Page "Kinship" Paragraph 20

A more flexible view of kinship was formulated in British social anthropology.

Among the attempts to break out of universalizing assumptions and theories about kinship, Radcliffe-Brown ( 1922, The Andaman Islands ; 1930, The social organization of Australian tribes ) was the first to assert that kinship relations are best thought of as concrete networks of relationships among individuals.

He then described these relationships, however, as typified by interlocking interpersonal roles.

Malinowski ( 1922, Argonauts of the Western Pacific ) described patterns of events with concrete individuals as participants stressing the relative stability of institutions and communities, but without insisting on abstract systems or models of kinship.

Gluckman ( 1955, The judicial process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia ) balanced the emphasis on stability of institutions against processes of change and conflict, inferred through detailed analysis of instances of social interaction to infer rules and assumptions.

John Barnes, Victor Turner, and others, affiliated with Gluckman ’ s Manchester school of anthropology, described patterns of actual network relations in communities and fluid situations in urban or migratory context, as with the work of J. Clyde Mitchell ( 1965, Social Networks in Urban Situations ).

Yet, all these approaches clung to a view of stable functionalism, with kinship as one of the central stable institutions.