Global Kinship: Anthropology and the Politics of Knowing

Michael Herzfeld

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 80, Number 2, Spring 2007, pp. 313-323 (Article) Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research DOI: 10.1353/anq.2007.0026

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INTRODUCTION

Global Kinship: Anthropology and the Politics of Knowing

Michael Herzfeld Harvard University

inship has cast such a long shadow over anthropological analysis that students who have never confronted its more technical aspects still profess boredom with the topic and relief that they do not have to deal with it. But deal with it, surprisingly, they doin a technically less demanding guise, to be surethrough the more fashionable medium of other topics that have become considerably more central to the discipline: nationalism, gender, warfare, bio-ethics, the ethnography of science, transnational mobility, memory and the uses of history. The technical virtuosity of kinship analysis has largely passed from the scene; what remains is a cluster of basic principlesthe importance of the nuclear family, the use of nuclear family terms in nationalistic rhetoric, correlations of inheritance rules with kinship structure, and the expectation that kinship should ideally be a major source of affect and cooperationthat barely seem to need analysis and that seem, to a very large extent, immediately comprehensible even to those who are only familiar with West European models of the relationships thus grouped together. But are these principles really so transparent? Kinshiprather than kinship systemshas become a global phenomenon, in which surface homogeneity and an apparent reduction in complexity may nonetheless mask considerable
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differences in use and interpretation. We can see the implications of this expansion especially well in the subtly contrasted but mutually complementary models of world diplomacy that Eleana Kim and Monica Konrad offer here in their respective essays on international adoption and the negotiation of biomedical knowledge; Konrad offers an especially subtle linkage between ideologies of shared (and exclusive) substance that characterize local kin groups on the one hand and the ethical and diplomatic aspects of transporting biomedical knowledge across the borders of nation-states on the other. The papers grouped together in this issue of Anthropological Quarterly indeed collectively illustrate both the persistence of kinship as a strong organizing principle of ramified relationships extending far beyond the face-to-face communities of anthropological yore and beyond the strongly Eurocentric bias, the latter being especially evident in the almost exclusive emphasis on the nuclear family and a rhetoric of parity between matrilateral and patrilateral kin that masks a continuing agnatic emphasis. This Eurocentrism now informs the extended (some would say metaphorical or at least metonymic) elaborations of local moral communities (Evans-Pritchard 1940; Campbell 1964) or, more conceptually, moral worlds (Kleinman 2006: 219) that we encounter in the rhetoric of most nation-states today. Imperceptibly, it seems, kinship, routed from the scenes of its computational glories, has insidiously slipped back everywhere, and its channels are numerous: from transnational migrations (Ho 2006; Watson 2005) to artificial insemination and the nationstate (Kahn 2000), kinship-in-general has clearly morphed into something still vital and important. Truth to tell, the capacity for such metaphorization (or metonymic extension) was always present; its lack of visibility is a direct consequence of a very unfortunate loss of vision, in which the relevance of older ethnographies to current concerns appears to have largely vanished. Yet we do not have to look far in order to recuperate the loss. The patrilineal idiom of the Bosnian and Kosovo wars builds on earlier models of patrilineal clan identity (see Herzfeld 1997; cf. Hammel 1968), anthropologically foreshadowed in Evans-Pritchards (1940: 237-238) insistence that patriliny among the Nuer was as much a political idiom as a literal statement of genealogy; he subsequently extended this insight directly to the historical emergence of statehood in Libya, showing how it shaped the response to external pressure and particularly the impact of colonialism (Evans-Pritchard 1949). Loizos (1975: 254) had earlier shown us how ordinary people (in other words, electorates) conceptualized the interaction of politicians from different ethnic enclaves in terms of kinship and affin314

