The State and Ideology of Kinship

International Sociology, 2019

The article treats the typology of the early state (“inchoate” – “typical” – “transitional”) from the viewpoint of the state beginnings. The author argues that in general typologies the state should be approached as a form of society, not as a kind of political system only. From this perspective he emphasizes the complex dynamics of the interrelations between the key principles of socio-political organization – the kin and territorial ties, in the process of cultural (socio-political) evolution. The conclusion is that the “full”, or “completed”, state should be characterized by the combination of primarily territorial (suprakin) social organization and specialized, professionalized and bureaucratized administration. This combination is observable only in “transitional early states”. As transformation processes usually develop in the administrative sphere faster than in the sphere of social organization, the “typical early state” can be called “incomplete”, or “limited”, state in which the political institutions are already approaching the level sufficient for state society but the territorial ties still do not outstrip kin ties, however counterbalancing them effectively. The “inchoate early state” cannot be designated as state in any sense, in its basic features (including the overall kinship nature) overlapping with those commonly attributed to the (complex) chiefdom. Finally, the ideology of kinship as a cloak for non-kin relations in states and as a reflection of socio-political reality in some supercomplex non-state societies (“alternatives to the state”) is discussed.

2006

2014

Kinship and Politics are often conceptualized as distinct realms of social life, in Western societies as much as in Western social science. The distinctness in Anthropological research in the sub-disciplines kinship and political anthropology began with the 1940s. However, recent process oriented kinship anthropologists tend to work increasingly on state regulation of reproduction and adoption, while political anthropologists studying nationalist identification and focus on entanglements of state and kin. Both research tendencies helped to progressively erode the conceptual boundaries between the subfields. The focus on the interconnections between kinship and politics expressed in the title „Doing politics – making kinship“ of the international workshop organized by ERDMUTE ALBER (Bayreuth) and TATJANA THELEN (Vienna) is thus very timely.1 In their introductory comments, the organisers historicized the workshop topic and suggested four cross-cutting themes: the impact of kinship on...

Kinship and Behavior in Primates (Chapais & Berman, eds.), 2004

Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society

Anthropologists have long studied ‘exotic’ kinship patterns in distant places that differedfrom what was seen as the traditional nuclear family. The second half of the twentiethcentury witnessed a number of changes (new patterns of birth and marriage, new reproductive technologies, the increased visibility of step- and adoptive elations) that changed scholars’ perceptions, convincing them that the traditional—even in Europe and North America—was no longer a helpful concept in understanding contemporary family dynamics. Accordingly, anthropologists reformulated their analytical tools to take stock of the variety of contemporary understandings of family life, placing the emphasis not on sexual procreation and blood connections, but on an enduring sentiment of diffuse solidarity: relatedness (Carsten 2000).

Studia Ethnologica Croatica, 2018

In societies like Kosovo, where the administration and state authorities fail to expand their authorities and care to citizens, kinship and social networks are domains that somehow fill this gap. In the Balkans, due to the inefficiency of the state authorities, up to the beginning of the twentieth century patrilineal kin groups in some sense represented the public sphere; in the case of Kosovo this was even later, namely up until the end of the twentieth century. Depending on specific historical, economic and political contexts, the kinship system turned into a system based on a combination of descent and marriage throughout the course of the twentieth century. In dealing with the question of what Habermas identifies as the public sphere-a sphere of private people who jointly form a public, meaning those people who did not hold public/official positions, my research intends to analyse interchangeable positions and roles that kinship has in relation to private and public domains-meaning the role kinship has in terms of family relations, social organization and the political system. This research is based on ethnographic data I collected over the years 2011-2015 in Isniq (a village located in the west of Kosovo).

H-Soz-Kult, 2018