AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST RESEARCH ARTICLE Kinship Past, Kinship Present: Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship Robert A. Wilson ABSTRACT In this article, I reconsider bio-essentialism in the study of kinship, centering on David Schneider's influential critique that concluded that kinship was "a non-subject" (1972:51). Schneider's critique is often taken to have shown the limitations of and problems with past views of kinship based on biology, genealogy, and reproduction, a critique that subsequently led those reworking kinship as relatedness in the new kinship studies to view their enterprise as divorced from such bio-essentialist studies. Beginning with an alternative narrative connecting kinship past and present and concluding by introducing a novel way of thinking about kinship, I have three constituent aims in this research article: (1) to reconceptualize the relationship between kinship past and kinship present; (2) to reevaluate Schneider's critique of bio-essentialism and what this implies for the contemporary study of kinship; and (3) subsequently to redirect theoretical discussion of what kinship is. This concluding discussion introduces a general view, the homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view of kinds, into anthropology, providing a theoretical framework that facilitates realization of the often-touted desideratum of the integration of biological and social features of kinship. [bio-essentialism, kinship studies, homeostatic property cluster kinds, Schneider, genealogy] ABSTRAIT Cet article reconsidère le bio-essentialisme dans l'étude de la parenté, en mettant l'accent sur la critique influente de David Schneider soutenant que la parenté est un «non-sujet» (1972:51). La critique de Schneider est souvent considérée comme ayant démontré les limites des conceptions de la parenté fondées sur la biologie, la généalogie et la reproduction. Dans les nouvelles études de la parenté, cette critique a conduit ceux qui travaillent sur la parenté conçue comme apparentement à présenter leur entreprise comme étant opposée aux études bio-essentialistes. Commençant avec un récit reliant parenté passée et présente et offrant une nouvelle façon de penser la parenté, cet article a trois objectifs cardinaux: (1) redéfinir la relation entre la parenté passée et la parenté présente, (2) réévaluer la critique par Schneider du bio-essentialisme et ce qu'il implique pour l'étude contemporaine de la parenté, et (3) enfin réorienter la discussion théorique de ce qu'est la parenté. Cette discussion se termine par l'introduction en anthropologie d'un schème conceptuel – le groupement de propriétés homéostatiques (GPH) vue de catégories naturelles – fournissant un cadre théorique pour l'intégration tant recherchée des caractéristique biologiques et sociales de la parenté. [bio-essentialisme. études de la parenté, le groupement de propriétés homéostatiques (GPH), Schneider, généalogie] ZUSAMMENFASSUNG In diesem Beitrag vertrete ich den biologischen Essentialismus (Bio-essentialismus) in Verwandtschaftsstudien. Im Vordergrund steht David Schneiders einflussreiche Kritik, die darauf hinausläuft, dass Verwandtschaft kein Gegenstand sei. Zumeist wird davon ausgegangen, dass Schneiders Kritik die Grenzen und Probleme vergangener, auf Biologie, Genealogie und Reproduktion basierender Auffassungen von Verwandtschaft AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 00, No. 0, pp. 1–15, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C© 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12607 2 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2016 aufzeigt hat, was später dazu geführt hat, dass jene, die Verwandtschaft als ,,relatedness"definierten, ihr Projekt als vom Bio-essentialismus streng getrennt betrachteten. Ausgehend von einem alternativen Narrativ, dass vergangene und gegenwärtige Verwandschaftskonzepte verbindet, sowie durch die Einführung einer neuen Verständnisses von Verwandtschaft, habe ich in diesem Beitrag drei zentrale Ziele erreichen: (1) Die Beziehung zwischen vergangenen und gegenwärtigen Verwandschaftskonzepten überdenken, (2) Schneiders Kritik und ihre Implikationen für gegenwärtige Verwandtschaftsstudien reevaluieren, und (3) die theoretische Diskussion darüber, was Verwandtschaft ist, neu ausrichten. Der Beitrag schliesst damit, ein allgemeines Konzept – den ,,homeostatic property cluster view of kinds" (HPC) – in die anthropologische Diskussion einzubringen, als einen theoretischen Rahmen, der die Verwirklichung des oft beschworenen Desideratums der Integration der biologischen und sozialen Eigenschaften von Verwandtschaft erleichtert. [Bio-essentialismus, Verwandtschaftsstudien, den "homeostatic property cluster view of kinds" (HPC), Schneider, Genealogie"] RESUMEN Este artıculo reconsidera el esencialismo biológico (bio-esencialismo) en el estudio del parentesco, centrándose en la influyente crıtica de David Schneider. A menudo se considera que la crıtica de Schneider ha demostrado los problemas y las limitaciones de teorıas del parentesco anteriores, basadas en la biologıa, la genealogıa y la reproducción. Su crıtica contribuyó a que aquellos que trabajaban el parentesco como afinidad ("relatedness") en el marco de los nuevos estudios del parentesco vieran su proyecto como desconectado de los enfoques bio-esencialistas anteriores. Mediante una narrativa alternativa que conecta el parentesco pasado y presente, y concluyendo con una manera innovadora de pensar el parentesco, el presente artıculo está constituido con tres objetivos en mente: (1) re-conceptualizar la relación entre parentesco pasado y presente, (2) reevaluar la crıtica al bio-esencialismo de Schneider y lo que ello conlleva para los estudios contemporáneos del parentesco, y (3) ulteriormente redirigir la discusión teórica sobre qué es el parentesco. En esta sección final se introduce en la antropologıa una visión general, la teorıa del cluster de propiedades homeostático (HPC) de tipos (kinds). Este marco teórico facilita la realización del desiderátum de la integración de los aspectos biológicos y sociales del parentesco. [bioesencialismo, estudio del parentesco, cluster de propiedades homeostático (HPC) de tipos, Schneider, genealogıa] Kinship is like totemism, matriarchy, and the "matrilineal complex." It is a non-subject. It exists in the minds of anthropologists but not in the cultures they study. –David Schneider, "What Is Kinship All About?" [1972:51] INTRODUCTION Consider a familiar narrative about kinship and its anthropological study. Once regarded within anthropology as a key to understanding the functioning and evolution of human culture and "perhaps the one field in which social and cultural anthropology could claim to have booked secure advances" (Kuper 1999:131), kinship was foundational for the ethnographic study of social structures and cultural practices throughout much of the 20th century. Despite this, the status of kinship studies fell precipitously from grace during the 1970s. Conceptualized as distinctively biological, genealogical, or reproductive (or bio-essentialist), kinship and its study came to be seen as having "reinforced the boundaries between the West and the rest" (Carsten 2004:15). Strangely manifesting its own kind of ethnocentrism, the study of kinship became an uncomfortable reminder of a colonial impulse that had motivated another, already jettisoned part of cultural anthropology's past: the study of primitive society (Kuper 2005). Yet rather than disappearing from anthropology, as had the study of primitive society, kinship was transformed. In kinship past, distinctively Western, bio-essentialist conceptions of kinship dominated ethnographic studies of kinship; in kinship present, such conceptions had been replaced by the more encompassing notion of "relatedness" in the "new kinship studies" (Carsten 2000; Peletz 2001). Given the various negative associations that bio-essentialist views had accumulated within