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ity, sometimes seeming to take the most absurd claims at face value in defense of ultra-nationalistic, exclusionary positions. Kinships importance in the self-representation of most nationalisms remains unabated. That association, which embarrasses anthropology by reminding it of the roots it shares with much (especially European) nationalism, may indeed explain why the discipline was relatively slow to return to this seemingly superannuated topic. Metaphors of motherland and fatherland and vague invocations of the nation as a family abounded, with occasional hints of a patrilineal emphasis even in those European states that vociferously, and disingenuously, treated patriliny as exogenous (and often as Islamic) (see Herzfeld 2005: 76-77; Linke 1985, 1999). If anthropologys task is to defamiliarize the seemingly natural, nationalisms many invocations of blood relationships would seem like an obvious target. We should also, and for similar reasons, attend to the persistence of a thinly disguised bias toward patriarchya bias that is often construed, like patriliny, as exotic and oriental (or, at best, as a holdover from an earlier era), but that is actually often of Victorian and Western inspiration (see, for example, Loos 2005 on the impact of Western Law in furthering the restriction of womens rights in 19th century Siam). If today the father state, mother country of Turkish nationalist discourse seems a curious Ottomanism in a nation-state that resolutely turned its back on its Ottoman past less than a century ago (see Delaney 1995; cf. zyrek 2004), this, in the context of international cultural relations, represents something akin to the lagging emulation of urban culture observed in peasant societies (Friedl 1964) transposed to the much larger framework of international relations. That ironic development parallels the larger transformation within anthropology itself, whereby kinship in general, once the hallmark of the exotic, is now found to be flourishing precisely in those spaces where its existence has for so long been denied. From being too complicated to understand, it came to seem too obvious for understanding to be an issue. As an academic preoccupation, moreover, kinship carried the dead weight of outmoded assumptions. Its structuralist entailment in alliance theory subjected it to a set of purely heteronormative assumptions, which included the idea that kinship was important as a scheme for organizing reproduction according to the dictates of nature (even though nature itself was increasingly understood as culturally variable). These assumptions seemed less and less relevant to the way that people who were themselves beginning to study anthropology conducted such activities as marriage. In a range of cultures from Cyprus to Korea, as Faubion points out, a capitalist logic of consumption (and thus of increasing315

