Engendering Disquiet: On Kinship and Gender in Bali

This chapter argues that kinship does not have the kind of reality usually attributed to it. Stipulating a cross-cultural reality to kinship is to equate discourses upon the imaginary with factuality. The unkindest cut of all is the way Western scholars treat kinship among non-Western peoples as something primordial to which they are bound, a state of affairs which 'the West' somehow transcends. The problem is that, whatever their purported basis in biology, as with gender, kinship relations are not natural facts. Anthropologists' statements about kinship are therefore, among other things, applications of classificatory principles to the actions, events and so forth from which relationships are inferred. It is not evident a priori that other peoples either use similar procedures or treat practices so idealistically as instantiations of ideas or categories. The criteria for inclusion in such worship groups may be expressed in several ways. Metaphor plays an interesting part in how relationships are portrayed.