Kinship Is Not a Cultural Invention but a Cultural Elaboration of Reproductive Facts
Anthropologists say kinship is purely a cultural construction, but a philosopher points out: reproductive facts like women getting pregnant and giving birth hold across cultures, kinship systems are cultural elaborations of them, and even incest avoidance is not uniquely human.
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The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
The two disciplines hold completely opposite views of kinship
Wilson says the book starts from a kind of ‘dissonance’: anthropologists think kinship has little to do with biology, while philosophers of biology — partly inheriting the biologists' view — think it has a great deal to do with it. He does not want to side with reductionism, nor to accept separatism, the view that the social sciences need a completely independent methodology. His goal is to find a middle ground: give biology and psychology their place in social explanation without letting them swallow the social and the cultural.
— Robert WilsonKinship is a cultural elaboration of reproductive relations
He proposes the progenerative view: kinship is a cultural elaboration of reproductive, biological and genealogical relations. Progeneration is the term that bundles these kinds of relations together; he does not choose among them. This view is in fact consistent with the mainstream view of anthropology's first hundred years (roughly 1860 to 1960), which later fell out of favour after being charged with being a projection of Western centrism, and after Schneider's critique. Wilson thinks that old view had the right direction, and that the problem is to cut it apart from its bad associations with racism and ethnocentrism.
— Robert WilsonAnthropology's discussion of incest omits the clinical literature
Wilson worked early on memory and trauma, and came into contact with Judith Herman's clinical work on incest. He found that anthropology's discussion of incest avoidance makes no mention of this clinical literature at all, and focuses almost exclusively on sibling incest. But the most prominent form clinically is cross-generational: father-daughter, older men with younger women in the household, uncles, stepfathers, family friends. He does not argue that clinical cases should serve as cross-cultural ethnographic evidence; he only points out that if you want to talk about avoidance mechanisms without looking at this evidence, the conclusions you can reach are necessarily limited.
— Robert WilsonThe Westermark hypothesis was pushed out of the field by Freud
In his 1890 work on the history of human marriage, Westermark proposed that people who grow up together lack sexual attraction to each other as adults and develop sexual aversion. Wilson thinks there is a fair amount of evidence supporting this direction. But as Freud's thought entered cultural anthropology in the 1920s and 30s, the hypothesis was thrown out of the field wholesale, and he thinks it was never seriously engaged with. What concerns him is not Westermark himself, but why the hypothesis was excluded so thoroughly.
— Robert WilsonIsraeli kibbutzim and Taiwanese minor marriages both support it
Two independent studies appeared in the 1950s and 60s. One was the Israeli kibbutz: children who grew up together in the same community were culturally expected to intermarry, yet the actual marriage rate was lower than expected; and even when they did marry, the divorce rate was higher and fertility lower. The other was the ‘minor marriage’ system in Taiwan and parts of China: girls were sent into another family to be raised alongside a boy, with the expectation of later marriage, and the result was a markedly lower divorce rate and reported sexual attraction. Wilson thinks these are not conclusive, but they are at least evidence from within anthropology, and it was not taken seriously.
— Robert WilsonLévi-Strauss said the animal world has no incest avoidance, and that is wrong
Lévi-Strauss said that if you look at non-human animals, incest is everywhere, especially among our closest primate relatives; only humans developed cultural constraints, norms and taboos, and so incest avoidance appeared, while animals have no mechanism at all. Wilson says this struck him as odd, because he remembered that in the primate literature at least some species have such mechanisms, and that the mechanisms people list are more than one, the Westermark mechanism being one of them. The more he looked, the more he found it ‘epistemically shocking’: in almost every non-human primate species studied, someone has reported such a mechanism.
— Robert WilsonThe false claim was still being repeated in the 80s and 90s
Lévi-Strauss said this in 1949, and still said it when the book was reissued in the 60s, when knowledge was indeed limited, but Wilson thinks it was already a fairly bold assertion. What he finds even less acceptable is that cultural anthropology was still repeating the claim in the incest and incest-avoidance debates of the 80s and 90s. He sees this as another ‘disciplinary groove’: people fall into it and ignore the crucial evidence. His conclusion is that separatism has narrowed the disciplines' own vision.
