Morgan’s work on consanguinity and affinity was developed by British psychologist W. H. R. Rivers who was also strongly influenced by Maine. Known for his “genealogical method” and his application of natural science principles to anthropology, Rivers was “until his death in 1922 … regarded as the leading contemporary specialist in kinship” (Parkin & Stone, 2004, p. 13). In terms of lineage theory, it was Rivers who distinguished ‘descent’ “analytically from inheritance and succession and defined it as the process regulating membership of a social group or class either through the father or through the mother” (Holy, 1996, p. 74). This definition of descent was adopted and developed by other British anthropologists including Rivers’ student at Cambridge, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown who used it “in reference to groups to which recruitment occurs automatically by virtue of birth, and which are exclusive in membership, clearly bounded and do not overlap” (Holy, 1996, p. 74), that is, in terms of unilineal descent groups.
One of Rivers’ companions on the Torres Strait expedition in 1891 was physician and ethnologist C. G. Seligman who along with Finnish sociologist Edvard Westermarck influenced Bronislaw Malinowski at the London School of Economics (LSE). Malinowski had previously studied at Leipzig under Wilhelm Wundt, the renowned ‘father of experimental psychology’ (Thomas, 2013). Malinowski was the key protagonist of functionalism which side-steps the arguments surrounding evolutionism and diffusionism by adopting an ahistorical perspective based on intensive fieldwork to study how a society is
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currently operating. With his background in psychology, Malinowski tended to emphasise individuals and understood the function of societal institutions in terms of satisfying basic human needs (Bell, 1997; Kuper, 1996).
Radcliffe-Brown, a contemporary of Malinowski’s who was heavily influenced by Durkheim, also adopted a scientific and synchronic approach to studying kinship but his emphasis was very much on social structure. However, Radcliffe-Brown never accepted the label ‘functionalist’ as his perspective was very different to Malinowski’s. Although they both focused on how society was functioning at the particular time it was being studied, Radcliffe-Brown’s emphasis was on social structure and how beliefs, customs and practices functioned to create social cohesion and therefore maintain the structure of the society (Bell, 1997). Thus he, and those who followed him, are often referred to as ‘structural functionalists’. Radcliffe-Brown (1929) defined kinship as the “genealogical relationship recognised for social purposes and made the basis of customary regulation of social relations” (1929, p. 50) with the understanding that genealogical relations were “not identical with physiological relations” (1929, p. 50).
Malinowski (1930) was rather dismissive of the contemporary study of kinship carried out by Radcliffe-Brown and his followers with its “complicated diagrams and formulae” (1930, p. 19) and what he referred to as “kinship algebra” (1930, p. 19). He felt that a “spuriously scientific and stilted mathematization of kinship facts” could not adequately represent the “intimate data of family life [and] full-blooded descriptions of tribal and ceremonial activities” (Malinowski, 1930, p. 20). He understood “kinship [as] a matter of flesh and blood, the result of sexual passion, and maternal affection, of long intimate daily life, and of a host of personal intimate interests” (1930, p. 19) and thus he questioned whether this could possibly “be reduced to formulae, symbols [and] perhaps equations” (1930, p.19). Indeed, Malinowski proclaimed in the 1930s that “classificatory terminologies do not exist” (1930, pp. 21-22)
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heralding a problematic that nearly caused the abandonment of kinship studies over forty years later.
Radcliffe-Brown viewed societies as comprising discrete groups organised by rules whose activities maintained the overall social structure. Influenced by Rivers’ definition of descent, he found unilineal descent to be the enduring structuring principle that could explain the continuity of social structure. As each person could only be a member of one such group, unilineal descent groups were bounded and mutually separated organisations that transcended individuals and endured across generations. Membership was by virtue of birth into a group constituted by membership rights and obligations in accordance with status. Unilineal descent groups were labelled as ‘lineages’ or, in cases where the founding ancestor was unknown or mythical, as ‘clans’. Lineages generally functioned as unitary property owning groups and were viewed as ‘permanent’ social units given that they were continually replenished through new births as the older more senior members died. Thus, they tended to be analysed as ‘corporate groups’ (Bell, 1997; Holy, 1996; Kuper, 1982). Although the division between the domestic and politico-jural domains of kinship would become more explicit through later theorists, it is clear that Radcliffe-Brown’s focus was definitely not on “intimate domestic arrangements … [as] these were assumed to be to a large degree universally constant, or a matter for psychological rather than sociological study” (Carsten, 2004, p. 11).
