Conceptual Tension: The Open Texture of the Language of Kinship

I consider the language of kinship because I am interested in what I take to be concepts having inexpungable tensions, tensions which cannot be removed by analysis without destroying the concept entirely. When I began to think about concepts such as these, it seems that those concepts used in our attempts to deal with the institutions in which human communities order their lives must surely be of that sort. This is the case because such concepts reflect both the stability and change these institutions undergo. Some writers emphasize one, others the other. The fact seems to be that human institutions are both stable and changing; yet stability and change seem to be opposing characteristics, and to say of something that it is both one and the other seems—at least on its face—to be applying incompatible characteristics of the same thing. There is no small amount of philosophical writing on the application of incompatible characteristics of the same thing, but the usual ploy is to sidestep the problem by introducing a difference. Given that red and green are species of the genus color, and that members of the genus are exclusive of each other and jointly exhaust the genus, what are we to make of the claim that something is both red and green? Apart from the suggestion that the claim may be made by someone who simply does not know whereof he speaks, can one solution be applied in the case of institutions?

On the face of it, perhaps. One could say that an institution may have a span of time in which it continues unchanged and then, for whatever reason, begins to change. Thus stability and change may both be said to characterize it, but at different stages of its history. (I doubt if anything may be said in terms of the spatial distinction: it is not likely intelligible to think of institutions as spatial in any event.) This solution, however, is not entirely satisfactory. One might well wish to say that institutions are always stable and changing—meaning that this is how they generally are and not considering those times when they may be wracked by revolution. We clearly cannot say that at one and the same time and in every conceivable way something is both red and green. Whether it is because of the logic or grammar of color terms or the logic or grammar of our sense of being something,^[1] virtually any of us would stick at accepting such a claim. Yet at least in ordinary speech, most of us would have no difficulty about the linguistic propriety of statements of the effect that institutions were always both stable and changing.

Why the qualification about ordinary speech? The reason is that among social scientists it has been a matter of dispute. I do not wish to review the literature, particularly since I believe that most readers will recognize that this, indeed, has been the case. I only want to say enough about the matter so as to identify the nature of the dispute. There are writers who have tended to emphasize the way in which institutions are stable—one thinks of Talcott Parsons and, I think, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. Others think of them as always changing; this is surely implied in the way writers like Frederick Barth tend to see institutions as emerging from the encounter of individuals. But why should there be what sometimes seems like fundamental quarrels simply because different writers focus on different aspects of the same thing? I suggest that it has to do with a tacit—for it is rarely made explicit—view of what concepts must be like if they are appropriate for use in science.

The solution of the red-green problem leaves the concepts involved unaffected. Red and green continue to exclude one another. Neither may be applied to the same surface at the same time. Each, we may suppose, may be understood as having fixed and determinate conditions of application, and each may be construed rigidly. If one is willing to ignore G. E. Moore about such things and allow that colors may be defined, then one would, I suppose, say that they may be sharply defined, as Gottlob Frege understood such things. It is, I think, clear that the long-term tradition of both philosophy and science is to agree with Frege that “[a] concept that is not sharply defined is wrongly termed a concept,”^[2] and it is that tradition, indebted to the sciences, that makes it impossible for social scientists to accept easily that logically incompatible notions may be applied to the same entity. And each side is so certain of the correctness of its apprehension of the entity—the institutions of society—that the clearly erroneous views of its opponent require some special explanation. Thus, it is not unusual to observe members of the constantly changing point of view attribute motives of political conservatism to the other side, who, in turn, return the compliment by seeing their opponents as social radicals. But if institutions are stable and changing at the same time, it would seem that controversies of this kind tend to divert our attention from what is really needed, namely, the development of concepts that can apprehend at once characteristics which are in tension. It is the development of concepts which reflects the stability and change of institutions. One such institution is kinship.

I turned to the literature—or a very small part of it—because I knew of kinship’s long-standing major place among the preoccupations of anthropologists and that many writers have taken the concept to be fundamental to understanding how a society or sociocultural system works. While I have found myself reading any number of interesting things, I must confess that I have found this literature collectively befuddling. Could I have imagined in advance how difficult it would be to define the field to which all this literature is presumed to belong, I would have looked for something else to do. The literature might have been helpful were there a reasonably detailed history of the study of kinship to consult, one which might, perhaps, make clear the changing character of the concept of kinship. But while I have run across some sketchy writing on the subject—by Sol Tax^[3] and Rodney Needham^[4] —I know of nothing that really sets out the historical course of that field of study. I would add that while I suspect that such a work would have proved helpful to me and would have guided my thinking, I suspect as well that it might have come to serve as a substitute for the detailed emersion in at least some part of the literature. I have had no choice but to try to understand actual anthropological writings, writings not meant for readers like me with little sense of what the fighting is all about. But I have come to see at firsthand what a variety of different things the study of kinship can be.

I should say at the outset that the matter is complicated by the dual reference of the terms that are used. On the one hand, anthropology purports to be a social science, which means that it approaches its subject matter in terms of concepts, problems, and theories that are its own. On the other, not infrequently—rather, I should say, for the most part—it attempts to present a way of life from the point of view of the people whose way of life it is. At times it tries to examine its object of inquiry from internal and external points of view. Clearly, the perspective of such people is not the cross-cultural perspective of comparative sociological investigation, and the notions suitable to deal with one set of problems may be quite unlike those needed for the other. One might suppose that the characteristics of, say, the Omaha kinship system as described in Murdock’s Social Structure^[5] are not in the minds, as it were, of any of the peoples who are said to have such a system—not even the Omaha Indians themselves. But no characterization of kinship systems that would make it useful for the purposes of Murdock’s inquiry could be expected to be found in a people’s understanding of their own institutions. Not infrequently, it is this very duality that stands at the center of
controversy, and sometimes a writer’s conception of kinship is opposed because it fails to be in accord with what the natives think. Martin Southwold opens what I think is an interesting paper by telling us that he intends to deal with what the word “kinship” means in “anthropological usage,” but that he will begin by attending to what kinship terms mean to a certain people in Africa.^[6] One might have thought that the variation of the term “kinship” in anthropological usage might be diagnostic of something in the history of the discipline. For example, would not the course of the variation of the meaning of the word “atom” tell us something about the history of natural speculation and physical science? But it would seem that in anthropology, the course of the development of the discipline and its terminology is constantly, or at least frequently, interrupted by what other anthropologists say on behalf of the populations studied.^[7] Southwold’s own conclusion is that “kinship” is a “meaningless” term and has no role to play in anthropology. His reason for this is: “What the word lacks is any one single distinct and ascertainable meaning. It is this characteristic which disqualifies it from use as a scientific term,”^[8] which seems to mean is that what is wrong with “kinship” is that it is not—perhaps cannot be—sharply defined.

One can easily imagine the attraction that the study of kinship had for those who would put the study of man or human culture on a scientific footing. William James writes of the blooming, buzzing confusion of the infant’s sensory experience until, in the course of time and cognitive development, the growth of a conceptual apparatus enables the child to organize his sensations with objects having specifically determinate characteristics.^[9] In all of science it would be hard to define anything more resembling those experiences of Jamesian infants than those of travelers, traders, missionaries, and anthropologists encountering for the first time the variety of behaviors of people not heretofore known to them.^[10] One can imagine a real sense of discovery when pioneers like Lewis Henry Morgan began to realize that there is something orderly about the language of kinship; the prospects of the systematizing of cultural material seemed to be opened by the realization that there were only a small number of kinship types. Morgan himself seemed to think that kinship could serve as a diagnostic tool, and combined with his commitment to the evolutionary point of view in the study of culture, took kinship system to be one of the criteria for a people’s place in the evolutionary scale. When one recalls that these early discoveries are virtually contemporaneous with the development of the periodic table in chemistry and not all that much later than the formulation of the system of biological taxonomy by Linnaeus, one can easily imagine what expectations were aroused with respect of the possibilities of scientific growth in anthropology. Indeed, decades later, one leading scholar in the field, making reference to the element of social structure, could go on to say: “These features are combined with one another in particular ways to produce a finite number of types of social organization, which in their totality represent a systematic classification comparable to those of Linnaeus and Mendeleyev.” ^[11]

In all this—and in much that cannot be dealt with—it is simply taken for granted that the concepts with which the study of kinship carries out its work are sharply defined concepts. To be sure, no one says anything about it. It never occurs to anyone that anything other could be the case, and all the conceptual analysis we get from science and philosophy presume that sharpness of character and lack of ambiguity in application are precisely what to expect from concepts that are to be taken seriously. One could suggest that Aristotle’s conception of the polis and Hegel’s treatment of the idea of freedom^[12] are both instances of conceptual analysis which do not emerge with sharply defined concepts, but I dare say that for most that would serve to shore up their position, as if there was anything to be learned about modern scientific thinking from that old metaphysician and that obfuscating dialectician. I shall return to these two writers somewhat later on, when the ground has been laid for a rather friendlier reception of their views.

In this and the following sections of this study, I shall be presenting two styles in the study of kinship which share in common the assumption—at least implicit—that kinship may be abstracted from the continuity of sociocultural life and treated as if it had an independence of sorts. One is the style of G. P. Murdock, the other that of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown. In a well-known work, J. A. Barnes^[13] has a detailed chapter on the work of Murdock—as well as chapters on Claude Levi-Strauss and Meyer Fortes—which is no doubt more adequate to its subject than what is presented here. Barnes is rather a detailed account of the course of Murdock’s life-long involvement in the study of kinship, with attention to change in theory and method. Obviously, for one interested in the course of Murdock’s intellectual growth, and the role that growth played in the history of the study of kinship, Barnes’s account is useful in a way that mine is not. I intend to limit my attention to certain aspects of Murdock’s Social Structure in order to attend to the way in which work of that kind implicates a particular notion of the sort of concept kinship is. In like manner, I intend to focus only on Radcliffe-Brown’s “Introduction” to the volume on the firm systems he edited with Daryll Forde.^[14]

With all its several and subordinate interests, the way I understand Murdock’s book, its central interest is to attempt to answer the question: How do systems of kinship nomenclature develop and change? One might want to explicate this question by pointing out that every human community ever studied is discovered to have a system of terminology by means of which individuals refer to the other individuals to whom they may be related—consanguinially or affinally—the facts of the matter being determined by means of detailed genealogical investigation. But increasingly, that way of formulating the question is called into question, and to insist upon it is to be perceived, by at least some investigators, as too formal or overly restrictive. In our own social world, we know that certain elderly men might be addressed as “Pop” or “Gramps” by people with whom they have no genealogical connection. There were two women, friends of my mother but in no other way related to our family, who were addressed by us children as “aunt.” Some would suggest that this is really no problem. What is basically a kinship term is extended by courtesy—honoris causa, if you will—and given the neolocal residence.^[15] Characteristic of our society, the “aunt” case even makes sociological sense inasmuch as the social relations between such friends of a mother and the mother’s family of procreation^[16] may well resemble those which obtain between the mother’s sister and the mother’s family of procreation. But to speak of the extension of terms in this way is precisely to settle the question—seemingly by fiat of the openness of kinship terms. Perhaps there are circumstances under which one would want to maintain that what the term means includes the way in which it is extended on those occasions when it is extended. Martin Southwold, in the paper to which reference has already been made, seems to suggest that the facts of genealogy are largely irrelevant to the application of kinship terminology, and offers the opinion that the reason we think of the terms in question as being kinship terms is “because we translate them by . . . English kinship terms.”^[17] His preferred procedure would be to attend to the detail of behavioral practice within which these terms are used and applied, and so determine what they mean without antecedent assumption of genealogical primacy.

But while this is a question which is to arise in the future, one does not feel its presence in Murdock’s book. There it is presumed that systems of kinship nomenclature—I shall hereafter use the shorter term “kinship systems”—have clear contours and that one may determine with respect to any society what kinship system prevails there. (This, of course, is only a matter of principle. Societies which are no longer available to be studied ethnographically and for which the existing ethnographies fail to provide unambiguous data are clearly societies for which such information may not in fact be had.) Having clear contours, kinship systems may be abstracted from the specific contexts of determinate cultures and treated as if they were separable things. It could be argued that such a view is an artifact of the methodology of the Human Relations Area File, the purpose of which required that culture be conceived as made up of discrete items which could be culled from ethnographies and recorded as separate items in an appropriate index—cards, I suppose, early on, and in ways made possible by computerized information-storage techniques today—which virtually forces sharpness of definition on the concepts used to define both the categories of culture and the determinate kinds of things subsumed under each category. And, of course, one knows how absolutely central a role Murdock played in establishing the Human Relations Area File at Yale, a branch or field of cultural anthropology devoted to cross-cultural studies of culture and society. But regardless of that bit of history, the matter upon which we are to focus here is the character of kinship concepts in Murdock’s theory.

There are and have been a very large number of distinct human societies differing from one another in all manner of ways during the course of the human career on this planet, yet there are, according to Murdock and others, only a very small number of destined kinship systems. One tendency is to distinguish among them by reference to the ways in which they refer to cousins. Thus, to pick just two examples, the so-called Eskimo kinship system is one in which FaSiDa and MoBrDa are called by the same terms but terminologically differentiated from as well as from sisters, as parallel cousins commonly but not always classified with sisters.^[18] The terms for the two cross-cousins are usually but not always the same and the Iroquois system is one in which FaSiDa and MoBrDa are called by the same terms but terminologically differentiated from parallel cousins as well as from sisters, parallel cousins commonly but not always classified with sisters. That some features may be “commonly” but not always present leads to the recognition of variations within the major or basic kinship-system types. The way to determine what system prevails in a place is to collect detailed genealogies and to ask the native population what terms are used to designate individuals whose genealogical relation to the person being queried can be determined. Such a procedure presumes that the kinship terms are really kinship terms grounded in genealogically determined relationships. We shall be seeing in the sequel examples of attempts by a number of anthropologists to offer alternative procedures, which procedures carry with them the assumption that the logic of kin terms is different from that implied by the procedure just mentioned.

