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"This important collection of inter-disciplinary essays on the new kinship shows diverse ways that relative values, shifting solidarities, and partial connections of truth and affect today create the ties that bind."--Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley

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RELATIVE VALUES

Duke University Press

Contents

Illustrations........................................................................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgments......................................................................................................................................................................ixINTRODUCTION Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon......................................................................................11 Substantivism, Antisubstantivism, and Anti-antisubstantivism Janet Carsten........................................................................................................292 The Ethnography of Creation: Lewis Henry Morgan and the American Beaver Gillian Feeley-Harnik.....................................................................................543 Making Kinship, with an Old Reproductive Technology Mary Bouquet..................................................................................................................854 Kinship in Hypertext: Transubstantiating Fatherhood and Information Flow in Artificial Life Stefan Helmreich......................................................................1165 Kinship, Controversy, and the Sharing of Substance: The Race/Class Politics of Blood Transfusion Kath Weston......................................................................1476 Strategic Naturalizing: Kinship in an Infertility Clinic Charis Thompson...........................................................................................................1757 Self-Conscious Kinship: Some Contested Values in Norwegian Transnational Adoption Signe Howell....................................................................................2038 Practicing Kinship in Rural North China Yunxiang Yan..............................................................................................................................2249 The Shift in Kinship Studies in France: The Case of Grandparenting Martine Segalen................................................................................................24610 The Economies in Kinship and the Paternity of Culture: Origin Stories in Kinship Theory Susan McKinnon...........................................................................27711 Biologization Revisited: Kinship Theory in the Context of the New Biologies Sarah Franklin.......................................................................................30212 Blood/Kinship, Governmentality, and Cultures of Order in Colonial Africa Melbourne Tapper........................................................................................32913 "We're Going to Tell These People Who They Really Are": Science and Relatedness Jonathan Marks...................................................................................35514 Genealogical Dis-Ease: Where Hereditary Abnormality, Biomedical Explanation, and Family Responsibility Meet Rayna Rapp, Deborah Heath, and Karen-Sue Taussig.....................38415 Ambivalence in Kinship since the 1940s Michael G. Peletz.........................................................................................................................41316 Cutting the Ties That Bind: The Sacrifice of Abraham and Patriarchal Kinship Carol Delaney.......................................................................................44517 To Forget Their Tongue, Their Name, and Their Whole Relation: Captivity, Extra-Tribal Adoption, and the Indian Child Welfare Act Pauline Turner Strong...........................468Contributors.........................................................................................................................................................................495Index................................................................................................................................................................................499

Chapter One

Janet Carsten

This essay explores the uses of the term substance in the anthropological literature on kinship. I begin with the varied meanings of substance in English. The very breadth of this semantic domain, I suggest, has been central to the fruitfulness of analyses of kinship that have employed the term. And this is amply attested to elsewhere in this volume, where substance is used not only to refer to blood (see Weston) and other bodily fluids but also to information (Helmreich), rivers and railways (Feeley-Harnik), and family photographs (Bouquet). But the ambiguities of substance, which seem to have gone largely unexamined in the literature, also raise problems-particularly for the analytic rigor of any comparative endeavor.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists twenty-three separate meanings for substance covering three full pages. Several of these meanings clearly overlap or are closely related to each other. Nevertheless, there are some important distinctions between substance as essential nature or essence; a separate distinct thing; that which underlies phenomena; matter or subject matter; the material of which a physical thing consists; the matter or tissue composing an animal body part or organ; any corporeal matter; a solid or real thing (as opposed to appearance or shadow); a vital part; what gives a thing its character; and the consistency of a fluid. I have selected just some of the OED's long list of meanings-those that, it seems to me, have relevance for an examination of the uses to which substance has been put in the anthropological study of kinship. The OED's list of meanings might be further reduced to four broader categories: vital part or essence; separate distinct thing; that which underlies phenomena; and corporeal matter. All of these distinct meanings have some bearing on anthropological understandings. Indeed, I maintain that the utility of substance as a term is due in large measure to the very breadth of the meanings that I have delineated.

This ambiguity emerges clearly in David Schneider's deployment of substance in American Kinship: A Cultural Account (1980). In tracing the passage of substance, from Schneider's original application of it in 1968 in the analysis of American kinship, to India, and from India to Melanesia, I attempt to highlight some of these discrepancies of meaning. It would be quite impossible to present a thorough examination of all the uses to which substance has been put. I have selected a few of the more prominent instances in order to make explicit the analytic work that is being done. It should be clear that I am more interested in what substance does than what it is. I focus on how substance has been employed in the analysis of kinship, rather than on what it means within any one particular culture. This is part of a larger project to study critically what kinship itself does for anthropologists (see Carsten 2000).

This chapter offers a critique "from within." The work that I discuss here has been highly influential and fruitful in the analysis of kinship and personhood over the past twenty years. Substance has undoubtedly been "good to think with," yet partly because of a lingering dissatisfaction with my own use of substance in the study of Malay kinship, it seemed worth exploring its ambiguities....