The Theory of Kinship Essay Example

one provided but not biology. The poststructuralist theory of kinship has come very near to outdoing itself as a theory due to its reduction of culture to ideology. This is a result of suggesting that there are no restrictions on the social bonds apart from those that are imposed by man. There is lack of understanding on what determines the nature of culture and why does it tend to be heteronormative. In other words, to explain the exact meaning of heteronormative, this can be attributed to the Freud rejection, which unexpectedly accompanied the poststructuralist deconstruction of the present classical theory of kinship referred to as Levi-Strauss. As a result of the purge of psychoanalysis, the unconscious has already played, at most a marginal responsibility in new means of understanding kinship since Levi-Strauss. However, deconstruction queer theory and feminist post structuralism among others, has dealt exclusively with various forms of kinship which are the basic social relations (Bruner 40).

On the other hand, poststructuralist psychoanalysis in the United States which took place within the same period of time, has managed to redefine the rule in order to meet the new political as well as ethical demands. Due to this, works were obtained on feminism and psychoanalysis, homosexuality and psychoanalysis, majority on social and psychoanalysis, however, we nearly learnt nothing on as far as kinship is concerned. This indicates that our effort in terms of the work we undertook is actually cut out for us. In order to bring together the main achievements of post structuralism, which include: its resistance to heteronormativity with the basic argument of the structuralist explaining in detail the conditions that form any kind

of normativity possible? Such inquiry is not taken or recorded as a new notion of culture but as post structuralism. This is due to the fact that it cannot pretend to a theory of culture while not accounting for the theory responsible for making cultures. The theory responsible for making cultures is from Levi-Strauss’ and Freud’s perspectives, which is unconscious. This essay explains the way in which the Elementary Structures of Kinship by Levi Strauss tends to sort out the relationship between culture and the nature so as to borrow his simple and elegant approach of comparing unconscious and culture. The extensive analysis of Chow’s article need to clearly show the reason behind revising needs of post structuralism in order to include the essence of unconscious in its understanding of the culture (Fabian 67).

Peter Ramadanovic, who is an Associate Professor of English, is the authors of forgetting futures among other various articles. The current essay is a section of his new project which is a critique of the post-structuralism. Therefore this article emerges from various conversations held with Catherine Peebles. The levi-Strauss’s theory of kinship is taken as an offshoot of thinking about kinship which was found in the early anthropology, basically in the race discussion, Kant, Blumenbach among others. Franz Boas defined culture as the totality of both the physical and the mental activities and reactions that characterize the behavioral aspects of individuals encompassing a social group individually and collectively in relations to members of the group, to each individual himself and to their natural environment. It also involves the products of such activities together with the role they play in the life of

the groups. The kind of enumerations of these kinds of life, sometimes does not involve culture. It is even more because its elements are dependent hence they have a structure (Bruner 40).
Recent assessment of the work of Levi-Strauss which is entitled “the future of the kinship structural theory”, Marcela Coelho de Souza, who is an anthropologist, claims that the Levi-Strauss’s work on kinship is based on the expectation of the relationship between nature and culture. She even goes ahead and identifies the most productive means to facilitate the understanding of this kind of a relation, that is, the one she thinks is maintained throughout his long career by Levi-Strauss. In purely structuralist terms, it is not a binary opposition but a dualism of exchangeable orders. The incest prohibition according to Coelho de Souza reading is not only a rule placing sexual relations or affinity, at the middle of the social network but also a rule restricting and even stopping certain marriages. It is thus a social norm as the former and much like a natural given as the latter. My claim with her’s seems to be similar.

I argue that there should be functional kind of a relation seen first for the culture and the nature so as to allow the possibility of culture which can eventually be manifested in accordance with the consanguinity and affinity. Due to this work, the concept of the incest taboo was being abandoned by the anthropology to be no longer useful. Ann Meigs’s and Kathleen Barlow had an overview of the current notion concerning the taboo of incest in both the anthropology and the ethnology. This gives a good implication

of the reason as to why these particular fields are on the move that is beyond the term. However, ethnology and Anthropology might be losing quite more that they opt to gain when they abandon their efforts to understand kinship. It is evident that following in the steps of nature as well as enacting that law that is held well prior to the days of Laius, declaring refraining from the same kind of relation affairs legal, adducting as evidence thereafter of the nature of the wild beasts, and ensuring that males do not come into contact for this kind of purpose, should be recommended because it is unnatural. Drawing from Punish and Foucault’s Discipline in particular, Chun argues that there should be a shift from disciplinary power which is operated through visible although there are unverifiable power apparatuses. To Gilles Deleuze’s notion of control societies that works through the softer forces of codes and modulation. Freedom is linked to autonomy unbound to subjects as well as institutions within the control societies as liberty for Chun is associated with individual subjectivity which is tied to the official institutions that are in the disciplinary societies. Maurice Merleau perceives the image with the body as an imaginary threshold that exists between the invisible and the visible. He says that the image is not a copy but it is an inward tapestry of the real and hosting carnal traces of things present in the external world.