Why would peoples adopt different kinship systems? One does not suppose that they hold conferences and arrive at intended determinations no matter how insistently the action theorists among us maintain that social science concerns itself with intentional action done according to rules. And the fact is—and whether or not it is a fact, it is taken for granted by Murdock and is part of what defines the subject of his theory—that so many different kinds of sociocultural systems make use of only a very small number of kinship systems. The fact that instances of the same kinship-system type may be found all up and down the scale of “cultural evolution”^[19] suggest that what we are looking for in order to make sense of it all is a small number of sociological variables rather independent of cultural variety. That is precisely the direction that Murdock takes. In his judgment, if we are to understand why a specific sort of kinship system is to be found in a given culture, we must attend to the forms taken by four specified social variables: the rule of residence, the rule of marriage, the rule of descent, and the form of the family. I do not intend to spell out what each of these is. Let it suffice to say that for each of these there is only a limited number of possible forms, and their possible combinations determine what kinship systems will find expression. It is clear that like kinship systems themselves, these four kinds of variables are presumed to have clear contours and may be abstracted whole, as it were, from the total sociocultural system without loss of integrity. Likewise, the concepts of them—either as general categorical types or the specifically determinate forms of expression one may find for each of them—must be expected to be sharply defined. Murdock takes it that these four are the independent variables with reference to the form taken by the kinship system, as the dependent variable. He states his theory in very general terms—he calls it “Postulate”^[20] though it is the only statement called a postulate in the book—and purports to derive from it thirty theorems which are tested statistically against information drawn from 250 societies.^[21]

That kinship systems are entities with presumably clear contours, and, in consequence, their concepts are sharply defined, gets further support from the conception of their development and change that we find in Murdock’s book.^[22] Assume that the presence in some given society of a kinship system of a given sort is rendered intelligible when we come to see what the forms are of the independent variables that prevail in that society. If that is the case then how does the new kinship system become intelligible when we see what has been happening to the independent variables? My very formulation of this problem invokes problems. I should be talking of how these variables—independent and dependent alike—change, but if we think of them as entities with clear contours, and as having concepts which are sharply defined, it is hard to know how we can talk in that way. If there is real change, then there must be stages in which the contours lose their clarity and sharply defined concepts are no longer adequate for their description. But no attention is paid to the actual character of change. There is ample reason to know in any number of cases that whereas a given people had at one time a given sort of kinship system, their descendants, at some other time, had or have a different sort. If we believe that kinship systems are dependent upon certain other social variables, then we know where to look for our answer. If we suppose that it is not the case that every form an independent variable may take is compatible with every form that each of the other variables may take, then it is clear that it cannot be the case that the succession of type may be at random. Given the present conjunction of independent and dependent variables, then the possible combinations are decidedly limited. Murdock takes the rule of residence as most crucial in influencing the emergence of the kinship system, and that it, in turn, is majorly affected by technological and economic factors. His sketch of a possible theory of how rules of residence develop and change is only that, a sketch, not worked out with the detail that we find in his working out of the theory of kinship systems, but what does emerge from the discussion is the possible ordered sequences of configuring the variables which Murdock thinks of as the “evolution of social organization”—to use the name of his chapter.

I think that the presumption is that what we have here is a conception of change, but given the way the matter is actually presented that may prove not to be the case. We may have a succession of entities which do not change. If our methodology defines our subject matter as consisting of entities having clear contours and to which reference is made by sharply defined concepts, then a conception of genuine change—a change within the entities themselves—may be very hard to formulate. We find in the treatment of the idea of freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of History a very sophisticated sense of history, but what I did not discuss in that paper is the fact that his treatment of the development of the idea of freedom takes place within a context of reference to unchanging and—one presumes—unchangeable folk spirits which once they emerge continue permanently as what they are. Thus, in attempting to describe the Chinese folk spirit, the folk spirit with which the history begins and which appears to be located temporally in the earlier antiquity, Hegel finds it relevant to cite an occurrence which is supposed to have taken place on the occasion of a British embassy to China not all that much before the time that Hegel was writing. It is hard to know how to understand the spirit of a people remaining unchanged for more than three millennia. But I suppose that what is involved is some notion that the spirit of a people is sort of an entity which achieves its own special kind of perfection and which cannot undergo change without destroying its essential nature. Thus, if, as I have argued in the paper to which reference has just been made, in Hegel’s view freedom is an open concept, the very understanding of which requires that attention be paid to the contingent factors that effected its history, and if Hegelian dialectic is a technique for the analysis of concepts of that sort, the spirit of a people seems to be a rigid entity the concept of which has no room for openness at all. It would seem to be suggested that what genuinely changes can be referred to only by open concepts, and since what is changing seems both to be and not to be something specific,^[23] the concepts in question would presumably have tensions which analysis cannot relieve. And what is thought of in terms of sharply defined concepts must be presumed not to change at all. Thus to think of what Murdock presents as the evolution of social organization as either an account of change or an account of succession is not unrelated to how one understands the logic of his concepts.

I want now to turn to Radcliffe-Brown and, as I indicated above, essentially to limit my attention to the “Introduction” to African Systems of Kinship and Marriage. As in the case of Murdock, it is not my concern to present the full scope of Radcliffe-Brown’s long-term preoccupation with the study of kinship, but, rather, to see what might be discerned about the logical character of the relevant concepts in a piece of anthropological writing which is both well-known and influential. But it might be well to call attention to an earlier, rather shorter address that Radcliffe-Brown devoted to the subject so as to point out to those who may find it of interest a bit of writing in which its author locates—historically—his own stance in the study of kinship vis-à-vis predecessors.^[24] The dominant tendencies of his predecessors were to approach the study of kinship from historical and evolutionary points of view. Given the fact that the sort of evidence upon which historians depend when they attempt to reconstruct the human past is not to be had by students of the societies which have—at any rate, in the earlier decades of the history of anthropology—been the objects of its study, Radcliffe-Brown took it that historical inquiries with respect to them could not hope to succeed,^[25] and he purported to find in the work of predecessors a tendency toward speculative or conjectural reconstruction not supported by empirical evidence. One standard ploy was to explain kinship systems by postulating earlier forms of marriage, forms for which there would be no evidence other than the kinship system to be explained itself. Such argument would appear to be circular. In any event, all this led Radcliffe-Brown to conclude that what was needed in this field was a way to get at principles of social organization, which are eminent in the societies being studied and which, in consequence, do not require the postulation of circumstances which transcend—temporally—what lies, empirically, before the investigator. Radcliffe-Brown’s relationship to his predecessors, at least from the vantage point of his own self-reflection as an investigator and methodologist, is presented in the lecture “The Study of Kinship Systems,” and it may possibly serve some readers as an introduction to his thought on the subject.

From what I have said, one may well expect that Radcliffe-Brown’s attention will be to social organization as unchanging–which, given how the previous section came to an end, would lead to the expectation that his analyses are implicitly in terms of concepts intended to be sharply defined—and those expectations will be realized. It is not, of course, possible to deny the fact of change: there is ample reason to believe that societies having certain determinate characteristics are descended or derived from societies rather different. And Radcliffe-Brown has no reluctance to recognize the fact of change. Thus, he says that “we must distinguish between a stable system which has persisted with relatively little change for some period of time and the unstable condition of a society which is undergoing rapid change.” But he immediately goes on to observe: “It is in the former, not in the latter, that we may expect to find some fair degree of consistency and congruence amongst the items that make up the whole.”^[26] This may make it seem that the whole within which one finds the sort of “consistency and congruence” of which Radcliffe-Brown speaks is what happens to interest him;^[27] someone else could worry about the instability of rapid change. But it remains quite problematic—to settle for a mild expression—if the study of such change is at all possible given the logical character of the conceptual tools which Radcliffe-Brown develops for the study of kinship.

If there are—or were—writers for whom the understanding of the kinship system required postulation of an earlier form of marriage, and if there are others who see such systems as always in the course of being created by means of the interactions of the people who constitute society, for Radcliffe-Brown neither approach will do. His procedure seems to be uncompromisingly holistic. While there are those who would say that holism is precisely the mark of the anthropological approach,^[28] it may be suspect that not infrequently that is simply something one says or is expected to say. The reason for this is that no small part of what is done in anthropology is not holistic at all. Murdock’s theory, to choose one example that ought to be fresh in our minds, is not at all. It abstracts from whatever whole there is presumed to be in the five variables—independent and dependent—and says implicitly that only this is relevant to the project being developed. To say that the state of the whole is what determines the state of the kinship system is to say that there is nothing special about the independent variables. It is clear that in Social Structure Murdock thinks that the variables he focuses upon are of central importance; it is they, rather than the culture as a whole, that determine the shape that the kinship system will take.^[29] It might be thought that the very idea that there is a field of study for anthropologists called “the study of kinship,” suggesting as it does that kinship defines an intelligible field which may be abstracted from the sociocultural system for study by itself, precludes a holistic view of the subject. Thus, one might suspect, no one who chooses to study kinship can be a holist, even if, for whatever reasons, he chooses to call himself one. Radcliffe-Brown tells us that “the first step in the study of a kinship system is to discover what terms are used and how they are used.” But he immediately goes on to say: “But this is only the first step. The terminology has to be considered in relation to the whole system of which it is part.”^[30]

To see what resorting to holism is intended to avoid, we may go back to “The Study of Kinship Systems,” a paper to which reference has already been made. Radcliffe-Brown makes reference to attempts by his predecessors to account for certain features of two kinds of kinship system, the Choctaw and the Omaha, the details of which need not detain us here. We already noticed that there had been a tendency to account for such things by appeal to certain marriage regulations which have been found to be associated with these kinship systems. Radcliffe-Brown goes on to observe that the basis for such a hypothesis “is the obvious fact that in each of the two varieties the terminology and the special form of marriage are consistent; the two things fit together in what may be called a logical way.” Radcliffe-Brown has no problem with this so far, but he proceeds to what he finds problematic: “But the hypothesis goes far beyond this. It supposes that this is some sort of casual connection such that the marriage custom can be said to have caused, produced, or resulted in the special terminology.” He then goes on to offer as an alternative the “equally plausible” hypothesis that the special form of marriage is a consequence of the terminology. He rejects the entire procedure underlying contemplation of either hypothesis by saying that if we adopt the original “hypothesis” the terminology is conceived to be in some sense explained, but there is no explanation of the marriage custom. By the alternative hypothesis the marriage custom is explained, but the terminology is not. I do not see how there can be any ground for a choice of one of these hypotheses in preference to the other except purely personal predilection.^[31]

Radcliffe-Brown’s account of this matter raises all manner of issues: Why, for example, should we not expect our hypothesis to go beyond our data?^[32] Or why should we expect one theory to do everything; we have seen in the case of Murdock’s theory that though the kinship system is said to be explained in the way we have seen, the variables which are independent within that theory may themselves be explained by means of other theories which would have to be formulated. But all that would take us far afield. What we want to notice is that for Radcliffe-Brown the key point is that the two terms—”terminology” and “marriage rule”—mesh together. They are congruent now, and we can deal with them only as together now, not as having some unobservable temporal sequence which allows one to cause the other. That is what he means when he tells us that the terminology can only be “considered in relation to the whole system of which it is part.” The problem, then, is not to explain the kinship system narrowly construed, but to understand the congruency of parts which are not really proper parts. It is this conception of the problem, I presume, that has resulted in the fact that Radcliffe-Brown has not produced studies of kinship as such, but only studies of social organization in which kinship is included.^[33]

It is to deal with this problem that Radcliffe-Brown introduces his conception of sociological structural principles, which long ago I called a species of Platonic forms.^[34] The “Introduction” to African Systems of Kinship and Marriage contains an account of a large collection of these principles, and that is surely among reasons for my thinking it the best statement of this side of Radcliffe-Brown’s interests. I do not think that it is necessary to present an account of more than one example. In Radcliffe-Brown’s view, kinship systems are to be studied by means of a technique of “comparison and analysis in combination,” and this reveals “that while there is a wide range of variation in their superficial features there can be discovered a small number of general structural principles which are applied and combined in various ways.”^[35] To exemplify what Radcliffe-Brown intends by a “general structural principle,” I shall quote in full paragraph form from the “Introduction”: the paragraph is not only straightforward but also it requires only minimal explication for non-anthropological readers:

The only sense I have ever been able to make of the closing sentence of the paragraph is that appeal to the structural principle is intended to explain the phenomena just described. It is clear from what we found Radcliffe-Brown to be saying about the kinship-terminology-marriage-custom question, that the marriage custom now described could not be explained in a manner acceptable to him by pointing to some other features of the social organization. What he seems to want is something that explains all of the congruent features at once; he seems to be saying that their congruence is owing to all of them exemplifying the structural principle. There is no openness to the possibility that determinate parts—variables, if you like—of the social organization mix in specifiable ways, much less that institutional arrangements owe their character to the interactions of individuals. This attitude is quite pervasive in Radcliffe-Brown’s thinking about such matters. Thus, shortly before the paragraph just quoted, discussing some matter in Max Gluckman’s contribution to the volume to which Radcliffe-Brown provided the introduction, he notes the presence in one tribe and the absence in another of certain marriage practices. He attributes their presence and absence to the principle of the “unity of the sibling group, with its implication of substitution of brother for brother and sister for sister.”^[38]

It seems to me that given the conception of general sociological structural principles, the problem of development and change becomes the problem of how one structural principle is replaced by another. The attempt to understand change as some social entity undergoing a form of transformation cannot be articulated in the language of structural principles. To understand change in the sense of undergoing a form of transformation requires being able to speak of the changing entity as becoming less and less of what it was—or was essentially—and more and more of what it is to be. One must have a conceptual apparatus capable of encapsulating this tension of a thing’s being and not being whatever it was that it is changing from. The Platonic rigidities of structural principles are not capable of providing the conceptual tools needed for this. For, surely, when Radcliffe-Brown says, at the end of the quoted paragraph, that “The structural principle involved is that of the unity of the lineage group,” he is saying the sort of thing that Plato would say—that things are good because they participate in the form of good. And the whole point of the theory of forms is to find the permanent which is true knowledge and thus avoid the flux of mere opinions.