— Robert WilsonHe supports the progenerative view with an explicit argument
The final chapter gives the ‘extended kin matters argument’, numbered one, two, three in the manner of analytic philosophy. Premise one: kin matters are governed by extended cognitive processes that bind people together within and across generations. Premise two: these extended cognitive processes generate culturally diverse kin forms, but across cultures and across time they uniquely depend on reproductive facts and on our sensitivity to those facts. Conclusion: kin matters are progenitively constrained. He stresses that this does not say kinship is biologically determined, only that reproductive facts have a special role.
— Robert WilsonThe ethnographic argument is missing a key premise, and fails even with it
The ‘ethnographic argument’ against the progenerative view is: the progenerative view treats kin-making as a cultural elaboration of reproductive relations; but the ethnographic record shows that kin-making involves a great many non-reproductive relations — sharing a name, being born in the same place, ritual kinship; therefore the progenerative view misdescribes kinship. Wilson points out that this conclusion does not follow, and that at least one premise is missing. He supplies in turn the most likely premises (such as ‘biological transcendence’: kin-making transcends reproductive relations) and argues that each is false, so that even adding them all does not make a valid argument.
— Robert WilsonThe premise of ‘reproductive innocence’ is itself bad ethnography
He singles out the premise of ‘reproductive innocence’: many cultures are said to have extremely limited reproductive knowledge, the example often cited being Australian Aboriginal cultures with restricted paternal knowledge, not knowing who the father is, and not understanding the male role in reproduction. Wilson says this claim is completely wrong, is itself bad ethnography, and is itself ethnocentric — it asserts that those cultures have in some sense failed to grasp the basic facts of reproduction. He thinks it has been repeated over and over for politically suspect reasons, and no one has corrected it.
— Robert WilsonIn their own words · checked verbatim
kinship is the cultural elaboration of reproductive biological and genealogical relations
Robert Wilson19:34
there's a kind of innate tendency that's what he called it that's not the language that i would use um for those who um grow up together to be sexually averse or to lack sexual attraction to one another when they are adults
Robert Wilson27:00
it's only when you come to humans who have developed cultural restraints and constraints norms taboos uh on incest that we get incest avoidance building up there aren't any mechanism
Robert Wilson31:02
i thought this is another case where you've got this kind of um disciplinary groove that people have fallen into and they're just ignoring this evidence
Robert Wilson32:02
i'm trying to undermine this idea that the avoidance of incest is is a human cultural innovation it's something that comes only with you know symbol using creatures who have norms
Robert Wilson34:09
these extended cognitive processes generate culturally diverse forms of kinship that universally across cultures and over time, distinctively rely on progenitive facts and our sensitivity to those facts
Robert Wilson46:39
But that's the claim. I think it's completely false. I think it's bad ethnography itself, but that's the sort of report.
Robert Wilson1:00:04
If we've got to point the ethnographic projection gun at someone, then I think it could be turned back on the people who are sort of initially holding that gun.
Robert Wilson1:01:09
Figures
| Year the Westermark hypothesis was proposed | 1890 | 27:00 |
| Year Lévi-Strauss stated that primates have no incest-avoidance mechanism | 1949 | 31:02 |
| Publication years of Wilson's two previous related books | 2004, 2005 | 6:14 |
| Number of sample reproductive facts listed in the book | about 5 | 48:46 |
Glossary
- progenerative view
- The view that kinship is a cultural elaboration of reproductive, biological and genealogical relations, which constitute constraints.
- Westermark hypothesis
- People who grow up together lack sexual attraction to each other as adults and develop sexual aversion.
- separatism
- The view that the social sciences, or anthropology, need a methodology independent of the natural sciences.
- extended cognition
- The idea that cognitive systems are not bounded by the individual body and can extend to symbols and tools in the environment.
- homeostatic property cluster
- An anti-essentialist theory of natural kinds, in which a kind is defined by a cluster of properties that reliably co-occur.
- disciplinary groove
- A hardened line of thinking within a discipline that leads people to ignore relevant evidence from outside the field.
How to listen
People working in anthropology, evolutionary psychology, kinship systems or philosophy of science, and social science readers concerned with how biology and culture are demarcated.
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