Strathern_ Marcus

Strathern’s article does a great service in “demystifying” the Euro-American folk notion of kinship as, on the one hand, endlessly ramifiable (the idea that everyone is ultimately biologically related, sharing the same substance), and on the other hand, based on the sharp division between the internally continuous and externally discontinuous – nature and culture, society and technology, the human and the nonhuman (what Strathern calls merographic connections). Strathern demonstrates how the Melanesian relatedness is heterogeneously constituted by the exchange and consumption of ‘nonhuman’ objects part and parcel with the exchange and ‘consumption’ of humans, and draws a parallel with the role of property in Euro-American kinship as that which distinguishes close kin (‘owners’) from those who do not belong. Property plays the crucial role of “cutting the network--” delimiting who is ‘real’ kin; thus rather than being exclusively ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ relatedness can be said to be configured through hybrid forms, at the interaction of the social and material. Thus the role of pigs and shells in Melanesia is much more closely related to the role of authorship title in a scientific paper or lollipops differentially doled out by a grandmother to ‘biological’ and ‘step-‘ grandchildren (Strathern note 20, from Simpson 1994).

I find this distinction of ‘active’ kin from the endless mass of ‘biological’ kin highly resonant with my experience of trying to understand kinship among the now-bilteral Nanai of Russia. For the first segment of my research I attempted to conduct a thorough genealogical survey of my informants to map out kinship ties in a village where people often claimed that ‘everyone is related.’ Yet what I found was that if kinship is everywhere, then it is nowhere- that is, if Nanai villagers configured themselves as widely genealogically related, this by no means translated into wide actualized social and economic ties. So as an example, for one family, out of perhaps 20 households with kin, only 2 others could be considered part of active kin networks of routine social contact and economic assistance. And indeed, nonhuman/material substances, such as monetary loans and food gifts (fish, wild meat) were crucial in constituting and delimiting ties of kinship.