Apart from implicit agreement with respect to the logic of concepts, there is very little that the two approaches of the study of kinship that we have been attending to have in common, and given the way we have become used to thinking about the practice of science—or normal science—as taking place within the frameworks defined by paradigms,^[39] ideals of order,^[40] or research programs,^[41] it is a wonder that no argument has been offered to the effect that these two writers—and any number of others—are not practicing the same discipline at all. This is not a prospect that would be greeted joyfully by anthropologists’ intent, as they are, upon keeping all of the recognized diversions within their traditional field—social anthropology, archeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics—from breaking off into completely separate fields, and so far as I know consideration of it is not yet on anybody’s agenda. Nor is it a question that has any consequences for us here. The important, if not striking, fact for us is that for all these differences, both Murdock and Radcliffe-Brown seem to be—they do not deal with the issue explicitly—committed to the use of concepts which are sharply defined. They are, of course, not alone in this. There is a quite considerable literature on the study of kinship which rests on the same commitment. Thus, in an early paper, we see Fred Eggan saying,

Most of this passage contains ideas clearly familiar to us. It is mainly the last sentence that attracts special notice, particularly inasmuch as what it asserts is precisely what is called into question—explicitly in a paper of Rodney Needham, which is to be the main focus of our attention in the present section, and implicitly in certain anthropological work to which we shall be attending a bit further on. Eggan’s sentence claims that the terminology with respect to which relatives are classified has intelligibility independent of context and usage. If we do not have certain information with respect to the regularities—or even idiosyncrasies—of behavior, we may still be expected to know what the terms mean. Some pages later on,^[43] he will talk about the extensions of kinship or kinterm to nonkin in ritual circumstances. The point is that what the terms mean is somewhat independent of these contexts of use, and so that changing contexts of use neither changes their meanings—they are simply extended to nonkin—nor brings out facets of their meanings hitherto not disclosed.^[44]

Rodney Needham’s “Remarks on the Analysis of Kinship and Marriage” is intended to be criticism of the preoccupation anthropologists have with such matters, and the heart of his criticism may be summed up in assertions he makes, one after the other, early on in the paper. First, he tells us that “anthropologists do often get into trouble of a time wasting and discouraging sort, when they argue about what kinship really is or when they try to propound some general theory based on the presumption that kinship has a distinct and concrete identity.” He immediately follows this observation with an unambiguous declaration of war on the entire enterprise: “To put it very bluntly, then, there is no such thing as kinship, and it follows that there can be no such thing as kinship theory.”^[45] At first blush it would appear that in Needham’s ontology only what is distinct and concrete can exit, but I don’t think that this is the real point. What would kinship have to be like in order to satisfy Needham’s demand? Anthropologists presume to derive their ideas of kinship from one or another kind of observation—be it observations of behavior, recordings of usage, or what have you—and kinship is, in some sense, second order based upon those others. Thus it is an idea, not something first order that may be encountered in some way suitable to its nature. Needham is telling us that the idea of kinship is not distinct and clear—That is, it is not sharply defined—and thus cannot play a role in an enterprise which purports to be scientific.

Needham next goes on to talk about marriage. He quotes, favorably, E. R. Leach to the effect that “‘all universal definitions of marriage are vain.’” He goes on to quote Leach further to the effect that “‘the nature of the marriage institution is partially correlated with principles of descent and rules of residence.’” But adds the interesting comment: “Perhaps it is not so much correlated, though, as it is defined in any particular instance by what we divisively call the ‘other institutes’ of the society.” And in addition to jural institutions, account must be taken of social and mystical ideas as well.^[46] The concept of marriage cannot be sharply defined. But rather than let that be reason enough to throw the concept of marriage out of court, we are first told something about the reason for this, namely, that what marriage is in any society is to some degree affected by other institutional circumstances. Indeed, Needham himself uses the word “defined” in talking about marriage. It may not be possible to offer a rigid definition which would satisfy the demand that it have “one single distinct and ascertainable meaning,” yet some kind of definition seems to be possible. What sort of definition is that? In one sense, it is not a definition at all. Rather, it is a recognition that what marriage is—hence what its concept is like—is inevitably affected by circumstances and experiences which may well be taken to be logically contingent in relation to the concept. The sort of things cited by Leach and Needham are surely to be included; I would certainly not wish to oppose myself to their authoritative views on such matters.

The careful reader may have noticed that I have been mixing up two distinct ideas in the previous paragraph, and it is time to disentangle them. What I have been saying, however, I should want to say about both of them, and so I do not think that anything untoward is consequent upon their being tangled together. Nevertheless, there is something to be said for separating them. One could imagine some scholar publishing a history of marriage in England or Western Europe, or what have you; actually, there is no need to imagine since such things have been done. Perhaps our scholar’s intention is to produce an account which renders intelligible—in the sense of telling how it came to be as it is—the form that marriage has in the contemporary world. Knowing where he is to end up, our scholar knows where to begin. I do not know how to explain what I just said by means of an example from the historiography of Western marriage, so let me offer another sort of example. It is only because historians of parliament know, as I shall discuss in chapter 4, what was subsequently to happen that they can point to a certain occurrence in the reign of Edward I as the beginning of the history of parliamentary institutions and government in England. Surely, no one then present could have remarked on the historical significance of the occasion. From the standpoint of a later vantage one reconstructs retrospectively the course of history in which one has entered knowing what to include and what not, when to begin and when not, only because one knows how the story ends, what the culminating stage is like. I would suppose that a history of marriage would be similar. And the concept of marriage in England—like the concept of parliament—constantly changes as it is affected by whichever sorts of things affect the course of its history. Marriage and parliament are historical concepts whose meanings are both fixed and changing through history. This is the tension in their conceptual meaning.

Again, the example of parliament will help us to see this. It is not difficult to believe that a serious citizen attentive to affairs of state in the reign of George III, if asked to define the idea of parliament, would not produce the same definition as would such a citizen in the reign of Victoria or that of Elizabeth II. There is continuity and change both with respect to the institutions involved and with respect to their concepts. We understand institutions through their concepts, recognizing that the concepts themselves, and the meanings they convey, change. This means that in fact discussions of kinship, marriage, and parliament cannot refer to or mean the same thing over time or across cultures because these institutions may represent something different at different places and times.

Historians are scholarly specialists, purveyors of etic accounts, not emic ones.^[47] The point that I am trying to make, however, reflects that we think of each stage of the historian’s account of marriage in England as being the presentation of the etic point of view. Anthropologists, too, are scholarly specialists, and they have no difficulty in distinguishing—at least in principle—between what in their writings are emic and what are etic. If the factors cited by Leach and Needham enter into giving shape to a people’s conception of marriage, then we can see that when those factors change in the course of time, so will that people’s conception of marriage. But what about marriage—a kinship—as a concept of the science of anthropology? Needham and Southwold may be perfectly able to recognize that a people’s connection to any of their institutions may be changing over time, yet may still have strong doubts about the utility of kinship as a concept for anthropology.

The question may be divided in two; that is, we may take it that there are two questions mixed up here. For the one I shall mention first, I have no answer at all. As for the second, I have no answer either—I cannot pretend to predict the future state of anthropology so as to know what concepts will prove to be valuable.^[48] But I shall in the course of subsequent discussion, try to show that what particularly bothers Needham and Southwold about the concept of kinship—its lack of sharpness, concreteness, and concreteness of identity—need not be an impediment. The first question has to do with the concept of kinship not in this or that society, but in the history of anthropology. There has, after all, been a history of anthropology, and one of its most enduring interests, at least since Morgan, has been the study of kinship. I would suppose that an historical study of the matter would show that over the course of time anthropologists have had changing views of what kinship is, much in the same way that historians have had changing views regarding what history is. In fact, one might expect that different conceptions of the matter co-exist in time. Thus, historically speaking, the concept of kinship has never been a sharply defined concept. What the factors were which determined the different shapes it has taken, how it has been affected by theoretical and ideological commitments, experiences in the field, and so on, I cannot say. I suppose that there are analogous historical questions concerning the natural sciences too; for example, the concept of atoms may have an historical openness, but that view could be opposed by those who think of such concepts as having the entire meaning determined by the deductively formulated theories in which they function^[49] and who may wish, therefore, to see what seems to be the history of atomism as, rather, the succession of atomic theories each logically self-contained and not historically connected.^[50] Since there is no possibility that anyone will take the history of anthropology—or of the anthropological study of kinship—as a succession of deductively formulated theories, such considerations do not obtain here.

Those who are not used to thinking about open concepts or about conceptual tension as an essential feature of some concepts might suppose that what I have been saying is precisely why the concept of kinship is useless for science. This, of course, is the second question to which I referred in the previous paragraph. As I have already said, one cannot know in advance how useful any idea may presume to be. But I do want to turn to the next part of my discussion which is intended to show that failure to be sharply defined need not be a fatal flaw in a concept.

It is supposed that if one knows what a concept means, one knows how to apply it or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein contended, how to use it. What could we mean by “knowing what a concept means” except that one knows the necessary and sufficient conditions for its application or use. If observation leads us to conclude that some individual seems to be using a notion in a somewhat unusual way, not infrequently we incline to wonder how it is that person came to his mistaken usage. But increasingly, we are discovering that philosophical writers are sensitive to the ways in which concepts may be of such a logical nature that it is not possible to settle on fixed criteria in their application, that they are malleable or flexible, capable of assuming new shapes or contours as they are introduced into new circumstances. Some writers incline to credit Friedrich Waismann with the discovery that there are such concepts, and I believe, in any case, that it is to him that we owe the expression “open textured” that is used in reference to them. Indeed, it would seem that in Waismann’s work overall, concepts are open textured because there are “always other directions in which a concept has not been defined,” its future possibilities remain open.^[51] It is, of course, too much to credit one man at one particular moment with such a discovery. The germ of the idea is surely contained in the difference between Kant’s conception of rigid categories of understanding and C. I. Lewis’s socio-pragmatic view of the emergence and character of the basic ideas in terms of which we order our world. And this latter view, perhaps narrowly construed as to keep the socio-pragmatic constricted to the domain of science, bursts forth into the view that there are no purely descriptive terms—which would, I suppose, have to be sharply defined—independent of theory, hence, that factuality is theory-dependent. This view of the open-textured character of concepts, then, has roots in a number of philosophical sources, and while I would not wish to deprive Waismann of any credit that is his due, I would wish to argue that the concept of the polis in Aristotle’s Politics and that of freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of History are both open concepts, and that, surprising as this may seem to some readers, an attempt to describe open concepts is to be found in Collingwood’s An Essay on Philosophical Method, first published in 1933. To be sure, Collingwood thought that his account was limited to philosophical concepts, but that is an error in which we are not required to follow him.

Some features of concepts, which are flexible, are characterized by W. B. Gallie as “essentially contested,”^[52] by which he means that it is essential to the nature of the concept that it be the focus of disagreement. Perhaps many concepts are open if not essentially contested, especially those referring to human institutions. I do not want to go into the details of his presentation, but I cannot help but wonder if this need not be the case in principle, even though it may in fact be the case. Concepts like beauty and democracy are beyond any doubt subject to contestation, but arguments do sometimes manage to get resolved. The word “art”—let us restrict ourselves here to painting—has a wide extension, but on more than one occasion in the history of painting some new kind of work is produced to which critics are most reluctant to extend the word. After a time, both because discussion leads to a general willingness to alter the intention of the term so as to warrant the extension and because gradually we become used to what once was obtrusive, the initial reluctance is succeeded by a grudging acceptance and then, finally, acceptance without qualification. Of course, the argument will continue over what art is, but that is because new artists will be introducing new ways of creating, and so the old argument is repeated in a new form. But imagine that suddenly painting comes to an end. Nothing new is added to upset our aesthetic complacency. We could then find that in fact art qua painting is no longer contested, though given what we know of its history there is no question about its open texture. In my judgment, what is significant about the concepts we are talking about is the way in which their changing character is owing to the changing circumstance of their application. What seems to pervade Gallie’s discussion is that essentially contentedness is founded in differences of appraisal in a sometime sense. But one may suppose that the changing nature of anthropologists’ experience—rooted in changes in theory and changes in the conditions of field work—may lead to contestation over the concept of kinship. There could be differences in appraisal, yet these would not be of a normative sort—in the axiological sense—but rather differences of the sort which in time lead to general agreement among those who pursue the same scientific goals.^[53]

Given the way that contestation and appraisal figure in the literature on open concepts, it is not surprising that some of the best-known discussions come from the literature of moral philosophy. J. M. Brennan has some very interesting things to say about how moral concepts are not descriptive yet cannot be dispensed with in moral discourse inasmuch as they define the standpoint from which alone moral discussion and disagreement are possible.^[54] This would seem to make these regulative ideas in a Kantian sense. Kant distinguishes between the regulative ideas which may be said to define, and ideas are constitutive of the phenomenal world. It will be recalled that in Kant’s view there was no way for us not to apply the categories of the understanding since they were the logical means whereby rational beings as such constituted the world in which they found themselves. Purpose, on the other hand, was not such a constitutive idea, for one need not to think of nature or any part of it in purposive or teleological ways. However, if one wants to think about biological entities as organisms—not as reducible according to some mechanistic ideal—then one could not dispense with the idea of purpose. We could commit ourselves, if we think we have reason to, to the merchant’s ideal, but should we determine to think of organisms as non-reducible—that the embryological domain can never be a special case of the physiological^[55] —then we must think along lines regulated by the ideas of purpose.

