INTRODUCTION

More than two decades ago, this question was asked by the late Roger M. Keesing in his textbook, Kin Groups and Social Structure (1975:122). He sketched out two lines of thinking, providing insights on how to deal with the problem: The first placed emphasis on “the actual,” focusing on individual interests and strategies for goal attainment and analyzing interpersonal relations and informal networks; the second line of thinking laid stress upon “the ideal,” investigating kinship in terms of people's own conceptual and symbolic world (1975:122–31).

In the following years the relationship between ideal standards or norms and actual kinship practices remained “a thorny question” (Barnard & Good 1984: 162). Whereas the first line of thinking has evidently produced some more food for thought (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1977; Holy 1986; Holy & Stuchlik 1983), the second does not appear to have had much to offer. On the one hand, symbolic analyses of kinship – especially those which followed and developed Schneider's approach (e.g., Delaney 1991; Inden & Nicholas 1977; Schneider 1968) – have been criticized for providing little evidence of links between allegedly culturally dominant indigenous concepts and symbols and specific “native voices.” The relationship between such cultural constructs and human action remains more or less unaddressed, and intracultural variations are neglected (Barnard & Good 1984:180; Starr 1994:229).