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ly sumptuous display) overtook the dour logic of reproduction; in modern nations, so the implicit reasoning went, one could study ritual without having to bother with kinship at all. That, as Faubion demonstrates, is a simplistic generalization, since elements of older attitudes and values, often transformed but recognizable, persist in newor not so newcultural forms. Following on a number of distinguished exemplars, however, the authors brought together here have all tackled this dangerous combination of obviousness and irrelevance head-on. Moreover, they trace it to source, showing that the role of kinship around the world remains entangled with the aftershocks of colonialism. The Japanese whose marriages to Filipina women both assert the First World status of Japan but simultaneously appear to subvert it, in the vivid picture that Suzuki draws here, are engaged in attempts at mastering a global system of ranking; their absorption of Western colonial and racist attitudes turns against them in a classic illustration of the workings of hegemony. The valuation of different forms and expressions of kinship thus cannot today be understood without reference to the larger context of that vaguely defined but instantly recognizable cultural successor to colonialism that I have called the global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld 2004); this formulation, which is paralleled here by Suzukis global national hierarchy and Kims broader global hierarchy of nation-states, offers the advantage of emphasizing that nations are themselves now enmeshed in a system of worldwide evaluation in which they are no longer necessarily the most important or the largest unit of analysis. The return journeys of Korean adoptees in Kims account takes them back to a simpler past; this is an allochronism, an imperial refusal to share contemporaneity (Fabian 1983), in which the actors find themselves ineluctably made complicit. Filipina women in Japan are similarly not only caught in a gendered system of global power but are banished to its past, taking the Japanese men they marry along with them. Japanese men thus claim to enjoy the meekness of their Filipina brides, in contrast to what they imagine Japanese women to represent. Such stereotypes are infinitely malleable, and, while their form may be globalized, their specific uses still have to be understood in ethnographic context; I have heard it said in Thailand, for example, that Thai men prefer Japanese wives as they are less likely to talk back at their husbands than Thai women! Despite such local variations, however, the mutual entailment of gender and kinship ultimately confirms and perpetuates the global reach of a rather limited set of assumptions, reproducing the global hierarchy of value through the conscription of bodies. Hegemony works through precisely the kind of
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embedded complicity that Suzuki describes among Japanese men who lord it over their Filipina wives while themselves suffering discrimination as men who were unable to secure good Japanese mates; or, in Kims equally striking example, the Korean language schools rejection of an adoptee and native English speaker because he was not white. One can easily multiply the examples from this set of essays alone. Koreans, for example, are collectively and painfully embarrassed at the circumstances that led them to export so many children for adoption; Kim describes an art exhibit in which pained messages from adoptees. printed on white fabric, were hung like pieces of cloth off of a drying line, suggesting the airing of (dirty) laundrya phrase that lies at the very heart of what I mean by cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 2005). But it is also important to remember that the laundry seems particularly dirty because of the axiological hegemony that forces entire nations into lagging emulation. Indeed, the key paradox of cultural intimacy, a notion that I explicitly derive from the nationalistic cooptation of kinship and family as key metonyms, is the nation-states own inability to operate without the very features that it denies. The export of babies in Korea, like the burgeoning of sex tourism in the Philippines, was, we learn here, official policy under dictatorial regimes now defunct. Whether these states continue to encourage such practices or not, the shared and rather guilty knowledge of official as well as personal complicity have also provided sources of economic security. Such processes are not only about kinship, to be sure; they are also about the selves that kinship organizes. The late Waranee Pokapanichwong (2003) has demonstrated historically and ethnographically how bodily images, and with them the live bodies of women in general and prostitutes in particular, have been systemically configured in Western perceptions of Thai identity; ugly village females became alluring oriental beauties. Women entered prostitution with the self-justification that it was what filial devotion to their desperately poor parents and other kin required of them. Today, the presence of a lively sex industry in Thailand continues to offer that economic security while simultaneously evoking a curious blend of embarrassment and complicity at many levels of society. One effect of the globalization of kinship under conditions of neoliberal economic managementalthough I take seriously Faubions apposite cautions about over-generalizing the term neoliberalism itself is that the models of kinship as well as the aesthetics of allure are made both simpler and more western. (Indeed, it is the creeping westernization of surfaces that produces the apparent economic homogeneity that Faubion questions.) Take brotherhood as the model of Brazilian musical success, for example. Dent evocatively
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shows how the harmonious performance of duplas reproduces the tension of hierarchy within equality that for his Brazilian informants typifies the relationships that should ideally subsist between brothers (even though their plangent style violates the canon of masculinity). But this is not the model of brotherhood that one finds in all parts of the Europe to which Brazilians look as the source of much high culture. In Greece, for example, brothers may be expected to fight viciously over inheritance; their very closenessa concept that has quite different nuances again in the Lebanese world described here by Clarkecauses their blood to boil, whether from passionate affection or from the most destructive hatred; were they to sing the rhyming couplets for which Crete, in particular, is famous, there would be no harmony but a valiant display of rivalry. In the Brazilian duplas, by contrast, there is an implication that brotherhood must always be a source of strength and harmony; performances are aesthetically pleasing insofar as they achieve the social ideal. For this reason, however, it would be useful to know what the sources of contention and amity among brothers might be today; Dent mentions shifts in inheritance practices as colonial settlers arrived in Brazil, but a more detailed account of present inheritance norms and practices would also enhance this already rich analysis of the performance and rhetoric of brotherly love by the various duplas. Moreover, given that the rather whinging style of the lyrics is a significant departure from gender norms, could it be that the performance of such unadulterated affection is sometimes also an ironic reversal of the expected relations between brothers? Could it be that calling themselves ritual kin (compadres) is an invocation of an ideal that can only, in real life, be achieved either in the sphere of spiritual kinship or on the selfavowedly fictional stage of musical performance? I raise these questions because they underscore an important principle that emerges strongly from a reading of all these articles, especially when taken as a groupnamely, that the new emphasis on the global does not allow us to let go of the local. It is, after all, that local that furnishes the valuable treasury of insights into exactly what went into this metonymic expansion of social life in the first place. What are the modalities of fraternal interaction that one can observe off-stage in Brazil today? Is what we see on-stage the embarrassing revelation of an emasculated manhood, appealing because it is on display (see Shryock 2004) but only for those who count as insiders and are thus privy to the cultural intimacy, the confession of weakness, that lies beyond the faade of male chauvinism? It should be relatively easy to match Dents descriptions to local ethnography in the more con318