The implications of thinking about open-textured concepts as regulative are far-reaching indeed; and as to the suggestion of Waismann that all concepts are open, we can expect that philosophers whose commitments in epistemology are realistic will stick at it. Even if we no longer think of categorical rigidities along Kant’s lines, realists would expect that the conception, in terms of which science is carried on, would be rather closer in logical character to his constitutive ideas than his regulative ones. It may be harder to defend—or even define—such an ideal for social science if one believes the ideas of the social sciences to be adequate to their goals. They must have their ground in the ideas and beliefs of the people being studied. The variety and variability we encounter in that domain make it very difficult indeed to formulate ideas that actually constitute the domain of kinship and marriage. One may suppose that underlying or presupposed by the tendency of some—even many or most—to reject the scientific utility of concepts which are not sharply defined is a commitment to realism, and perhaps my own willingness to take this seriously is rooted in my clear rejection of that point of view.^[56] Perhaps it will be suggested that this cannot be the case, given that Collingwood, who in my opinion made a serious and interesting attempt to characterize open concepts—though, of course, he didn’t think of them in those terms—was hardly a realist. Yet from the course of his discussion it is probably when he is willing to allow—perhaps to insist overly much—that the concepts of science are rigid. But I don’t think that too much can be made of this. As I observed above, Collingwood produced his book more than eighty years ago. He took for granted that there was a settled tradition among logicians concerning what the character of concept is. He had no interest in challenging or upsetting that tradition. He wanted only to show that the concepts of philosophy are different from those of use in empirical contexts.

My presentation in this section of material from Collingwood will be very selective. What I want to do is to appropriate from his discussion what I have found useful in thinking about concepts which are not sharply defined. The actual character of his argument, its false start and new beginnings, will not be worked out here. Indeed, candor requires me to admit that there are passages the point of which are not clear to me. I suspect that they contain ironic—if not actually sarcastic—references to the forms of analytical philosophy which had been displacing the philosophy with which he had been more comfortable, but I cannot be sure about it. I can only say that those who, after reading what follows, develop a keen curiosity to know what Collingwood actually argued, will know easily enough what recourse lies open to them. They may turn to An Essay on Philosophical Method itself: as in so many other issues, Collingwood on the matter in hand may be read with profit and pleasure.

The treatment of philosophical concepts in Collingwood’s book is divided into consideration of two aspects, the overlap of classes and the scale of forms. While it is the latter, with its emphasis upon the way in which the generic essence of a concept may be manifested in variable degree, which is, I think, more important for our purposes, I shall say something about the former as well. Collingwood takes it that the function of a concept is to unite different things into a class.^[57] I am not sure how adequate a view this is. Surely, it is not the function of the concept “free society” to classify societies so as to distinguish between those which exemplify a certain set of conditions and those which do not. But we need not labor that point now. Some concepts are classificatory, and we may think of Collingwood’s remarks as directed at concepts such as those. And he tells us that, according to the logicians, those concepts classify in two ways. They order together those entities which are properly subsumable under it, that is, its extension, and they specify the characteristic that members of the extensionment exemplify if they are to be members of the extension, that is, its intension. Things may instantiate the concept in different ways, and each of these ways is a species of the concept as genus.^[58] Thus, red, green, blue, and so on, are species of the genus individual present in the generic class that will be present in one, and only one, of the specific classes, which are thus exclusive in relation to each other and exhaustive in relation to the generic class. ^[59] The point seems to be that not only are the species exclusive in the stated way but also that it is of the nature of concepts that no entity can exemplify more than one species of the genus. With this Collingwood disagrees: “a work of art as such has a generic nature, which is differently realized in the specific natures of poetry and music. How, then, are we to classify a song? Neither the suggestion that in a song we have conflated two distinct works of art, one a poem and one a piece of music, nor that the song is a third species of art, neither poetry nor music, is acceptable; each flies in the face of common sense and experience.”^[60] Thus Collingwood concludes that a song is an instance of something containing two specific forms of the genus.

I think this example is more important than Collingwood seems to recognize, given that the observation is made and then he moves on without dealing with it any more. Of course, he is not engaged in the enterprise of analyzing the conceptual tension of open-textured concepts, a question which was hardly on the agenda of philosophy at the time he was writing his books. Thus we cannot fault him for not noticing what is made significant by the context of our present discussion. What I want to say about the kind of concepts we are interested in here is that they contain tensions which are not resolvable by analysis. These tensions are owing to the way in which the contingencies of experience enter into the formation of a concept, pushing it to the variety of ways in which it is expressed. If some determinate kinship system is undergoing change, then it may be characterized by the tension that is owing to its both being—in some way—and not being—in some other way—what that kind of kinship system is. Likewise, the concept of covenant that we find in the Hebrew scripture is both an agreement entered into by the parties to the covenant and a gracious gift of the God of Israel to his people. There is no point to talking about the separation or distinction by analysis of two separate concepts—covenant and gift—on the ground that a covenant which is a gift is a conceptual monstrosity. To affect such a separation is quite simply to destroy that historically determinate idea which is Old Testament covenant, for all of the tension of its two logically incompatible components. The idea of a song in Collingwood’s example, embodying or encapsulating as it does two mutually exclusive species of the genus art, is still another instance of conceptual tension which must continue if we are not to lose the concept of song altogether.

Collingwood then goes on to illustrate the standard logicians’ view of the nature of classificatory concepts from both the exact and the empirical sciences.^[61] Thus, a line is either curved or straight; no line can be both and there is no third species. There are other examples from mathematics, and collectively they are thought to justify the conclusion that “the concepts of exact science strictly conform to the rules of classification and division is laid down by logicians.”^[62] The examples from empirical science are from biology, the system of classification of the biological sphere being the point of reference. Unlike the situation in mathematics, there may be instances which seem to lie between the borders of the classification system and for which we lack the means of determining on which side of the line they actually belong, but these do not affect the principle involved. Given the logic of classificational concepts, the species are exclusive and exhaustive in the way indicated, and one supposes that cases of the sort indicated are merely fortuitous and that—in time and in principle—their proper location in the classificatory schema may be determined.

The next phase of Collingwood’s discussion of classification concepts is his attempt to argue that philosophical concepts do not—and cannot be expected to—conform to what the logical tradition tells us about concepts. The exclusiveness of the species—that something can belong to one and only one—is said not to be the case for philosophical concepts: “The specific classes of a philosophical genus do not exclude one another, they overlap one another.”^[63] Thus, logicians divide the genus thought into two species, proposition and inference, but it is not the case, Collingwood tells us, that these are exclusive inasmuch as “a judgment may also be an inference, an inference may also be a judgment.”^[64] And, with respect to the genus good, we are told that it is divided into three species, “the pleasant, the expedient, and the right.” But surely, what is pleasant is not infrequently both expedient and right, and so, clearly, here too the traditional classification of the logicians is not capable of doing justice to the specific character of a philosophical concept.^[65] Collingwood provides additional examples, but these are sufficient, I think, to make clear his purpose.

There are some notions which may seem, sometimes, to satisfy the conception of the logicians and sometimes not. Collingwood thinks that in the course of its history an idea may have a philosophical phase and a non-philosophical one.^[66] Thus, depending upon what stage it is in, that determines whether it satisfies what the logicians have taught about concepts. I think the circularity of this is patent. Show him a concept he takes to be philosophical being used in such a way that qua genus its species is exclusive and exhaustive, he has but to reply that you have discovered it in a non-philosophical phase. Thus, there would seem to be no easy way to take issue with what he says about overlapping classes being philosophical only. I think that the distinction simply has no point. Overlapping classes are exemplified by a series of entities which participate or partake variably in the generic essence of a concept. This is very common in art, history, religion, and the social realm. Where you have this kind of situation you have the sort of overlap in question.

It may be that the logicians to whom Collingwood adverts failed to notice the overlap of classes, and it may be that Collingwood became particularly sensitive to their presence while thinking about the logic of philosophical concepts. But since the point of departure for our present investigation is the anthropological literature on kinship, I should like to devote a bit of space to showing that it is possible to think of the concept of kinship—concerning which there can be no suspicion that it has a philosophical phase—as satisfying the condition specified by Collingwood for philosophical concepts. We said earlier that anthropological writers have discovered and distinguished a rather small number of kinship systems, not infrequently defined in terms of the terminology used for cousins. Working with a framework of theoretical interest in how such systems develop and change, we could imagine it being deemed useful to define the domain of theoretical interest as that of kinship systems, treat the concept of kinship as genus with respect to which each of the small number of identified kinship types is a species. On the face of it, it might seem that inasmuch as the kinship arrangements of any given society must be of one and only one of the type—Omaha, Dakota, or what have you—it would appear that collectively the set of kinship types specifies the genus in precisely the way that Collingwood tells us the logicians’ tradition claims.

But there are two further considerations that may subvert this conclusion. First of all, it might be possible to say of a society that some aspect or feature of it seems to be of type A, but some other of type B. I believe that I have actually read things which may be reconstructed in this way, but I took no serious note of it and can give no reference. But the point is possible in principle even if no instance actually exists, and since Collingwood’s is a point of principle, that may be all that is needed. But, second of all, what is the situation when a society is in the course of undergoing change from one kinship system to another? Obviously, it still exists. Equally obviously, even if it were fully an instance of one determinate species of the genus kinship system, and even if at the end of the process of change—if such a thing is conceivable—it becomes fully an instance of another such species, it must be something—or a sequence of something—in the course of the transition. In the course, it belongs to both, which seems to suggest that the species overlap. It is not difficult to see that this kind of thinking may be applied to all manner of domains of our cognitive interest. Thus it seems reasonable to conclude that the overlap of classes is a very common feature of our intellectual endeavors and of the domains of reality—however our different ontologies require that we take this expression—toward which those endeavors are directed.

A scale of forms is a series the entities of which differ from one another in both degree and kind. Indeed, it is change of degree that leads to change in kind.^[67] Thus, the sequence ice, water, steam constitutes a scale of forms since as we increase the degree of temperature applied to whatever it is that H₂O refers, we get its qualitative change from ice to water and from water to steam, which change is a change in kind. The example, by the way, is clearly not a philosophical one, and Collingwood does not really think that it represents a scale of forms of the sort that interests him (59f.), though I think it is a perfectly good example for getting an account of the matter going. Collingwood excludes this example—and non-philosophical examples like it—from the extension of this conception of a scale of forms because, as he says, “The variables are something extraneous to the generic essence,” and he goes on to explain what he means by saying that “thus the essence of water, that which is common to its solid, liquid, and gaseous forms, is represented by the formula H₂O, and heat does not appear in this formula either explicitly or by application.”^[68] Thus, while the degree of heat changes in the course of the transformation just mentioned, the generic essence of water is not affected. Collingwood would say that in any of its forms—solid, liquid, or gaseous—it participates in the generic essence of its concept in precisely the same way. In contrast to this, “where we find expositions of a philosophical . . . scale of forms we find the variable identified with the generic essence.”^[69] In the case just considered, the variable was the heat or degree of temperature, and that, Collingwood makes clear, has nothing at all to do with the generic essence of water. In a philosophical scale of forms, the generic essence itself is the variable which changes.

It is all right to formulate verbally the distinction between philosophical and non-philosophical scales of forms, but what is needed is attention to examples, lest we suspect that what we have is but a formal distinction having no application. The following paragraph is as clear an illustration as one could want.

Had Collingwood not himself offered this example, and in the unlikely event that I would have thought of it myself, I would have suggested that here, indeed, is an instance of a non-philosophical concept—I presume that the concept is that of felt or experienced heat—in which difference of degree and difference of kind were precisely as Collingwood says is the case for philosophical concepts only. As it happens, I can only suggest that Collingwood has begged the question, and, because concept has the character it has, simply presumes it to be in the philosophical phase of its history. Be that as it may, it does exemplify what he is trying to tell us about philosophical scales of forms. Other instances are provided. Taking it that the concept of art is a philosophical one, he can say that if “one work of art is more beautiful than another, no great subtlety of thought is needed to recognize that it is beautiful in a different way; it does not merely exceed the other, for the other has its own kind of beauty, and can only be beaten by one which achieves a beauty of a higher kind.”^[71] And in considering the concept of good things, the species of which are virtue, knowledge, and pleasure, he would have it that each shares in the generic essence of goodness but in different degrees, and that it is “impossible to recognize a genuine difference in kind in goodness without recognizing that in these kinds goodness is present in varying degrees.”^[72]

Some of what Collingwood has to say in the course of his discussion suggests to me that he is mainly thinking about normative or evaluative concepts, which again supports my contention that the concept of felt heat is not really properly included in his class of philosophical concepts. In any event, even though the lowest item in a scale of forms does not in fact share heat in the generic essence of its concept to whatever minimal degree, in comparison to its successor it doesn’t share in it at all: “The lowest case in the scale, when compared with the next above it, not only loses its own intrinsic goodness and acquires the character of badness, but it actually becomes identical with evil in general; in it the abstract idea of evil finds a concrete embodiment, and at this point in scale the achievement of goodness simply means the rejection of this one thing.”^[73]

If one may think of the course of development of some sequence of goods each of which shares in the generic essence of the same concept which each successive one possesses to a greater extent than its predecessor, then if after some stage has been reached there is then a reversion to an earlier stage, one may say that there has been a lessening of good, hence an increase of evil. Let us take the concept of humanity to refer to that set of bio-psychological entities toward whom we feel a sense of fellowship and with respect to whom we acknowledge moral obligations. And let us think of the concept of humanity as having a history such that in the course of time it is extended to ever-widening groups of people. At first humanity may mean little more than the family or even the tribe: we read of peoples whose word for “humanity” is their name for themselves. In the course of the progress of the idea it extends to an entire nation—the part of which were once always at loggerheads, if not bloody war—and ultimately to all of the human race. One may think that when the idea first encompassed the entire nation, it represented a positive advance, a most definite accretion of good in the world. Yet having once formulated the ideal of all mankind as morally responsible one for another, the reversion to that earlier stage represents unmitigated evil: How else shall we characterize the self-adulation of the German nation—and its ultimate expression in the Nazi program—after Kant’s enunciation of the ideal that each person should be treated as an end and never as a means?

