Zitate GSIA 2

The view advanced in this Introduction is that to understand any kinship system it is necessary to carry out an analysis in terms of social structure and social function. The components of social structures are human beings, and a structure is an arrangement of persons in relationships institutionally defined and regulated. The social function of any feature of a system is its relation to the structure and its continuance and stability, not its relation to the biological needs of individuals. The analysis of any particular system cannot be effectively carried out except in the light of the knowledge that we obtain by the
systematic comparison of diverse systems.

All the kinship systems of the world are the product of social evolution. An essential feature of evolution is diversification by divergent development, and therefore there is great diversity in the forms of kinship systems. (...) For a kinship system to exist, or to continue in existence, it must ‘work’ with at least some measure of effectiveness. It must provide an integration of persons in a set of relationships within which they can interact and co-operate without too many serious conflicts. Tensions and possibilities of conflict exist in all systems. Professor Fortes and Dr. Richards have pointed out the tensions that exist in societies that approximate to mother-right. In systems approximating to father-right the tensions are different but exist none the less, as may be seen in the account of the Swazi. For a system to work efficiently it must provide methods of limiting, controlling, or resolving such conflicts or tensions. (...)

Whether a kinship system functions well or not so well as a mode of social integration depends on the way it is constructed. Just as an architect in designing a building has to make a choice of structural principles which he will use, so, though in less deliberate fashion, in the construction of a kinship system there are a certain limited number of structural principles which can be used and combined in various ways. It is on the selection, method of use, and combination of these principles that the character of the structure depends. A structural analysis of a kinship system must therefore be in terms of structural
principles and their application.

“The purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences.”

«With the exception of the few cases to be discussed in the next chapter, adolescence represented no period of crisis or stress, but was instead an orderly developing of a set of slowly maturing interests and activities. The girls’ minds were perplexed be no conflicts, troubled by no philosophical queries, beset by no remote ambitions. To live as a girl with many lovers as long as possible an then to marry in one’s own village, near one’s own relatives, and to have many children, these were uniform and satisfying ambitions.”

„Wenn der Inhalt des Mythos ganz zufällig ist, wie lässt sich dann verstehen, dass die Mythen von einem Ende der Welt zum andern sich so sehr ähneln?“

„Wir behaupten nunmehr, dass die wirklichen konstitutiven Einheiten des Mythos keine isolierten Beziehungen sind, sondern Beziehungsbündel, und dass jene nur in Form von Kombinationen solcher Bündel eine Bedeutungsfunktion erlangen.“

“... die Beziehung zwischen mütterlichem Onkel und Neffen verhält sich zur Beziehung zwischen Bruder und Schwester
wie die Beziehung zwischen Vater und Sohn zur Beziehung zwischen Gatten und Gattin.”

"They are our enemies. We marry them.’’

“(...) if there are sufficient conflicts of loyalties at work, settlement will be achieved and law and social order maintained. It is custom which establishes this conflict in loyalties. Men are tightly bound by custom, backed by ritual ideas, to their agnatic kin. Ritual ideas sanction the customary ties to maternal kin. ... At every point each man is pulled into relations with different men as allies or enemies according to the context of the situation. A man needs help in herding his cattle: therefore he must be friends with neighbours with whom he may well quarrel over other matters – or indeed over the herding of cattle.”

"alle Handlungen, und selbst noch jene, die sich als interesselose oder zweckfreie, also von der Ökonomie befreite verstehen, [sind] als ökonomische, auf die Maximierung materiellen oder symbolischen Gewinns ausgerichtete Handlungen zu begreifen".

"The concept of culture I espouse, and whose utility the essays below attempt to demonstrate, is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical."

"Kultur ist deshalb öffentlich, weil Bedeutung etwas Oeffentliches ist… Der allgemeine Einwand gegen private Bedeutungstheorien gehört seit dem frühen Husserl und dem späten Wittgenstein so sehr zum modernen Denken, dass er hier nicht noch einmal vorgetragen werden muss. Allerdings muss noch dafür gesorgt werden, dass man auch in der Ethnologie davon Notiz nimmt. Vor allem aber ist eines deutlich zu machen: Wenn man sagt, Kultur bestehe aus sozial festgelegten Bedeutungsstrukturen, in deren Rahmen Menschen etwa ein Komplott signalisieren und eingehen oder sich beleidigt fühlen und darauf reagieren, so folgt daraus noch keineswegs, dass Kultur ein psychologisches Phänomen, ein Merkmal einer individuellen geistigen Verfas-sung, einer kognitiven Struktur oder was auch immer ist, sowie daraus ja auch nicht folgt, dass der Tantrismus, die Genetik, die Verlaufsform des Verbs, die Klassifizierung von Weinsorten, das Gewohnheitsrecht oder der Begriff des ,bedingten Fluchs‘ ... bloss ein psychologisches, mentales oder kognitives Phänomen ist.“

„Als ineinandergreifende Systeme auslegbarer Zeichen (wie ich unter Nichtbeachtung landläufiger Verwendungen Symbole bezeichnen würde) ist Kultur keine Instanz, der gesellschaftliche Ereignisse, Verhaltensweisen, Institutionen oder Prozesse kausal zugeordnet werden können. Sie ist ein Kontext, ein Rahmen, in dem sie verständlich – nämlich dicht – beschreibbar sind.“

„A good interpretation of anything - a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society - takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation.“

"Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of 'construct a reading of') a manuscript—foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sounds but in transient examples of shaped behavior."

“Whenever culture is understood to be a collective phenomenon, it needs a sociology. When this sociology is left implicit, the danger is greater that it is a weak sociology.”