Editorial Foreword

Abstract

SYSTEMS OF CONSANGUINITY AND AFFINITY Kinship, so prominent in the previous issue, returns in this. Gillian Feeley-Harnik reevaluates Lewis Henry Morgan and his works, seeing his pioneering anthropological kinship studies and his researches on the beaver as aspects of a unitary vision comprehending the landscape and its inhabitants. She proposes a “natural history of kinship,” the aim of which is to break out of the box which Durkheim built and David Schneider dismantled, in the critique of Morgan's supposed biological notion of kinship: the impossible project of asserting that kinship is purely social, abstracting humans from their landscapes, their animal relatives, their bodies. She finds that Morgan's ideas of relationships were more linguistic and social than physiological, but also entangled with a wide range of geological and zoological phenomena, earthy and watery. Understanding his work in his own terms, “his example may inspire us to search for new ways to integrate phenomenological, political-economic, and ecological analysis into the study of how people understand their life processes.”