In sum, for Collingwood, a philosophical scale of forms is one in which the generic essence is variable and every change in the degree or extent to which it is shared is equivalent to a change in kind. In addition, it seems also to be Collingwood’s belief that once some degree of excellence has been achieved, retrogression is not simply a loss of good but a positive accretion of evil. I am not certain how consistently this may be carried out. It is hard, for example, to see how one can talk in this evaluative way about felt heat; to be sure the extreme that means physical pain—and even change to the body—is beyond doubt evil, but it is not clear that there are degrees of goodness or desirability that are to be correlated with the less extreme degrees of felt heat. Nor is it clear that it holds for the species of the genus good thing—virtue, knowledge, and pleasure—for even if virtue is a good thing in higher degree and a better way than pleasure, there need be no incompatibility in pursuing them both, and to achieve pleasure need not entail a diminution of virtue. Thus, it would seem that only some of the scales in which Collingwood was interested are such that any stage of it “is good in itself, but bad in relation to the one above.”^[74] And there would have to be scales the stages of which emerge historically in a determinate sequence.

One thing that emerges from all this, and in spite of the initial stance that I have taken with regard to some of Collingwood’s claims, is that Collingwood has been telling us important things about concepts which are not sharply defined, that are flexible, changeable, and variable without ceasing to be identically continuous.

I have been claiming that Collingwood is mistaken in thinking that his is an account of philosophical scientific concepts, and I have wanted to say that what he has been saying may be said of other kinds of concepts as well. I want to illustrate this by attention to features of two examples, neither one of which seems to me to be all that unambiguously philosophical. The first is Aristotle’s conception of the polis, the second Hegel’s conception of freedom. It is not hard to recognize that there will be immediate opposition to this, that any number of readers—and Collingwood, too, were he alive—would reject outright the suggestion that these are not philosophical concepts. And not least among the possible reasons for such a stance would be that both of the authors cited are beyond doubt philosophers, and that both of the books from which the examples are drawn, Aristotle’s Politics and Hegel’s Philosophy of History, are philosophical books. I am not so preposterous as to compare myself to either of these two, but while virtually everything that I have written during the course of my life has some claim to be considered philosophical, my name does appear on the title page as an author of a book which is by no possible stretch of the imagination a work of philosophy,^[75] and no one who has ever read it could possibly—or, at least, reasonably—say that, since Goldstein is one of its authors it must be a work of philosophy. The Politics is logically a work of political science, and the analysis of the polis comes out of Aristotle’s treatment of the nature and change of sociopolitical systems. And Hegel’s treatment of freedom is a work of conceptual and institutional history. To be sure, both works contain much philosophical reflection and analysis. But it is possible to say that Collingwood’s analysis of the physical concept of simultaneity is a piece of philosophical analysis without being any less physical. The fact is I simply do not set much store by the rigid distinction of philosophical and non-philosophical concepts, and I think it fruitless to insist upon it. I should suppose that all theoretical science—not excluding Aristotle’s political science—contains an admixture of philosophy, which makes it all the more futile for anyone to attempt a characterization of philosophical concepts done in contradistinction to those of science.

If any part of Aristotle’s Politics may be called political science, as distinct from political philosophy, it is the material contained in Books III–V. The literature dealing with these books is vast, indeed, and it is not to be thought that my remarks in what follows are intended to be a contribution to it. I want, rather, to indicate briefly what it is about Aristotle’s treatment of the concept of the polis that suggests that the open-textured concept is already at work in this most pioneering contribution to the history of political science, hence of social science. Given Aristotle’s purposive way of construing whatever it is he deals with, we may expect that his conception of the polis will be purposive, too. And, indeed, it is: the polis is to be understood in a functional way, in terms of its contribution to the realization of what is particularly human—although, in practice, it may appear that what is particularly human means what is particularly Hellenic—the realization of the good life. That, to be sure, is not the most precise of expressions, but inasmuch as it is not that side of his account that is of interest to us here, it is perfectly serviceable. Thus the interest to us here is what is made of this instrument for the realization of the good life: how is it to be characterized? What we do not get is an attempt to state the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept polis, because experiences and observation show that there is not simply one type or sort of institutional entity which exhausts the generic essence of polis. Rather, what Aristotle discovers is that there are six different kinds of such entity. Three of them—monarchy, aristocracy, and something that might be called a constitutional sort of regime—are taken to be moral or healthy sorts of polity. The other three—tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy (in the sense of power in the hands of the masses not tempered with the restraint and judiciousness that the other classes of society might contribute—are taken to be perversions of the polis. That all six are taken to be forms of the polis, are taken to exhibit in different degrees the generic essence of that concept, actually creates a problem for Aristotle’s purposive conception of the polis. For, according to his account, the perverse forms do not realize the good life for the citizens of the polis but are used to further the selfish ends of those who control it. One sees, then, the polis/state serving as an instrument of exploitation along Marxist lines. One would think that, given Aristotle’s method of analysis, inasmuch as the six do not function—to be sure, in variable degree—to further the same end, they cannot be said to be instances—species—of the same genus. However, as interesting as this problem may be, and whatever its possibilities either to correct Aristotle or point to its limits of purposive method of analysis, it is not an issue that can be dealt with here. Instead, I shall limit my attention to the three licit forms of the polis, forms which, Aristotle tells us, are, indeed, concerned with the good life of the governed.

As we have seen, there are three of these: kingship, aristocracy, and the constitutional form. The most obvious way in which they are distinguished is in the locus of power. In kingship, power is in the hands of the one, and in the ideal, in the one who is best fitted to rule. In aristocracy, the locus of power is in that minority of the population who are as a group the best. This is in contrast to the case of oligarchy, where the power lies not with the best but with the rich intent upon becoming richer. In the final form, the power lies with the many, but the many conceived of as responsible citizens, not the part of democracy swayed by the demagogue en route to becoming a tyrant. I do not intend to characterize these three in detail. But I do want to say that they clearly satisfy Collingwood’s conception of a scale of forms. Each of them may be a polis, exemplifying, as it were, the generic essence of that concept. But the difference between monarchy and aristocracy is not simply one of degree, a nominal reference with respect to the locus of power. An aristocracy is quantitatively different from a monarchy; we have precisely what Collingwood considers to be a difference in degree which is a difference in kind. And so on to include the third form: for surely a sociopolitical world in which the entire body of citizens participates actively in the endeavor to achieve the good life is different in kind from a polity in which the majority are the passive beneficiaries of the philosophy—taken literally or etymologically—of the one or the few.

We find similar considerations when we turn to the notion of freedom in Hegel’s Philosophy of History. I have already made reference to my “Dialectic and Necessity in Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” which is devoted to this manner, and here I want only to sketch some relevant points. The main part of the book, following its introduction, is taken up with an historical-dialectical account of the concept of freedom. Hegel indicates that freedom emerges in ancient days in China and in the course of the generations, centuries, millennia, it moves westward constantly undergoing changes of shape. In the course of his account, Hegel deals with a succession of word-historical peoples whose folk spirits manifested especially in their states or cultures,^[76] and influenced the successive characters of the concept in question. It is often said that, for Hegel, in China one is free, in Greece some are free, and in the modern world all are free. It is impossible to exaggerate how much of a simplification this formulation is. The analysis that Hegel offers does not, for example, go from China to Greece, but goes from China to India, various ancient Middle Eastern countries, including Judea and Egypt, before going on to Greece. Each of these is presented as having its own distinctive culture, conception of subjectivity, and form of freedom. Yet, for the purpose immediately before us, I think that adopting the simplification will cause no harm. So, let us think of Hegel’s account as having only three stages and consider them briefly. For Hegel, freedom is the unity of subjectivity and substantivity. Subjectivity is clear enough, and Hegel means little else than the feeling of a free person for being unconstrained or unfettered. Substantivity—sometimes called “its universal”—is the non-subjective contrast of will; it is that which one seeks to achieve in terms of the real possibilities—not merely logically possible ones—defined by the sociocultural reality within which one has one’s life.^[77] By this he means whereby the subject may realize the contrast of his will and the instituted means which are provided by the subject’s soul world. In Hegel’s view, the nature of the substance and the institutional means whereby it may receive expression and realization both develop during the course of a mutually intertwined history.

I suppose that an effort to define the generic essence of freedom in the concept of Hegel’s account would involve the mixing of subjectivity and substantivity. At every step of the account, we are provided with a description of what each of them is in the culture of the given world-historical people. In China only one is free, but in Hegel’s opinion—I cannot present the details—only one experiences himself as subject, so that his being free is not a circumstance which infringes upon the subjectivity of those others who are not that one. If we move on to Greece, we see that many are free, though not all, it being notorious that Greek society depended upon the existence of slaves. Yet more than one is free here, and, in the ideal, in Greek politics we ought to find a body of citizens jointly concerned with the realization of collective good in which they all participate. In Hegel’s view, in China the substantial is located in the feat of the emperor—to one free man—but in Greece it is located sociocultural means—think of Socrates’s discussion of the laws in Plato’s Crito—whereby citizenship receives its definition. The contrast of these two alone makes it clear that the difference between China and Greece is not merely of degree, but the number of those who are free. Rather, the difference in number is inextricably linked to a difference in kind: the institutional arrangements which support the freedom of the one in China are entirely unlike those which support the freedom of the some in Greece. It will be recalled that in Collingwood’s account of the exile of forms, once we have achieved a higher stage of expression of the generic essence, to revert to an entire stage is to revert to evil, no matter how much that earlier stage represented an increase of good when it was first manifested. The idea of freedom seems to be an idea of the sort which exemplifies that feature, though, as I have already indicated, I do not think that it is the case for all scales of forms. That some were free is surely better than that only one is free, but that all are free is better still. Yet to revert from the modern condition—on Hegel’s view of it—is not merely to replace a greater good with a lesser good, it is clearly to make worse—to add evil to what was once better.

Why do forms of polity—and the notions we require if we are to speak of them—and conceptions of freedom change the way they do? I would myself claim that this is always owing to the impact upon them of factors of experience which are logically contingent to the concept yet are part of the circumstances to which the concept is applied. Both Aristotle and Hegel in their respective accounts cite such factors which subject concepts to change over time. I do not wish to present here what their accounts are like, for I am not concerned with their particular theories and their possible reformulations so as to make it possible to deal with them in ways that contemporary social scientists would deal with problems such as theirs.

In the present section of this study, I have tried to do a number of things. I have tried to show that Collingwood’s conception of conceptual flexibility has application even to concepts of the sort I—if not Collingwood—refuse to admit are purely philosophical concepts. And while I have chosen—from Aristotle and Hegel—concepts which are classified in a way, I have chosen concepts which belong to the sociopolitical-historical sphere, which, as such, resemble concepts which function in social science. And, finally, I have tried to indicate that in the way that Aristotle and Hegel deal with the subject matter of these respective concepts, it is clear that they recognize that the sphere from which those contingent factions come, which make their impact on the concepts before them, is precisely the sphere that attracts the attention of social scientists.

But if there are suggestive parallels between social scientists and the classic philosophical writers, there is little to be gained by trying to force them together too far. Thus, I have no desire to explore the possibility that one distinction between Aristotle and Hegel is that in the former we find anticipated the observer’s standpoint, whereas in the latter the participant’s position is privileged. This might suggest itself inasmuch as the notions we find treated by Aristotle—the three species of the genus polis—are recurrent, and Aristotle goes so far as to offer an explanation intended to specify the circumstances under which one will be replaced by another. The Hegelian account of the idea of freedom, to the contrary, is not a theory of occurrence at all, and so it might be thought that at each stage of the history with which Hegel presents us we find an attempt to characterize the sociocultural world of a world-historical people as might be experienced from their own point of view. The distinction is an important one if for no other reason than the point of departure for this study comes from the literature of anthropology, and anthropologists are very keen on the distinctions regardless of how individual anthropologists would assess the relative importance of the two standpoints. In the discussion which follows, I intend to let the distinction stand as we receive it from the literature. But I should like to make one caveat, though once I have made it I shall not let it intrude upon what follows.^[78] And that is that I do not think that in the actuality of the practice of anthropology the distinction is all that radical. No matter how dependent the fieldworker may be upon his informants, the reconstruction of what is supposed to be the natives’ standpoint is the reconstitution of the anthropologist. For him it is a standpoint hence conventional, not rational. Surely, no anthropologist simply records; there is a point to anthropological inquiry, and it is not the point of the natives.

