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Lfter nature: English kinshiP in the

late twentieth century


MA RILY N DJ,RA T HER N
Department of Social Anthropology
Manchester Universitv

Watercolour, 1817 or 1818


The watercolour (painted by Diana Sperling in l8l7 or 1818) shows a conventionally attired
couple (proprietor and servant) stepping through the half-open doors of the house (its choice
interior visible) into the rain to improve the garden (with potted flowers). These relationships
at once offer an allegory for the character of English kinship as one might think of it in
1989 or 1990 and are cancelled by it.
Reproduced by kind permission of Victor Gollancz Ltd, from Mrs Hurst Dancing by
Diana Sperling, illustrations by Neville Ollerenshaw.
The tigtu oI the
Univerciry oI Conbidgc
1o ptint and sell
att nannet of books
w a s g r c n te d by
Henty YllI in 1534.
The Utiwrsit)
has printed
a n d publ i she.l rc n I inuous Iy

CAM BR ID GE

UN IV ERSI T Y PRES S
CA MBRIDGE

NEW

Y OR K

PORT CHES TER

ME LB OURNE

S YDNE Y

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge


The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP
40 Wes t 20th Street,Ne w York. N Y l 00l l -421 l . U SA
l0 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Victoria 3166, Australia
O Cambridee Universitv Press 1992
First published 1992
Printed in Creat Britain at the University Press,Cambridge
Librarv o/ Congre.ss cataloguing in puhlicotion datu
Strathern, Marilyn.
After nature: English kinship in the late twentieth century/
Marilyn Strathern.
p. cm. (The Lewis Henry Morgan lectures; 1989)
Includes bibliographical references.
Kinship England. 2. England Social conditions. 3. Kinship cross-cultural studies
4. Ethnology Philosophy. I. Title.
II. Series.
cN58 5.G8S77 1992
306.83'09 4dc20
91 377 5
CIP
.4 catalogue record.for this book is available frorn lhe British Library
ISBN 0 521 405254hardba ck
ISBN 0 521 42680 4 paperback

2 .a',,
*-Y)--4-

) .1.-|

VN

For M.A.L.

X V II I

Preflace

for their especialkindness,and the Department for their stimulation. With an


extension of time and critical attention that was a privilege in itself, members
of the Anthropology Department and of Women's Studiesat the University of
Virginia also heard the full set of lectures.
I should add that the book was finished in June 1990. Since then the
Warnock Report, to which severalreferencesare made, has becomethe basis
of legislation, although I make no mention of this. There has also been a
changein the British premiership.While it would have beenin keepingto have
retained the original text, this would have sounded odd, and I have made
the appropriate alterations.
Severalcolleagueshave read the manuscript, and they are thanked warmly
for their comments and criticisms: Anthony Cohen, Frederick Damon,
JeanetteEdwards, Sarah Franklin, Jane Haggis, Eric Hirsch, Frances Price,
Nigel Rapport, Tim Swindlehurst and Nicholas Thomas, as are the Press's
readers.Jean Ashton has also taken care of it in her own inimitable way. I
should add that where 'n.d.' appearsin the bibliography, I am grateful for
permissionto cite as yet unpublishedwork.
David Schneideris the anthropological father of this booK since it is both
with and againsthis ideason kinship that it is written; his reactionshave been
characteristically incisive and generous.Another colleague,Joyce Evans, is
the mother of this book, sinceit is from her Englishnessthat I write; her love
and knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature have kept me
culturally on track. She is also my mother in the literal sense,and my thanks
are also filial.
Marilyn Strathern
Manchester
January 1989/June1990

Prologue:making explicit

Visitors to England, the English are fond of telling themselves,are often


struckby the spacedevoted to gardens and parks, so different from the civic
plazas that grace continental Europe. Towns and cities are likely to be
cramped,higgledy piggledy. But go into the suburbs with their lawns and
flower-bedsand you will sensean avenuearchitectureof its own kind, at once
domestic(the semi-detachedhouses)and public (a common front of shrubs,
hedges,fences).What might be regarded as typically English, however, is the
productnot only of the demandsof a particular social classbut of a particular
period
from mid-victorian town houses built as country homes to
Edwardian villas at the very edges of the countryside and garden cities
enclosingthe idea of countryside within.
That is, of course, no revelation. On the contrary. the English also tell
themselves
about the particular periods they are heir to and the extent to
which things have altered since.If it is no revelation, then one might
wonder
how the twin ideas of continuity and changecoexist. How
come that the one
(change)seemsas much in place
as the oiher (continuity)?
i, is equally conventional to deny that the typical ever exists. When
lo.
,
vlsltors
to England remark, as they do, on rubbish in the streets of the
me.tropolisor when the English
abroad are treated as responsiblefor forestac^idrain. the senseis of falling on changed times. In denying the
lltlltllt
of particular characteristics,one may well deny that one can ever
:ll]:.,t?
what is typical abour rhe English. A vision of consrant change
;T:l:t
that of perpetual conrinuity; all appears transient and nothing
J:iil"::
-'*qs Lo?tlBeand continuity
are thus playedoffagainstone another.Indeed,
be visualisedas a sequenceof eventsthat,happens'to something
;;;'|..,"un
'"at otherwise retains its identity,
such as the English ihemselves,or the
m
akes
change
evidenr .r t is in just sucha coexist ence
;T::l
ytl gt' c ont i nuir y
"'+lt^":-tfit
culturalepochs are formed. I wish to
a senseof epoch.
and the transientcoexistin a manner"onu"y
that makes it possibleto
u*u'll llublt
respectto almosr anything, how much change has raken place.
This
i'" l'.:lrn
o verYgeneral,
ordinary and otherwiseunremarkaltr tind of question.It

Englishkinshipin the late twentiethcentury

seemsto lead naturally to further questions about what should be conserved


and what should be reformed. It also exerts a presencein certain academic
ways of thinking, where the relationshipbetweenchangeand continuity is
often spelled out with considerableexplicitness.Let me illustrate the general
idea through a particular example.
Take attitudes towards the natural world. When what variesseemto be the
different meanings that different historical periods have put on it, or the
different effects of diverse social practices, then 'nature' itself appears an
enduring, even timeless,phenomenon.In Keith Thomas's (1984) detailed
account of the dramatic changesthat occurred in the idea of nature in England
betweenI 500and 1800,the referencepoint throughout remainsthe countryside
and its plants and wiid and domesticanimals.This means,of course,that Alan
Macfarlane (1987),with an equal order of detail, can tracea traditional love of
nature back to medieval England and argue the reversethesis:far f;om there
having beenradical change,one finds consistentantecedentsto contemporary
attitudes. His evidenceincludes the longstanding English obsessionwith
gardening, and their habit of keeping animals as pets. The observations are
not trivial. Macfarlane points to an intimate connection between these
characteristicsof the English and the individualism of their modern kinship
system,a connection that, he claims, has roots in English societyfor as long as
records go back. The cultural preconditions for later changes were always
there.It is the extent of the continuity that is impressive,in his view, rather
than the extent ofchange.
Whether or not there have beenchangeson the face of the countryside,or in
ideasabout the environment.the conceptof nature thus remainsa constant
fact in the debate. One can therefore dispute as to whether activities and
attitudes in relation to it have altered or have stayedthe sameover the course
of time. The result is that change and continuity becomemeasurableentities
insofar as each appearsto have had more or lesseffect on the sameobject. The
one may be conceivedas a quantifiable (how much, to what extent) constraint
on the other.
Now an academicdebate such as this, about the relative amount of change
and continuity, is consonant with that mid-twentieth-century mode of
scholarly theorising known as 'social constructionism'.The theory is that
what is constructedis 'after' a fact. It is proved in the way peoplecan be seento
fabricate their world and in the models they build of it, and offers a kind of
autoproof, since it knows itself as a model also. In this theory that is also a
model, valuescan be seenas constructionsafter social facts,or societiescan be
! seen as constructions after natural facts. What becomesquantifiable is the
amount of human activity ('construction')that has taken place.Implicit in the
theory/model is the assumption that changeis a mark of activity or endeavour
whereascontinuity somehow is not.
But I propose we disarm the antithesisbetweenchangeand continuity of its

Prologue:making explicit

of thinking what they measure,we might think


--r;firble power. Instead
on the other to demonstrateits effect.Magnifying one is to
a.oends
llljrr.i
the hindsight that, over the span of an epoch,the
_""".,fu borh. I write with
radical changeson their headsby striving most
most
the
'j..'liirf,,ttuu" brought
sense
of continuity with thepast. And have in the
a
preserve
i)T"nentlq ro
very
concept of nature to which they would
the
revolutionised
ll"..r,
faithful'
be
to
i)"aualy Prefer
model of the world containsmore than
'' Ther"holars'social-constructionist
up after, or out of, elementsother than itself
built
is
society
that
idea
rhe
reproductiveindividualsand primordial sentiments
inaturalentitiessuch as
pairs
and families).It alsoincorporatesthe idea that,
parental
or unitssuchas
the natural world, human artifice must at the
modifying
and
upon
in working
its
to
laws
and to that extent imitate it. I suspectthat
true
remain
time
same
ideas
is
borrowed
from, as much as it describes,models
of
concatenation
this
more!.generallyheld. The academic debate to which I alluded, between the
anthropologically minded historian (Thomas) and the historiananthropologist(Macfarlane), leads us to an area where such models are to
be found: kinshiP.
The anthropological study of kinship since mid-Victorian and Edwardian
times,aswell as the (indigenous)models held by others of the social classfrom
which by and large the authors of such studies came, has drawn heavily
on the idea that kinship systemsare also after the facts, and specificallyafter-r
certainwell-known lacts of nature.r The facts, it is held, are universalwhereas
ideasabout kinship obviously vary. In this view, for instance,cultural dogmas
differin the extent to which they recognisebiological connection, social classes
in the extent to which they emphasise maternal and paternal roles, and
historicalperiods in the emphasis given to family life. In short. societiesor
sectionsof society differ in the way they handle the same facts. This is an
axiom or assumptionthar is u, .uth pirt ol English kinship thinking as it
ts ol social constructionisttheorising about it. I capitaliseon the thought
that making this implicit assumption explicit has
alieady deprived it of its
axtomaticand paradigmaticstatus.
The epochin question
coversa span of modern Western thought of particular
hterest to anthropology,
following the hundred yearsor so after Lewis Henry
r ---oJt
tr
rvlorgan's
endeavoursof the 1860s.Among other things,its practitionerswere

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"
"jul tu r e( th e
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i
gh
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ha
v
e.m
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rrr

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quu

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uruE

Yardsticks
of civilisation),
or groups.Iun""'more'or'ress'cohesion
(indices
of

e ^l :

' ^ t1

'-

.more'
.less'
"vttuarlt]), or
persons
-'
be
v!
r r lv lw
symbolised
o
J r r r uv r r ow u
as
o
r
vor
l
luJJ
r-' " " rr s
close
9
ru)9
to
Lv
lnature
ldLul9
/ ., ,- . .
| "
\women's
u urr
distance
r4 l l u c
from
l IO m
ssocial
ocla
centrality). One might think of the modern
cPochas
pluralist. then, and i ts successoras postplural in character.

Thatthlreh"r b..;;r;;;;;i"';il;;iinir.p""r,

is superseded
isoneor

Prologue: making explicit

English kinship in the late twentieth century

the ways in which such successtons


my themes.At least,I hope to show one of
point from which to look back to a
vantage
postplural
a
il;p;.; by contriving
one. The motive lies in a thwarted ambition'
rnod.rn
^^^
David
time, it had been my ambition to write a counterparl'to
F;;"*.
kinship.
English
of
account
cultural
Schneider,sAmerican Kinship (tbot): a
later was to realisethat
coming to the task more than two decades
H;;";.,
was confident
Schneider
which
on
constructs
ii_., iruo crranged.The twin
to
be identified
not
were
kinship
American
of
.rr"gt, to premise his analysis
and the order of Law'
Nature
of
order
the
were
These
with such transparency.
vlz. Society or culture.
,n" ,rJ", of Law referring to human organisation,
of American
dimensions
major
iney naO appearedto Schieider to constitute
exemplifiindigenous
were
indeed
about kinship in the 1960s,and
,hi;ilC
its '
developed
hadanthropology
cations of constructs on whose basis
construccultural
or
social
The
century'
previous
disciplinary force over the
the generalmanner in
finsnlp had always been a special instance of
iion
'out
of ' nature. Indeed,
"f
which human beingsconsiructed socLtiesand cultures
life had thus
human
of
models
the developmentoispecifically anthropological
this was
I
believe
systems.
eiucidation of kinship
;;;; h"rd'in hand *itn tn.
anthropology'
Jqually true of British as it was of American
N o wlh a d de l ib e ra te ly wi s h e d to av o id a .soci al ,ac counti nfavourofa
. c u lt u r a l' o n e .In th e m id -tw e n tie th c e n tu ry ,theseterms codedasi gni fi cant
However' my cultural
differencebetweenBritish and American anthropology'
to Americanise my anthrointerest stemmed, I thought, not from a desire
that seemedto
pology but from a desireio bring to light certain assumptions
models
anthropological
social
inhere in British approachesto i<inship., The
illuminating
so
and
mid-century'
the
of kinship so well nurtured in Britain in
in r e la t i o n to n o n -w e s te rn s o c ie tie s ' s e e m e dafteral l toobscurer atherthan
I had in my mind an
clarify things when it came to elucidating the English'
that gave this subtitle to
alternative cultural account because,whatever it was
and Law were there to be
Schneider'swork, the twin constructs of Nature
model and of the
English
unpacked as premises both of the indigenous
it' I think in
describ-e
to
(British) anthropological studies that sought
(a cultural)
I
am
that
rather'
oi
naive;
retrospect I had beei interestingly
book'
this
write
me
made
of the processesthat
"*.-plu.
I ti s wid e ly th e c a s e in c o n te m p o ra ry Bri ta i nthatone' s senseofti meor
c h a n g e - u y u l,o b e s e n s e d a s th eA me r ic a ni sati onoftheE ngl i sh.Y eti nmy
of kinship that have
own case it is notlust home-grown conceptualisations
c o m e t o s e e m in s u ffic ie n t,s o to o d o Sc h n ei der' smoti vati ngconstructs.
Ne it h e r s e e in g th e En g li s ,h th ro u g h m o d e l sdevel opedfornon-W estern
cultural model of American
systems,nor seeingth"t ith'o"gh that particular
k in s hi p , w il lq u ite d o to d a y .An d th e s e c o n s tructi onsappeari ns uffi ci entfor
the point of view of their
one simple reason. fhey are now visible from
previously taken-for-grantedassumptions'
'T h e pr o c es s th a tle a - d s to th e d is p la c e me ntofanal yti cal model s ,anout come