cultural anthropology more generally, a rearticulation of kinship free of past bio-essentialism was a welcome advance.1 David Schneider's extended critique of kinship (1965a, 1965b, 1970, 1972, 1977[1969], 1980[1968], 1984) is widely recognized as having played an influential role not only in the demise of bio-essentialist kinship studies but also in this subsequent reworking of kinship. For example, Nancy Levine (2008:376) identified Schneider's critique as both "the most devastating and most productive for future research," a judgment shared by many other Wilson • Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship 3 contemporary kinship theorists who self-consciously distanced their work from traditional kinship studies, doing so by explicitly acknowledging Schneider's critique of bioessentialism (Carsten 2004:18–24; Franklin and McKinnon 2001a:2–3; Strathern 1992:xviii, 4; Yanagisako and Collier 1987:29–32).2 Schneider's central place in establishing a view of kinship past as bio-essentialist is also reflected in contemporary work less comfortably viewed as part of the new kinship studies. Marshall Sahlins's (2011a:6–10; 2013a:12–18) sweeping, recent writing on kinship, critical as it is of core aspects of Schneider's critique, shows Schneider's influence in its sustained attack on the very aspects of kinship studies that were Schneider's primary target: its bio-essentialism (Sahlins 2013a:62–89). The influence of Schneider's critique is also singled out in recent articles in this journal-on adoption and child circulation in the Marshall Islands (Berman 2014) and on fatherhood and paternal investment in the Mosuo (Mattison et al. 2014)-that more tentatively return to explore of the role of biological relationships in kinship.3 My central aim in this article is to reconsider bioessentialism in the study of kinship, focusing on Schneider's critique. Beginning with an alternative narrative connecting kinship past and present and concluding by introducing a novel way of thinking of kinship that draws on resources beyond anthropology, I here have three constituent aims: (1) to reconceptualize the relationship between kinship past and kinship present; (2) to reevaluate Schneider's critique of bio-essentialism and what this implies for the contemporary study of kinship; and (3) subsequently to redirect theoretical discussion of what kinship is by applying a view, the so-called homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view of kinds, to kinship. This view provides a theoretical framework that facilitates the realization of the often-touted desideratum of the integration of biological and social features of kinship and does so whether or not the view itself constitutes a form of bio-essentialism.4 BEYOND THE STANDARD NARRATIVE: THE 1960S AND ALL THAT The revival of kinship in a post-Schneiderian guise opened up a novel array of topics-reproductive technologies, chosen families, autoethnography, gay and lesbian intimacy, invented communities, the body and personhood, artificial life, Internet dating, identity politics, disability activism, ethnicity, and adoption practices-and innovative approaches for those working on the various meanings that relatedness has for individuals and cultures. Methodologically, rather than focusing on structural or functional aspects of culturally exotic forms of kinship, such studies typically emphasize the performativity and lived experience of kinship, exploring how ongoing bodily and mindful interaction with technological and other social innovations shifts the meaning that kinship has in domestic and distinctly Western sites, such as in vitro fertilization clinics.5 As indicated, the dominant contemporary narrative within cultural anthropology about kinship is anchored around Schneider's charge of bio-essentialism against the past study of kinship. When Alfred Kroeber (1909) posited procreation as a process that unifies all kinship systems, when Kingsley Davis and Lloyd Warner (1937:292) said that "kinship may be defined as social relationships based on connection through birth," or when E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940:183) spoke of being a kinsman "actually or by fiction," they manifested this kind of bio-essentialism, one that privileged biological relations over other relations in the conceptualization of kinship. In effect, Schneider (1984) argued that kinship theory in general was methodologically structured around a kind of translation manual that all ethnographic investigations of kinship should consult in understanding kinship systems other than their own. That manual directed theorists to translate all putative kinship terminologies via a biological–genealogical–reproductive grid and, thus, to conceptualize kinship bio-essentially in any ethnographic context. For Schneider, that bio-essentialist grid was an ethnocentric projection, imposing a peculiarly AmericanEuropean conception of kinship onto other cultures.6 According to this narrative, Schneider's critique of kinship showed that past disciplinary obsession with the reductive project of shaking each culture through the bio-essentialist sieve of kinship was fatally flawed. Next, following a short, dumbfounded lull in work on kinship (especially in North America), a concept of kinship liberated from bio-essentialist presuppositions arose, resulting in work often expressed not in the language of kin and kinship but in that of relatives and relatedness. In shedding the skin of bio-essentialism, the new kinship studies made a decisive break with a more troubled anthropological past that was scientistic and ethnocentric (Carsten 2004; Franklin and McKinnon 2001a; Moutu 2013; Weston 1997; Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). This general type of narrative is familiar to historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science, being a variation on the radical juncture approaches of the two most influential figures in the intersection of these fields, Thomas Kuhn (1962) and Michel Foucault (2002[1969]). We could thus read this standard narrative either in terms of there being a Kuhnian paradigm shift mediated by Schneider's critique and its uptake by the new kinship studies or as exemplifying a new Foucauldian discursive formation or episteme for the study of relatives that breaks free of the bio-essentialism of the past through a Schneiderian radical juncture (cf. Carsten 2004:19). Although it is common to offer some sort of critique of a dominant narrative before (or as a part of) motivating an alternative to it, here I want simply to provide a short statement of such an alternative narrative, one that aims to facilitate a rethinking of the story that many anthropologists now tell themselves about the place of bio-essentialism in kinship past and present. In fact, there has been no radical juncture in the study of kinship; calls to rethink 4 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2016 kinship have recurred with sufficient regularity throughout the 20th century to constitute something of a disciplinary ritual of their own. Since the disciplinary-founding work of those legalistic, proto-anthropologists Henry Maine, John Ferguson McLennan, and Lewis Henry Morgan, kinship systems have been viewed as culturally universal, with the variety in kinship systems being at least an order of magnitude smaller than the number of cultures. Hypotheses about the genealogical, structural, and functional affinities between the various kinship systems have been at the heart of kinship theory, with theorists concerned about the social significance of certain, putative biological facts, such as the supposed necessity of biparental sex for reproduction, mothers for birth, and the dependence of infants on parental, especially maternal, care. Such "facts" were sometimes viewed as biological universals about, or determinants of, kinship. Schneider's critique of kinship targeted such bio-essentialism. Like much social science, the study of kinship draws