Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: social science in practice
- I MODELS OF THE REAL SOCIAL WORLD
- II MODELS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
- 8 Feedback and real time in social inquiry (1967b)
- 9 Time flies like an arrow (1971f)
- 10 Kinship studies: some impressions of the current state of play (1980c)
- 11 Sociology in Cambridge: an inaugural lecture (1970m)
- 12 Social science in India: colonial import, indigenous product or universal truth? (1982c)
- III A MODEL OF MODELLING
- Postscript: structural amnesia (1947: 52–3)
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Kinship studies: some impressions of the current state of play (1980c)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: social science in practice
- I MODELS OF THE REAL SOCIAL WORLD
- II MODELS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
- 8 Feedback and real time in social inquiry (1967b)
- 9 Time flies like an arrow (1971f)
- 10 Kinship studies: some impressions of the current state of play (1980c)
- 11 Sociology in Cambridge: an inaugural lecture (1970m)
- 12 Social science in India: colonial import, indigenous product or universal truth? (1982c)
- III A MODEL OF MODELLING
- Postscript: structural amnesia (1947: 52–3)
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the late 1960s I began work on a book about the study of kinship but in 1969 my move to Cambridge entailed giving up the work, at least for the time being. The uncompleted text was published in 19 71, and in the preface I indicated that I had abandoned kinship studies (Barnes 1971m: xxiv). Nevertheless several years later I was invited to contribute to a symposium on kinship systems and somewhat hesitantly accepted. The invitation gave me an opportunity to discuss some aspects of the complex, and sometimes deliberately obscured, relation between the disciplines of social anthropology and sociology. This was, I thought, appropriate for a conference held in India where this relation has taken a distinctive form. As in Chapter 1,1 used Schneider's book on American kinship (1968) as a convenient exemplar of what, in my view, was the wrong specification of this relation.
Changing emphases
The study of kinship has long had a special place in anthropological writing and research. Morgan's Systems of consanguinity and affinity (1870) demonstrated more clearly than any other work of nineteenth-century scholarship that anthropology had a specialised corpus of data which demanded particular skills for its analysis and which could not be comprehended merely with the help of a good classical education and some practical experience of exotic peoples.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Models and InterpretationsSelected Essays, pp. 169 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990