, s,Iiherate endeavour on the part of scholars,matches or is an analogy for


9tIi^, .rncessesin Western (Anglo-Euro-American) social life at large. In
(as they often do)
llTJ'^"ifrr,'oologists collapsethis analogy when they claim
the general social and
informed
by
accounts
are
anthropological
iili
"urti",
is
11,i"""f prcceptsof their times. What was implicit, and not seen then,
Making things explicit I refer to as a
is
now.
and
seen
explicit,
6xde
ii.r.Uu
e1 literalisation,that is, a mode of laying out the coordinatesor
^,^.tir.
granted. One
I^nventional points of referenceof what is otherwise taken for
process
is
of
construction
describing
a
is
to
realise
that
filr., of litcralisation
of
social
constructionism.
is
the
sorts.
This
autoproof
of
iiselia construction
Literalisrrtionentails,so to speak,a half-movement;its complementis the
granted and thus apprehendedessentially
recreationof what must be taken for
or figurativelyfor its intrinsic qualities.But the constant opening out of the
convintions upon which human endeavour is seen to rest has had such an
emphaticplace in Anglo-Euro-American discoursepreciselyfor the emphasis
eivento the role of human construction in the making of societyand culture. It
lsthisparticular investmentin the efficacyof 'construction' that leadsstudents
of sociallife to make evident to themselvesthe basis of their own particular
constructions.
Considerthe revelations of change and continuity. What we might take as
characteristicallytypical, a product of some continuous and taken-forgranted identity, may well be revealed as equally the product of specific
historicaltimes and thus of change. Such an opening out or literalisation of
thetypical as belonging to one particular period rather than another recreates
in turn the taken-for-granted idea that it is, after all, historical periods that are
distinctiveby what typifies them.
Thereis one specificmove towards literalisation whoseeffectI wish to make
explicit: in the currentlv orevalent idea that nature and culture are both
cultural constructionr, itt. on. term (culture) seemsto consume the other
lnature).We might put it that an antithesis between nature and culture as it
mtght have shaped certain discoursesin English life has become flattened, if
so,it is flattened in
a mode specificto the lat! twentieth century, and one that
nastndeedhad
an interestingeffect as far as culture is concerned.This may be
tttustrated
in the awkwardnessof a recentcritique of mine (Strathern 1988).
ruy objection
there was to the way the distinctions between Nature and
Societ)'and Individual, had in the past been attributed unthinkingly
+L-lllure'
-l^1lt:t*|"lic
systemsof certain non-Westernpeoples.The critique m uy i"il
oeJustified,
but icould not account for the r,n.iry status that culture retained o*l.unalysis. Culture in the senseof systemor organisationwas easyro
TII
{'dKe explicit
as an analytical device; but ihe narrative was left taking for
culture in the senseof a distinctivenessof style or imagery. Crudely,
:;:Ttd

cil;HTiln.t,

un outcome
of anexcess
is thatof r
of sorts.Theexcess

Lulture exceeds
itself (Nature vanishes)and. outcultivated. Culture is

Englishkinshipin the late twentiethcentury

manifestas style.And an excessof individualism?Does Societyalso vanish;


will the Individual becomevisible only in the exerciseof an agencywhere all is
choice? Excessesof style and choice may appear an obvious process of
Americanisation from an 'English' point of view. Yet holding that view is
equally a processof Anglicisation.
While much of what I say applies to Anglo-Euro-American or Western
culture in general,such culture is only lived in specificforms. None of us lives
generalisedlives, generaliseas we might about life as such, and I take English
as one form. In any case,the English are adepts at literalisation a penchant

Why do I Drefer that we in Britain


shouldtake the
route
of expansion throueh
diversification and' differentiatioil?
Most profoundly,becauseit seemsto
me to be the onewhichis naturalto us.
Historically,traditionally,Britain is a
bottom-uP,not a top-down societv.
We should build oil our nation'al
g_qnius,-on
what comesnaturallyto us.
We do bestwhenwe avoidthe abstract
i .rtellectualconstruct, the grand detign. We do much, much be"tterwhen
the practicalinteUieence
of themanvis
appliedat the levefwhere,in thiscate,
the studentsare tausht and the researchis done.This if the wav I hope
British higher educationwill growin
tne next quarter century.
I The Secretary of State.for Education, 1989
Exlract from a speechby the Secretary of State for Education and Science,Kenneth
Baker "Higher Education: the next 25 years". The Times Higher Education Supplement.
I 3 Ja nu ar y 1 98 9.
Reproduced by kind permissron.

Prologue:making explicit

, ^r^.rcwithEuro-Americans becomesa posture in their commitment to the


lliJ,]'"i.61oiricism and practical action. The stereotypeof pragmatism3has
tlliii^"*of
persuasionin it. They apparentlylove the literal-minded.Their
real world' only clear away the assumptionsand you
about'the
:]'-;;:", are
clearaway the constructionsand you will get to the
only
truth;
rhe
;ii;;, ro
facts'
r,r,kins the implicit explicit is a mode of constructingknowledgewhich has
i""" u,i.ngine for changefor more than a hundred years.It has also produced
in int.tnut senseof complexity and diversity. But to make explicit t/ris mode
outliteralisation of the literal-minded. I suspect
tur i6 own effect: the
particular literalisating move has been behind the
this
to
similar
something
prevalentsenseof a now that is after an event. This senseof being after an
of being post-. definesthe presentepoch.
"vent.
The single most significant event in question is the earlier modern epoch.
whenconstructionswere instead after a fact - the facts of reality, nature or
procreation- and where human endeavour bore the imprint of a complex
This was the epoch that produced the scholars'social constructionenterprise.
ism. Anthropology was the discipline that uncovered the quantity of
enterprisein human endeavoureverywhere.It is its own enterprisethat is now
madevisible.and 'after' the facts has come to mean after the facts have ceased
to bequantifiable.We know today that there are asmany of them as we care to
make. Hence this book is written from hindsisht. It deals with the modern
epochfrom the vantagepoinr of its displacemenl.The resultis no more than a
teleologythat extendsback from the present and in asking about how things
appearin the late twentiethcenturyattendsonly to their possibleantecedents.
The following coordinates may be useful to the reader.a Modernists
characterised
Englishsocietyas complex or plural, a product of long history
and much change. The typical was timeless, and tradition or continuity
rmpliedhomogeneity;changeimplied innovation, the introduction of foreign
elements,heterogeneity,in short. diversity. Hindsight
tells us that it was, of
course,the senseof continuity
which was subiect to chanse. and all that was
necessary
to transform a tradition was to brini it into the f,resentand give it a
contemporaryplace. (The
stylistic re-introduction of 'traditional' forms that
c^onstitutes
postmodernism in art ancl architecture presents this as a reveIt was simply a matter of valuing one'salreadyestablishedvalues.In
fl:".:)
ractall that
was necessaryto transform ones' valueswas to value them in such
ut make explicit (ro oneself)rheirconrextor basis.In therebymaking
ljlV
lo
tne trnplicit
explicit, one took away that axiomatic status and created new
'axen-for-grantedassumptionsfor excavation. With hindsight we can further
l]l^11*.-as a model of knowledge, such a practice offered a constantly
::cqlng horizon of what there was to know: one could seekto know more
otQ
*ot.thing by investigatingits context the
or
assumptionson which its
*"sumptions
were grounded.

English kinship in the late twentieth century

That modern dimension of grounding or context in turn yielded a senseol


perspective,the 'point of view' from which an entity was seen. One could
always gain a new perspectiveby providing a new context for what was being
oUs"iu"d. There were thus as many points of view as there were facetsof social
and cultural, including scientific, life. Thisplurality was a given, and complex
societyawarded itself the abiliry to superimposeperspectives(self-conscious
'constructions') upon a plurality inherent in the nature of things.
British anthropology participated in that literalising endeavour. Its claims
to attention restedon the dual skills of putting things into (socialand cultural)
context, and in making implicit (cultural and social) assumptionsexplicit. It
also claimed kinship as a particular domain of expertiseand activity. Again
with hindsight one can seethat it nonethelessran into problems when it came
to dealing with kinship in its culture of origin: there was too intimate a
connection between anthropological theories of kinship and indigenous
constructs. The connection can be turned to use. In thinking about what
English kinship was to become, I propose to use British anthropological
kinship theory and English kin constructs as mutual perspectiveson each
other's modernisms. This necessarily deprives each of its perspectival
completeness.
The processesby which the English produced a senseof complexity for
themselveswere alarmingly simple. But, like simple computer viruses, they
could proliferate at speedthrough the social machinery. In showing the way
literalisation constantly produced fresh perspectives.one has said all that need
be said about the mechanism by which we once imagined ourselves in a
complex world.
The effects were everywhere. The mechanism might be simple, but the
products or results were innumerable. Thus when members of a complex
societycompared it with that of others, they could think of themselvesboth as
producing 'more' individualistic individuals (more subjectivity), and as
providing 'more' cultural and social contexts in which to act (more
institutions).sIn the account that follows, I give recentexamplesof simple
proliferations of form - the shapesthat ideasand valuesand idioms take. The
material will appear inevitably disparate, out of scale even, an observation
about kitchens in London illustrated by office designs in Manchester; an
introduction to the field of English kinship [in Chapter One] offering
observations drawn from quite disjunct levels. The immediate effect may
suggestplurality taken to excess;but the disparatenessis not quite what it
seems.It is with postplural vision that the pluralism of the preceding epoch
becomesevident.6
Illustrations have been selectedwidely but not at random. I have hoped
both to make it evident that the observations that apply to kinship or to
anthropological study are not applicable only to these domains and to draw
in issuesin the managementof present-daypolitical and social life from which
neither kinship nor anthropology is isolated.At the same time I have also

Prologue:making explicit

hoped to suggest that such free-ranging access,such apparent freedom of


choice, in the end turns the senseof plurality into an artefact of accessor
choiceitself.An approximationto the insight,then, of what it might be like to
belong to a culture whose next imaginative leap is to think of itself as having
nothing to construct.It would not, after all, be after anything.

Individuality and diversity

1
Individuality and diversity

To those who were bringing up families in the 1950sor 1960s,their children


are already quite a long way down the road from dreams of garden cities, as
they are from taking for granted a view of enclosed fields and hedgerows.
Prairie farms can be found in southern England, and the rain that has kept the
countryside with its own parks and gardens proverbially green prompts
thoughts of a man-made pluvial. Despite such global manifestations of too
much enterprise,however, the slogansof the self-namedEnterprise Culturel
assert that a natural and traditional individualism is being restor{ to the
English. If so, its environment has changed. Today's is the individualism of
zapping between television channels, of single-minded captivatioq by east
Asian computer screens,of a world where social conditions are taken for
cultural style and First World shopperscan consume the food of almost any
country on earth. In t964, I saw sugar cane and taro for the first time in the
Papua New Guinea Highlands; twenty-five years on, I can choose African
varieties of them in a suburban Safeway in Manchester. Meanwhile, there is
talk of schemesto privatise city streets with security guards and residents'
patrols public areasare said to make the defenceof domestic property too
difficult.
It is tautologous to say that the changecomesfrom microchips or consumer
demand or urban decay: this is the change. And so is the form that late
iwentieth-century individualism takes.Such individualism as the English wish
to award themselvesis after all a new individualism. In any case,individual
enterpriseis regardedas containing an inherent momentum towards novelty.
In what sense,then, might we regard individualism as traditional if, as is
also the case,it is the enterprise of individuals that is held up as a source of
innovation, development and the transformation of tradition? The one
abstraction (tradition) seemsto work againstand at oncemask and exposethe
other (novelty). Theseare issuesin the construction ofideas that are not to be
settledby deciding'how much'tradition or novelty is found at this moment or
that. It is in order to approach the construction of ideasthen, that I start with a
field of phenomena in English culture that epitomises tradition under the
l0

ll

pressure of change.. Kinship is my example. The period is roughly the


modeinismof the 1860sto 1960s,but the view is from now (cf. Hastrup n.d.).
If I sornetimesshift in tense,it is becausethe late twentieth century contains as
rnuch as it supersedesthis earlier modernism. I speak of kinship; the Fnglishl
more readily refer to family and relatives
Family relationships are conventionAlly taken as embodying primordial i*.'r.
. ries rhat somehow exist outside or beyond the technologicaland political f # *'
rnachinationsof the world, that suffer change rather than act as a force for I $ "/
change.Indeed, the enduring ties of kinship may be regardedas archetypicallyI I
traditional in antithesis to the conditions of modern life. The wider the
network and the more extensive the reach of kin relations or the more
emphaticthe solidarity of the family, the more traditional they seem.It is,
however,possible both to accept that conceptualisation of tradition and to
realiseits contemporary force. Precisely becausekinship is supposed to be
about primordial relations, the fundamental facts it endorses have been
intrinsicto the cultural enterprisebuilt up after it. Ideas about what is natural,
primordial and embedded in the verities of family life are thereby made
relevantto the present, will be refashioned for the future. Where I rurn to
earlier historical periods, it will be to amplify how such ideas revolve on
themselves and revolutionise us in the process.

a.

Facts of kinship
Pets and children
An antithesisbetweenan extensivereach of kin relations and the enterpriseof
individualsis one that Macfarlane (1978) would project far back into the
Englishpast. There he finds quite habitual the denial of relationships and of
kin claims beyond the narrowest span. Individualism is traditionil for the
English.Go back to the thirteenth century, even, and you will discover the
Englishbehaving in the sameindividualistic way we take as so typical
of our
own tlmes. These connections led Macfarlane to conclude
that the great
his.toricaldivide (the origins of capitalism) was not
such a divide after all, and
ndeed there was a reason why England
was the first industrial nation
-" -- of>k:np
-'' t
l

F tr r ^ ^ ^

rr-

thaiby"l50o,
una.certainly

-'-\

-:'
L:r^"f:ll::.,f1
9L]uio,lq;i:" i?'.0
conditions
'ue,e.'t'
for the modern
viewof naturewerealready.rtuuilrn.a egTg:gj). "( .

wouldstress
the
lu, *h.r"u, hisaccount
'9..1', or of proclivitiesthat are curiously
""rti;;;;;it;;r"il;;;J:")a:
.preserved',
^"'a ' 't"/ ''/
ir iis afso-an
it
lY"l

iti),t;;;ki

iJ*, o"iy.nau,o
1
insofar
lh
r n o, ^- ,r
as
tneyare'r;;;;;;
in new forms: tradition is thereby reinvented ,--,
converselywe arriveat theffin
other view, that new ideas can
:S!gy{ha!se.
onlyemerge
fiom thei
ir antecedents.It i s tradii tion that chanses:
: indeed, it
th

rvr rr rl r rr lu

i, uil ,t,ut
iun.

of course,a view implicated in the very claim (which is my claim) to


,',Lhl,-tt,
'rlndsight.There is a similar view implicated in the craim ro perceive

Englishkinshipin the late twentiethcentury

12

appear
connections.It is an anthropological axiom that howeverdiscretethey
some
in
is
nothing
not
embedded
relations;
of
product
to be, entities are the
axtom
the
contexr or worldview that givesit its specialshape.I propose to take
individull
to
app.lies
concepts
also
discrete
to
applies
what
literally, as though
s
p.rron, and that by relations we may also understand the 'relations lonc
relatives) of English kinshiP'
emotion for dwelling on tradition. or for
_ The English iave. u ,p"iiul
jusiout
reach of enterprise:sentimentality.Their
of
. ii
dwellins on-what is
point. Macfarlane is taken with rhomas's
in
case
a
pets
is
for
*-.*/:^ -;;il;?;i;ty
.*