on and adapts existing folk concepts. But the idea of Western bio-essentialized folk concepts of kinship being endlessly ethnocentrically projected onto non-Western cultures by ethnographers and kinship theorists is itself a kind of anthropological myth. Liberating kinship from its putatively bio-essentialized shackles has rarely led in practice to abandonment of the biological facts that anchor kinship terminologies and concepts across all cultures. This is true both of the extension of kinship studies into domestic spaces and of continuing attempts to articulate the practice and lived reality of kinship in non-Western cultures (see Berman 2014; Mattison et al. 2014). The study of kinship has changed innovatively due to Schneider's influence. Yet it is a projection of its own kind to view these changes as marking a radical juncture in that study. Whatever doubts there are about the extent of ethnocentric projection in understanding kinship studies past, we can nonetheless maintain the idea that a conception of kinship indeed has been projected from "the West" to "the Rest" in kinship present (cf. Kuper 2008, esp. pp. 727–728). This conception of kinship reflects the shift in kinship structures in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, a shift that involved experimentation with different ways of being a mother, a father, a child, and a family. That was, as they say, the 1960s: working mothers, the spread of contraception, skyrocketing divorce rates, Brady Bunch families, communal living and free love, sexual liberation, dropping out. Combined with developing technologies of reproduction, those in the West had new ways to live and new ways to make new sorts of people to live in those new ways. As Western conceptions of kinship were pried from whatever forms of bio-essentialism rigidified them, anthropologists subsequently came to speak more freely of relatives than of kin, of relationships rather than of kinship. Relative and relatedness came to be the preferred terms of cultural analysis for emerging forms of kinship. That conception of kinship was then projected onto societies subject to past colonial and imperial influence, including through ethnographic intervention and its aftermath: kinship theory. In short, if there has been an ethnocentric projection from the West to the Rest regarding kinship, it is more recent than proponents of the standard narrative of the history of kinship studies have thought. It is the projection of an extended or loosened concept of relatedness to places that anthropologists then find it to have existed in all along, a projection that reflects the social changes in Western societies underway since anthropology has been engaged in the very project of rethinking kinship. RELOCATING SCHNEIDER Schneider's critique extended over a 20-year period, culminating in his A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984). It was influential in part because it dovetailed with broader theoretical and political changes to the discipline during the 1970s, such as the emergence of feminist perspectives on gender, the family, and social structure (Ortner 1984) and the shift away from structural approaches to society in favor of interpretative understandings of culture (Geertz 1973). In these respects, Schneider's critique contrasted with that of another leading internal critic of kinship studies, Rodney Needham. In much the way that Schneider would shortly summarize his own views, Needham (1971:5) had claimed that "there is no such thing as kinship, and it follows that there can be no such thing as kinship theory." Prior to reaching this conclusion, Needham had previously engaged in philosophical debate focused on the distinction between "physical" and "social" kinship that was so important in British social anthropology (Barnes 1961; Beattie 1964; Gellner 1957, 1960, 1963; Needham 1960). But three other features of Needham's view are more important here in relocating Schneider's critique of bio-essentialism. First, Needham's reasons for this concordant conclusion were explicitly Wittgensteinian, appealing to Ludwig Wittgenstein's cautionary reminders about the misplaced search for essences and criterial meaning and drawing on his famous analogies to games and family resemblances in thinking beyond essentialism.7 Second, Needham made no attempt to link his views here to external developments elsewhere in anthropology or academia more generally, despite his earlier interdisciplinary engagements regarding physical and social kinship (e.g., Gellner 1960). Third, this repudiation of kinship and kinship theory was not accompanied by methodological or practical changes in how one regarded either kinship or kinship theory. Despite sharing a conclusion with Needham, Schneider's challenge differed in all three of these respects. It was grounded not in the work of a philosopher with marginal standing among anthropologists but in the idea that cultural investigations should focus on the symbols that make up a culture and how they are understood within it. Schneider (1980[1968]:18) made explicit his focus on "the symbols which are American kinship," foregrounding his emphasis Wilson • Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship 5 both on meaning and on kinship in the West. Schneider's symbolic anthropology was distinguished from the related hermeneutical, interpretative approach (e.g., Geertz 1973) by Schneider's methodological view of anthropology as an empirical, inductive enterprise and by his divorce of culture from consideration of norms and values (e.g., Schneider 1976:202–203). These meaning-centered approaches, both deriving originally from the heuristic separation of culture as the realm for anthropology advocated by Talcott Parsons (1951), spoke to, and indeed stoked, deep-seated, longerstanding relativist tendencies within anthropology; both also found affinities with broader poststructuralist trends in the humanities and social sciences that swept through North American universities in the 1970s. The third point of contrast between Needham and Schneider, however, is most significant here. As one of his titles-American Kinship-suggests, Schneider shifted his focus in kinship studies from culturally exotic to culturally familiar locations. In the late 1940s, Schneider had undertaken ethnographic work on the Micronesian island of Yap, much of which concentrated on kinship (Schneider 1953, 1962; see also Schneider with Handler 1995). Schneider's work on kinship in the United States had begun jointly with the sociologist George Homans (Homans and Schneider 1955; Schneider and Homans 1955), work from which Schneider later distanced himself (Schneider 1965a; see also Feinberg 2001:7). In American Kinship (1980[1968]), Schneider's emerging critical view of kinship studies meshed with the symbolic view of culture and cultural anthropology that he saw replacing such ethnographic and sociological studies. Schneider's interest in kinship as a cultural system and in offering descriptions that captured the participant perspective led him to view U.S. kinship as a system of meanings structured around the twin symbols of blood (shared biogenetic substance) and love ("diffuse, enduring solidarity"). For Schneider, these symbols provided the key to understanding kinship in U.S. culture, contrasting this with a view of kinship simply as a result of biological facts.8 UNDERSTANDING BIO-ESSENTIALISM IN SCHNEIDER Although Schneider's critique of kinship studies was apparent in his work from 1965 to 1975, his most sustained criticisms are contained in A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), the concluding chapters of which provide capsule statements of two related clusters of criticisms. The first critiques the "quartet of kinship, economics, politics, and religion" (1984:184) as nothing more than "a valiant attempt to use the constructions of European culture as tools for description, comparison, and analysis" (1984:185). The second cluster of criticisms