I shall not bother to contrast this observation with one we have clearly seen Martin Southwold to have made to the effect that the trouble with the concepts used by anthropologists in such matters is that they are not sufficiently unambiguous. I want, rather, to attend to what it is that Leach himself is trying to say. He seems to be complaining about something, and that something has apparently to do with anthropologists believing the way scientists normally do. Though he does not say so explicitly, I think that we may infer from what he does say that in Leach’s view there is something about the subject matter of social structure that makes it inappropriate for anthropologists to approach it in the manner normal to science, notwithstanding how much anthropologists do tend to make the fact that they are, indeed, scientists, not scientists of a sort. Normal scientists’ behaviorism is all right for normal scientists’^[80] subject matter, and that, I take it, means a subject matter that is itself inflexible or refined: rocks and planets and what have you. Because anthropologists try to believe like normal scientists that what they have managed to do is to assimilate their inherently unstable, ever-changing objects of study to that of those who are appropriately normal scientists, hence their structural forms emerge as data.

The terms cited in the quotation from Leach, and many others like them, most certainly do appear in the writings of anthropologists devoted to kinship systems and social structure. The extent, however, to which they are unambiguous and sharply defined is not itself all that certain. If they are anthropologists’ terms, then we might expect that what they mean would be reflective of anthropologists’ experiences from anthropologists, qua practitioners of a discipline which has its own determinate ways of carrying out its business. But these ways are not settled all at once. We know from such historical sketches and overviews as are available, that over the decades anthropologists have approached this investigation in different ways. To be sure, the kind of terminology cited by Leach may be found in virtually all of the decades in question. But if they are used in different—changing—contexts of work, one must expect that their meanings change as well. Thus they may well not be sufficiently open textured so as to be adapted flexibly to the continuously emerging insight of anthropologists. These are insights which need not themselves be merely idiosyncratic but simply reflect the ways in which both the cumulative result of their own work and the growth in related fields affect what anthropologists do and how they conceptualize what they do.

To see just precisely how all this developed we would need to have what, as far as I know, we do not actually have: a detailed history of the study of kinship systems and social structure with special attention—and in detail—to its conceptual nature. But whether we have it or not, I can easily inspire some readers reacting with impatience and disdain to the last two paragraphs. Those readers would want to insist—and not without justice—that that is not the sort of thing that Leach is trying to talk about. The character of his terminology has for the moment a fixed and unambiguous meaning, and it is that terminology fixed in the indicated way, that he seeks to hoist upon the subject of his study. I might demur from the suggestion that it is even fixed for the moment, because if one thinks that it is likely to keep on undergoing change he must suppose it always to be open textured. But this is closely a relative matter, and Leach’s point, in the end, is that the terminology is too rigid for the purpose of capturing or encapsulating something as open ended as human social intercourse. If you think of terms as unambiguous, you think of them as being defined independent of specific applications, the point being that you know how to apply them precisely because you know what they actually mean, what the conditions are that are necessary and sufficient for their use. In a paper first written earlier than the ethnography to which reference has just been made, Leach says the following: “A kinship term in isolation has no significance; it is the relationship expressed by a pair of reciprocal terms which has structural importance and which can be interpreted in terms of behavior.”^[81] Thus, it is clear that in Leach’s view to know what the term means one is required to attend to the context of its use, to discover in the field what are the means of behavior and the ideals of culture which are involved in the term’s use in native contexts. This would be a strange thing to say about anthropologists’ terms, and thus it is clear that what Leach is not talking about is natives’ terms. And this is the case even if the anthropologist chooses to use English words to gloss the terms of the natives’ own language, it being too much to expect readers of his ethnography to keep in mind some dozens of terms in a strange language being met for the first time.

This reading is reinforced by a comment made later in the same paper: “I hold . . . that the type of structural analysis favored by Radcliffe-Brown postulates a formal rigidity which is not found in practice, so that it is always necessary to consider carefully in what sense these final implications are a reflection of actual behavior.”^[82] He goes on immediately to add the following:

One may notice that we seem to shift between the perfective of observer and actor and terminology suitable for each. It is not surprising to see Radcliffe-Brown cited as exemplifying conceptual rigidity. But it would not be at all that difficult to inspire a Radcliffe-Brown reply to Leach’s criticism. It would point to the fact of Radcliffe-Brown’s conception of what he was doing. Social anthropology is a corporative discipline and, thus, requires a system of concepts that makes possible the comparison of institutional forms that are to be found in many societies. This is not the same thing as attempting to describe the behavior of actors within the same society in terms of the norms and ideals that underlie that behavior and give point to how they, the natives, talk about what they do. It is, of course, the case, that we have reason to suspect that the conceptual tools with which to carry out the tasks that Radcliffe-Brown set for himself may themselves be open textured, affected in ways indicated by the history of the discipline, but that is not the immediate issue between Leach and him. It would seem to me that Leach’s point is that he define one’s tasks as rendering intelligible the social behavior of specifically determinate peoples, and thus to put at risk, the comparative and thematical character of social anthropology. I think it is not unfair to say that within the field there is insistence on both, and that by the very same people. Thus, we find a conceptual tension in the very self-definition of social anthropology.^[83]

The passage with which my last quotation from Leach alone ends—”there is no obvious relationship between the kinship terminology and the social order as manifested in actual behavior”—gives expression to two thoughts. The one is that the sort of analysis he associates with Radcliffe-Brown cannot do what Leach and others want to have done. Perhaps its potentialities have been exhausted and new ways^[84] of work must be devised, rather like the way in which no one can compose music in the romantic style any longer. The other implies that the ethnography of kinship and civil organization ought to be done in such a way that the terminology be understood only as giving expression to the sort of behavior that is manifested in a particular given society. Thus, the terms are to be understood, not as they might be numbers of our own society, nor as abstract and conveniently available for whatever comparative purposes the theorist may have in mind. I think it not unreasonable to suggest that the ethnography that Leach actually published in 1954, Political Systems of Highland Burma, is a clear reflection of this kind of ethnographic ideal. He seems willing to concede that “in matters social, it is English which is usually the more precise language,”^[85] in contrast, that is to say, to the language of the Kachin people who are the subjects of his book. But I wonder if he really thought that this would be what he would find had he undertaken an ethnographic study of an English-speaking community, that it simply reflects the fact that the kind of rigid analysis he went out to produce in his book is usually written in English—English words to gloss native terms. He goes on to warn us that if we attempt “to interpret a social structure by means of analytical categories which are more precise than those which the people use themselves, one injects into the system a specious rigidity and symmetry which may be lacking in the real life situation.”^[86] He goes on immediately to add,

It is not ambiguity in some untoward sense that science is usually at pains to avoid that is involved here, but the elasticity that Leach invokes toward the end. What he is, in effect, telling us is that the categories—and their attendant terms—with which the Kachin organize their social behavior and talk about it is open textured. It is this that permits them to apply a coherent pattern of ideas to what appears to be a miscellany of behaviors. But if Leach is one of the earliest writers to give expression to this ideal of an ethnography which treats the conceptualization of the natives as open textured, he is by no means the only anthropologist to produce ethnographies in accord with it. In what follows, I shall deal briefly with a number of such ethnographies in order to give some idea of what they are like and some indication of the different sort of factors that different scholars have seen that changes and gives shape to the concepts used.

It is not possible in brief to do justice to the rich detail in any of the ethnographies to be considered here, and surely not to P. H. Gulliver’s Neighbors and Networks,^[87] the first of the works to be dealt with. In the account presented by Gulliver, kinship proves to be a very open sort of thing, as extremely unlike structural rigidity as one could define. Not infrequently, the anthropological literature on kinship leads us to think of concrete kinship groups which have some determinate stability over time, but we see little, if anything, of that in Gulliver’s account. Rather, the process of kinship is not genealogical—though I would not wish to say that genealogical considerations are excluded—but in work groups, groups which come into being for the purpose of working on behalf of some specific individual, mainly in connection with the requirements of subsistence. Thus, the “range of kinship was ego-centered, and therefore to some extent the set of kin—neighbors of one resident of kin—were consequently unlikely, if not impossible.”^[88] Gulliver makes clear from very early on in his book that what we have in the society he studied is “a non-lineal kinship network” which can be treated as if it were “virtually unbounded and infinite.”^[89] “Infinite,” of course, is a bit of an exaggeration, and the important point is the untowardness of the system being employed. There is hardly anyone who may not under appropriate circumstances be included in the network which defines the action group of some particular persons; there are all manner of reasons which may lead to the exclusion of someone who was, at an earlier time, part of the network. Obviously, if kinship was construed as it has been more traditionally, to speak in this way would make no sense. There are some for whom it would be strange to speak of the networks and action groups described by Gulliver in kinship terms, but it is precisely Gulliver’s point that in the native’s own usage these things are built within terms of the idiom of kinship.

By means of many detailed examples, which I cannot review here and are available in Gulliver’s book to anyone who cares to read ethnography, he shows us how the idiom of kinship operates in Ndendeuli society. Kinship and cooperation appear to be virtually correlative, to such an extent that we discover—and, indeed, so in the natives’ speech—kinship relationships coming into being where they hadn’t existed before and ceasing to be when they are no longer useful. There are instances in which contributions to the solutions of matters in dispute are made or not, depending not on the individual’s sense of fairness in justice, but, rather, with reference to his own self-interest as he understands it. And he knows that what he does, in fact, do will affect not simply his personal relationships with the parties to the dispute, but his kinship relationships to them.^[90] How are we to take this kind of thing? We can’t really say that what we have here is simply an extension of kinterms to non-kin with whom one develops personal relationships of one sort or another. To begin with, from a genealogical standpoint the people involved in the sort of network Gulliver describes are already related, which is precisely what we would expect in a small society. They are not, however, always related in the way you’d expect if you interpret the terminology on genealogical terms. The fact is that Gulliver, himself an anthropologist and trained in the ways of people of that sort, takes genealogies and from time to time makes statements which reflect his benign required knowledge of that sort. Thus, he remembers that the “range of men’s kinship relations^[91] contained a fairly large number of genealogically defined linkages, and the genealogical structure of kin-sets showed a good deal of irregularity.”^[92] These seem to offer only vis-à-vis the anthropologically generated knowledge of genealogical kinship understood in the traditional way. But when Gulliver attends to the actual practices of the Ndendeuli, we do not find irregularities, but relationships which are, in the native idiom, relationships of kinship.

That kinship terms can be applied and withdrawn from the same individual suggests that they are open textured, and when I first read Gulliver’s book I thought he was just about as open textured as could be. While it is clear that the system described is, indeed, a very open one, with networks developing in all manner of ways largely in accord with the interests of individuals and with comparatively little structural constraint, I now suspect that my initial reaction needs a bit of qualification. Gulliver is, after all, trying to present an ethnography, and he is not particularly interested in the problem of conceptual tension. Thus, he does not present his initial theory with any questions in mind. From the standpoint of kinship qua genealogical, Ndendeuli kinterms seem very open textured and may be applied to all manner of people who are related in genealogically different terms. But if the idiom of kinship among the Ndendeuli is not genealogical,^[93] if the terms are applied according to other criteria entirely, say criteria of social intercourse and cooperation, they may prove to be less open than I thought at first. Yet, for all that, I do think that Gulliver’s account shows them not to be sharply defined either. And the factors thought to effect the conceptual shapes they come to have—factors which are logically contingent relative to these natives—come from the sphere we might think of as the social organization of subsistence and cooperation. Though there are relevant details in Gulliver’s book, I see no purpose of the present study that would be served by presenting them here.

The second of the ethnographies we are to look at briefly is one of several volumes that Melford Spiro has devoted to Burma.^[94] The account in Spiro’s book is rather more traditional than what we have found in Gulliver. But its interest for us here is less than the way in which he attends to factors—neither linguistic nor genealogical—but that he likes to be relevant in the ways in which people think about and function within the sphere of kinship. In the early pages of the book, Spiro notes references to views and orientations other than his own, but the first real intimation of what he will be saying comes from his criticism of componential analysis, a critique to which he devotes considerably more space than to other positions he mentions. For what follows, I should be attending to what Spiro says about componential analysis because it is this that leads to his own approach. There is, in consequence, no attempt by me to be fair to those who views are criticized; I have made an effort to consult the works cited by Spiro in order to determine for myself the extent to which he does them justice. I confess that for a while I thought that I ought to have an account of their views presented in this study. This is the case because if Spiro is right, componential analysis would seem to be an orientation toward the terminology of kinship that likes it to be a sphere of sharply defined terms of concepts. In the end, I decided to let Murdock and Radcliffe-Brown satisfy the need for such in the present study, finding myself more inclined to deal with their socialized procedures rather than an approach that treats kinship as a separate domain.

Spiro begins his critique by offering a statement of what he takes componential analysis to be.

