Traditional frameworks

Traditional ideas → Pre 1980s

• Levi-Strauss + Radcliffe-Brown

• Kinship based on descent groups, marriage relations and classification

• Assumed a universal mother-father-child triad

Schneider’s three core argument (1984)

1. Genealogical grid is euro-american not universal

2. ‘Facts of life’ (shared biological substance) are not universal

3. Anthropologists imposed own cultural categories and ‘discovered them’ elsewhere

Colonial implications of Schneider’s critique

• All kinship models were measured agasint western baseline

• Naturalised certain family forms and made others seem primitive

Schneider → US kinship

• Relatives love each other because they share blood, but this alone is not enough and must be accompanied with love and respect 

Criticism of Schneider

• ‘Threw out the baby with the bathwater’

• Abandoning kinship leaves us with no vocabulary for an important domain of human life - important use in legal situations

Clarke (2008) view on New Kinship

• The revival driven by the likes of NRT may reinstall cultural imperialism

• Ethnocentrism is replaced with western liberal ideas and ignores the likes of sexual morality