V":-'' il;;';;'il;

tint uetwe"nkeepinspetsand 'a modern,atomistic,kinship

satisfaction- pets act as


system' (19S7:-t5).The link is that of emotional
back into medieval
traces
j&: substitutes for children - and is one Macfarlane
exists beyond or
that
a
need
as
'\
ir-"r.'fl" tri-self puts emotional attachment

o ut s id e t h e rel a tio n s h ip s a n d ,i n d ee d ,s u g g estsi ti sacaus e.ratherl han' a


coming into being. such a needfor surrogatesis to be
f .oau", of relationships
English kinship that set it
interpreted *itt ,.rp."ito ail tle characteristicsof
offfromitsEuropeancongeners'suchaslatemarriage,lowbirthrate,isolated
children' which in
units. Pets were regardedas luxuries, a1 altgllative
"" living
t u r n m e a n t t h a tth e En g lis h c a me to re g a r d ch i l dren.asl uxuri esal so,as
kind of uniquenesstherebS
superior pets, and sentimlntally accordedthem a
depictions of children
seventeenth-century
and
He cites (u86: 5afl sixteenthi n < l u lg e d u "o p ".* a a s p l a y th in g s .2 An d li ke p ets,hei ntri gui ngl yadds,i nti me
.they would leave theii.,owners": pets died, children left home and withdrew
emotionallY'(1986:55)'
I t is t h u s a s o c i a lre l at io n s h ip p fa p a rti cu l a rki nd.nam e|ybetw eenpar ents
he callsindividualism.For much of
and children *t,i.n..n,rulty
"uirii6i'*hat
early modern times, Macfarlane
into
the medievai period, and exiending
do c u m e n t s t h ec o n c o mi ta n tin d e p e n d en c eofchi l drenfromparents ,the
nature ofinheritance,
prevalenceoi*ug" labour and service,the contractual
, in short an individualistic system where private emotions were strong and
.fo-rm-altlnsrrin' wsak (lggi: 139). The individualism that these (social)
.
of uniqueness often
arrangements nourished was exemplified in a sense
e x p r e s s e d a s is o l a tio n is m .Ita ls o h a d a n e l e cti v enatur e,thati s,w asamatter
of choice.
countryside back to a
His own reach is generous:he traces the love of the
of Anglo/Saxon,
waves
three
the
through
came
that
Germanic preference
about the
something
as
and
iountry,
the
of
settlements
Viking und No.-un
quotes
He
century'
English that was still to surprise visitors in the nineteenth
visitor
a
as
gardens
parks
and
the Frenchman Taine and his comments on
to England in the 1860s:
lnmyopinionthesegardensreveal,betterthananyotherwork,thepoeticdreamin
has gone
the Englishsoul. . . All their imagination,all their nativeinventiveness
into their Parks."
t o f t h e t h en i n d us tria l to wn o fM a n c h e ste r Tai new rotethat]

Individualityand diversiry

13

Hereandin Liverpool,asin-London,theEngrishcharactercanbe seenin


theirway
of building.Thetownsmandoeseverythingin hispowerto..ur. ulinfu
townsman,
and triesto fit a country-house
and a bit of countryinto a corneroithe town. He
feelstheneedto bein hisown home,to bearone,king of hisfamityanJ seruants,
arro
to haveabout him a bit ofpark or gardenin whichhe can relai after
his artificial
business
life. (Macfarlanel9g7: 7g, relerences
deleted)
The individualism associatedwith a low birth rate, with
a high value on
each unique child and with keeping pets for surrogate emotional
satisfaction
was also to be seenin a.cherishingof particular patches of the countryside
both the wild moors and mountains of the romantic aestheteand those
pieces,
of private property which meant that 'the Englishman, could retire
behind
walls. Individualism becamevisible in professedsolitude, and solitude
was a
condition in which wildernesswas also to be appreciated.So where
Thomas
arguesthat a perceivedseparation ofman from nature in the seventeenth
and
eighteenth centuries was the precondition for a new and individualistic
attitude towards specific animals (quoted in Macfarlane l9g7: g0),
Macfarlane himself insists that such cultural traits were in evidence
long before.
Along with a market mentality and high mobility. they were
p* or.a very
ancientsystem' (1987: r37), exemprifiedin the most intimate
of rerationships
when children could physically remove themserves
from their parents and
pT,r"lt who wanted to be cared for by chirdren
had to enter into conrracts
wtln them.
It is lessthe claims to the historicalcontinuity
of individualismthat I find
inlerestingin Macfarlane's account than the
contemporary rendering he gives
of one of its forms. An individual in his view
is u p".ron who can ,"t t i- o.
herselfofffrom proximity to and relationships
with others, and is thus created
1pDern! separated from the constraints
of relationship itself.
Societyis the Frenchman'smeat and drink; to
be lelt alone,the Englishman,s.
Henceit is that governmentof any kind irks him
wrote one Macneile Dixon (r93g:
70) in the interwar years,a sentimenrto
I shall have causeto return. what Macfarlane's
observationsadd is that
Illtl
tndividualism
was also to be found in the literal capacity of a person to
move
the society of others. Isolation was a physical (geographicat)
fact. 7
XY?,T:.
householdsfacilitated the individual's removir from the'
;:: ".sep^arare
prror relarionships,then separationappears
as a quantifiablefact!
;;::::it "t
possibteto.assessits degreeor incidenceby
eitaUtistringhow
i;::::,:"
:e,
,y^.hrldren
were able to set up on their own. This indeed is similar
to
;;"'l.Ti
ol questionsoften askedof historicar
materiar.yet whetheror nor ir is
i;;:':f
by enumeration, such a relationship betweenindividualism
ann"",ll,uTtnutecl
-- rourit'o'
-uBtification. rs arso one of analogy, and the anal0gy is an apparatus for

couldsrandfor anexercise
of independence.
rn rheimage
"rs uuue Delngsent away from home or breaking free
"rllJ:i.|lt:T:]rl
from its parents was

English kinship in the late twentieth century

Individualityand diversity

being set against the givens oI


an invitation to imagine the inclividual person
relationships'
his or her social situation, and againstpre-existing
individualism as a
to
regard
therefore,
paradoxical,
It is somewhat
The evidence,as we have
characteristic oJ certain relationships themselves.
the past have arranged
in
might
seen,is the way that parents and children
pets
children may be the
like
how
or
contractual ug...m.nt, with one another,
as 'special' is
someone
To
treat
affection.
objects of their parents' special

is not its parents provides an image for thinking about the contrast between
traditionversusnovelty,relationshipsversusindividuals;that the child comes
from its parents prompts a counterinterpretation. Tradition innovates;
relationshipsproduce individuals.
Supposethese conceptualisationsdid indeed once constitute a reproductive, or procreative(after Yeatman 1983),model. The model would be both
grounds for and an outcome of kinship thinking. Its implicit developmentalism rnakes generation appear irreversible: children seem further on in time
from their parents; tradition comes 'before' change. we could thus say that
relationshipscome'before'persons.Parentsalreadyunited in a relationship
produce individual children. we might further say that their unity as one
person presupposesthe individuality of the child. yet, in their children,
parents (rersons in a relationship) also produce other than themselves
(individualpersons).Individuality would thus be borh a fact of and .after.
ki nshi p.

l4

c o nc e iv a b ly as mu c h a r e la tio n a ld e v i c e a S to enteri ntoanapparentl y


make one kind of
impersonal contract with them: both reconstructions
What
these particular
kind.
..i'utlonrrrip out of a relationship of another
character of
pre-existing
possibilities have in common is the notion that the
'relationships
status of the
implicit
The
granted.
for
need not after all be taken
reexplicitly
relationship
the
and
parent-chiid tie can be circumvented,
individual
the
of
satisfaction
private
lesser
or
greater
constructed to the
parties.
'
the individuality of
English ideas about the value of individualism and
they describe'
what
of
p..ro"n, are not to be understood simply in terms
taken-for-granted
to
resistance
namely by documenting people's solituae or
exist on their own! They
relationshtps - uny *o." than ideas or concepts
look at the management .consequently
must
coexist witir others. The observer
o f re l a t io n s h ip s a n d a tth e re l a tio n s b e twe e n i deas' Wemi ghtconsi der' then'
child generatesthe image
how the partiiular social relationship of parent and
individual. Indeed, we
of the child not just as son or daughier but as a unique
prrtont as thefrst ./act oJ'English kinship.
I might considerlfte indivielualitvis
L e t m e s p e ll o u tthe i mp l ic a tio n s .Li k e c o n ti nui tyandchangeortradi ti on
in antithesis'Any one of
and novelty, societyand individual may be construed
or principle that has a
force
or
element
an
as
of
theseconceptsmay be thought
it competeswith its
as
insofar
lives
people's
on
effe:ct
governing or reguiative
Each pair of concepts thus seems to ofler a
iair in {uantitative effect.
there are many such
iotalisini perspective on life. At the same time
culture' 'TradiEnglish
p".rp."tiu.i, for many such antithesesrun through
with the idea of
overlaps
hence
as
and
tion, is similar to but not quite the same
. c o n ti n u it y ,;iti s c o n tin u ity Se e n fro m th e p o i ntofvi ew ofw hati sregardedas
overlapsin turn
characteristicor typical about something.The'conventional'
point of view of what is
with the idea of 'tradition'; it is tradition seenfrom the
may form a similar
regarded as regulative in social life' Pairs of concepts
.enterprise'working againstthe inert influence
series.For instance,the idea of
o f . c u lt u r e '(tra d i tio n /c o n tin u ity /c o n v e n ti o n) addsanotherperspecti veto
not of isolatedconceptsbut of analogies'Finally
what then appears
^well as a string
be comp-osedof elements (enterprise/inertia) internally
a pair may
in a prior (inertia) or
connected as though each were, so to speak, the other
state.
(enterprise)
transformed
reproductive
Think of thesepartic;lar antithesesas though they modelled a
the child
That
parents.
its
process.The chili that comesfrom its parents is not

t5

Conventionand choice
Individualism has its own quantification effect - persons are thought to
exercisemore or less individuality, by analogy with the amount of freedom
one has to act in this or that manner. It is even measurablebetweenparents
and children, at least to the extent that the English regard children as more
individualistic than parents. In the relationship between them, it seemsthdf ,
the parent can stand for the idea of relationship itself, cast in terms of given
ties,obligation and responsibility,while the child demonstratesthe capacity to
grow away from relationships,as an independentpersonconstructing
hii qJher own referencepoints. Thus, as Janet Finch describes(19g9: 53). the
parent's duty to care for the helplesschild is more of a certainty
than the
child'sduty to care in later years for a helplessparent. However,
it is quit6'
possibleto reversethe case,and stressthe greater
individuation ofthe parents
(eachrepresentinga unigue-ti-dg-p-lrhe
family; by conrrast with the child who
oelongsto both. The
Sarenr chil]\ relationship in fact offers a two-way '
appa-ratusfor imagi ning-degreesof i nd i vid
uality.
It is a characteristicof the organisation of ideas
that I describethat almost
any perspectivecan be countermanded
by another. Hence the view ,from the
cnlld'finds, so to speak,
another version in the view ,from the parent'. The
vtew from the child
seems a specifically English echo of Macfarlane's
seventeenth-and
eighteenth-cenluryobiervation'that obligations, like
ernotion, flowed down
[from pur"nt to child]' in that, after the jurist
Drackstone.
'natural afrectiondescendsmore strongly
than it ascends' (19g6:
"4,. lhe vrew from the parent has nineteenth-centuryantecedentsin the
uniqueness
claimed for the parent-child relationshipby virtue of its basisin
the individual
identities of each parent. This uniqueness became, for
an index for those kinship systems to which English was
li_ll$:,"ty,
'tttmatly perceivedto belone.

16

Englishkinshipin the late twentiethcentury

It was the American Morgan who, in classifying systems by their


designationsof kin persons,showed that the conventionsof descriptivekin
terminology were not universal but constituted a distinct type. The type was
common to ancestral Aryan, Semitic and Uralian language groups. as he
called them, the last a category that included Europeans and Muslim peoples
of the biblical lands of the Near East, and thus in his view the ancestorsof
what we would call Westerncivilisation(Trautmann 1987:133).Anthropologists who by and large reject the evolutionary model that lay behind
Morgan's eventual sequencingof types nonethelessby and large accept the
distinctivenessof descriptive terminologies.
A descriptive terminology acknowledges the uniqueness of a child's
parents, being based upon the 'correct appreciation' (so he said) of the
distinction betweena lineal and a collateralconnection.A child's individual
parents are differentiated from other senior kin, as in the English designation
of these as aunts and uncles. Descriptive systems contrast with those
classificatorysystemsof kin terminologies from elsewherein the world which
confound theserelations with others, and where parents and parents' siblings
mav be known bv a singleterm.
Now originally, Morgan conceivedthe contrast as betweenthose closer to
and more distant from nature. The descriptivesystemwas closer to the facts'---.
Thus he characterisedit as one that 'follows the actual streams of blood'
(quoted by Trautmann 1987: 137). Indeed the draft opening chapter of
Sl,stemsof Consanguinityreferred to family relationships existing in nature
independently of human creation. If genealogy was, in his view, a natural
arrangement, then the genius of the descriptive terminology was that it
implied true knowledge of the (universal) processesof parenthood and
reproduction (cf. Schneider1984:98). The individuality of a child's particular
mother and particular father was preservedin the distinctive kin terms.
Morgan was writing in the 1860s,about the time of Taine'sobservationson
the English countryside. Adam Kuper (1988: 64-5) reminds us that Morgan
in 1871.
was also a visitor to England, when he deliveredcopiesof his S.ysle,fls
He called on Maine, Mclennan, Lubbock, Darwin and Huxley, and'took the
Lubbock Tylor model [of social evolution] back to America'. British social
anthropology was to become in turn heir to this American intervention (cf.
Fortes 1969).However, parts of Morgan's theory were too much for some at
the time. John Mclennan's subsequent quarrel with Morgan included an
attack on his explanation for classificatoryterminologies,pointing to the
absurdity of imagining that anyone might not recognise'his' own individual
mother. Ever since,anthropological debate has largely concernedthe validity
of Morgan's classificatorymodels;but we might turn that around and reclaim
Morgan from a Western perspective.In the courseof making his classificatory
discoveryevident,he had also made the uniquenessof parental identity the
founding assumption of his analysis of that class of advanced, descriptive
kinship terminologieswhich includedthosebasedon Englishlanguageusage.

Individualityand diversity

17

Whatever one might say about the formal properties of the terminology,
perh.rpsthe popularity of Morgan's schemeamong anthropologistsrestsin
i he d.montt r at i o n t hat t he individuali t yof t he parent svisiblycont r ibut est o
the uniquenels.of the parent-child relationshifis a whole. The contrast is
with systemsthat do not afford such a senseof uniqueiress.For the twentiethcentury English, that contrast reappears as an internal feature of the
relationshipitself, in the same way, as I have suggested,that one party to the
relationshipcan Lpp-ggl:.Tglel ggique or individuated than the other.
The generalpoint is indicated in"ttre frequent interdigiration of kinship
termsand personal names.It is as though the very use of kin terms in English
hasa classificatorycast to it, while personal namesare held to be descriptiveof
the unique individual.3 A kin term denotes a relationship and thus a
perspectiveon the person from another's viewpoint. of course,a contrast lies
betweenkin terms themselves.Terms of referencefor absent relativesappear
more formal than the often familiar diminution of terms of address.But when
a nameis regardedas more informal or personal than a kin term, then all kin
termscome to have generic connotations. Betweennames, there is a further
contrastin the differentiationof surnameand Christianname.Thesedaysone
talks of first rather than christian name and, for most people, the connotationsof the baptisedname as admitting the personto a community of souls
is displacedby its personalisingfeatures(Firth, Hubert and Forge (1969:304)
equatethe Christiannamewith'personalname').In that aspect,the first name
is more personal, we might say, than the surname or family name.
Here lies a history within a history. Harold Nicolson, writing in 1955,
commentsthus on the twentieth-century revival of a fashion for first names
which had prevailed briefly in certain circles at the turn of the eiehteenthand
nineteenthcenturies:a
In my own life-time... the feelingaboutChristiannameshas
[again]changed
completely.
My fatherwould neverhaveusedthe Christiannameof any man or
womanwho wasnot a relationor whomhe had not knownfor at leastthirty years.
My auntcalledherhusbandby hissurname
until thedayof hisdeath.It wasin the
reignof EdwardVII that the useof christian namesfirst becamefashionable,
and
eventhenit wassurroundedby all mannerofprecautions
andrestrictions.
Todayto
address
a manby hissurnamemight appeardistant,snobbish,old-fashionable
and
ratherrude. . . I am oftenamazedby thedexteritywith which
actors,band-leaders,
merchants,
clubrrenand wireless-producers
will rememberto say 'Veronica'or
'Shirley'to women
to whom theyiave not evenbeenintroducea.
tnis engagrng
naottderives,I suppose,from the united states:from
the beliefcherishea
uy tni
crtlzens
of that Republicthat all men,asall women,arecreatedequalandthat these
gambitsof intimacyform part
of the pursuitof happiness.
(Nic'holson1955:273)
N-otethe consensus
about the signification of such shifts, that among any
ctrcle of people
the move from surnames to first names is a move from
tormality to
informality; it parallelsthe decisionspeoplemake as to whether
rrreyusekin
termsor namesfor their relatives.The latter is also interpretedas

l8

English kinship in the late twentieth century

./ \

./'

-/

--f-

Exlrc.Fomtllol

\-

Individuality and diversity

-:.

