ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Apologies to Sahlins: Aristotle and the Anthropology of Kinship

• In Event: Genealogy & Inheritance between Passion, Law, and Science, I

English Abstract

This paper analyses the new kinship anthropology of Marshall Sahlins as emblematic of more widespread tendencies in the interpretation and use of Greek texts. In his writings on kinship, Sahlins treats Greek thought as helpfully free from any obfuscating entanglements with modern biology, and thus uniquely valuable to the project of defining kinship as a phenomenon of “culture,” not biology. I reconstruct Sahlins’s view, then argue against his use of the ancient material. Sahlins aligns nature/biology/matter and opposes them to soul/culture/ontology. But the ancient material, beginning with the very passages from Aristotle that Sahlins himself cites, tells a different story: one in which there is profound tension between “biogenetic” and “materialist” theories of kinship. “Materialist” theories of kinship—which emphasize shared matter as the basis for kinship relations—most often oppose the special status of biogenetic parents (particularly fathers) as generators and argue instead for the unruly, unmanageable multiplication of material influences on offspring, from all directions. I thus diagnose and argue against a convergence of disciplinary priorities that enables Classics and Anthropology to together produce and theorize a field of culture securely “quarantined” (per Donna Haraway) from bodies, embodiment, and biology. In short, an approach that reduces Greek thought to culture free of biology cannot rise to the challenge Sahlins himself eloquently imagines, of theorizing kinship in a way that circumvents biology/culture. Rather, I suggest, we can better pursue this goal by granting the Greeks their own “biology” of kinship, observing the dialectics and tensions that attend to its place within Greek thought, and writing "materialist" histories of kinship in the longue durée.

Author

• Malina Buturovic