offers a version of this claim about kinship in particular: in undertaking elaborate ethnographic reconstructions of other cultures in terms of a specific, Eurocentric conception of kinship that is bio-essentialist, kinship theorists have committed the near-original anthropological sin of ethnocentric projection. Given the place of what I am calling "bio-essentialism" in Schneider's extensive critique and the subsequent uptake of that critique in the new kinship studies, it is surprisingly difficult to find a precise expression of what the charge of bio-essentialism amounts to in Schneider's work. We need to undertake at least a little hermeneutical elbow work of our own to understand just what about kinship, according to Schneider, has been ethnocentrically projected. Schneider summarizes his views at length in his final chapter of A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Here he identifies "three basic axioms used in the study of kinship" (1984:188), all of which he thinks are mistaken, Eurocentric projections. Together they support a view that Schneider also thinks is false called the "Doctrine of the Genealogical Unity of Mankind"-"the thesis that at one level all genealogies are equal to each other, or can be treated as dealing with the same thing and so are comparable" (1984:125). While there is a sense in which, for Schneider, this doctrine, assumed in both Parson's (1951) and George Murdock's (1949) foundationalist views of biology in the study of culture, is at the heart of kinship studies, because according to Schneider himself it is derived from three "axioms," it is not the most fundamental thesis that Schneider ascribes to kinship theorists. The first of these axioms elaborates on Schneider's identification of kinship-alongside economics, politics, and religion-as "one of the four privileged institutions, domains, or rubrics of social science, each of which is conceived to be a natural, universal, vital component of society" (1984:187). With this having been the topic of the preceding, short chapter, Schneider moves directly to state the second axiom, which claims that kinship has to do with the reproduction of human beings and the relations between human beings that are the concomitants of reproduction. The reproduction of human beings is formulated as a sexual and biological process. Sexual relations are an integral part of kinship, though sexual relations may have significance outside kinship and sexual relations per se are not necessarily kinship relations. [Schneider 1984:188] This second axiom can be stated so as to connect explicitly with and clarify the doctrine it putatively supports: kinship has been construed primarily as a bio-essentialist relationship of one kind or another, one between biological ancestor–descendant pairs that, over time, constitute biological ancestor–descendant lineages. Sexual relations matter insofar as they are the biological means through which these pairs and lineages are generated. In old-speak, kinship is a matter of consanguinity, biologically construed, with alliances relevant insofar as they create the resulting bio-genealogy.9 Schneider playfully names the third axiom, which he refers to as "the fundamental assumption" in several places (e.g., 1984:176, 177), "Blood Is Thicker Than Water." Given its fundamentality, it is unfortunate (even if inevitable) that there is no clear, univocal statement of what the axiom says. To get a sense of the problems here, consider three 6 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2016 of Schneider's earlier references to "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" (see also 1984:173, 176, 177, 189, 191, 193, 194): (1) The assumption that Blood Is Thicker Than Water says that whatever variable elements may be grafted onto kinship relations, all kinship relations are essentially the same and share universal features. [1984:174] (2) This assumption [that Blood Is Thicker Than Water] makes kinship or genealogical relations unlike any other social bonds, for they have especially strong binding force and are directly constituted by, grounded in, determined by, formed by, the imperatives of the biological nature of human nature. [1984:174] (3) Because "Blood Is Thicker Than Water," kinship consists in bonds on which kinsmen can depend and which are compelling and stronger than, and take priority over, other kinds of bonds . . . All kinship bonds are of essentially the same kind. All of this is because kinship is a strong solidary bond that is largely innate, a quality of human nature, biologically determined, however much social or cultural overlay may also be present. [1984:165–166, italics in original] Reference (1) characterizes the axiom as saying that kinship has universal features. The second reference has "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" implying that genealogical bonds are distinctive in strength and that they are the result of a biological imperative. Perhaps developing this latter theme, the third reference characterizes the axiom as implying that kinship bonds are constitutive of human nature or biologically determined: they are part of our psychological or biological makeup. Having an essence, being distinctively strong, and being largely innate, however, are three very different properties. (Schneider himself may have intended, of course, to point to all three of these features-or might not have noticed, or cared about, the differences between them.) In his concluding summary, Schneider more elaborately presents "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" as follows: sexual reproduction creates biological links between persons and these have important qualities apart from any social or cultural attributes which may be attached to them [and which are] . . . derivative of and of less determinate significance than the biological relations. These biological relations have special qualities; they create and constitute bonds, ties, solidary relationships proportional to the biological closeness of the kind . . . These are considered to be natural ties inherent in the human condition, distinct from the social or cultural. [1984:188] Although Schneider's reference to "natural ties inherent in the human condition" may signal innateness again, the primary pair of characterizations in this passage is of biological relations as being important or having significance in abstraction from social or cultural attributes and of them being determinative of other properties and relations. These are yet further features that Schneider attributes to bioessentialist conceptions within kinship studies. Thus, "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" says any or all of the following: biologically construed kinship relations have universal features, are distinctive in strength, are innate (part of human nature, biologically determined), have significance in abstraction from any other properties or relations, and are determinative of such other properties and relations.10 Later we will see why kinship itself does not have any of these distinct features essentially. The issue here, however, is the relationship of "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" and Schneider's other axioms to the traditional study of kinship, kinship past. A reading of that axiom ascribing all five features to how kinship has been conceived throughout a tradition stretching 100 years would merely parody that tradition, offering a kind of pastiche of different views of kinship that adequately characterizes none of them, a point I develop further in the next section. As Schneider's own detailed discussion (1984:97–143) suggests, many prominent kinship theorists, such as Émile Durkheim, W. H. R. Rivers, and Bronisław Malinowski, reject one or more of the above characterizations of kinship. One might well think that, because the big idea at the heart of Schneider's discontent with kinship studies past that has had much downstream influence within kinship present