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ventional sense; his revelation that brothers guitars should ideally be made from the wood of a single tree, for example, has a nicely Durkheimian ring to it, reminiscent of the systemic association of the raw materials of Greek holy icons with the particular kin group that venerates these images (Danforth 1989: 169-170). And the guitar that seduces the viola restores masculine pride even as the singers appear ready to throw it to the winds. Globalization may thus have introduced major changes in scale, but these amplifications only make sense if one can anchor them in a more local context. Another and parallel shift in the study of kinship has come about through the development of new technologies that bring in their train the possibility of new relationshipsor the necessity of denying them (e.g., Kahn 2000). Metaphor breeds metaphor (so to speak); the discovery of common DNA extends kinship back in time, often in ways that prove shocking to those concerned, and, as Faubion suggests, such connections become as real as the face-to-face modalities that we were more accustomed to calling kinship. Italians often say of a persons character that it is in his [or her] DNA. But it is not clear that this is such a new development in all respects. In the master narrative currently popular in anthropology, nationalism replaced relationships with premises of shared culture and thus of some kind of besetting similarity (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Handler 1985). There is, to be sure, a great deal to be said for this argument. Thus, for example, the prerogatives of royal blood were democratized; the logic that has American mensignificantly to a much greater degree than womenadopting the dynastic numbering system as a suffix to personal names also produces, among families of wealth and distinction, an assumption that resemblance will index blood. This is what Marcus (1992: 173-187) calls the dynastic uncanny. But such assumptions have also long existed in rural societies (e.g., Vernier 1991), so that the idea that physical resemblance (the semiotic property of iconicity) reveals the presence of common blood predated the popularization of DNA-based metaphors and is likely to have facilitated that process. As Carsten eloquently points out here, the rupture between tradition and modernity may not have been so great (and was certainly not as great as Gellner [1983] and Giddens [1991] imagined it to be); the rupture itself is ideologically and rhetorically constructed, although clearly the technology is new. The technology amplifies older assumptions and, by entwining them in new situations, makes them look novel. Anthropologists must be careful not to fall into that trap. But just how old are these ideas? Here again Carstens and Faubions warnings against too simplistic an understanding of recent worldwide transitions
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are apposite and timely. Much of what appears to be new is inflected with older ideas; much of what seems to be traditional and local actually represents an adaptation to intrusive and imperial values. Thus, patrilinearity clearly is an old mode of kinship reckoning in the European heartlands; but is is also a persistent filter that interferes with our perception of non-Western societies as having sustained it since time immemorial. I found myself wondering whether the exclusion of Sierra Leonean refugee women who could not claim a male protector from access to aid resources, which Gale details so instructively here, might not itself be as much a reflection of persistent Victorian ideas as of indigenous models of appropriate gender relations; it certainly, as Gale dramatically shows, has material effects. Similar concerns arise in the consideration of models of personhood. Marilyn Strathern, Kim reminds us, has pointed out the Eurocentric character of the search for selfhood; but we must also be careful to avoid the exoticism that, by denying the possibility of such a concern in other cultures, would force back to a Eurocentric claim on individualism as the Wests unique prerogative. What is new here, and appropriately so in an epistemology that pays attention to practice and agency, is the recognition that kinship is, as Yngvesson acknowledges, something that occurs in a process of doing conceptual and social work. Official forms of knowledge attempt to straightjacket that labor in a rigid typology, much of it related to power differentials (as Suzuki reminds us, brides do not possess the automatic residence rights that adoptees have in the U.S. system) Whether it is the creative manipulation of identity cards documented by Gale or the search for birth parents in a land that treats the adoptees as having been orphaned, moreover, kinship, far from being the clear