the living is known to Belcher Island Inuit (Guemple 1965), !Kung Bushmen (Marshall 1957), Ojibway (Landes 1969), and a number of Gê-speaking peoples of central Brazil (Seeger 1981; Da Matta 1982; Lave, Stepick, and Sailer 1977; Melatti 1979; among others). This homonymous kinship is worth some discussion here, at once for notions of shared being that are completely independent of bodily connections and that are much more prevalent than relations of birth. In the exceptional case that proves this rule, kinship is virtually exclusively based on name-sharing.

So far as shared being is concerned, the intersubjectivity is total: namesakes are a single person; the name-receiver takes on the identity of the name-giver. So Ruth Landes reported for Ojibway:

Ego and the namer of ego are “namesakes” and by definition one and the same person. . . . [By] naming I have given someone a portion of that power which is I. . . . The namesake term seems analyzable as “my body” or “my self.” (1969, 23, 117, 117n)

Likewise, Anthony Seeger for Suya of Central Brazil:

The male name-receiver is said to be the exact replica of his name-giver in ceremonial affairs. . . . The Suya maintain there is an actual identity between the two, that in some sense they are one being. (1981, 141)

Or !Kung Bushmen, according to Lorna Marshall:

The !Kung believe that the name is somehow part of the entity of a person and that when one is named for a person one partakes of that person’s entity in some degree.... The !Kung have put to good use the belief that persons who have the same name partake of each other’s entities. (1957, 22– 23; see also Lave, Stepick, and Sailer 1977; Guemple 1965, 328)

Name-sharing relationships are thus reminiscent of Aristotle’s determination of kinship as “the same entity in discrete subjects.” Name-sharers call each other reciprocally by the same term, such as the Inuit “bone” (saunik) or Ojibway “my body” (niiawaa). Like other kin, they respect particular rules of conduct toward each other, usually including responsibilities that can be described as life-giving, such as providing material aid when needed or taking an important role in a name-receiver’s life-crisis rites. It is reported for Belcher Islanders that names embody and thus transmit to name-receivers the status, character, or attributes of the name-giver (Guemple 1965, 328)— an observation that in many other societies could pass for what parents transmit to children by birth. And among the other aspects of their kinship, there exists between name-giver and name-receiver that “mysterious effectiveness of relationality” by which what one does or suffers happens to the other (see chapter 1). Guemple invokes Leach’s notion of “mystical influence [of affines]” in this connection, such that between namesakes “feelings of anger and resentment, and socially reprehensible conduct, are reciprocally detrimental, especially in matters of hunting efficacy and health” (329). Harboring ill thoughts, one may thus endanger the life of one’s name-sharer.

Being the one person, a name-receiver takes on the name-giver’s kinship relations and addresses them accordingly; and they use the appropriate terms in return. This may hold even if the name-sharers are of opposite sexes, as is possible for Ojib-way, so that the parents of a female name-giver will then call her male namesake “daughter.” Often the namer and namesake were otherwise related before sharing the former’s name rearranged their kinship. On the other hand, people who had no previous relationship may enter into homonymous kinship. Or else, upon first meeting, strangers may determine their kinship transitively if either has the same name as some kin of the other (Bushmen). In Guemple’s study of the Belcher saunik, or “bone,” system, he found:

All of the terms of the saunik system take precedence over other forms of address and reference, including names, nicknames, diminutive names and genealogically-derived kinship terms. . . . In the most general case, any Ego can address and refer to the relatives of anyone whose name is the same as his (i.e., namesake, namegiver, or namesharer) by the appropriate terms used by that other in addressing and referring to them. . . . He may also address and refer to anyone having the same name as any of his kinsmen . . . by the term he applies to that kinsman. . . . Ideally, there is no limitation in the range of persons to whom Ego can relate using skewed [i.e., non-genealogically derived] terms, and it sometimes happens that he will exploit name identity to relate to persons to whom no known (or imaginable) genealogical connection can be traced. (1965, 326, 330– 31)

Belcher Islanders are perhaps unique in applying relationships derived from name-sharing to “primary” kin. Gê-speaking peoples and others maintain their nuclear family relationships. For Belcher Inuit, however, it appears that homonymous kinship is even more solidary: “Persons who reside together, either in a single household or a camp, or who are regularly involved in joint effort of some kind (hunting, fishing, etc.), even if these are members of Ego’s nuclear family, are commonly identified by skewed terms in address and/ or reference” (331).

Belcher Inuit are not unique, however, in thus overriding genealogical relations for homonymous kinship when they have the option. Most name-sharing peoples prefer name-derived relationships over “genealogical” ones outside the household. As, for example, the Suya, of whom it is reported: “Naming terminology always overrides all other kinship, as does ceremonial kinship terminology” (Seeger 1981, 142; see Lave, Stepick, and Sailer 1977; Marshall 1957, 7). And everywhere, the effect is a community of kinfolk related largely or primarily through naming relations— the “skewed” terms of the Inuit— rather than those that follow from procreation and filiation. Virtually the whole community may be ordered by kin relationships that are arbitrary from the point of view of genealogical connections. The Krahó, for example: “A given Krahó normally calls all other Krahó, with the exception of his closest relatives, by the relationship terms which are applied to those people by the individuals who bestowed names on the speaker” (Melatti 1979, 59). Indeed, name-sharing may be the fundamental means of extending kinship widely beyond the residential community. Using name relationships, the !Kung Bushmen of Nyae-Nyae are able to spread kinship in all directions, as much as one hundred miles away. “The !Kung who live in this region are not ia dole [strangers] to each other. The name-relationships make them feel they are one people” (Marshall 1957, 24).

It can hardly be claimed that name kinship is a metaphor, given that it has the essential qualities of kin relationships everywhere— notably the attributes of intersubjective participation— whether or not the parties are genealogically connected. But for all that, a problem remains: viz., that all these postnatal determinations of kinship, including those for which no genealogical connection can be imagined, are nevertheless formulated in (apparently) genealogical terms. New Guinean men who are nourished from the same soil, being common offspring of the land, are thereby “brothers” to one another. The name kinship of !Kung Bushmen is not different from the ostensibly genealogical determination of relationship terms; it is only that the parties involved adopt each other’s kinship statuses. Does it not follow, then, that the relations derived from procreation comprise the primary “code” or “model” of all human kinship? Or that such “true” relations of genealogy provide the “focus” or “type species” of kinship categories? Moreover, are not these “primary” terms the means by which anthropologists analytically determine a domain of kinship in various societies? Never mind the irony that the biological premise has to be saved by a kind of “fictive kinship,” in the end is not kinship founded on biological relationships?

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 1101