remains clear, this is just so much textual wrangling: nuances aside, Schneider did show that those working on kinship had continually projected onto non-Western cultures a conception of kinship according to which biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations play distinctive roles in structuring and governing the social relations and cultural practices subsumed under kinship. I want to suggest, however, that this big idea itself faces a series of deep problems that derive from the kind of complexity revealed by our hermeneutical side-trip through Schneider's text and that these problems continue to plague contemporary dismissals of bio-essentialism. PROBLEMS FOR THE BIG IDEA ABOUT BIO-ESSENTIALISM AND KINSHIP Consider first bio-essentialism and the study of kinship. On the one hand, softened or weakened interpretations of each of Schneider's axioms and the Doctrine of Genealogical Unity of Mankind may well encompass all major kinship theorists, including Morgan, Durkheim, Rivers, Malinowski, Evans-Prichard, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Murdock, and Meyer Fortes. Yet such interpretations-for example, taking the second axiom to say simply that kinship concerns biological reproduction and its outcomes in some way-give us doctrines denied by very few, including Schneider himself. On the other hand, offering enriched or strengthened characterizations of these axioms and the Doctrine to make them more substantive-say, taking "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" to entail the strong, five-fold form of bio-essentialism that we outlined in the previous section-produces an analysis that fails to apply to many prominent kinship theorists. For example, both Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss are well known for giving priority to kinship as a social rather than as a biological category. Thus, interpreting Schneider's second or third axioms to imply that biological relations determine or fix kinship, or that the social recognition of kinship is only an overlay to a biological foundation for kinship, leads to a characterization of traditional kinship studies that excludes key figures, such as Durkheim or Lévi-Strauss.11 Wilson • Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship 7 This dilemma raises a question about the empirical adequacy of the constituent claim that the ethnocentric projection thesis makes about "The West": Does bio-essentialism in fact accurately characterize the study of kinship, say from Morgan (1871) to Fortes (1969)? Proponents of the standard narrative about kinship studies have typically supposed an affirmative answer to this question, citing Schneider's critique (Carsten 2000:8, 2004:19–22; Franklin and McKinnon 2001a:2–4). Yet attention to cultural variation in kinship systems and concerns about the bio-essentializing of kinship are readily found throughout traditional studies of kinship, posing a further challenge to the standard narrative.12 A parallel issue arises with respect to the second part of the claim of ethnocentric projection, that concerning "The Rest": Are there any non-Western cultures in which biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations play a distinctive role in characterizing kinship? For Schneider's thesis goes significantly beyond denying the universality of bio-essentialized kinship to proclaiming its absence beyond the West-implying that no non-Western cultures share a distinctly Western, bio-essentialized conception of kinship (see also McKinley 2001:136). This claim would be refuted simply by finding one such culture that ascribes biological, genealogical, or reproductive relations the distinctive role they have (let us suppose) in the West. On the enriched understandings of bio-essentialism we have been considering, there may be few (if any) such cultures, but I have already indicated that such understandings of bio-essentialism do not characterize the views of many (if any) kinship theorists. By contrast, the softened versions of bio-essentialism that do accurately capture much pre-Schneiderian anthropological thinking about kinship also characterize many (but not all) non-Western cultures. In the standard narrative, recall, the study of kinship did not dissolve after Schneider but was self-consciously transformed, invoking a more pluralistic conception of kinship as "relatedness" (see also Wilson 2016). Kinship so conceived could be studied both in Western domestic places and spaces as well as cross-culturally (e.g., Carsten 2000; Faubion 1996), once the bio-essentialism of the past was given up. One problem with this view is that, as impressive as is the variety in the conception of what makes for relatives and relatedness, there must be some way to delineate the particular forms of "being related to" that pick out kinship from the larger genus of human relationships. That genus includes relationships of intimacy, such as friendship and love, of enmity, and even more mundane relationships, such as being a neighbor of or belonging to the same Internet chat group. We gain a universally applicable notion of kinship as relatedness only by failing to distinguish kinship from many things it is not. Here the price of the radical pluralism embraced by the conception of kinship as simply relatedness is not so much eternal vigilance as ubiquitous and boundless kinship. To come full circle, if we appeal to biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations to rein in the concept of kinship-that is, if we treat it bio-essentially-as is implicit in the practice (if not the theory) of the new kinship studies, we are not so very far from the object of Schneider's critique.13 So probing at the very idea of bio-essentialism via Schneider's own discussion reinforces doubts about the standard narrative of the history of kinship studies and the place of bioessentialism in that history. Bio-essentialism about kinship holds that biology, genealogy, and reproduction are distinctive features of kinship. We have seen that the distinctiveness of such features was construed in various ways by Schneider himself and that the resulting gradient running from softened to enriched forms of bio-essentialism poses problems for critiques of bio-essentialism insensitive to this variation. But that variation also creates an opening for a positive view of kinship or relatedness that allows one to reconsider bioessentialism afresh. Here I draw on recent work in the history and philosophy of science that has engaged with essentialism in a sustained manner over the past 25 years that views biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations as constraints on, but not determinants of, the concept of kinship.14 HOMEOSTATIC PROPERTY CLUSTER KINDS, KINSHIP, AND BIO-ESSENTIALISM On what is sometimes called a traditional essentialist view (Wilson 1999), kinds are defined by a set of underlying, essential properties, each individually necessary and jointly sufficient for membership in the kind, where such properties also are causes of the kind's observable properties. Kinds in the physical sciences are often thought to have such essences. The chemical kind water is defined in terms of its being composed of two bonded molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen, and the associated microstructural properties of water are causally responsible for its higher-level, observable properties, such as its transparency and boiling point. Likewise, a proton in physics is a particle with a positive charge and a particular mass, and these properties are the causes for a proton's observable properties, such as its behavior in gravitational and electrostatic fields. The most natural way to apply this form of essentialism to bio-essentialist conceptions of kinship would be to define kinship in terms of some set of biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations, relations that would also serve as the underlying causes of putatively "higher-level" social and cultural features