structure of Radcliffe-Brownian imagination, is uncertain; it is so because it is deeply embedded in something he recognized, the life cycle, but, as such, imbued with what his scientistic approach could not recognize: the inevitability of uncertainty in that same life cycle (see Kleinman 2006: 195). In this regard, official adoption policies, with their tendency to obliterate prior identities while countenancing leakages and loopholes in practice, are not so far removed from, for example, what happened when Nuer adopted Dinka; these foster children became technically Nuer, but their identity might still be shadowed by the socially shared knowledge of their different origins (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 221). In this sense, modernity itself is a little like adoption in Yngvessons portrayal of differences between American and Swedish usage: we can recast modernity, not as a clean break with the past (as the
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present hierarchy of value would imply), but as a scaled-up negotiation of the tension between shared rules and strategic practices. The rampant consumerism of today may, as Faubion hints in these pages, draw some of its inspirations from long-standing practices of sumptuary display. States do not easily admit to such proximity to a non-state past, and their adhesion to formal codes can at times occlude social knowledge and, paradoxically from the states own perspective, increase uncertainty. Technological refinement, moreover, does not alter this situation; on the contrary, as Carsten points out in an excellent illustration of this ironic reversal of (especially) Western epistemology, the technical mastery known as pre-natal testing may actually deprive mothers of a kind of experiential knowledge that was once widely shared and a source of solidarity. Uncertainty, or indeterminacy (here the earlier Giddens [1984] is useful), is also built into what used to be treated with a peculiar versionan instance of what Bourdieu (1977: 37-40) calls officializing strategiesof the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, so typical of prescriptive systems of all kinds. In the case of FBD marriage in the Arab world, for example, the apparently systemic rule emerges in Clarkes account as a taxonomic device, useful for bringing (artificial) order to ideologically and politically unstable social landscapes. As such, it is a category for external consumption (and anthropologists have avidly consumed it!); it is only comparatively recently that insiders have learned that such a rule might occasion embarrassment in encounters with the outside world (and have already had to make strategic compromises when the actors are Christian rather than Muslim). This is in itself an indication of how far the global hierarchy of value has determined the contours of cultural intimacy, which operates strongly in this arena according to Clarkes rich account. Without such a hierarchy there would be no embarrassment and thus no comforting inner zone of disreputable or dubious practices to define the comfortingly familiar experiential basis of social solidarity. Kinship is like any moral system, in which formalization of the rules is precisely what makes their transgression especially easy for those willing and able to dissemble. Bureaucracythe identity cards of the Sierra Leonean bulgur wives identity cards come to mind againoperates in much the same way. When bureaucracy meets kinship and adopts it as an identifying device, as in Gales account, there are vast possibilities for creative interpretation, especially because this particular zone of cultural intimacyhere in the form of complicity between the authorities and those over whom they exercise poweris relatively immune to inspection.
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Nonetheless, the embarrassments are there. They are present in all such situations where weak communities or nations must deal with the opprobrium they have earned in the eyes of the more powerful. As nations try to reclaim their lost children, anger at birth parents who once abandoned those children is easily transposed onto reactions to the land where the children were born. It takes emotional as well as conceptual labor to confront such agonizing conflicts. The authors who have contributed to this special issue have undertaken that labor in ways that not only reassert the importance of kinship for anthropology but also, and necessarily, courageously refuse the conceptual simplicity that the managers of new global economies of knowledge seem determined to impose on the world. That refusal is a forthright demonstration, in a world too easily seduced away from critical self-knowledge, of the now-urgent importance of anthropology itself.

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