Remarks and inventions : skeptical essays about kinship

Kinship is a fundamental and character istic concern in social anthropology, yet as a theoretical topic it is in a state of deteriorating disarray. Dr Needham turns a skeptical scrutiny on questions of conceptualization, method, and history in this field of study, and proposes a radical revision of the conventional approaches and criteria.

The first chapter considers in turn the standard divisions of the subject, such as marriage, descent, terminologies, incest, etc., and offers a theoretical readjustment, inspired largely by the precepts of Wittgenstein. The second makes innovations of analysis and method in exploring the necessary disparity between relative age and kinship categories as means of social classification. The third is an historical examination of Radcliffe Brown's claim to have predicted and then discovered the Kariera system in Western Australia, followed by a critique of the repeated assertions by Lévi-Strauss and others that this was a triumph of structural ism, a validation of scientific method in social anthropology, and evidence of the unconscious logic of the human mind. An introduction sets the essays in context and stresses their concerted significance for a more critical scholarship in the study of human nature.

This volume, dedicated to the memory of Andrew Lang, a brilliant maverick and skeptical intelligence in the early development of social anthropology, is an incisive critique of many widely accepted ideas about kinship, social anthropology, and the claims of structuralism.