\
z'cnrar.cnrNoeA Great-cnndra
i
/UNCLE

GMNDPA I
GRANDAo

I
I

G..ndr.
G.r nny
Nanna( N an )

Au nt

Fomlllol

UNCTE
cous lN...

FATHER
DADDY (DAD)
PAPA(PA)
POP

Mothcr
Mummy(Mum)
Mamma(Mr)
Mom

Aun t
Auntie
C o ur l n ...

Personal
Namer
PERSONALNAMES

Terms of Address to ConsanguineKin


levels.For cousinsand other kin of
Note.The figureis rranged in generation
and belowpersonalnamesare used.
own generation

2 Terms of address lo consanguite kin c.1960


Reproduced by kind permission of Routledge, from Fomilies and Their Relatives,
Kinship in a Middle-Class Sector of Londor. by Raymond Firth. Jane Hubert and
Anthony Forge, 1969.

a gesture towards inforn-rality, as down-playing the given role element in a


relationship and up-playing the uniquenessof the interpersonal dimension.
What happensin everydayaddressis illuminating in this regard.Plate 2 is
reproducedfrom a study of families in London begun by Raymond Firth and
his colleaguessome five years after Nicolson's observations (Firth, Hubert
and Forge 1969:302).(An accompanyingdiagram not reproducedhere shows
the rather different spread of terms used when people refer to kin in the
presenceof third parties.)The authors of the study remark that English terms
of address were regularly replaced or supplemented by personal names
provided,that is, the addressees
wereofa generationequalto orjunior to ego.
Only a tiny percentaCe(6%) of their respondentsin the early 1960srecorded
using personal names to addressparents (1969:.304-6).

l9

4n interesting aspect of the interplay between personal names and kin


family life, then, lies in the asymmetry of reciprocal usage.
terrnsin intimate
called
by their personal names,parents and grand-parentsby kin
are
Children
aunts
and
uncles are often known by a combination of kin term
while
terrns,
name.
Members
of a junior generationare also assumedto be
personal
and
youngerin age ('children' means both offspring and young persons).In some
circles,it is an affectation to addresssomeoneas son or daughter face to face,
whilesisterand brother as terns of addressoften carriesjoking overtones.In
the principal contrast betweengenerickin terms (for parents) and individual
personalnames (for children), individuality seeminglybelongs 'more' to the
child than the Parent.
It is parents who normally bestow these individual names. Although
anyonecan call themselvesby what name they please,convention has it that
your namesare bestowedby the parents.So this individuationis establishedat
birth. Parentsproduce a unique offspring; it is the parents'duty to name their
child,anticipatingthe child'sindividualityin exercisingtheir own. While there
is no choiceabout giving the child a name,they can choosewhich name it is to
be, and may even think they have invented a name - my own Marilyn being a
casein point. The child may, of course,determine usage;I do not usemy initial
name. Friends, like kin, also reserve to themselvesthe right to vary the
person'sname as they please. Such practices can be taken as a particular
exampleof a more generaldistinction betweenconvention and choice.Within
theparent child relationship,I have asserted,that distinctionis played out in
terms of expectationsthat parents will implement convention - 'socialising'
their children - while children will implement choice - making 'their own'
lives;or betweenthe roles in which personsfind themselvesand their freedom
to act as individuals, to which a generation difference adds weight (cf.
Strathern1982:80, 84).
$* leat u ry o,[ c-o-nlempo.uary.]inship- pr"actice inrhe. I 980s"is-a.further shift i n

rro-qlhe-b-i!-q+J.us9-9-lk-is*t-e.tr$-rl-edd-rps
lnqlisht95m-i"qol9gi9+lp-et-t-ggg,

ctoseseniorkin to a choice betweenthat and the personal name. Again, where

i;-i;IG,il,
folmaritvas suctris-regarffi'as"cdn$fairir-'tlii;

u-liberating

lnlormality. Using the first name to personalisethe person named seemsof a


ptecewith the idea that to treat people as persons one must treat them as
unique individuals. For the current trend towards apparent terminological
reciprocity is frequently held to be an act of mutual individuation: in having
the liberty to treat the parent as an individual person, the child is 'more' of an
tndividual him/herself thereby.Yet calling a pirent by a first name is not quite
the same as calling the child by a first name. The child claims the greater
rloerty.Rather than establishingnew conventionsfor relationships,then,
the
move is colloquially regarded as treating the parties to a relationship as
tndividual personsrather than.asrelatives.That ii, it is regardedas a negation
of convention.
Now there is no inherent reason why calling a person Ann is more or less

Englishkinshipin the late twentiethcentury

Individuality and diversity

individuating than calling that person Mother (cf' Firth, Hubert and Forge
of
1969:310).s-Thenumber of Anns in the world no doubt run in hundreds
nriddlemother.
a
one
has
only
Mary,
person
Indeed,
each
thousands, while
classrespondentin Firth's London study (Firth, Hubert and Forge 1969 311)
explained her small daughter's use of a kin term towards her thus: 'To her
there is only one Mother, but there are two or three Mary's in our circle.'
Another said that to use first names among kin was actually to introduce a
distance, to make them feel less close. With respect to a circle of named
individuals, then, the (generic)kin term can also work to a personalisingeffect.
It singlesout a specifictie. But much more than kin terms, namesseemto add
to the personalisingmove the significant factor of choice, itself an ingredient

like tradition, seemsto be antecedent,to'come from' the past, while choice,


like invention,seemsto lie in the future. In kinship idiom, children are future
to the parents' past. Increased variation and differentiation invariably lie
ahead.afragmented future as compared with the communal past. To be new is
to be different. Time increasescomplexity; complexity in turn implies a
myltiplicity or plurality of viewpoints.
Ilmodern peoplein the 1950sand 1960sdid indeedseethe future as full of
more and more highly individualised persons, more heterogeneity, many
analogiesfor the processwere available to them. Change could be identified:
l. when convention was challenged, as in the shift from formality to
informality in kin address;2. when personswere able to exercisegreaterchoice
than before,as in what they wishedto call another; 3. in increasingattention to
individuality, so that when personal relationships overrode kinship obligations.individual agencywas seento override stultifying givens of existence,
4. in the
manifestedin the equation of physicalwith relationalseparateness;
consequentassociationbetweengreaterindividuation and greatervariation
ordifferentiation,asin the notion that, asindividuals,personsweresingularin
the sense of being unique and therefore innately variable; 5. in simple
magnitude,in that with more thingsin the world more individuals- increase
itselfindicatedchange;and so forth. In sum, the future was knowableby the
infinite possibilitiesit held. Although any of these conditions might be
imaginedin reverse- more red tape, more constraints - such a reverseflow
also appearedto go against what was apprehendedas natural development.
For the conditionscould all be referredto the further suppositionthat over
time things naturally evolve from simple to complex states.6Complexity
displayeda variety and plurality of individual forms whose interconnections
challengedany simple systematisation.Thus we arrive at the English view of
the individualist who knew his/her own mind and made a life for him/herself,
with thepast thought of as relativelycommunaland homogeneousby contrast
with a varied. heterogeneous
future.
This proliferation of concepts,forming a string of associationsbetween
..
roeas that are not quite the same (continuity/tradition/convention:
change/novelty/choice)supports the modern connection between the twin
processes
ofdifferentiation and complexification. There were'many' concepts
in the sameway that the world was full of 'many' things- so that evenwhat
appearsthe same(suchas continuity/tradition)on closerinspectioncould be
differentiated(continuity is a question of time, tradition one of form). This
anticipatedproliferation modelled the very comprehensionof change.It also
suggestedthat one's perspectivewas a matter of
choice.
. Ideasabout increasingsocialcomplexitywereconcordantwith ideasabout
tncreasing natural complexity (cf. Cohen
1985: 22). Time and variation
oecameinextricably linked in this scheme,and the mid-twentieth-century
habit of referring io contemporary society as 'complex' had just such a
resonance.
All I wish to bring into this well-known picture is the fact that the

20

of informalitY.
That a move away from kin terms in address, or away from titles and
surnamesin other spheres,is imagined to be a move away from formality or
conventionperhapsderivespart of its power from former habitsof address.It
was once the casethat a superior was at liberty to addressan inferior by the
first name but not the other way round. ln Morgan's time. servantsas well as
children will have beenaddressedpersonally,although the servantwould have
had to take regard of the rank order among the children. Employers might
invent names for their servants.What lent this liberty importance, however,
has long ceased to signify. Rank has been reconceptualisedin terms of
personal interaction, for the present choice appears simply betweenmore or
less formality. Formality still carries connotations of respect, but it has
become a matter of individual style whether or not one implements that
formality in intimate circles.
A practiceoncedefinitiveof rank - calling solrleoneby their firsl name- is
no*i".n as a negationofrank. That is, one conventionis challengednot by
what is perceivedas another convention, but by what the English perceiveto
be anti-convention. Underneath the convention, one discovers the 'real'
person. Thus. to call a parent by a first name today is not necessarilya sign of
insubordinationor lack of respect.On the contrary, it may be encouragedby
the parent as a positive indication that within the family everyone has the
choice of being treated 'in their own right', as a person rather than simply as
some role-player. They are all special, all as it were one another's pets. To
borrow the words of a Canadian sociologist,the solidarity of the modern
family dependson'personalattachments'betweenindividualmembers(Cheal
1988: 144). Convention is concealed in the anti-conventional effect of
'personal' expression.This bears on views of change and diversity.
Like certain kin obligations, time is seento flow downward. It thereby
contributes to the asymmetry in relations between parents and children, and
to the contextsin which parentsare regardedas actingmore from convention,
children more from their capacity for individual choice. Out of the fact and
direction of generation, the antitheses between convention and choice or
relationshipsand individuality acquire a temporal dimension.Convention,

2l

22

English kinship in the late twentieth century

same sequence was reproduced in the context of family relationships,


encapsulatedin the widely held notion that as personal choice and autonomy
became more important, kin conventions became less so. The diminishing
importance of kinship over the generations appeared a reflex not just of
increasingindividuality but of increasingcomplexityin life at large.That the
developmentwas anticipated meant that suchdiminution was also intrinsic to
the conceptualisation of kinship relations themselves.
Modernist complexity was perceived not so much as the complexity of
involute and self-repeatingpatterns, oflayer upon layer oftextual exegesisor
of the juxtaposing of mystical and mundane experience,as above all an effect
or outcome of quantity. The more people there were, the more points of view,
the more potential differences of perspective. This intimate connection
betweencomplexity and plurality restedon one presupposition.Proliferation.
led to complexity provided what increased was not homogeneity but
heterogeneity.Complexity was thus held in place through a commitment to
preservingdiversity, underpinned by the notion that if what were reproduced
were unique individuals.diversity would be the natural result.But insofar as
diversity appearedto be in the nature of things, its naturalnessalso made it a
precondition. This gave a fresh twist to the reproductive model.
As part of the supposedmodelling of the reproductive processto which I
referred earlier, I take diversity as a secondfact of modern kinship. Whrle
individuals strive to exercisetheir ingenuity and individuality rn the way they
createtheir unique lives, they also remain faithful to a conceptualisationof a
natural world as diverse and manifold. Individual partners come together to
make (unified) relationships; yet as parents they ought at the same time to
stand in an initial condition ofnatural differentiation from each other. In the
relationshipsthey build and elaborateupon, it is important that the prior
diversity and individuality of the partners remain. Such relationships are
'after' individuality, even as human enterprise is modelled upon and in that
sense'after'nature with its own impetusto variation.If in order to reproduce
personsmust preservenatural diversity, then diversity would be both a fact of
and have a priority 'before' kinship.

Diversitt, and the individuql case


Such a reproductive model would have no purchaseif the facts of kinship did
not resonatewith how people seeand know the world. Let me exemplify the
workings of the model in connection with one way in which the modern
English reproduce and createknowledge afreshfor themselves.Conceptualising a world full of individuality and diversitygave rise to certain'questions'.
My'answer' offers an explanation or context for one particular question,from
hindsight.
The question sounds obvious: to whom are my present remarks meant to
apply?

Individuality and diversity

ZJ

canons of generalisr Isingmyself as I have occasionallydone offends the


I have no
my
uniqueness,
is,
virtue
of
that
by
individual,
qua
^rif,ns:
narrowly
case by
draw
so
on
one
would
only
status.
One
l,..esentative
generalisations
aggregate:
individuals
in
the
connection
with
.i'"*ing some
fashionedfrom what a plurality of individualssharein common. Hence
"re
point for
lne shouldreally specify what replicablefeaturesform the reference
making general observations about
purport
be
all,
I
to
After
.*u.ple.
ln.'r
but wheredo I fit in - and to what areaor regiondo the observations
tcinsirip.
cannot be collapsed into a
If
refer? the vast diversity of Western culture
There
is
true
of
Britain.
are class,geographical,
homogeneity,the same also
between
the British, none of
days
ethnic
differences
and
these
occupational
English'.
In fact, the sameis
with'the
in
any
simple
way
aligned
be
can
which
life
Whenever I
her
experiences.
with
his
or
own
each
individual,
of
true
also
person,
if
it
is myself,it
and
even
including
the
individual
unit,
social
a
at
look
seemsas though I can only make senseof the isolatedcaseby putting that unit
or personinto their social or cultural context, and thus accounting for both
the specificityand replicability of its or his/her position. Obviously, this
qualification puts innumerable problems in the way of characterising
'English'kinship.
Theproblems evidently faced Schneiderapropos'America', and his exercise
hasbeencriticised on this account. Sylvia Yanagisako (l 978: I 985) showsthat
a JapaneseAmerican understanding of the relationship between Japanese
and American culture distinctively qualifies the way in which
JapaneseAmericansinterpret'relatives'and 'persons',the apparentlybasic
elementsof American kinship.T Anyone embarking on a study of English
kinshippracticeswould certainly feel bound to specify the classbackground
of their study, and would expectto be dealing with classdistinctivefeatures.
Taine'sEnglishman is all very well in his country home, but we know that the
numberofcountry homesper head ofpopulation has never been very great at
any time in England's history. We cannot conceive of not qualifying
generalisationby attention to the specificsocial and cultural background of
the individdals to whom it is meant to apply.
To what context, then, do I addressmyself? Habits, practices,norms,
nomenclature- anything the English might wish to say about 'English
rtnship' (cf. Schneider'slist, 1968:l4-18) seemssubjectto diversity.And to
what range of practicesdo I addressmyself? Individualism and diversity do
not seemon the face of it to have any specificplace in the domain of kinship at
Mo..ou.r, I have not only invoked a high level of generalitybut have gone
lll.
.o.yondeven 'the English' in implying that these or similar conceptsalso
belongto a field of Western ideas,while social scientistsknow that when they
took al specificinstitutions they find there is never any single Western type.
This has beenMichael Anderson's(1980:l4) argumentas far as the family
rsconcerned.MichdleBarrett and Mary Mclntosh (1982)cite him to this effect
tn their own characterisation of 'the anti-social family'.