There is an assumption that the body’s inner core, which is in retreat from the bodily surface, tends to remain impermeable to the social structures of both the race and the gender. The inapplicability

of the binary relationship that exists between the object and the subject when people are induced into information machines is what is referred to as the poster. In particular, Chow derails the present conversation on the Chinese cinema away from fascination just about a shiny new object of vision with regard to the investigation of the social and intimate, generally referred as fantasies, that generate or initiate visual production. Peter’s new book makes quite interesting contribution in as far as the growing study of science fiction is concerned. Paik continues the move away from the study of texts which had dominated work on the genre during the 1970s in order to study films and comics. Paik is both an attentive and a thoughtful reader. For instance, his careful and close analysis of the series of Alan Moore, called the Watchman, points out certain aspects of the narrative it is very easy to miss even in the readings of the series repeated. He offers a nuanced reading of the complicated relations existing between the problematically appropriated narrative and the comic series in its film. He also captures the depressing fatalism of Moore’s V for Vendetta. He also maps out the historical dimension of every narrative, may it be critical reaction to Thatcherism or the alternative history provided by the Watchmen. Moreover, he recognizes a common thread that runs through a group of texts and films which seem to be disparate. His book starts by analyzing Moore’s The Watchmen and concludes after discussing a variety of chapters taking into consideration the evaluation of the Moore’s V for Vendetta and the Matrix films, which is discussed in the

final chapter.

Paik focuses on the figure of the superhero and also reveals these texts’ bigger social conversation. He connects Joon-Hwan’s paranoid science fiction and the Miyazaki’s epic narratives with Moore’s critical reading of superhero comics through a set of similar ethical concerns. He begins his text with a statement which states that his book is a study of revolutionary change. The connection between focus of the book and this claim, a series of comic narratives and film that extensively engage in the figure of the superhero, is negotiated by the understanding of the revolutionary change not as a general activity but as an activity of the demiurgic creator. Paik negotiated this kind of a shift by thorough reading of Boris Groys’s book which claims that socialist realism strived and eventually attained the goal of the avant-garde to organize the society’s life; this is in accordance with monolithic artistic forms. According to Groys, that logic depends on the function of the artist as the new world’s creator. Stalinism changed this desire onto the state hence creating new artistic forms so as to achieve a consummate unity of the aesthetic theory as well as the political undertaking in his leadership past the revolutionary state. He notes that Groys’s terms do resemble the narrative conventions of American superhero comics, where he records that the struggle between the counter-revolutionary wrecker and the positive hero of Bolshevism is a disagreement that exists in a transcendent plane, whereby material reality is decreased to a mere staging ground for the battles of their superhuman.

Through this action, Paik claims that the project of the Soviet and the liberal capitalism dominated by the U.S

constitutes forms of myths which contain an ideological symmetry that betrays their shared faith in technology. This is regardless of whether it is in form of sociopolitical engineering or in the form of an infinitely expanding market globally. This is aimed at forever eliminating the historical intractable affiliations of scarcity, war and poverty. Both of the U.S and the Soviet projects fall on a sort of messianism, where they legitimate extraordinary acts of exploitation and violence in order to form a new and more perfected world. Referring to the work done by the political theorist, Carl Schmitt and conservative jurist, he says that these formations keep on being constituted through secularized versions of the older theological debates of political aspect concerning the relation of an omnipotent god to sovereign. The demiurgic creator becomes the concealed double of the secularized figure of the sovereign. He also claims that the material that he examines critiques these formations of myths, disclosing the hidden acts of violence that were actually essential to their foundation. He claims that that critique emerges out of a commitment towards realism. He defines these kinds of tests as realist. However, he differentiates his notion of realism from the generic realism. Realism in this latter sense depicts a discourse which evaluates in a dispassionate and impartial manner, the workings of power. It therefore arises as a result of the awareness that the wellsprings of conflicts arising out of political aspects generally lie in the strong struggle between two irreconcilable types of the good. Realism as a political discourse takes place under certain ways that are contrary to the mythical forms that are found in liberal

democracy as well as in the Soviet project. In a more effective way, realism involves a rejection of what is seen by Paik at the heart of the both projects, the perfectibility of human nature, a belief in the perfectibility of society and the implicitly. He argues that tragedy can be read outside of the Aristotelian framework that has already been largely accepted by even its radical critics (Bruner 40).

There are important truths revealed by this tragedy for instance the fact that pain is a critical part of existence of a man. It fails to critically and extensively narrate the conflict from the perspective of just one group. This construction of realism permits happening of a significant form of cognitive mapping to take place, this happens by demanding an effective analysis that can operate from the belief that a conflict comes from equally legitimate but irreconcilable situations. Thus, it enables one to think structurally instead of thinking as a partisan. However, it lowers the rich history of utopian thought to be an easy call for perfection, instead of recognizing its duty as a protest, critique, satire, which are all essential to its formation as a genre because it is the fantasy of perfectibility. Perhaps more importantly, Paik’s realism construction as a tragic political struggle ignores the long reception of the genre as an outlet of protest for those who are exploited and the poor. Additionally, Paik records a few references to the study of comics and to the film theory. His lack of commitment towards this critical tradition may turn to be very difficult to be reduced to breach of protocol, however it results in

a number of analytical challenges in what could have actually been a more critical intervention in the field.

Work Cited

1. Bruner, Jerome. "Culture and mind: Their fruitful incommensurability." Ethos 36.1 (2008): 29-45.
2. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the other: How anthropology makes its object. Columbia University Press, 2014.