of kinship. Such an application of traditional essentialism to kinship would specify a precise form of bioessentialism about kinship of the kind that Schneider sought to critique, one according to which biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations played an asymmetrically determinative role in the universal structure of kinship. Whatever one says about physical and chemical kinds, there are compelling, well established, general reasons to reject traditional essentialism about both biological and social natural kinds (Hull 1965a, 1965b; Sober 1980). Many 8 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2016 biological kinds, such as species, subsume an intrinsic heterogeneity (Wilson 2005: chs. 4–5) among their members, defeating attempts to define them in terms of intrinsic essences. For example, interbreeding between individuals within a species promotes genetic variation within that species, implying that there is no genetic essence for species membership. The same is true of social kinds: there is no intrinsic property shared by those who are unemployed or criminals. The cultural variation central to the Schneiderian rejection of bio-essentialism about kinship provides reason to see kinship or relatedness as likewise intrinsically heterogeneous and so to reject such traditional essentialism about kinship in particular. This failure of traditional essentialism implies that biological, genealogical, and reproductive properties and relations cannot be distinctive features of kinship in virtue of being some kind of underlying, determinative essence of kinship. That distinctiveness, if it exists, must be understood in some other way. It is better understood, I suggest, in terms of imposing constraints on the concept of kinship. Consider an analogy to the concept of disease. Even though the causes and effects of diseases can be conceived differently, as can their prevention, cure, and social significance, there is still something distinctive of disease-namely, that it concerns the health and well-being of some living thing and, thus, the proper functioning of that thing's body or mind. We can express this relationship by viewing health and well-being as constraints on the concept of disease. Biology, genealogy, and reproduction constrain the concept of kinship in much the way that health and well-being constrain the concept of disease. To say this about kinship is nontrivial, insofar as many key notions in anthropology-for example, the other "privileged institutions" of economic, politics, and religion-are not constrained in this way. This constraints-based view suggests the form that bio-essentialism might take, given the falsity of traditional essentialism. Within recent philosophy of science, the most widely discussed alternative to traditional essentialism about biological kinds provides the resources for articulating such a constraining relationship. This is the homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view of kinds, developed originally for moral properties and later applied to species and other biological kinds that are intrinsically heterogeneous. Despite its unwieldy name, the idea behind this view is relatively simple. At least many (if not all) kinds are defined by stable clusters of properties, only some subset of which is necessary for membership in the kind and the stability of which is underwritten by facts about the world, including underlying mechanisms of co-occurrence.15 This appeal to worldly stability distinguishes the HPC view as a form of naturalistic realism from similar-sounding approaches, such as pheneticism or numerical taxonomy about species and higher-order taxa in evolutionary biology, and from Needham's earlier "polythetic" view of kinship, based in his appeals to Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance. In contrast to the HPC view, these views are forms of operationalism or instrumentalism about kinds. As with other applications of the HPC view (e.g., to species), a HPC approach to kinship at least purports to provide the basis for a sophisticated form of realism about kinship.16 On the HPC view of kinship, biological relations, such as gives birth to, is born from the same body as, and procreates with, partially and nonessentially characterize kinship, alongside other kinds of relations, such as is primarily cared for by, lives in the same house as, and enters into a socially recognized ceremony of marriage with. Just which biological and social relations constitute kinship in any specific cultural circumstance is revealed by corresponding ethnographic work, and relations that are constitutive in some such circumstances need not even be present in others. Within a culture, or a culture at a time or a subculture, these constitutive relations form a cluster that is stabilized by mechanisms and systems, making the clustering systematic rather than a matter of mere social construction or a theorist's projective imposition. Such mechanisms in the case of kinship often take the form of established practices and conventions, with variation in these producing the variation we find in kinship systems. For example, consider just the pair-wise clustering of the biological relation being born from the same body as and the social relation lives in the same house as. This pairing is supported by the widespread (but not universal) cross-cultural practice of siblings living together with their biological parents. The laws, customs, and moral codes that serve as mechanisms reinforcing the stability of this clustering allow for this pair of relations to come apart-parents can die or be incapacitated, foster care and guardianships exist, other family members may provide the house for one or another of two siblings, and children do (eventually, I'm told) leave home. Moreover, cultures exist in which this pair-wise clustering is diminished or absent altogether, having instead a conception of kinship or relatedness that draws on other homeostatic clusterings of properties in the HPC kind (cf. Carsten 2004 on houses and kinship). Particular HPC proposals regarding kinship will be informed by empirical, often ethnographic work, and the HPC view itself could be falsified by the results of that work. The view would turn out to be false if the relevant biological and social relations did not cluster at all; if kinship were documented in the total absence of some such cluster of relations; if what clustering there was lacked the systematicity and stability crucial on the HPC view; or if there were completely nonoverlapping clusters of relations across different cultural circumstances-a sort of splintering of the concept of kinship. This falsifiability is part of what makes the HPC view of kinship a substantive, even if high-level, hypothesis about the nature of kinship. Finally, note how the HPC view of kinship integrates with the alternative narrative to the history of the study of kinship introduced earlier. The change from traditional to the new kinship studies does not so much replace a bioessentialist notion of kinship with a more general notion of relatedness as draw on a shared conception of kinship that Wilson • Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship 9 has come over time to emphasize new, often technologically mediated biological and social relations as the foundation for kinship relations in increasingly globalized world cultures. Adjustments and augmentations of the conception of kinship in response to shifts in Western social and cultural practices are simply changes in the HPC kind kinship. Whether the HPC view further supports bio-essentialism about kinship in marking out distinctive biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations remains an open, empirical issue. But once we think of these relations as constraining rather than defining kinship, we have a ready-made place for those relations in the conception of kinship in the wake of the failure of traditional essentialism, whether or not that place accords these relations a distinctive role in kinship. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Early in this article, I noted in passing that recent integrative work by Sahlins and ethnographically centered articles published in this journal by Elise Berman (2014) and Siobhán Mattison and colleagues (2014) have at best an ambivalent relationship to the new kinship studies. Returning to discuss this work in concluding should both clarify the nature of the contribution that the HPC view makes to kinship studies and round out the overall reconsideration of bio-essentialism about kinship that is my chief aim here. Sahlins's (2011a, 2011b, 2013a, 2013b) wide-ranging, deep-reaching, yet succinct discussion of kinship has already garnered much attention within anthropology, and it is particularly apt here to continue the comparisons to Schneider's work invoked in many initial responses to Sahlins. Sahlins's own three-word summary of his view of what kinship is- "mutuality of being"-seeks to express the overall integrity of kinship studies, departing from Schneider's iconoclastic labeling of kinship as "a non-subject." Still, Sahlins shares with Schneider a view of kinship as culture, rather than biology, with this bifurcation between these two understandings of kinship-what kinship is, is culture; what it is not, is biology-literally structuring Sahlins's book. Rejecting such a division is central to the constraints-based, HPC view of kinship, which constructively enables a move beyond the culture–biology divide. In addition, while "mutuality of being" provides a short and informative anchoring definition of kinship, the HPC view of kinship takes the very enterprise of providing such a definition to be a relic of a game that philosophers have long played-the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for concepts-a game that has never been won. The sweep of Sahlins's (2013a:2) "exercise in uncontrolled comparison . . . with ethnographic examples cherry-picked from among this people and that" in support of the idea that kinship is mutuality of being makes for engaged and engaging reading. But the function of such examples is quite different in the HPC view. They are not illustrative of a view that we accept prior to their consideration. Rather, the details provided by ethnographic work allow for a specification of the properties that make for kinship "among this people and that" and that provide evidence about the homeostatic mechanisms that make those properties both hang together yet vary across different cultural circumstances. Integrating such details into the framework provided by the HPC view is critical, of course, to the full development of that view's application to kinship. But it is a downstream job for ethnographers themselves reconsidering bio-essentialism beyond the bifurcated, reductive, either–or take on culture and biology that Sahlins and Schneider share. Berman's (2014) "interactional constraints" on kinship practices associated with the experience of adoption in the Marshall Islands, constraints imposed by the physicality and materiality of pregnancy and childbirth, and Mattison and colleagues' (2014) reevaluation of the view that the Mosuo "do not have fathers" can both be read in this light. Both articles are concerned with what might be thought of as excessive responses to perceived bio-essentialism, responses that either mistakenly deny or minimize the place of biological constraints on kinship (cf. also Wilson 2009). In effect, each article reconsiders bio-essentialism in a way that moves beyond the bifurcated view of culture and biology underpinning the false dilemma between socially constructed and biologically reductive views of kinship, a dilemma present even in sophisticated, integrative theoretical work on kinship. Around the time that Schneider began his critique of reductive, bio-essentialist views of kinship, Clifford Geertz (1973:37) also caricatured what he called the "stratigraphic conception" of various dimensions to culture, according to which biological factors provided the foundational level for an analysis of higher-level factors, such as the psychological and social. The rejection of such a stratigraphic conception is the rejection of one kind of bio-essentialism about social relations and culture, one implicit in the Parsonian demarcation of culture as the anthropological realm that shaped and informed the views of both Geertz and Schneider. Schneider's views constitute the most influential critique not only of this kind of reductive bio-essentialism about kinship in particular but also of a much more loosely defined bio-essentialism about kinship. Although I have suggested that the murkiness in what bio-essentialism amounts to in Schneider's critique of kinship raises questions about the rejection of bio-essentialism and the delineation of kinship within the new kinship studies, Schneider's idea that biology and kinship themselves are culturally constituted has had a deservedly strong influence on the direction of the study of kinship. Perhaps ironically, bio-essentialism itself may encompass a broad enough rubric to show how kinship is something more than Schneider's epigraphic "non-subject." Elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences, forms of essentialism divorced from the kind of reductionism that both Geertz and Schneider rightly rejected have for some years garnered serious consideration for the constructive promissory notes they issue. In kinship studies, those promissory notes include a nonreductive conception of kinship, the HPC view of kinship, that accords a proper place for both 10 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2016 biological and social relations. I have argued here that reconsidering bio-essentialism about kinship invites a richer understanding of the relationship between kinship past and kinship present, and I have outlined why the HPC view of kinship creates an appropriately nonfoundational space for biological, reproductive, and genealogical relations in the conception of kinship. Whether those promissory notes fulfill their potential is something very much for the kinship future to determine, both that influenced by Schneider and that showing more continuity with kinship past. Robert A. Wilson Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6J 2E7, Canada; rwilson.robert@gmail.com http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/raw/ NOTES Acknowledgments. I would like to thank both the editor and ten referees for the journal for their detailed feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript and for guidance leading to the present article. Thanks also to Matt Barker, James Faubion, Don Gardner, Janet Keller, Adam Kuper, Bart Lenart, Jay Odenbaugh, Marshall Sahlins, Warren Shapiro, George Theiner, Charlotte Witt, Marc Workman, Alison Wylie, and audiences at the Australasian Association of Philosophy's annual conference, Western University, the University of Calgary, and Concordia University in Montreal for their perceptive and useful feedback. 1. Apart from the important works of Carsten, Kuper, and Peletz already cited, versions of this narrative can be found in Bamford and Leach 2009a, Barnes 2006, Brightman 2013, Dousset 2007, Faubion 1996, Franklin 2013, Franklin and McKinnon 2001a, Levine 2008, Trautmann 2001, and Yanagisako and Collier 1987. 2. Informative characterizations of both Schneider's critique and the new direction in kinship studies can be found in novel, integrative research on kinship (Carsten 2000; Faubion 2001; Viveiros de Castro 2009); in area reviews (Levine 2008; Peletz 1995, 2001; Scheffler 2001); in explicit reflections on Schneider's influence (Feinberg 1979, 2001; Feinberg and Ottenheimer 2001; Kuper 1999: ch.4; Wallace 1969); in selfconscious locational work from researchers at the forefront of the redirection of the study of kinship (Bamford and Leach 2009a; Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Franklin and McKinnon 2001a); in critiques of ethnographic research conducted in the new kinship studies (Shapiro 2009, 2010, 2011); and in critical discussions of books in the field (Barnes 2006; Dousset 2007; Faubion 1996; Goody 2005; Miller 2007; Shapiro 2015b). 