Focality and Extension in Kinship: Essays in Memory of Harold W. Scheffler

Abstract

Hal Scheffler was one of the world's great anthropologists and, without question, its foremost authority on human kinship. These considerations in themselves would be quite enough to merit a collection of essays in his memory, but his work also touches upon certain larger issues in our appreciation of the human condition, as well as current social controversies.It was for his extensionist position on kinship terminologies-what he liked to call 'systems of kin classification'-that he was best known. In a nutshell, Scheffler would come to raise two questions: (1) What is the primary meaning-what he called the focus-of kinship terms like English 'mother', 'father', 'brother', 'sister' etc.? (2) By what procedures do people extend these meanings from their foci to others? His answers, based upon meticulous analyses of kinship terminologies in various parts of the world, were that focal membership is supplied mostly by nuclear family relationships, from which relationships it is extended to peopleeven to things-outside the nuclear family; and that these extensions are accomplished by ordered sets of rules that have considerable generality cross-culturally. Choiseul Island kinshipScheffler's first publication on kinship, based upon his doctoral dissertation, was his book-length treatment of sociality on Choiseul Island (Scheffler 1965), now part of the independent Solomon Islands. Two things deserve special emphasis in Scheffler's Choiseul analysis. First, there are rich data on distinctions made by the Choiseulese themselves. Second, Choiseulese ideas about kinship are not so different from our own. 1 We are especially indebted for this personal information from Jan Simpson, Hal's widow, her secretary Mary Smith and Ray Kelly, his Yale colleague. 5 INTRODUCTIONWith regard to the first point, even though more distant kin are superficially classed with one's parents, siblings, children, and other close kin, these latter are said, in native parlance, to be the 'true' members of their respective kin classes (Scheffler 1965: 75, 81). The singling out of focal membership by words translatable as 'true' (or 'real') is typical of a very large number of kinship terminologies throughout the world-a point Hal Scheffler would repeatedly make in subsequent analyses (e.g. Scheffler 1972b: 354; Scheffler 1973: 766; Scheffler and Lounsbury 1971: 43) and which probably supplies the most frequently encountered evidence in the ethnographic literature for the extensionist position (Shapiro 2016(Shapiro , 2017. With regard to the second point, Scheffler notes an expression in the Choiseul language that he translates as 'kin', which implies that they idiomise kinship in ways that are entirely familiar to English speakers. Towards a general theory of human kinshipA year after the publication of his Choiseul analysis, Hal Scheffler put forward nothing less than a general statement on human kinship. In this important but neglected essay Scheffler lays the groundwork for his general position on human kinship, to wit: [D]ifferent socie...