Spiro then goes on to say that for this kind of analysis the crucial problem is the identification of significant features: “For componential analysts, the attributes of kinsmen that constitute their significant feature for their classification are the ‘inherent distinctions’ of kintypes—sex, relative age, generation, lineality, and the like—which they conceive to be the ‘properties of genealogical space.’”^[99] After discussing some examples, Spiro then asserts: “To the best of my knowledge, no native speaker has been found anywhere who defined his kinterms by means of these criteria—at least not exclusively.”^[100]

What Spiro doesn’t like about componential analysis is that it likens kinship to be a domain which is independent of the actual psychological give-and-take of real human interrelationships. It is clear from what he says—as well as from what he does when he describes the sphere of kinship in the course of his ethnographic presentation—that in Spiro’s view we cannot expect to understand the sphere of kinship by attending namely—much less solely—to terms and their meanings in genealogical space. We know that there are societies which do not distinguish terminologically between mother and mother’s sister, and about that Spiro says that “to contend that because the kintypes ‘mother’ and ‘mother’s sister’ are not denoted by separate terms, they have no separate cognitive meanings, reveals the limitations of a theory that confines cognitive meaning to semantic—and specifically, referential—meaning, and assumes that objects have no conceptual status unless they are named.”^[101] Spiro immediately adds that if we attend less to kinterms—and more to behavior—it can be shown that since conceptions of kinsmen are, to a large extent, acquired in the process of interaction with them, children’s “conceptions of kin are often acquired prior to their acquisition of kinterms,” and he goes on to add that they may acquire the terminology with reference to him whose exact genealogical relationship to them they don’t even know. If behavioral variability is solvent to those questions of conception, concepts are rather more open textured than we would expect on the assumptions of componential analysis.

Spiro’s approach to the determination of what kinship means is “six pronged.”^[102] This suggests that kinship is to be understood as the outcome of the interaction of a number of elements which enter into and emerge from the experiences of the individuals who constitute the society. Given the variability which all this invokes, one must suppose that what kinship means cannot be some explicit state of conditions for the application of a set of terms to a collection of relatives. Without presenting the details of Spiro’s ethnography of the Burmese people he selected, one can see readily enough that if his practice does in fact accord with his program—readers will have to decide that for themselves—we have, once again, the expectation of an account of kinship as open textured.

Early in his study of Malay kinship, David Banks tells us that the Malays make use of the ideas of closeness and distance in composing relationships, and likewise the distance between heavy and light. The first distinction, he goes on to explain, has to do with the degree of relationships, the second with “probable or preferable consequences.” He then proceeds to say something important about the program of his book:

I don’t know who he has in mind when he speaks of “neo-Kantians”; certainly no one held such a view about categories more strongly than the original non-neo-Kantian, Kant himself. And it is the neo-Kantian, C. I. Lewis, who had interesting and stimulating things to say about how our basic categories are affected by our histories and the sociopragmatic chamber of our experience in a work that Banks might have found worth his while.^[104] In any event, the particular form that Banks’s study is instructed to take part in is to put the “study of kinship categories within ecological context” in order to study “the relationship between kinship ideas and man’s place in nature.” This seems to be justified by the observation, “So the relationship of man to nature changes, one may assume that the relationship between men also changes, as have their meanings of those relationships.”^[105] It is possible to specify the purposes that are served in the course of Banks’s book. On the one hand, he attempts to tell us what kinship consists in, and that, one may presume, would point to the sorts of factors the changes of which give rise to the changing conceptions indicated in the long passage quoted above. And, on the other hand, a good point of Banks’s test tells us about the role kinship plays in the major components which make up social life in the Malaysian society to which the book is devoted. Banks informs us that the Malays have no word that “covers the semantic terrain of the English term ‘kinship,’”^[106] and while I do not recall any of the other anthropologists whose work is cited in this study making similar observations about the language spoken by the peoples they study, I should not be surprised if this were not an uncommon situation. And I suppose that once one is aware of the possibility that the domain of kinship is an open-ended one to the functioning of which an open-textured terminology is essential, there is an advantage to not doing a verbal switch with which to indicate what it is. It is, I should guess, that he did not have a Malay term upon which to depend. Banks makes the point that he intends to use a number of Malay terms.^[107] He is required to discover just how the native population characterizes the domain he seeks to explicate, and to discern the way in which the native concepts of closeness and weight, and their correlatives, distance and lightness, are used to characterize the ways in which people are related within what he calls “the social field.”^[108] Malay Kinship is constituted by a number of elements, rather than simply nearness and weight, by means of which kinship seems to be defined. The qualification contained in the previous sentence is surely justified by what Banks himself says: “Consanguinity is one important determinant of closeness and weight of social relationships.”^[109] The common—or traditional—view is that kinship is made up of consanguinity and affinity, but here we see that the field of investigation for Banks’s inquiry is not one to be understood in genealogical terms, but is, rather, a field to which the genealogical is but one determinant, though to be sure an important one. There are, however, others, and Banks subsumes them under two wide-ranging headings: the sphere which he says may be likened to the rationalist, means-ends, voluntarist, need-satisfying model of Western sociology, and the sphere which is said to be the “spiritual basis of social relationships.”^[110] With respect to the former, people are brought into all manner of interpersonal relationships in the course of their trying to achieve determinate goals. These determine in part nearness and weight, and thus contribute to the shape and character of the domain before us. As to the former, Banks takes it to be more difficult to find tangible expressions of it, but it is a sphere that reflects the impact of the Muslim faith on the people of the community studied. And Banks notes that the people tend to see this spiritual element in dyadic terms: they understand the way individuals are related or share a social field, and the end (they tend?) to be rather wary of such general notions as “brotherhood” or “village interest props.”^[111]

Banks devotes chapters to how each of these spheres plays its role in the interpersonal relations of the people in his Malay community. I do not wish to sketch these here; I do not see how that would serve the purpose of the present study. What I want to emphasize is that if the domain of kinship is one which is defined by the concepts of nearness and weight, which are, in time, determined in their application by the variability of social relations, it is not difficult to see that it is an open-ended domain into understanding why Banks did not choose to make use of ethnographic techniques which would tie him to the relative rigidities of genealogical emphasis. And while I do not wish to insist on it, and cannot exactly sense how one can make it work, one may wonder if the domain defined by nearness and weight as variables may satisfy Collingwood’s ideas of a domain in which changes in the variable produce changes in the generic essences both in degree and in kind.

Finally, I want to refer briefly to one more study, mainly because it introduces for our consideration an additional element which we have not seen discussed in the other ethnographies, namely, the element of ideology. Let me say at once, Roberto da Matta does not seem to mean by this term what readers familiar with its Marxist usage may expect. Rather, it seems to refer to basic beliefs, as much, it would seem, with ontology as with anything else. In any event, what da Matta thinks is appropriate in the approach to the study of kinship is clear in the following passage:

What da Matta claims to be doing is to reverse the usual approach in the analysis of kinship. Others seem to imply “that the terminology reveals the ideology, or at least is in its examination,” but in da Matta’s approach “ideology is taken as the basis for the analysis of the terminology.”^[113] Readers will have noticed, of course, that toward the end of the long passage quoted da Matta is, in effect, rejecting the genealogical approach. It is surely clear by now that it is only from the standpoint of that approach that one can distinguish between kinship properly so called and the alleged extension of kinship terms to fictional pseudo-kin. Implicating what da Matta says here is the view that one is required to explore the full range of social situations with which the kinship terminology functions in order to determine what it means, and not assume a priori that one range of usage is what the term really means and the rest is honoris causa.

I do not wish to discuss what precisely are the ideological elements which enter into the Apinayé kinship system as these are presented by da Matta,^[114] nor deal any further with the system as such. He does believe that attention to the sort of factor he wishes to introduce into the discussion eliminates perplexities which arrive from the traditional, formal analysis.^[115] But to spell all this out would take as much space as da Matta devotes to it in his paper, and the interested reader can look for himself. The point for us is that once again we discover an approach to kinship which makes sense only on the assumption that we are dealing with a field of inquiry which requires that the concepts used be open textured.

One persistent feature of our intellectual life is the quest for precision, exactitude, and certainty when the experience which is its point of departure is hardly conducive to such a goal. To be sure, we cite Aristotle to the effect that we ought not to seek more exactitude than a particular subject matter allows, and that is supposed to permit us to require less from ethics than from physics, yet there has always been a mood in political philosophy—which I incline to think of as Platonic and which can be traced early enough from Plato to Marx and beyond—which is not content to accept the looseness—not to say sloppiness—of human existence and is satisfied only if it can impose rigid constraints on the human social realm. The rational world, however, is not all that conclusive to rigid apprehensions: that we accompany our measurements with application of a margin of error rests upon the assumption that nature is exact, but our actual experiences with measurement are equally compatible with Charles Peirce’s view that so pervasive is evolution in the world that even the very lows of nature themselves are constantly evolving and that at any point in time they survive only loosely. And I need not emphasize how far removed from the religious experiences of religious people is the theological demand that God be characterized in certain absolute terms: the suppliant who reminds God of injustice overlooked is hardly praying to One who is all knowing, and the Abraham who demanded that God justify His divine purpose with Sodom and Gomorrah could not have believed that what God wills is right in virtue of His infinite goodness.

The inglorious demands of the philosophy of science which dominated for the largest part of the twentieth century have been replaced with a sense of what science is and what science can do that is less exacting. This philosophy of science is informed by an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the history of science, as evident by the work of Thomas Kuhn and his concepts of normal science and scientific revolutions. The literature is vast and cannot be reviewed here. One good thing about this change in intellectual climate is that it should remove a good deal of the pressure felt by at least some practitioners of social science to make what they do accord with what is done in the hard sciences, the exact sciences, or risk the possibility that what they do is not science at all. Why would the possibility that the study of kinship is the study of what might be characterized with precision and abstracted from the buzzing confusion of the everyday existence of people in society have been so attractive to those pioneers of this study except for the fact that it would enable them to input into the science of social anthropology ideals of theory and practices which seemed so settled on those branches of science which had become the very models of how knowledge was to be defined? It is really no longer necessary to say with Needham and Southwold that there is no such field as the story of kinship since the terms with which it is carried out cannot be defined with precision.^[116]

It would be nice if I could pull this study to a clear conclusion. One reason for my not being able to do so is that within it there is a tension between the open concepts of the discipline itself—those which emerge from the ongoing development of the observers’ standpoint in the course of the history of the discipline—and those of the many hundreds and thousands of native informers who have supplied anthropologists with what they know about how natives live and think about what they do. There is no way that I can effect a resolution of the tension, and I incline somewhat to suspect that, in the end, it may not be susceptible to resolution in principle. Even to those anthropologists most committed to reconstructing the emic standpoint of the native, that standpoint is a standpoint, not an inevitable vision of the world. The most I seem to be able to say is that the reality of the investigation requires precisely that it be approached with concepts which are open textured—which are capable of encapsulating the tensions effected in concepts by the impact upon them of the contingencies of experience—and so what we require to have in the discipline is a conceptual apparatus which is sufficiently flexible so as to give expression to the genuine essence of the concept of kinship—in the required broad sense—in the variability of its manifestation.

In discussing the open texture of kinship terms, I have suggested that there is likely two courses of development that I was not able to keep apart. On the one hand, we have the terminology of some people, and one may suppose that the way in which the native terminology is open to change—intrinsically and extensionally—is rooted in the character of its own experience relative to the usage of such terms. And, on the other, we have the terminology qua the conception of tools of anthropological analysis, and we may suppose that the kind of openness one may find here is rooted in the experience of anthropologists or field workers and theorists.

With this in mind, the high historical sketch by Lamont Lindstrom of the notion of “big man”^[117] which we find in the anthropological literature is worth our attention. The term appears in certain ethnographies and is used to refer to individuals who occupy certain positions of leadership. By “positions” I do not mean specific offices. The question is, how is such a term used and how are we to account for the vagaries of its history? Lamont Lindstrom’s account is written with reference to a body of ethnographic studies with which I have no familiarity, and, given that it was published in the American Anthropologist, intended for an audience concerning which the author could expect familiarity with the literature rather like his than mine. Thus, I risk getting some of the facts wrong. But I do think I’ve got the gist of the exposition right, and I do think it both interesting in its own terms and relevant to what I am trying to do here in studying conceptual openness and tension.

The initial expectation of European visitors to Melanesian peoples was that there would be chiefs among them, and while Captain James Cook, for example, claims that such were pointed out to him, those so indicated did not seem to perform as chiefs. Clearly, the chief was to satisfy certain expectations, and if the term were to be extended to the Melanesian individuals which were pointed out to Cook and the men who were with him, the word “chief” would have to undergo certain changes. As flexible as the word may in fact be, apparently it wasn’t all that flexible that speakers of ordinary eighteenth-century English could extend to its use in the required manner without becoming self-conscious about it. Still, the word was used for a time, and from that there comes a rather interesting truth. Lindstrom quotes the following from R. H. Codrington, an anthropologist and missionary who lived among the Melanesians late in the nineteenth century.

Codrington’s sentence contains two very interesting points. The first is that Western visitors, operating with their own term “chief” or its equivalent, one supposes, in other European languages, and having some sense of what it is supposed to mean, “find” what they should find were their applications correct. And the second is that the natives so designated come to think of themselves in terms congruent with the expectation of the Europeans who so address them, and this comes to effect what their so-called subjects come to think and do. Although Lindstrom says nothing about it, we may speculate about how these new circumstances affect the term—and the concept it contains—by means of which the natives designate their “chiefs.”

The conceptual clash between the intention of “chief” and what ethnographers found to be the reality of Melanesian leadership continued in the course of time, with new efforts to resolve what was clearly a conceptual tension emerging. On the one hand, while retaining the European ideal of chief, a “second typological category evolved to encompass the Melanesian experience.”^[119] And, on the other, attempts were made to introduce new terms such as headman, centerman, strongman, manager, director, and executive. Eventually, “big man” emerged as the winner. Once it emerges, the notion of big man has its own conceptual history—briefly presented in Lindstrom’s paper^[120] —and while I see no point in attempting to summarize his summary, I would observe that history seems to result from the history of anthropology itself, the expectations and experiences of ethnographers working in the Melanesian field bearing fully on this. Thus, these experiences result in developing the concept and, eventually, leading to questions with respect to its adequacy. Lindstrom ends his account with a passage which, from any perspective, conveys a sense of paradox:

Having shown how the circumstances of experience lead to conceptual change, our author, seemingly dismayed by the haphazardness of it, would like his colleagues to make the process orderly. Does Lindstrom actually believe that the circumstances of experience which will characterize the next two centuries of anthropology can be known in advance?