English kinship in the late twentieth century


is an essentially
Do we suggestthat the family, recognizablein its different forms,
is anti-social?In one
anti-social institution, or that this particular type of family
to a particular,
sensethere ls a'correct'answer to this questioni v'e must refer
or essential,category
historicalty and socially specifc,form offamily since no general
commonly lumped
can be derived analytically from the many varied arrangements
. . that 'the one
togrtnq as thefamity. . . Michael Anderson, for instance,writes '
there can be no
years
is
that
last
twenty
the
in
has
emerged
wirich
fact
un'ambiguous
there is not,
,i*pte nlrto.y of the Western family sincethe sixteenthcentury because
been
has
always
West
The
system.
family
single
a
been,
there
hai
nor ever
and by
characterizedby diversity of family forms, by diversity of family functions
pointl
diversity in attitudes to family relationshipsnot only over time but at any-one
in time. There is, exceptat the most trivial level, no Western family type' [Anderson
1980: l4]. (Barrett and Mclntosh 1982:81; my emphasis,origina| emphasis
removed)
A related position is encapsulated in the opposite argument which they also
(and see David
cite, not that there are potentially many forms but only one

Morgan 1985:16ff1.
Anderson's position . . . is entirely denied by Peter Laslett. Far from endorsing the
view that nosingle lamily form is characteristicof the West, Laslett maintains that,
pending evidenCeto the contrary, we should assumethat the nuclear form of the
iamily prevails. He argues . . . that tleparturesfrom this J'amily form are merely the
'fortuitousoutcomes'of localtzeddemographic,economic or personalfactors' In his
insistencethat the extendedfamily is no more than a sociologicalmyth, Laslett puts
forward the proposition that'the present state of evidenceforces us to assumethat
the family's organization was always and invariably nuclear, unless the contrary
can be proved' [Laslett 1972 x,73]. (1982:83,my emphasis)

Barrett and Mclntosh's own conclusion, and one to which I shall return, is
that the family is a contested concept. lt is the place of diversity that is of
immediate interest.
Diversity appears as an interference to generalisation; either there are
.many' typ-esoielse only 'one'. Once diversity is admitted, we can conceiveit
as starting with individual experienceand proliferating through heteroge-

neouspotulations and organiiationsin a way that defiesasmuch as it aids

reduction. Social scientistsare generallyhappy to settle for a middle range


just
diversity, such as class and ethnic background. Firth's study was not
addressedto familiesin London, but to middle-classfamilies in two residential
kinship
areas. Indeed, to reveal that in talking mainly about middle-class
as a
well
as
background,
values I am drawing on a privileged educational
feel
reader
the
make
perhaps
will
suburban upbringing in souihe.n England,
of
informant
an
myself
as
use
me
to
on securerground and might even allow
evident'
be
would
status
sorts. My representative
defend
But as far as the account as a whole is concernedI do not propose to
to
intended
They are
my remarks on the grounds of their representativeness'
lives'
generalised
be exemplary. To repeat an earlier point: none of us leads
only speiific ones. One therefore always works through concrete instances'

Individuality and diversity

25

generalideas' values' norms' habits of conduct in particular


ond encounters.
I take 'English kinship' as a particular form of
- rr ic in thls sensethat
f@t--l'u'""hio. But my concernis not with a subcultureof Westernculture

*.-orincati
onisatonce
,,
, xrfi':"",.ffi
,]i""h*l
[H:i;ilff
ff
;;
:Ji
t?l'""".in.tess
to.specify what might be particular to the
appearsnecessary.
to a specific
i" which I render English kinship itself. I should be true
reasons
(see
Four),
there
are
several
Chapter
will becomeapparent
l"rr*;.As
class
middle
with
way
the
to
do
the
largely
usage,
.'-.-,.--,
f.,"u, on middle-class
general
values.
Yet
social
regard
as
they
what
communicate
J",i".ir,, and
not stop there. There are many middle-classways of doing
does
iuriiJuri,y
suburbs are not the same as northern ones, and not all
itrrr, and southern
The original question raisesits head. What then is
yuppies.
are
.,r#rrionulr
is to be exemplified in its middle-class
Iie middleclasstype?If English kinship
middle
class is to be exemplified in some
the
that
iorr, ttt"n it would seem
style, a choice that invites us to
cultural
and
regional
particular education,
variants;
local
and so on'
and
occupational
further
ionsider
WhenDavid Schneiderand Raymond Smith (19'73)attempted to grasp the
diversity of American kinship, they did so by making middle-class kinship
exemplaryin a strongsense.Schneider's(1968)earlierstudy in Chicagoin the
1960shad focusedon a middle income population. Although this population
evincedthe cultural apparatus of 'American kinship', there were also marked
divergencesfrom what Schneider and Smith call 'lower-class' kinship
practices,and the comparison is the subject of the joint monograph. They
concluded that the middle-class values they had analysed - including
emphasisput on the growing autonomy of the child and intra-familial
individualism(cf. Firth, Hubert and Forge 1969 460)- in fact encompassed
lower-classvalues. Lower-class kinship did not comprise a separatesubculture, but promoted values and attitud-esspecifically in referenceto middleclassones,which thus held a hegemonicstatus.Moreover, middle-classvalues
weresymbolicallydeferred to as ideal and generalisable(conventional),while
tower-classvalues were taken
to represent a particular and specific kind of
struggle('real life' choices)
with the 'real world' of limited resources.
One contrast between middle- and lower-classkinship practiceslay in the
extentto which
middle-classfamilies emphasised.o-p"i*".
in the managementofsocial relations
and applied rationality principles to decision-making
tDchneiderand Smith
lg73: 114). They endorsed innovation, and were
on enterprises, including the .making' of relationships, that is,
ll"t:-|*
relationships through explicit affective and pracrical dimen:;:::tru.cting
tn love-making,cf. varenne rgjj: lggff). Similar featureshavebeen
f'.*'tas
retelant to middle-classEnglish kinship; more
than that, the middle
;;"s1iy
beena vehiclefor widespreadand radical social change.However, I
il"::.",*
the material to hand to contrast middle- and (what the English
n*"1"_'luu.
Prcfer
to call) working-classkinship practices
as far as the English are
.^::

26

Englishkinshipin the latetwentiethcentury

concerned.I cannot make the middle classexemplary in the hegemonic and


encompassingsensethat Schneiderand Smith intended.
If thereis a classdimensionto my account,it addresses
the opportunitiesfor
communication the middle class have made for themselvesin tenns of
educationand the disseminationof ideasthrough writing and reflection.This
is the classthat doesnot just advertisebut analysesits own conventions.This
is the class that makes its implicit practicesexplicit to itself. Here is the
common backgroundto the intimate connectionbetweenindigenousmodels
of kinship and the way in which scholars over the century between the
1860s-1960shave describedsociety and the nature of social relationships,
especiallythe way in which anthropologists have approachedand reflectedon
kinship systemsthemselves.
one could think, for instance.of the connection that George Stocking
(1987:20u2) makesaproposcertain changingcircumstancesof middle-class
family life in Englandfrom the I 8 50sonwards.The attentionbeingpaid to the
possibility of divorce going through the courts rather than throueh parliament can be related to the then current debate among anthrJpological
scholars on matriarchal institutions. Thus he suggeststhat the argument of
Mclennan's Primitive Marriage, published in 1g65,two years before the first
Matrimonial causes Act was passed,'was conditioned by the contemporary
concern with problems of human sexuality and by the processesof social
changeaffectingthe institution of human marriage' (Stocking 19g7:201).
That particular legislativepracticesin England raised in people'sminds
universal issuesto do with human sexuality returns us to the relationship
betweenthe particularand the generalas a cultural fact. The questionofhow
one moves from individual casesto generalisationsabout systemsis, so to
speak,an indigenousone. Indeed the ielationshipis a problematicthat has
both informed the aims of descriptivepractice and has seemedto prevent the
elucidation of the perfect system. If overcoming imperfect desciiption has
driven scholarly practice for a century, it in turn has at once been iuelled by
and sought resolution in a pluralist specification of quantity.
The specificationhas had two dimensions.Generalisationimplies that
collectivitiesare made up of units which can be enumerated.Societycan thus
be imagined as a plurality of particulars,as'a collection of individuals'(cf.
Schneiderand Smith 1973:21). However, there have always been competing
modelsto this vision of society.Michael carrithers (19g5:236)observesthat
'a view of how individual human beings should interact face
to face is not
necessarilythe same as a view of how they should interact in respect
of a
significant collectivity'. The latter, alternative, rendering evokes another
quantification:the extentor degreeto which a collectivitytranscends
its parts.
Under this second specification, individuals can only be defined in
reflerencesto the whole. The question then becomes 'how much'
of the
transcendentwhole is to be found in each. For if the former specificationgives
rise to enumeration and thus to quantity in the senseof trre plurality or

Individuality and diversity

27

t he lat t ergivesris et o
,nul ti pl i cit yol l si ngular )unit st hat can be c ount ed.t hen
by volume or weight. What can be traced back to Edward Tylor's
",,unii,V
as Tim Ingold notes (1986: 441,cf.
lrltrt.-rtug.' or'degree of culture',
was
in
Morgan's
notion of greater or lesser
already
there
1968),
stocking
It
is
in
the
historical
disputeabout whether
also
there
civilisation.
of
J.*r.m
well as in what I have
as
change/continuity
can
be
observed,
less
or
,oJr.
positions
deducedto be kinship assumptionsabout some people being in
than
others
and who
or
more
individuality
more
uniqueness
show
wherethey
'more'
person.
longer
speakof
scientists
might
no
of
a
Sociai
sense
that
arein
but
were
still
in the
in
an
evolutionary
idiom,
social
development
of
erades
freedom
that
volume
with
amount
of
choice
or
of
concerned
the
u"ry
1960r
individuals could exercise.
Whetheror not this investmentin specifyingquantity is part of the middleendeavour,s
classpursuit of rationality as a utilitarian, competence-enhancing
generalisable
individuality
into
make
and
diversity
also
the specifications
phenomena.They in turn resolve the phenomenon of individual difference
into anotherphenomenon.the capacityto analyse.What becomesmeasurable
isthedegreeof applicability of either the individual caseor diverseexamplesto
account of them. I give a brief illustration.
a generalised
Stocking(1987:200 1) suggeststhat it is from the 1860sthat one finds the
first hint of a number decline in the English middle-classfamily. The idea
prevalentin the 1960sthat 'the [middle class]family is small in size' (Fletcher
1962 125) seems eminently quantifiable. If the reference point were the
nuclear family based on the household, then one could look at changing
householddemography(by contrastwith the past)or at comparativestatistics
(by contrastwith the working class);eitherprocedureassumesthat what is to
be enumeratedare the numbers of individuals. What relatives live together?
On the other hand. one could look at the degreeto which family members
cooperateor assistone another,a volume of behaviourmeasurableperhapsin
terms of frequencyof visits and amount of help (e.g.Young and Willmott
1957).How strong is the link betweenthis or that kinsperson?Now both types
of magnitudehave a significantnon-quantifiabledimension.The very idea
that families evince one or other kind of 'size'is taken to be a generalstate of
affairs.That is, the analyticalpropositioncan be appliedto all families,so that
regardlessof the particular measurementsall are measurable.
In short, quantity (volume and enumeration)solvesthe problem of how to
think of both individuality and diversity with respectto the general.One can
measurethe degreeto which values are prevalent or how a society allows this
or that through the behaviour of individual persons as in showing the
percentageof personal name usage for parents. Description based on such
analysis encompassesboth the representative and the unrepresentative.
Conversely, any analytical type can be shown to have its counterpart in a
particular (segment of) population. Only where the population cannot be
specified does generality or representativenessmake no sense. Hence

28

Englishkinshipin the late twentiethcentury

Anderson's sarcasm:there is no western family type because,of course,there


is no generalwestern population as such. There are only a massofdifferences
between people who imagine themselvesas Westerners.
This self-evidentproposition becomesin turn my own starting point. we
are dealing with people who themselvesmake generalisationr,*ho imagine
they are part of larger collectivities, who act with reference to what they
assume to be widespread norms and such like, and who are consequently
preoccupied with what they take to be a relationship between
the pariiculai
and the general. The English thus distinguish between phenomena
whose
own character includes the fact of their generality and those
that seem
characteristically atypical or individual. A version of this familiar
to
anthropologists is the question of how far 'symbols' are shared. lt rs not
confined to the English. As Anthony cohen (19g6; l9g7) has shown
in his
study of whalsay in the Shetland Islands, the truth of the matter is
that when
people draw on certain symbolic usagesthey are drawing on constructs
whose
property includes the assumption that they are shared - it
is they who
generalise,and also thus (in the whalsay case)evoke a community
of sharing.
social scientists(including anthropologists) replicate people's accounts,
and
what we might call indigenousanalysis,in attemptingto measurethe extent
of
the sharing: how many people hold this view; how strongly they hold it, and
so
on. Quantification presumesdiversity as a given.
Now' as Yanagisako shows in Japanese-American attitudes towards
tradition, kinship offers a field for the display of diversity. when thought
of
against other facetsof life, kinship relationshipsare redoGnt of tradition
and
community; yet by the sametoken tracing genealogicalconnectionsback
into
the past, thinking about one's roots, can also diversify the past
into
innumerable'different'and specifictraditions.
Esther Goody and christine Groothues (r9g2: 2r7) cite the judgement
of
the President of the High court Family Division in 1972 ton"rrn,ng
u
Ghanaian girl being fostered by a professional English couple. whereas
her
Ghanaian parents had intended to have her grow up with an educational
advantage before returning to Ghana, the Englisir couple pressed
for
adoption. one of the grounds was the length of time the giil hai been
with
them. Thejudge felt obliged to offer some generalremarks.-Hisanalysisof
the
situation was that a problem had beencreatedby the west African practice
of
coming to Britain to study or work and then fostering out children, problem
a
insofar as the children were 'brought up in and learn our British
ways of life.
[For thenj when a strong bond of attachment and love has been forged
betweenthe children and foster parents, the natural parents take
them away.,
In other words, in providing a home, the foster parents
had accustomecrthe
child to a specific way of life.
sngclficfamily arrangementsof the English couple are
being contrasted
.lh1
with the failure of the Ghanaian parents(he iaid) to'provide
u hI-"'for the

\
Individuality and diversity

29

this perspective, the specific belongs to a general ('British')


child. From
is held to representsharedvalues.But if home is whereways of
and
iradition
a further source of diversity becomesapparent. The
transmitted.
are
life
particular and non-representative.
become
also
can
specific
Kin lives are private lives, the home is an intimate place, and every family
has its own conventions.Whether or not they are sharedwith others of like
classor region, or can be claimed for the nation, lives are lived according to
soecificdomesticstyles.If tradition is past style,styleis presenttradition; and
in ttrelr styles, famtlies are like so many individuals. Hence the judge's
referenceto particular attachments.While each family has the opportunity to
rearearea general style or generic tradition ('class') in the way children are
brought up, in becoming the focus of deliberate, decision-making transmission, such style may equally well be claimed as unique and innovative. The
Englishpoint to the changesthey have seensincethe early twentieth century in
householdstructure, rates of divorce, the meaning of adoption, patterns of
care,stateintervention,and so forth. In any case,couplesdo their particular
thing. Certainly in relation to their own children, parents move on from what
their parentsdid; each family quite appropriately createsits own modes,even
aseachparentalcoupleproducein eachchild a new individual.In short, every
'home' (to use the judge's term) exemplifiesthe same,unique combination of
possibilities.
The relationship betweenthe particular and the general,the unique and the
representative,belongsto an elementarymathematics that both differentiates
onenessand plurality and seeseach as a product of operations done on the
other.Thus, like'society'itself,kinship may carry the resonanceof a tradition
or a community made up of a collectivity of valuesor of individuals;their
attributescontribute to its aggregatecharacter(enumeration).At the same
time, kinship may also appear as a transcendent order which allows fbr
degreesof relatednessor solidarity or liberty and for relative strength in the
'expression'of values;it is like an organismwhich functionsas a whole entity
to determinethe character of its parts (volume). This is true both of relatives
(the number one knows, the extent of attachment) and of families (how large
they are and how cohesive).'The English' similarly appear as now aggregate,
now organism.
Quantity is compelling. It offers a way of imagining the generalisations
through
which the English have analysed their own culture. But unless we
completelytake the actors'view,suchindigenousanalysismust be a subjectof
and not merelythe meansto study.It is particularlyinterestingfor the natural
limits it sets to comprehension. Recall the framing of the questions that if I
wrsh to generaliseabout English culture then complexity the pluralism of
socialforms inevitably appearsto interfere with my task. Diversity seemsan
inevitable fact of nature, self-evident when one thinks of human beings as
themselves
so many individuals.On its head, however,the problem is rather

Englishkinship in the late twentiethcentury

Individualityand diversity

how the English make it self-evidentthat the world is plural, complex and full
of individuals. Of what, then, and how is this pressingsenseof heterogeneity
composed?