Conversely, Malinowski (1930) recommended that the study of kinship should start with the elementary family of parents and children before proceeding to the “subsequent processes of extension” (1930, p. 25). He maintained that “[t]he processes of the extension of kinship from its extremely simple beginnings in plain parenthood, to its manifold ramifications and complexities in adult membership of tribe, clan and local group… forms the real subject-matter of the study of kinship” (1930, p. 25). He also distinguished the family from the clan in terms of function, with procreation being the function of the family whereas the “functions of the clan [we]re mostly legal and ceremonial” (1930, p. 28). He
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understood the family as “embrac[ing] two principles essential to procreation – motherhood and fatherhood” and regarded the lineage and clan as being “based on the partial negation of one of these principles” which produced as a consequence “the one sided distortion of kinship” (1930, p. 26).
Although lineage theory originated from Rivers’ work and was developed by Radcliffe-Brown, it is generally associated with Evans-Pritchard who studied under Malinowski at LSE but “became a fervent advocate of [Radcliffe- Brown’s] ideas” (Kuper, 1996, p. 82). In 1940, Evans-Pritchard was “the first to interpret his ethnographic material in [lineage theory] terms [as he] portrayed the Nuer [as a] society … governed by the lineage principle” (Holy, 1996, pp. 77-78). Lineage theory explains how segmentary lineage structures are formed through large lineages splitting into more manageable segments. Often in patrilineal societies the split was on the basis of the sons of the founding ancestor. British anthropologists generally separated the domestic domain from the public domain and focused on the public politico-jural domain to examine political organisation and how social relations were regulated by rules (Holy, 1996, p. 71). Evans-Pritchard (1940, p. 162), for example, explicitly focused on the public domain. Using lineage theory, he described the Nuer social structure as a dual system with the political segments paralleling lineage segments. As kinship studies originated from the legal profession it is, perhaps, not surprising that the politico-jural domain dominated this field.
The main challenge to the British dominated lineage theory and the descent model came from France in the form of the structuralist, alliance theory of Lévi- Strauss. Alliance theory proposed that women were systematically exchanged to develop enduring social bonds between lineages across generations. The focus was on how alliances were formed and perpetuated through prescriptive marriage rules which also ensured the avoidance of incest. An example of such a rule found in both matrilineal and patrilineal descent groups was a rule directing matrilateral cross-cousin marriage in which a man marries his mother’s-brother’s daughter and a woman marries her father’s sister’s son.
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Thus, the emphasis in kinship studies moved from studying how societies functioned through descent systems to how societies were structured through prescriptive marriage rules in relation to a principle of reciprocity which over time created enduring solidarity between two groups (Carsten, 2004; Holy, 1996; Kuper, 1982, 1996). These marriage rules were very different to the discursive rules discussed in the introductory chapter as Lévi-Strauss theorised that social relations were a reflection of an underlying unconscious structure.
Homans and Schneider (1955) argued against Lévi-Strauss on the basis that marriages were organised by people, not societies. This provoked a strong defence of Lévi-Strauss by British anthropologist, Rodney Needham (1962), an Evans-Pritchard follower who became renowned, along with Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas, for bringing Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism to Britain (Kuper, 1996, p. 161). Heated academic exchanges between Needham and Schneider let to Needham being labelled as “Schneider’s arch antagonist” (Feinberg, 2001, p. 25), both men were later involved in ‘the Gellner debate’ and both men were key proponents in the challenge to ‘kinship’.