Notes

See my “On Anything Whatever.” Mind vol.74 (Apr. 1965): 236–39.

Quoted in Morris Weitz, The Opening Mind (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977), xi.

Sol Tax, “From Lapitare to Radcliffe-Brown: A Short History of the Study of Social Organization,” in Fred Eggan, ed., Social Anthropology of North American Tribes, enlarged edition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 445–81.

Cf. In some of the earlier pages of his “Introduction,” Rodney Needham, ed., Rethinking Kinship and Marriage (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971).

George Peter Murdock, Social Structure (New York: Macmillan, 1949).

Martin Southwo1d, “Meanings of Kinship,” in Rodney Needham, ed., Rethinking Kinship and Marriage (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971), 35–65, p. 35.

I am not raising the issue of whether or not what people do is to be understood in terms of what they mean and intend. Nor am I suggesting—or hinting—at the desirability of opting for behavioral methods which pretend that there is an actor’s standpoint. That is far removed from my own point of view. But I do wonder about the integrity of the observer’s standpoint—the legitimacy of the standpoint of the social sciences themselves—if that perspective must always be subordinate to the standpoint of the actor.

Southwold, “Meanings of Kinship,” 40.

Presumably infants never experience a blooming, buzzing confusion because they come into the world with a rigid set of organizing concepts called “categories of the understanding.” This rigidity may be contrasted with C. I. (Clarence Irving) Lewis’s more flexible conception of the way in which history and experience affect the experience of fundamental concepts (Mind and the World Order, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929). For a stimulating, undeservedly neglected account of the history of the movement from Kant to Lewis—and Karl Manheim—see “Knowledge as Interpretation: An Historical Survey,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 10 (1949–50): 526–40.

10.

Cf. Raymond Firth, Elements of Social Organization (London: Watts,1951).

11.

George Peter Murdock, “Changing Emphasis in Social Structure,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, 11, 1 (1955): 361–70,p. 361; quoted disapprovingly by Rodney Needham, “Remarks on the Analysis of Kinship and Marriage,” in Needham, ed., Rethinking Kinship and Marriage, 1–34, p. 23.

12.

On Hegel, see my “Dialectics and Necessity in Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” in Leon Pompa and William H. Dray, eds., Substance and Form in History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981), 42–57.

13.

J. A. Barnes, Three Styles in the Study of Kinship (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971).

14.

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Daryll Forde, eds., African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (London, New York, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1950).

15.

For non-analytical readers, this term refers to a household set up by a husband and wife which is independent of—neither part of nor an extension of—households of either’s parents.

16.

Essentially, this is a family consisting of parents and their children.

17.

Southwold, “Meanings of Kinship,” 39.

18.

Murdock, Social Structure, 223. “FaSiDa” and “MoBrDa” are “father’s sister’s daughter” and “mother’s brother’s daughter,” respectively; parallel cousins are children of siblings of the same sex; cross-cousins are children of siblings of the opposite sex.

19.

For a consideration of this issue, see Gertrude Dole and Robert L. Carneiro, Essays in the science of culture; in honor of Leslie A. White, in celebration of his sixtieth birthday and his thirtieth year of teaching at the University of Michigan (New York: Crowell, 1960) and my comments in “The Phenomenological and Naturalistic Approaches to the Social,” Methodos (1961): 225–38; reprinted in M. Natanson, ed., Philosophy of Social Sciences.

20.

Murdock, Social Structure, 138. More than thirty years after I first encountered it, I note the essence of the theory still wears well. If one removes from it the one word which refers to kinship construction genealogically and replaces it with an expression that had to do with behavioral interaction, I do believe it could be made to fit such treatments of kinship as one finds, say, in P. H. Gulliver, Neighbors and Networks (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971)—which presupposes a concept of kinship which is open and not sharply defined and with which we shall be dealing in the sequel—as well as the sorts of theory Martin Southwold (“Meanings of Kinship”) wants to take into account in determining what kinship terms mean.

21.

The theorems are formulated in ordinary English, as Murdock is never able to formulate theorems using all four of his independent variables at a time. I once tried without success to persuade a logician friend to translate the whole of it into symbolic logic so as to overcome that difficulty. I don’t know if anyone still cares enough about a thing first published in 1949 to deal with it with any of the new techniques made available by computer technology.

22.

Murdock, Social Structure, ch. 8.

23.

At a later stage of the discussion, when I have appropriated for my purposes R. G. Collingwood’s idea of a scale of forms in which its generic essence of a concept is exemplified variably, this will serve to make more sense than I suppose that it does now; Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933).

24.

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, “The Study of Kinship Systems,” reprinted in the collection of his essays and addresses, Structure and Function in Primitive Society (London, Cohen & West, 1952): 49–89. The essay which follows in this collection, “On Joining Relationships” 90–104, is also of use in understanding Radcliffe-Brown’s approach to kinship.

25.

All this was decades before more recent attempts—at least for African peoples—to develop techniques of historical reconstruction which depend on non-literary evidence. These endeavors have clearly produced a sizable literature, as well as any number of works of methodological reflection.

26.

Radcliffe-Brown, “Introduction,” African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, 13.

27.

Holism is precisely a characteristic of Radcliffe-Brown’s only original ethnography, The Andaman Islanders (Cambridge University Press, 1922), and the kind of functionalism which characterizes that work is unintelligible without some sense of a whole; cf. my “Recurrent Structures? and Teleology.” Inquiry 5 (1962): 1–11.

28.

See Conrad Arenship’s presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, “Cultural Holism through Intricational Systems,” American Anthropoloqist 83, 3 (Sept. 1981): 562‑81.

29.

I would venture to suggest that the whole project of the Human Relations Area File, and the sort of corporative cross-cultural study it fosters, is not compatible with a holistic position—be it methodology or ontology—but that is not to be pursued here.

30.

Radcliffe-Brown, “Introduction,” African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, 6f.

31.

Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society, 54–58.

32.

In my opinion, in all interesting scientific questions there is an inevitable gap between theory and data. If we could eliminate that gap—say, in the way the logic tradition has sought to “solve” the problems of indication—the quest for knowledge would instead be boring; cf. my “Toward a Logic of Historical Constitution,” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 71 (1983): 19–52.

33.

See, for example, his influential study, The Social Organization of Australian Tribes (New York: Macmillan, 1931).

34.

Leon J. Goldstein, “A Note on Platonism in Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 60 (1958): 575–80.

35.

Radcliffe-Brown, “Introduction,” African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, 2.

36.

Presumably a concrete social group membership which is determined by descent through the male line.

37.

Radcliffe-Brown, “Introduction,” African Systems of Kinship and Marriage, 65.

38.

Ibid., 64f.

39.

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962).

40.

Stephen S. Toulman, Foresight and Understanding (New York, Harper & Row, 1963); see my “Ideals of Order: History and Sociology,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 4, 4 (Dec. 1974): 333–52.

41.

Imre Lahatos, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

42.

Fred Eggan, “The Cheyenne and Arapaho Kinship System,” in Eggan, ed., Social Anthropology of North American Tribes, enlarged edition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 35–95.

43.

Ibid., 47f.

44.

I do not myself believe that any sense can be given to the view that concepts have hidden facets of meaning which may become manifest under determinate circumstances, though I believe that some entries on the subject of open concepts do defend such a view. But I do believe that these and other concepts that are affected by the changing—logically contingent—circumstances of their use, hence may be thought of as carrying their histories with them. See my “Dialectics and Necessity in Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” supra n. 13.

45.

Needham, “Remarks on the Analysis of Kinship and Marriage,” in Needham, ed., Rethinking Kinship and Marriage, 1–34, p. 5.

46.

Ibid., 6, emphasis added; the quotations from Leach are from Rethinking Anthropology (London: Athlone Press, 1961), 105, 108.

47.

“Emic” and “etic” are terms one finds in the writings of anthropologists and intended, respectively, to distinguish between the point of view of observer and actor.

48.

For the impossibility of this in principle, see the two volumes of Bernard Bosanquet’s Gifford Lectures. The Principle of Individuality and Value, and The Value and the Destiny of the Individual. London: Macmillan, 1912.

49.

See F. S. C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities (New York: Macmillan, 1947), ch. 4.

50.

Ibid., 65ff.

51.

Friedrich Waismann, “Verifiability,” in Antony Flew, ed., Logic and Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1951), 115–45; quoted in William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 64.

52.

W. B. Gallie, “Essentially Contrasted Concepts,” reprinted in ch. 8 in his Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964).

53.

I omit from consideration differences in pursuit of goals owing to differences in ideological commitment more likely to affect anthropology than physics.

54.

J. M. Brennan, The Open-Texture of Moral Concepts (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1977); see also John Kovesi, Moral Notions (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967).

55.

See J. H. Woodger, Biological Principles (New York: Routledge, 2001).

56.

See my Historical Knowing (Austin & London: University of Texas Press, 1976); “History and the Primacy of Knowing,” History and Theory, Beisheft 16 (Dec. 1977): 29–52; “Against Historical Realism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 11, 3 (Mar. 1980): 426–29.

57.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 27.

58.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 27 f.

59.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 28.

60.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 28f.

61.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 29f.

62.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 29.

63.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 31.

64.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 30.

65.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 41f.

66.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 35.

67.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 57.

68.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 59.

69.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 61.

70.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 72f.

71.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 77f.

72.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 78f.

73.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 84.

74.

Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, p. 84.

75.

Lucy S. Dawidowicz and Leon J. Goldstein, Politics in a Pluralist Democracy (New York, Institute of Human Relations, 1963).

76.

See my “The Meaning of ‘State’ in Hegel’s Philosophy of History,” Philosophical Quarterly 12, 1 (1962): 60–72.

77.

For an account of these ideas, see ibid.

78.

I am making the caveat so that when I am tried—as surely I shall be—with permitting a standpoint that seems to escape from my structure—I can point to it and deny the charge

79.

E. R. Leach, Political Systems of Highland Burma (London: G. Bell & Son, 1954), 103; Leach’s italics.

80.

I like that in this work of 1954 there is no intention to suggest what the term “moral science” was to come to mean under the impact of T. S. Kuhn.

81.

E. R. Leach, Rethinking Anthropology, 34f.

82.

Ibid., 51.

83.

Actually, it is implicit in our earlier recognition that there is a tension as to whether the conceptual tools used by anthropologists encapsulate anthropologists’ experiences qua anthropologists’ or natives’ experiences qua people engaged in the behavior which is the point of departure for the entire enterprise.

84.

Leach wrote the essay in 1943; Rethinking Anthropology, 1.

85.

Leach, Political Systems, 105.

86.

Ibid., 106.

87.

P. H. Gulliver, Neighbors and Networks: The Idiom of Kinship in Social Action among the Ndendeuli of Tanzania (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1971).

88.

Ibid., 71.

89.

Ibid., 25.

90.

A friend once said of a relative of her husband, with whom, in fact, her husband had once been in business, and with whom the relationship had deteriorated to such a degree that it was contributing to a decision to move to another city: “He used to be our cousin. Until I read Gulliver’s book, I thought it was funny.”

91.

Understood in the non-genealogical way of the Ndendeuli.

92.

Gulliver, Neighbors and Networks, 292.

93.

I don't want to exaggerate this and make it seem that the Ndendeuli have no genealogical knowledge or acknowledge it when relevant. But Gulliver does say: “Ndendeuli genealogical knowledge was not particularly extensive, and was quite often vague in details. . . . When recording genealogies I repeatedly found that the cut-off point in acknowledged memory tended to coincide with the point at which active relations ceased, ibid., 219.

94.

Melford E. Spiro, Kinship and Marriage in Burma: A Cultural and Psychodynamic Analysis (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1977).

95.

In presumed contrast to psychodynamic or sociocultural meaning.

96.

If Spiro is correct about this, there is a suggestion of positive influence, presumably objective of the philosophy of science dominant at the time that componential analysis was being developed.

97.

Cf. Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Reference,” in Translation from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter T. Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 56–78.

98.

Spiro, Kinship and Marriage in Burma, 11f.; Spiro’s italics.

Ibid., 12.

Ibid., 13.

Ibid., 21.

Ibid., 9f.

David J. Banks, Malay Kinship (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1983), 6.

104.

C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World-Order.

105.

David J. Banks, Malay Kinship, 6f.

Ibid., 47.

Ibid., 7.

Ibid., 47.

Ibid.

Ibid., 48.

Ibid., 49.

Roberto da Matta, “The Apinage Relationship System: Terminology and Ideology,” in David Trayberry-Lewis, ed., Dialectical Societies (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 83–127.

113.

Ibid.

114.

Ibid., 97ff.

115.

Ibid., 96f., 106, 116.

116.

In the case of Needham, at least, the judgment seems almost poignant when one thinks of how much of his career has been devoted to the study of kinship and related matters. It is rather reminiscent of Carl Becker’s view of the effect that history—a subject to which he had devoted his entire life—had no cognitive significance, was not a realm to which considerations of truth and falsity were relevant. See Carl L. Becker, Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1935).

117.

Lamont Lindstrom, “‘Big Man’: A Short Terminological History,” American Anthropologist 83, 4 (Dec. 1981): 900–5.

118.

R. H. Codrington, The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and Folklore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), 46; quoted in Lindstrom, 901.

119.

Ibid.

120.

Ibid., 902f.

121.

Ibid., 903.