In the framing chapter on The English people, he quantifies the


phenomenon.

30

Facts of nature
Who are the English?
Over the century betweenthe 1860sand 1960s,'theEnglish'acquiredcertain
definitive features, although they are ones that have, since the counteremergenceof ethnicpoliticsin the 1970sand 1980s,beenthrown into disarray.
In that period of innocent ethnicity, the English were regarded both as a
productive amalgam of diverse peoplesand as a highly individualistic nation
holding on to individualism as a transcendent characteristic of themselves.
The aggregating concept stressedthe 'melting pot' symbolism of heterogeneity, the organic concept that of a redoubtable character that was only to
be exemplified idiosyncratically in eachindividual English(man).The English
were thus self-definedin an overlapping way as at once a people and a set of
cultural characteristics.I exploit the ambiguity in my own account. and refer
to the English as though they were identifiably both.
The following rendition sets out some definitions of a sort. In 1929, the
Professor Dixon to whom I alluded gave a seriesof public lectures on the
Englishman at University College London. He took the occasion as an
invitation to expatiate on the distinctivenessof the English. We are treated to
The English Character, The English Genius, The English People,the English
Soul, The English Bible, and to cap it indubitably (cf. Brooker and
the Englishman'.It is in his lectureon
Widdowson 1986:I l9), 'Shakespeare
the English genius that Dixon claims the Englishman is typically an
individualist(1938:65).As a population of individualists,the Englishare also
'a many headedpeople' (1938: 71).
What is an individualist? our sageasks.'He is a man more guided by his own
opinions than by those he hears about him, not content to blindly follow the
crowd, who desires to see things for himself, one in short who 'shoulders
responsibility for his acts and judgements', with all the latter-day qualities of
reliance and initiative (1938: 68-9). Indeed, rather than following the
suggestionsof others, he would by choice work 'in his own garden on his
p r i v a t e p l a n '( 1 9 3 8 :6 7 ). By th e s a meto k e n , he i s' tol er ant' of the habi ts of
others. Dixon slides into a paean on diversity. Becauseof its respect for
individuality, he argues, England has nurtured a multiplicity of spirits and
opinions,and '[W]here in any societywill you meetsucha curiouslyvaried,so
parti-coloured mental tapestry' (1938:72).This in turn leadsto the celebration
of the English as a hybrid people in terms of their origins; 'an astonishingly
mixed blend', this 'glorious amalgam' (1938:90) is the natural generatorof
manifold talent.

3l

Kent. whichstandswith Norfolk and Suffolkhigheston [the] roll of fameamong


Englishcounties,although extremelyprolific in the sixteenthand seventeenth
decayedin theeighteenth,
centuries,
andwhollylost hergenius-producing
powerin
the nineteenth.. . Thusa countryor a countymay lose,thoughwe know not why,
its mysteriousvitality.
The predominantlySaxondistricts.Middlesex,Surrey,Sussex,Berkshireand
Hampshire,standlow on the list of talent,comparingvery unfavourablyin this
with Dorsetand Somerset
respect
in thewest. Buckinghamshire
to theNorth, and
Kent, Norfolk and Suffolkto the East.we observe,thenthat in the regionswhere
thecomponentelements
aremostnumerous,wherethereis mostmixedblood,the
greatest
ethniccomplexity,geniusor ability most frequentlyappears.The hybrids
haveit. Norfolk, SuffolkandKent arethecountiesin whichtheminglingof racesis
greatest,
andprecisely
thesecounties,andnot thepurelySaxonor purelyNorse,are
richestin talent.(1938:108)
His book is about the genericEnglishman,and 'his' geniusin that sense;what
the analysisthen uncovers are the hybrid individuals (literally, the geniuses)
whosequalificationfor being consideredtruly English lies in their talent and
thus in their evident exerciseof it. And if he can count up the number of
countieswho haveproducedgeniusesby comparisonwith thosethat havenot,
he can also talk about Englishness
itself as a matter of degree.In realisingthat
the term is not susceptibleto exact definition, he writes: 'Some of us in these
islandsare more, somelessEnglish,someof us, of course,in no senseEnslish
at al l ' (193 8;5) .
The lecturescelebratethe achievementof a period - particularly between
1880and 1920- when 'English' was being legitirnated is a national culture
(colls and Dodd l987). Nations did not just havecharacteristics
or traits,they
had cultures. In the later years of the nineteenth century, the new
system of
education was held in part responsible for the state of this
freshly acknowledgednationhood (Dodd ilaZ' :;. The salientquestion
becamewhat
attributes were to be taken as representativeenough
to be taught in schools,
how a senseof being English might be conveyed.
Among th. trudition,
promoted in art, letters,music
and architecturewith which pupils became
tamiliar was the ruralism of southern
England (cf. Howkin, DSZ, O:;.
Institutions such as 'English' u, un .du.utionar
curriculum or as an
academicdisciplinetaught
at universitieshad to be invented:rural cortages
and the countryside were there
to be discovered.But they had to be discovered
oeyond the distress of
the then agricultural depression, and were evoked
above all in a particular
form of past rurality, namely the Tudorism of
rttzabeth'sEngland (Howkins
1987:70).As a style,Tudorism was eminently
recoverable.Under
the Henrys and Elizabeth, domestic dwellings had for the
rrrsttime become
significantboth in number and in substance.Manor houses

JL

English kinship in the late twentieth century

Individuality and diversity

aDd were built in the newly durable combiacquired a novel spaciousness


that meant even modest cottages
half-timbering
and
nations of brickwork
later. Like the Bard claimed by
years
hundred
three
occupied
be
rtiff
at once
-ignt
Diion, and despite the Welsh origins of the name, Tudorism was
English'
visible in the landscapeand indubitably
In ,",.orp.ct, Engiishnessthus takes an architectural form, humorously
which first
conveyed Uy OsUe.i Lancaster's drawings of domestic interiors
of
number
one
of
a
hand
any
Lancaster's
under
But
uppear"d in tSfS.
which
through
diversity
the
evoke
sketchings
his
serves:
evocative forms
Englishnesscould c/so appear. Stockbrokers Tudor is flanked by Aldwych
Faicical. Modernistic, Cultured Cottage and Vogue Regency'
olde
electroliers.
All overEuropethe lightsare goingout, oilJamps,gas-mantles,
go on again
not
they
or
whether
and
anJwall-brackets,
staniards
lanthorns,
Tudor
the
in our time,thepresentmomentseemsasgoodasany in whichto contemplate
the
roomstheyhavi illuminatedin thepast.For the historyof the homeprovides
and
growth
of
picture
the
reliable,
most
ihe
most intimate,and in someways
whetherit be a Tudor
developmentof Europeanculture.. . [F]or self-revelation,
there'sno placelike
Berchtesgaden,
at
chalet
villa on the by-passoi a bomb-proof
1953:Prefaceto lst edn,1939)
home.(Lancaster
IS
But although he Europeanises the context. it is clear that Lancaster
'home' he
word
the
on
culture.
European
of
version
English
an
presenting
comments:

5TOC KB ROK ER S

- 'homeloving'; a
it serves,among other duties, to distinguish a psychologicaltype
values 'there's
moral
of
a
standard
-'home
comforts';
Jiscomfort
of
high d.gr..
'homely';
and a radio
physical
charm
no ptaci like it'; a noticeable lack ol
p ro g . u t , o . o f o u t s t a n d in g b o r e d o m B 'B ' C 'H o me s e rv i c eB u tde s p ite th is
of the
i.e.i"ndou, adjectival expinsion it still retains. beneath layer after layer
one lives'
in
which
house
the
of
meaning
substantive
its
original
sentiment,
treacliest
the word
on closer investigation-oneis able to isolate the proper application of
.home' still further, and properly confine it to the inside ol one's house. . . [T]he
hence tts
word implies a sphere over which the individual has complete control;
appearance
the
whereas
And
individualists.
rugged
oJ'
in
a
land
pop
ulirity
.norrnou,
prejudices
of the interioi of one's house is ihe outcome ol'one's own personal tastes,
and bank balance,the outsidein ninety-ninecasesout ofa hundredis the expression
or evn
of the views on architectureof a speculativebuilder, a luxury flat magnate'
(1953: 9' my emphasis'
gentleman'
country
eighteenth-century
an
occasionally
punctuation emended)

widely
of all the styles he brought to light, stockbrokers Tudor became
gently
so
thus
were
adopted as a self-descriptionby those whose pretensions
parodied.
lies in the
My own disaffectiontiom/affection for Stockbrokers Tudor
houses,
semi-detached
of
Its
avenue
up.
grew
southern English road in which I
the late
in
built
was
gables,
Tudorbethan
at
hinting
black and white fiontages
interior
Lancaster
Osbert
the
grand
as
as
.n"un,
no
*"."-by
1920s;the houses
round the
suggests.though such houses and no doubt such people were

TUD OI{

..Four

Fnc! round my bed,


Oakc bcam.s overhead.
Oldc ruggro on yc floor,
No stek6rolcr;utd
asic for mo.c.,,
Sur.x hou.-dqab,one.
(Tloditional, .otlt tu ntieth .att/).)

OT even rhe first uorld rvar and its afrcrmath could scnsibly diminish
f
thc antiquarian cnrhusiesm which hrd first gripped the Errglislr
I \ !
public early in Vicroria's reign
^
; and tl,e .rcrmou. advance in
mass-production mcthods that took place during the iDter_war period
only
served to increase the enormous output of handicrafts.
The experience
gained in aircraft and munition factorics tvas soon bcinq
utilizeJ itr the
manufa.ture ofold oak beams, bottle-glassrrind6y-panq. Jnd
wrouglrt_iron
Tudor )ighting lixturcs.
In intcrior dccc'ration thc chcrishcd idcal, relentlcssly and all
too
succesfulJy pursud,.uas a glorificd vcrsion of i\nne Hatharvay,s
cortagc,
\!1 tI 5u( n modlh(altun s as w ere r)e(es\ trv lo cuD fi,rm
t o trrl )\i llrl rtic
standards ofplumbing.
In construction the Tudor note was truly sounded :
in thc furnishing considerablc deviations from s(rict period accuracv
w.,.
pcrmissible. Thus cightcenth-ccn(ury four-p,,srers, Rcgcncy
sampleis, and
Victorian chintzcs
all soon came to be regardcd u, TrJo, by adoption_at
least in estate agcncy circles.
Soon certain classes of the community were in a position to pass thcir
whole livcs in
long Elizabethan day-drcam; spencling tlr;ir nigirrs
-one
undcr high-pitched
roofs and ancient eaves, thcir days in lrekking from
Tudor golf clubs to half-timbercd cocktail b.rs, anj their
evcnires rn
contemplating I\{r. Laughton,s robusr intcrprcration of Henrv Vlll
;mid
the Jacobcen plesterwork of the Glorirnr prh, e.
\

nl:{lr .t Tudor, ear l.t.rtrt n


i.*il
' rum the 1953editionof Hontes rieIh centur1.
Sv,eer
Hones by OsbertLancaster,originally
uu D ti s hei nd 1 9 i 9 .
by kind permissionof osbert Lancaster,A CortrxtnHisroryof
irTt"^ltq
Architecture,
JohnMurray(publishers)
-'ru
Ltd.

J-t

J+

English kinship in the late twentieth century

corner. The estatewas thus under construction at the time when Dixon was
deliveringhis lectures.Aspiring to a gardensuburb,it had beencarvedout of
an ancientwoodland that once suppliedElizabeth I's successorwith timber
for his fleet,and someof whoseremainingoaks carry individual preservation
orders. Like nrany statelyhomes in England, the treesare no longer private
property but part of everyone'spast.
The Garden Suburbhad sprungup in the wake of the gardencity movement
of the 1900s.one visionarymodel of the gardencity, in the words of Ebenezer
Howard, restedon making the distinction betweentown and country quite
exphcit.'Town and country must be married and out of thisjoyous union will
springa new hope,a new life and a new civilization';it was to be a marriage'of
rustic health and sanity and activity [and] of urban knowledge and urban
technical facility, urban political co-operation' (quoted by Thorns 1973: 17).
The very phenomenon to be avoided was the formlesshomogeneity of the old
urban suburbs.The gardencity promiseda completelynew urban form. But it
was the gardensuburb that spreadwith suchpopularity in the interwar years;
and, neither urban nor rural, it was to collapse rather than sustain the
distinction.
Let me return to one aspectof Dixon's rendition. This is the notion that
diversity is a natural outcomeof the mingling of difl'erentpeoples,an amalgam
which preserves
its original vigour. Inter-minglingcontainsa geneticimageof
cross-fertilisation, though the difference between plant and animal imagery
might give one pause.I suspectthe hybrid that Dixon celebratesis to be
thought of as roseratherthan mule. Unlike the sterilemule, the cultivatedrose
with its Tudorbethan resonancesgrows healthily on a wild rootstock. Indeed,
the vigorous programme of hybridisationdevelopedby plant-breedersover
the hundred years since the 1860sliterally turned a modest victorian shrub
into the most prolific and diversefloweringbush in the Englishgarden.Above
all, in the rangeof rosescalledHybrid rea, accordingto my 1976gardeners'
manual, one finds both 'old favourites' and 'new exciting varieties'. New
varietiesappear each year. As Dixon intimated, infinite diversitv is oossible
for the future.
1989,sixty years on, lies in Dixon's future. How fares the hybrid?
In the late twentiethcentury, the English are more consciousthan ever of
ethnic diversity. Yet the result does not seem to be an ever more heady
amalgam. or at least people do not readily assimilatelatter day ethnic
differentiation to that of the celts and the saxons and the Danes whose
diversity, children were once taught at school, made up 'our isrand race'.
value was put on the mixing of ancestrywherewe now only seemabreto see
the proliferation and diversification itself. In the late twentieth century it has
becomedoubtful who or what 'the English' aree- or indeed whether the term
is usableat all. As a consequence.
we might remark, former perceptionsof
quantity do indeed seem to have lost some of their power. Has something
'happened'then?

Individuality and diversity

35

Whot is EthnicRecord
keeping?
Ihe collecting
of informotion
obouto person's
ethnicgroup.

NIIOR.IN
MonchesterCity Councilbelievesin
equolrightsond opportunitiesfor oll
In itsrole os the lorgest
itscitizens.
ond on im Por iont
l ocolemP l o Y er
the Councilknows
services,
of
provider
towords
equol
work
it must
Putting
thot policyinto
opportunities.
orocticetokestime ond we needto
seehow muchprogresswe ore
moki ng.