3. I shall return to discuss this recent work further in concluding. Note also that Schneider's critique features prominently in the background discussions in most of the contributions to the 2013 Hau book symposium dedicated to Sahlins 2013a; see, for example, Brightman 2013 and Shryock 2013. 4. The HPC view originates in the ongoing rethinking of essentialism beyond anthropology in philosophical work on ethics (Boyd 1988), the emotions (Griffiths 1997), species (Boyd 1999; Griffiths 1999; Wilson 1999), biological kinds more generally (Wilson 2005; Wilson et al. 2007), and human kinds (Khalidi 2013). 5. For a representative, diverse sampling, see Bamford and Leach 2009b; Carsten 2004; Eng 2010; Faubion 2001; Franklin 2013, 2014; Franklin and McKinnon 2001b; Levine 2008; Rapp and Ginsburg 2001; Strathern 2005; Toren 2015; and Weston 1997. Notwithstanding the prevalence of such work, much ongoing work on kinship bypassed Schneider's critique and continues with more affinity to kinship past; see, for example, Allen et al. 2008; Dziebel 2007; Godelier et al. 1998; McConvell et al. 2013; Read 2001a, 2001b, 2007; Shapiro 2009, 2015a, 2015b; and Wilson 2009. 6. Although this appeal to a translation manual might be thought of as a metaphor for an unwritten practice, works that functioned as an actual manual began with the publication of W. H. R. Rivers's (1968[1910]) "The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry." Such appeals to genealogy played crucial roles in eugenics around the same time, largely through the work of the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor and in earlier appeals to tree-structures in taxonomic thinking. See http://eugenicsarchive.ca on eugenics, Bouquet 1996 on tree thinking, and Bamford and Leach (2009a, 2009b) on genealogy more generally. 7. As Wittgenstein (1953) had argued, there is no essence to being a game, no single feature or set of features that all games share in virtue of which they are games. Rather, each game shares some features with some other game, much as each member of a family may resemble some other member of that family (see also Biletzki and Matar 2014). 8. In American Kinship: A Cultural Account (1980[1968]), Schneider did not provide quantitative ethnographic data to support his claims, simply informing readers, in his preface, that his analysis rested on 6,000 pages of interviews. Nor did he engage in ethnographic speculation about kinship elsewhere, beyond the statement that kinship in "primitive and peasant societies" was less "differentiated" (1980[1968]:vii). For important critiques of Schneider's analysis of U.S. kinship, see Feinberg 1979, Fogelson 2001, Kuper 1999:134–143, Wallace 1969, and Yanagisako 1985. 9. I avoid paraphrasing simply in terms of genealogy here for two reasons. First, following Goodenough 2001, I take genealogy to have a much more encompassing sense in kinship studies than it is portrayed as having by Schneider and those accepting his critique. Second, there remain nonbiological approaches to genealogical kinship relations, such as Read (2001a, 2007), distinguishing between "genealogical grid" and "genealogical tree," and Montague 2001, which views kinship as offering a multipleslotting classification. For the role of genealogy in structuring how social scientists, particularly anthropologists, have conceptualized the lives of non-Western people, see Bamford and Leach 2009b. 10. While the aphorism "blood is thicker than water" is sometimes used descriptively to summarize, explain, or even predict interpersonal interactions, its more significant use is as a prescriptive Wilson • Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship 11 or normative reminder to a particular relative to emphasize the importance of his or her biological family obligations and expectations based on these familial ties. Schneider's neglect of the normative or prescriptive meaning of the aphorism itself may seem puzzling, but it reflects his general segregation of norms and values from culture (e.g., Schneider 1976:202–203) as part of his distinctive departure from the Parsonian paradigm from which his views developed. See also Kuper (1999:71 and ch. 4) and Fogelson (2001:33–35) for broader discussion of Schneider here. 11. Schneider (1984:191) responds to this kind of objection, saying, for example, that when "Durkheim said that 'kinship is social or it is nothing', he did not mean that it loses its roots in biology and human reproduction; only that it was now to be treated as a social fact, not a biological fact." This view of Durkheim is unconvincing in part for reasons Schneider himself gives in earlier discussion (1984:99–101); see also Sahlins (2013a:12–18) on Schneider on Durkheim. Schneider's handling of Durkheim here is especially egregious but still representative of his limitations as a historian of his own discipline. For his treatment of Rivers, see Schneider (1984:102–107), and see Goodenough (2001:207–211) on Rivers and more generally on genealogy in kinship studies. 12. This is to raise a prima facie problem with the empirical adequacy of Schneider's claims about kinship past, worth articulating given the largely uncritical way in which those claims have been treated within the new kinship studies. Arguing definitively against the empirical adequacy of Schneider's analysis of kinship studies, however, would require a distinct, chiefly historical research article. Schneider's skepticism about his earlier ethnography of Yap grew from doubts sown by his selective reading of Labby's (1976) Marxist ethnography of Yap and occupies the first half of A Critique of the Study of Kinship. My skepticism about Schneider's analysis of kinship studies grows from doubts sown by his selective reading of those studies, which occupies Critique's second half. See also Kuper (1999:147–149) and Goodenough 2001. 13. Precisely the same concern has been expressed about Sahlins's (2013a) view of kinship as mutuality of being, including in the contributions by Bloch 2013, Brightman 2013, Feuchtwang 2013, and Shryock 2013 to the Hau book symposium; cf. the contrasting view on this delineation problem of Carsten 2013 as well as Sahlins's (2013b) reply to symposiasts. 14. Apart from this work's growing prominence in the philosophy of science (see below), I simply note the broader engagement with essentialism to which it contributes, including questioning the adequacy of what historians of biology call "the essentialism story" in their field (Amundson 2005; Winsor 2006); the resurrection of essentialism about species in the philosophy of biology (Devitt 2008); and the articulation of psychological essentialism in cognitive science and its putative implications for anthropology (Gil-White 2001). 15. See Boyd 1988 for the original HPC view; Boyd 1999, Griffiths 1999, and Wilson 1999 for the original deployments to species; Griffiths 1997, Kornblith 1993, Rieppel 2005, Slater 2013, Wilson 2005, and Wilson et al. 2007 for extensions to other kinds; and Ereshefsky and Matthen 2005, Ereshefsky and Reydon 2015, Magnus 2014, and Slater (2012, 2014) for ongoing critical discussions. 16. For pheneticism and numerical taxonomy, see Sokal and Sneath 1963; for earlier, so-called polythetic definitions of kinship, see Barnard and Good 1984, Good 1996, and Needham (1971, 1975). The link between the HPC view and realism is clear throughout the literature cited in the preceding endnote, but see especially Boyd (1988, 1999), Griffiths 1999, Kornblith 1993, and Wilson 1999. REFERENCES CITED Allen, Nicholas, Hilary Callan, Robin Dunbar, and Wendy James (eds.) 2008 Early Human Kinship: from Sex to Social Reproduction. Oxford: Royal Anthropological Institute/Blackwell. 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