Why theseProposols
for EthnicRecordkeeping
ond Monitoring?
Ethnicrecordkeepingond
monitoringmokeit possibleto tellif
Monchester's
equol opportunity
policyisworking

TI'rtCHESTER
-CitY

Council-

DefendingJois - tmproring Servkes

EDUCATIONCOMMITTEE

Whot is on ErhnicGroup?
An ethnicgroupisone in whichthe members
hoveo shoredcullurolbockoroundond
identity.ThisdoesNOT meo"ncountryof birih
or notionolity.

How would ErhnicRecord


keepingbe done?
Fochpersonwouldbe oskedio sovwhich
groupheor shefeelstheybelongio by ticking

l.?ll;-,,",

eaxrsranr
!
trlroorrrlsr!
arntcalt!
vrrrult:sr f]
rrnocanrraean
!
OTHERBLACKT-.l
elxouorsxr !
?LEA5l3taCtfY U
aucxanrrrsx
!
rnrsx!
cxtrrs:f]
!
EASTAFR!5^N wxrreanrrrsx
n
OTHERWHITEfI
ftl^ltttacrfY
U
rNotet!

WouldI hoveto give


my EthnicOrigin?
Not if you don't wont to. Butthe CityCouncil
hopesyouwillco-operotesowe concheckthot
policyisbeins put inio
*::r?.r":'.oo.rtunities

Whor is the Purposeof


RecordKeeping?
Io mokesurethotoll oppliconts
for lobsond
everyonewho usesCouncilservicesore
treotedfoirly ond equolly.

4 EthniLnonitorins. 1987
Mant'hesterCiry Council's categoriesfor a proposed ethnic monitoring scheme (1987).
E ng l t sh'does not app ea r.

If I suggestsomethinghas happened,it is only to point to somethingthat


,
lut b..n 'happening'all the time, namely the way peopleput value on what
they value.When this takes the form of making the implicit explicit, then what
*1t on." taken for granted becomes an object of promotion, and less the
cultural certainty it was. A cultural certainty to which I refer here is the
associationbetween the twin concepts of individuality and diversity. It was
once a fact of nature that these went tosether.

Englishkinshipin the latetwentiethcentury

Individualityand diversity

Somepart of the story as it was told in the period betweenthe establishment


ofEnglish as a national culture at the turn ofthe centuryand (say) 1960went
along lines like this. The English made variation, evinced in complexity and
multiplicity, one of the vehiclesfor their senseof civilisationand enterprise.
Variety was also reproductive variety. The greater the genetic diversity, the
more rugged the offspring, and that was as true of culture as of peoples.If
England formed the basisof a hybrid nation, it was a vigorous hybrid, created
centuries ago by waves of conquerors each of whom added their genesand
skills to the stock. Over England's history, the displacement of royal
dynasties,the rise and fall of classesof merchantsand industrialists,the
absorptionof smallgroupssuchas Flemingsand Huguenots-'additions to an
alreadyinfinite complexity' (Dixon 1938:100) all sustainedthe imagery of
constant infusions of 'new blood'.lo The country's institutions were invigoratedby cross-fertilisation.Each individual therebycontributed his/her
uniqueportion without losingthe transcendentcharacteristicof individuality;
that was preservedin the singularity of 'the English' themselves.
That is a story that now belongsto the past. Uniquenessand variety have
become an aim of cultural practice. Ethnic groups must be recognisably
'ethnic'. The constantproduction of new goods includesthe reproductionof
old ones, as the media promote freshjuxtapositions of familiar and exotic
waysof living. Thoselate twentieth-centurypeoplewho can afford it live in an
infinitude of other people's variations, with the rider that many can be
sampled,consumed,partaken of bread done in the styleof Vienna, of Poland,
ofTurkey. A consequence
ofthis production ofdiversity is that'real' (natural)
diversitybecomeselusive.Distinctionsseemto collapse.The cognoscentinow
know that Chinese food served in Manchester take-aways is Chinese food
intended for English (?British) tastes; that novelty is specially created by
specialistsin creations;that giving your pet cat rabbit from a pink tin instead
of lamb from a greenone panders to a consumer demand for colour coding variety is 'colourful'. Everywhere we seepromotions and creations that seem
to referenceat whim this or that tradition. It is as though unique cultural
forms must take after other unique cultural forms (Jameson1985).
In the words of one 1980sjournalist, Britain has become a wholesale
imitation, of itself and of others imitating itself.

ambiguous. This would be the view from the late twentieth


thoroughly
centurY
-the time, everything feels as
A senseof epoch has to be retrospective.At
poignantly
present
experiencedin the
The
is
in
crisis.
crisis
though it is
'less'
is
nature
in
the
world
today
than there once
there
much
..nrojion that
world's
resources
to
human benefit
the
natural
about
turning
was.Confidence
fear
consumption.
Teenagers
talk
about
what it is
to
about
their
way
hasgiven
vegetarian,
I
course
about
becoming
the
of
endless
discussions
In
eat.
to
right
that
on
similar
to
the
sixteenthand
appear
the
surface
reasons
heard
have
hesitationsover barbarous slaughterfor the table that
seventeenth-century
Thomas (1984: 2934) records, although they are hardly based on the same
theoriesof temperamentalcomposition.It is not that animalsshould not eat
other anirnals,I think, but that human beings are too easily systematicabout
it. The purposefulnessof the domestic slaughteris 'unnatural'.
Animalsrather than plantscomprisea kind of proximatenaturewhich may
alsobe endowedwith interestsof their own (cf. Haraway 1985:68). Whether
through keeping pets in the house or filming wild creaturesin their own
habitats, the English can coopt them to preserve an essentialsenseof the
diversityand plurality of natural life. a late twentieth-centurysensitivitythat
belongsto a moment consciousof the numerical reduction of the world's
destruction of England's own wildlife seems to have
species.Systen-ratic
reachedits peak at the end of the eighteenthcentury.By I 800 many speciesof
bird that had been common centuries earlier were gone for ever and the
countrysidewas already denuded of the small mammal life that had been
hunted out or vermined out; fish that once swam in the Elizabethan Thames
were polluted long before the corning of pesticidesand chemical fertilisers
(Thomas1984:274-6).The presentcrisis,however.is focusedon the denuding
of the planet.
I suspectthere is too closea parallel betweenwhat is taken to affect natural
life and what is taken to affect human life. Among other things, cultural
diversityas such seemsnewly at risk. Societiesare content to cocacolarise
themselves;
anyone'slogo will do when costumesand customs are glossily
preservedas the exotic face of adventurousmulti-nationals.
A paradox becomesa commonplace:changeis bringing about homogenisation. When it was a caseof exporting constitutionalreform or development
schemesfor health,educationand standardof living, homogenisationhad its
justifiers. Uniform laws and universal rights were to be made available
everywhere.But culture itself as a common export? The anthropologist at
leasthas resistedthe idea with his or her insistenceon the individual integrity
and plurality of cultures;the very idea of culture implied a distinctiveness
of
tradition and style. As long as the colonial encounter meant the clash of
culturesor culture contact, there was the possibility that new forms would
naturally yield unique and vigorous hybrids.Today, and to thosethat reflect
on it, what seemsto be tradedeverywhereis the'same'heterogeneity:
cultures
borrow bits and piecesfrom one another, reassemblingthe old stock of styles.

36

Thereis apparentlyno Briton too incongruousor mis-shapen


to sport a T-shirt
proclaiming
allegiance
to Harvard,Yaleor theMiamiDolphins.I evenoncesawa
down-and-outunderCharingCrossarchesin baseballcap bearingthe elegantly
intertwinedinitialsof theNew York YachtClub. (Wholesale
imitationof a culture
loundedon wholesaleimitation naturallyproducessomeparadox.The'yuppie'
style favoured by young bankers and brokers in Mrs. Thatcher,seconomlc
Wonderlandis believedthe epitomeof hard-nosed,
thrusting,fingerpopping
New
York. It is actuallyNew York's rather confusedparody of English'classic
(PhilipNorman, Weekend
elegance'.)
Guardian.l0 lI December1988)
Culture in turn somehowseemsat once lessthan real and larger than life, in
the same way as the relationshipbetweenEnglish and British has become

37

38

English kinship in the late twentieth century

Individuality and diversity

39

.rt ercis'nothingnew'; or ratherthereis'too much'traffic.At least,suchviews


j-,i,f.,. nostalgiathey evincefor other timeswerestandardin the middle-class
1""'",in 1989and into 1990.They have a powerful counterpartin the future
f^r-linrtrip' the possibility that new forms of procreation will produce
not to enhancebut at the expenseof diversity.
iiaiu;auott

I9BB VOI,IINIT,
2 ISSUE9
SF]PTT,NTBF]R
EditorMarvRatcliffeArl Direclor
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Oystcr House
is a pearl among restaurants.
The popularity of this, the second
Restaurantto be openedin
the last two years, has been quite
phenomenal.
with his undoubted
knowledgeof the fish trade, is the
third generationof fishmongersand
knows that top quality, fresh produce is oi paramount importance.
Oysters are flown into Heathrow
twice a weekfrom lreland,crabsare
despatched from Cornwall, live
lobstersfrom Scotlandand the wild
salmonarrivesdirect from the Scottish rivers. There's quail, guinea
fowl, wild duck,saddleof hare,fillet
of venison, duckling from Norfolk
and chicken from Surrey. Looking
after the "drinks",
has
compiledan imaginativeand extensivewine list.
Bookingis advisable.

5 Oyster House, 1988


Reproduced by kind permission of Reed Publishing Services

more technologY
Lessnuture'
postplural.I do so to suggestthat, self-evidentas the
Thisis thenostalgiaI call
also stem from a prior and very specific
seem,
they
anxieties may
modelling
of the world. If English ideas about reproduct(modern/pluralist)
model,
it
was not just for the making of personsbut for
formed
a
ive process
future.
Kinship
delineated a developmental process that
of
the
making
the
guaranteeddiversity, the individuality ofpersons and the generationoffuture
possibilities.
Hybrids were one element of the model. Out of a plurality of stocks was to
comethe singular characteristicsof the English(man) who preserveddiversity
in a tolerance for all forms of life. In the language of the time, one could
identifyan Englishcharacter.In the languageof the gardeners'manual,'one
hundredand fifty years ofhybridisation has given us the perfect [rose] plant'.
If individuality were swamped,on the other hand, then hybrid could turn into
mongrel,and The Societyof Pure English,founded in l9l3 (Dodd 1987:15),
saw only contamination in the blundering corruptions that contact with
'other-speakingraces' produced. Here the purity of the individual form (in
this casethe English language)wasjeopardised.Individual forms must also be
kept separate.
The English sense of plurality was much indulged in the making of
distinctions. Thus most thinkers on the subject have urged the readers of
books and articles to keep separatethe diverse meanings of 'nature'. With
hindsight,however, it is intriguing to seehow environment has been literally
imaginedas countryside, the life cycle of organismsas the habits of plants and
animals, the taken-for-granted background to human enterprise as the socalledlawsof the physicalworld, and so forth. In the sameway, diversityhas
oeenliterally imaginedas a matter of geneticvariation. Sincethe late 1970s,
this last connection has acquired a new and pressing salience,and one that
directly affects the cultural keepers of natural diversity, human beings
themselves.
For a decade now, considerable publicity has been given to artificial
7
parenthood, and particularly to the figure of the surrogate mother. In the
\
)t^mageof the surrogate mother appears the possibility of splitting apart . I
tunctions that in nature are contained in the one body. ovulation and
r.{'
Sestation. The English reaction to the new reproductive technologies in /r "'ii
generalhas predictably ranged from wonder to fear. For they appear to make
within human reach other dreams/nightmares, such as cloning - the

40

English kinship in the late twentieth century

possibility of individuals reproducing themselvesmany times over


and
geneticdetermination that parents may be able to screenout or preselect
certain attributesof the child for whom they wish.
The divergence of views can be summarised in the two positions stated
during the Parliamentary debate on Enoch Powell's The Unborn Children
(Protection) Bill in 1985.The debate raised general questions about medical
researchinto human fertilisation; I quote from Naomi Pfeffer's 1987 essay.
One Member of Parliament stated the case as follows: 'The object of our
interestin medical researchinto embryology and human fertilisation is to help
humanity. It is to help those who are infertile and to help control infertility. . .
The researchersare not monsters, but scientists.They are medical scientists
working in responseto a great human need.We should be proud of them. The
infertile parents who have been helped are grateful to them' (House of
CommonsDebates,198+5, 73,column 654).Opposingthis view,Pfefferadds
(1987:8l), 'are thosewho seethesemeansof treatinginfertility as misguided
and unethical becausethey seethem as meddling with the secretsof life itself.
This technology,they argue,"promisesbenefitsperhaps,but [it]could end by
destroying the essentialhumanity of man . . . The technology that promised a
paradise now shows signs of delivering a hell" (ibid., column 649)'.
"._.
\ )
Technology can also be understood as 'too much' culture; nonethelessas a
source of anxiety in this field it seemsa relatively new target. Anxieties over
artificial insemination, for instance, have taken interestingly different forms
over the last fifty years. I continue Pfeffer's account.
Artificial insernination (using donor semen)has been clinical practice as an
a
I infertility treatmentin England sincethe late 1930s.11
However,not until case
\, details were later published in the British Medical Journal was it widely
', kno*n. It then became
a matter of public outcry. likened to 'human stud
1
n
a
reference
to the introduction of agricultural centresfor cattle
lfarming'.
linsemination in the early 1940s.
L- An
articlepublishedin theSundayDesparcft
in November lg45articulated
manyo[
the contemporaryconcernsabout artificialinseminationusingdonor semen.It
'
of test-tubebabieswill becomethe euardiansof atomi f warnedthat 'a super-race
- # ' ' 4 \i bombsecrets
. . . Fatherswill bechosenby eugenic
expertsof tie UnitedNations'.
( 1 9 8 7 :93 )
Different concernssurfacedduring the 1950s.A divorce court had been asked
whether artificial insemination by donor constituted adultery if a wife went
aheadwithout her husband'sconsent.A committeeof enquiry was set up in
1959.
The social issue. . . was the question of legitimacy.As Lord Brabazon of Tara put it,
'When we come down to brass tacks, the whole thing revolveson whether the child
should be a bastard or not'. Bastardy was perceivedas a growing threat; since the
SecondWorld War the number of illegitimate births had been rising steadily. . . To
many it appeared that the institution of the family, which they believed
underpinned Western civilisation, was under threat. Children conceived through

Individuality and diversity

4t

{r

a consciouseffort to bring forth an illegitimatechild tit


represented
tl i
donor semen
.
inseminationwould be used by the greedyand lit
.
.
artificial
Lltnin marriage
,,"..ruputorsto defeatclaimsto titlesand estatesnot rightly theirs.And not only
itselfwasinjeopardy. . . 'knowledgethat there
.l-. oairimonythreatened;paternity
is a potentialthreatto the securityof
the
fatherhood
ofsome
about
,.lrn..r,ointy
94,r ef erences
omit t ed)
ut|.rz119 87:

tii

\i

less about the animality of the


In the 1980s,however, the debates are
into biologicalprocess,less
the
intrusion
oftechnology
about
than
nrocedures
t
he
kind
of cont ract t he part ies
union
t
han
about
of
a
l bor t rh. l aw f ul ness
property claims to bastards
the
and
less
about
with
each
other,
make
should
than about rights to the products ofone's body. Finally, they are lessabout the
ownership and disposal of whole persons than about the ownership and
disposalof reProductive cells.
Long establishedas procedures for artificial insemination might be, they
find a new context in the 1982 committee chaired by Mary Warnock.
f, Handlinghumangametes[eggsandsperm]andembryosoutsideof thebodyraised
and legalownership.lt is not surprising -.\
I the problemof moral responsibility
of the WarnockReport
' thereforeto find that very many of the recommendations
' ;, ..
*3r-eebouttheirownership,supplyanddisposal.In manywaystheWarnockReport , - a '
the anxietiesabotit'iidoptionof childrencurrentin the 1920s.Then
recapitulates
. i,. ,,
adoptionwasnot regulatedby thelaw; it couldbe and wasexploitedasa sourceof -1 . .. - .' '
cheapchild labour. . . Insteadof a traffic in children.we have [today] a tradein
humangametesand embryos,and in placeof white-slavetraders,in the public
doctorsand
imaginationaredesperate
infertilemenand womenandunscrupulous
scientists.
ln this context,the reasonsfor the inclusionof artificialinsemination
usingdonor semenand surrogacyfor consideratiop"j,y_-llp-"Qgmmittee
chairedby
Mary Warnockbecomeclear;in both gametesareipgghasedleither
by doctorsor
throughcommercialagencies.
(Pfeffer1987;'916,emphasisremoved)
The public mind, as reflectedthrough the Warnock Committee, links artificial l
insemination to commercialism, to market manipulation and consumerl
choice.r3And where those earlier anxieties touched on the implications for
people'slegal and social standing, the present anxiety concerns interference
with natural relations. Civilisation is not so much under threaJlNglugggll
much is.
Natural processis also about future potential. Hence clinically established
proceduressuch as artificial insemination, and newer ones such as in vitro
fertilisation, come to be put aside 'technologies' such as ectogenesisand
parthenogenesis
which are little more than imaginative extrapolations into the
Iuture. The Warnock Report (1985:4) claims they all have in common'the
pgb-li-c--mind';
the question is the kind of
-auxrety they-lhey.e].e9n9i1teg
iL 1_h-9
Iuture one can expect.Hilaiy Rose expandsthe point.
CertainlybeyondIVF andtheactualor potentialgenetherapies
liesa scientificand
technological
horizonalongwhicharerangedotherpossiblereproductive
interventtons:wouldit be possibleto reara foetusfrom fertilizationto independent
'birth'
entirelyin vitro (ectogenesis)?
To cloneidentikitcopiesof individualsfrom single

A)
T-

English kinship in the late twentiethcentury

cellsor 'genelibraries'?To rear a humanembryoin the uterusof a non-human


hybrids?Or to providea techniquethat
creatureor evenmakehuman-non-human
wouldenablewomento givebirth withouttheneedfor spermto fertilizetheireggs
and
(parthenogenesis,
Theseprospects
a form ofcloning)?Couldmenhavebabies?
dreams.(Rose1987:158)
othersform the stuff of science-fantasy
Here the hybrid is no metaphordrawn from anotherdomain (plant breeding),
and does not describe cultivated characteristics. It refers to the literal
possibility of producing human beings by graft.
Crossinghuman gameteswith thoseof other speciesis at presenttechnically
impossible (Ferguson 1990:24), and in any caseunlikely to be developedfor
therapeutic purposes when transpecies genetic implants hold instead a
realisticpromise of development.Much of this thinking must remain in its
science-fictionform, but it still remains thinking about the future. And the
future has always been imagined as a matter of infinite possibilities. Thus
Fergusonnotes it is a possibility that the embryo may be manipulated 'so as to
engineerinto it additional geneswhich, for example,may not naturally occur
)sin the human species'(1990:la). Perhapssome of the apparentlyirrational
fears such writers seek to allay are fears for the future of possibility itself.
If technological mastery were indeed gained over genetic makeup, the
expressedfear is that the way would be open for eugenic programmes that
would inevitably lead to preferencesfor particular types of persons. As the
, English are used to telling themselves,it is lessthe technology that is in doubt
how it will be used. Perhaps the prominence of the clone image in
$tran
tv people's vision of the future encapsulatesthe anticipation that the exercise
of choice in this regard would take away choice. The very idea of selecting
for clones obviates the idea of selectionitself. Choice would thus be shown
up for something other than it seemed.More technology does not seem to
compenesatefor less nature.
, - Technology, for those who are afraid of it, is a kind of culture without
I people. Meanwhile one is at the mercy of people. The reduction of naturally
\ produced genetic material, like reduction in the diversity of the world's
f species,is symbolised in the fantasy that if those with the power in fact get
, \ ' \ / their hands on the appropriate technology, they would produce versions of
1l
, i',i.: 1 , i i themselvesover and again and/or counter versionssuch as drones and slaves.
\ '{ A particular individual would be reproduced- but its multiplication would be
the very opposite of individuation. Diversity without individuality; individuality without diversity.
I have referred to the modern English opinion that kinship diminishes in
importance over the generations.Perhapsthis has fed the present-dayfeelings
of being at a point at which there is actually 'less'nature in the world than
there usedto be. And here we come to a conflusion.In one senseit would seem
? **-.---that 'more'
technology means 'more' culture. But if more culture creates
o
choice that is no choice, then with the reduction of diversity there is also 'less'
culture. The mathematics does not work. The perception that there is less

In d i vi du a l it y an d d i ver si t y

43

"\i\

joined to the feeling that there is lessculture,


nature in the world is thus n/so
less community, less tradition, less
for
that
matter
society
less
and
perceivedas under assault from the
was
traditionally
Tradition
convention.
from changethat made the
innovation,
choice,
from
who
exercised
individual
that is under assault
place
now
individuality
to
be
in.
It
is
more
varied
a
world
from the over-exerciseof individual choice, from innovations that reduce
variation.ra'More'choiceseemsless'choice':with the engineeringof genetic
I
**f .1stock,the potential for long:term future variation may be reducedrather than
* tJ
enhanced. When diversity appears to depend literally on the vagaries of
may
not
ensue.
risk;
variation
at
it
suddenly
seems
individuals,
human
In the modern epoch, kinship and family could play either nature to the I
ildividual's cultural creativity,or societyto the individual'snatural spirit of i
enrerprise.But if that former symbolic order pitted natural givens against.f

culturalchoice,pggl ,ql"qltig!-q-gg,ilg!*qatiua!.
919-]onger!
-vsrip-!iglr.-t!9n
Thd;;;rspa-Aivil;itffi ;l piay off ag*nJi' oirenffihei. Thei
persua<les.
postplural nostalgia is for the simultaneous loss of convention and loss of
choice.
At the root of current debate (for example, the several contributions to
Stanworth's volume 1987; Magarey 1985; Spallone and Steinberg 1987;
Dyson and Harris 1990)1sis a profound issueabout the shapenot just the
English but Westernersin generalgive to ideas.They have in the recent pastl
usedthe idea of nature, including the idea of natural variation, as a vehiclefor
thinking about human organisation and its future potential. In its place is 4
late twentieth-century equivocation about the relationship between human
and natural process.For every image of technological advance as increasing
humanpotentialliesa counter-imageof profligatewastefor trivial endsand of
-lgsource dpletron. This includes Westerners' reproductive capacities.Artificial processesare seen to substitute for natural ones, and thus present
them sel ve saS WG lover l989: l8) . What isint er f er edl
with is the very idea-o-fTlfr-aJuraffict. Or, to put it another way, of the'
-differencebetween natural and cultural ones.
Schneider'sAmeiidah Kinship dei,pi,cted
sexual'intercourseas a core symbol:
the diffuse enduring solidarity of close family relations was attributed to j l
sharingsubstancethrough the act ofprocreation. Procreationwas a natural
fact of lil'e.But that 'natural' imagehas lost its obviousnessin a world where ;
couplescan seekassistanceto begetoffspring without intercourse.So too have lij i
the 'cultural' conventions of the union. The otherwise lawful connection of r
husbandand wife may conceivablysubsumea contract with a birthing mother '
or an agreementto obtain gametesby donation.
Yet changecan alwaysbe denied.Some will seekcomparisonswith other ,
cultures and other conventions,although the reassurancethat these newi
modes are simply part of the manifold diversity of human ways ofl
reproduction is, I shall suggestin the next chapter, misleading. Others who
cast their minds back to the science-fictionwriters of earlier this century. or

I
I

English kinship in the late twentieth century

even to Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein,will say, as it is said of individualism,


, ,, that these things have always been with us. Human beings have always
about creating life; there have always been ways of dealing with
ffifantasised
u infertility; there have always been those who deplored
the spoiling of the
countryside, as the English Lakeland poets protested with horror at the
railways that were to bring tourists to their beloved spots (cf. Lowenthal
1990).It is, in fact, this very capacity to think one is perpetuatingold ideas,
I simply doing again what has been done at other times and in other places,
i before, elsewhere,that is itself a profound engine for change.
' Anthropologists have always had problems in the analysisof social change.
Perhaps it is becausesocial change sometimescomes about in a very simple
way. As far as aspectsof English culture are concerned,all that is required is
what (middleclass)peopledo all the time, namelythat they do what they think
can be done. Put into action,this becomesan effort to promote and implement
current values.16Values are acted upon; implicit assumptionsbecomeexplicit,
and that includesrenderingculturally visible what may be perceivedas natural
process.
This has beena conceptualenablementof changein the West sincemedieval
times. Over the last century, it has also become a matter of rendering visible
Thus what is madeexplicit
the cultural premisesof the perceptionsthemselves.
is the basisnot just of natural or moral but also socialunderstandingsof the
world. The senseof new values, new ideas, new epochs, comes from the
consciouseffort to make evident the valuesand ideaspeople already hold. To
feelcontemporary time as a time of crisisis part of this: there is no going back.
One cannot recapture the point before explicitness.Hence, as I remarked at
i
the beginning, new ideas always come from old but this is accomplished
simply through putting current ideasinto perspective,acting on and finding
'
'
contextsor reasonsfor them. The resultantand constant relativisingof 'our'
': understanding of 'ourselves'helps produce the sensethat there appearsto be
and less to be taken for granted and thus less nature in the world.
r--"_lgss
The modern English middle classhave put effort into valuing their values,
having ideasabout their ideas,trying to typify their type of epoch.We might
regardtheir curiosityasindeeda peculiarly'Western'approachto knowledge.
Sincepeoplesimply value their values,it looks as though they are upholding
their traditions. Yet it is that active promotion that takes them where they
have never been before. Consider again the English concept of individualism
and the individuality of persons.
The 1980switnessedan interesting phenomenon. To a remarkable extent,
British public discoursehasbecomedominatedby the metaphorsand symbols
of the government,by which I mean not a constitutionalconsciousness
but the
specificdepictionof socialand cultural life promoted by the political party in
power. Its discourse generates a single powerful metaphor: that the way
forward is also recovering traditional values.Tradition has becomea reason
for progress.The way forward is defined not as building a better society, for

Individuality and diversity

45

present
that smacks of the collective and state idioms against which the
life for individual
For
forward
is
a
better
way
constructed.
the
is
ideology
persons, and that is to be achieved by pror4oting what is proclaimed as
'Britain's
lEngland's)long lived 'individualism'.'A return to Victorian Values,, ,.

y-:fu_i9_tru_"gll
te.e_-d_e_991.L."-lg
l-.-sgtl*-ley-:1b_i9_iru_"qi11.1-"..l.y,an
is presenred as at once--eyqki
i19l

state intervention
intervention interfering
interferins in individual
individual choice
choice and personal
retreat
--irc^r from state
effort.r?Rather, as a consequence,enterprisemust be privatised, and the
sovernment has indeed privatised one of the country's foremost plant6reedinginstitutesalong with its seedbank. Such a projectionof the past into
the future is beautifully exemplified in the elision with Contemporary
American: recapturing traditional valueswill bring the bright future promised
by (what Englishfantasiseas)Americanenterprise.In the 1980s,Englishpubs
havebecomeheavywith reinstatedVictorian decor in high streetsdominated
by over-lit fast-food outlets.
As a pieceof history, of course,the'return to Victorian values'is nonsense.
But it ought to interest social scientists.A traditional value is claimed for
England's (Britain's) true heritage, and individualism promoted and encouraged in the name of returning to tradition-.i
Not only is the individualism promoted so actively in the late twentieth
centuryradicallydifferentfrom its counterpartof a century ago, it would not
be conceivablewith the intervening era which made the state an explicit
instrument of public welfare. For the target of presentpolitical discourseis the
tyranny of the collective. Indeed, the way in which the present 'individual' is
construedcomesdirectly from valuesand ideasthat belong to that collectivist
era. This is also true of many of the ways in which anthropologists have r.
thought about the study of kinship.
Schneiderwas right to celebrate1984with a critique of the idea of kinship.
His book is an attack on the unthinking manner in which generationsof
anthropologistshavetaken kinship to be the socialor cultural constructionof
natural facts. But underlying the attack is the recognition that this is how
kinship has been constructed in anthropology from the start, and indeed that
this is its identity.
The anthropologicalconstruction of kinship as a domain of study was
formed in a specificepoch.It cameinitially from the modernismo[ Morgan's
era, from the 1860sonwards, but flowered in England in the middle decadesof
the twentieth century. This was the era when the anthropological task was to
understand other people's cultures and societies,being thereby directed to
their modes of collectivisation and public welfare. The concept of kinship as a
set of principles by which people organised their fundamental relations
epitomisedthe anthropologicalcapacity to describecultural production on
the one hand and the way people made collective and social life known to
themselveson the other. It was thus no accidentthat kinship played such a
part in the making of British Social Anthropology, which - and however
hybrid the origins of their practitioners- between 1910-1960was basically

46

English kinship in the late twentieth century

English anthropology. Kinship was above all seento be concernedwith what


peoples did everywhere with the facts of human nature.
For the modern anthropologist the facts of kinship were simultaneously
facts of nature and facts of culture and society. In this light, it is more than
intriguing to look back on these mid-twentieth-century assumptionsfrom a
world that seems,if only from the ability for endlessprintout or in the timeless
attributes of role-playing games, to post-date Society, and whose culture
might no longer mould or modify nature but could be everything that is left
once Nature has gone.

2
Analogiesfor a plural culture

Looking back almost ten yearslater, the British obstetricianwho pioneered


techniquesof in vitro fertilisation and embryo transfer gave his motive as selfevident:'It is a fact that there is a biological drive to reproduce',Patrick
Steptoesaid, and to thwart this drive would be harmful (quoted in Stanworth
lggT: 15). The procedure involves fertilisation outside the body. The first
person in England conceived this way was born in 1978; she was also
r
celebratedin the pressas the world's first. Her birth has come to be regarded
as cultural property for it 'servesas a symbolic watershed' for a deeply felt
debateabout the new reproductivetechnologiesin general(Rose 1987:152).
It is, I suggest,a symbolic watershedfor former reproductive models, and I
interpret aspectsof the debate in the reflectedlight of the model I have called
modern. The debate turns on ideas about persons and relations that can no
longer be taken for granted, and on this fact. While many women wish to have
children, Michelle Stanworth comments (1987: l5), the views that have
gatheredround the issuedo not simply reflect that wish; they institute their
own vision of what is risht and natural.
Displacing visions
Images in anticipation
The future orientation of the debate is provocative in itself. The last chapter
touched on the ease with which discussion slides from the immediate
accomplishment of embryologists to futuristic fears about genetic manipulation. Such leaps into the future accompany the scientisation of existing
procedures. Diverse forms of assistedreproduction are classed as medical
intervention,and medicineas science,'science'providingthe technologythat
enablesotherwisechildlesspersonsto havechildren(cf. Doyal 1987;Spallone
19871.
On the one hand technologyis thus seenas enabling;2on the other hand
intervention has becomea symbol of interference.'The Surrogate Mother has
become . . . the personification of anxietiesabout unpredictabletechnological
and social developments'(Zipper and Sevenhuijsen1987: 138).

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