Kinship and gender relations across historical Asia and Europe: An introduction to comparative reassessments between the 8th and 19th centuries CE

The interface between kinship and gender offers new challenges and opportunities for collaborative endeavours among historians and anthropologists. In one way or another, these two terms (or certain version thereof) and the social relations they address, are attributed some crucial meanings in most societies across diverse socio-cultural settings and different historical periods. It thus would seem self-evident that historians and anthropologists seek to explore and understand how kinship and gender might influence each other, and interact with societies at large.

For some time around the turn of the last to the present century, however, a previously crucial field of research interests for a while attracted less fascination than before. Older theoretical paradigms had lost substantial parts of their previous impetus, while much of the empirical research that was possible within these earlier paradigmatic frames had effectively been accomplished. During the ensuing low tides of studying intersections between kinship and gender in history, unspectacular but unprecedented research developments nevertheless took place. They included more detailed individual case studies of wide exemplary relevance, as well as the emergence of new comparatively oriented conceptual frameworks. The present collection strives to take stock of these recent developments, by translating and elaborating them into a range of interrelated research endeavours.

In both social and cultural anthropology and history of the late 20th and early twenty-first century, gender studies had largely abandoned earlier grand theories while combining empirical ethnographic and historical anthropological work with new orientations in philosophy and epistemology, such as the work of Judith Butler (2004, 2006) or Gayatri Spivak (1999). The pursuit of intersections between gender studies and kinship analyses for a while remained interesting mainly in as much as it concerned new reproductive technologies. At the same time, kinship analyses – once considered a key dimension of anthropological expertise – had reached a substantial impasse resulting from dichotomous debates between those defending versions of previous structural, functional or relativist meta-narratives and those who promoted their general abandonment along postmodern lines of criticism. In a parallel way, kinship in Western historiography had for a long time been described as opposed to societal development and thus ‘in decline’ in relation to whatever ‘progress’ happened (cf. Duindam, 2021). Within this conceptual framework, kinship was held to be the ‘functional predecessor of almost everything, but never a constitutive factor in the emergence of anything’ (Sabean and Teuscher 2007, 1), as the editors of a seminal volume put it.

Somewhat at the margins of reflections about that impasse around the last turn of the century, however, several innovative elements for alternative perspectives nevertheless had been building up, advancing new trajectories in the historical exploration of intersections between kinship and gender studies. In socio-cultural anthropology, these included early efforts towards comprehensive new comparative analyses of kinship and gender (Collier and Yanagisako 1987), as well as important collections of monographic analyses, such as Faye Ginsburg’s and Anna Tsing’s co-edited volume Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture (1990) with substantial processual dimensions of contemporary history in it, or several topical monographs such as those by Janet Carsten (e.g. 2000, 2004) or Peter Schweitzer (2000) addressing the wider interconnectedness of kinship relations.

These and other studies already clearly highlighted the requirement to overcome the impasse, and how to best pursue that by approaching the topical intersections between kinship and gender in more agency-centred, diverse and pluralist ways instead of entirely abandoning any interest in these intersections altogether. Relatedness thus has become crucial for addressing multiple dimensions of interaction and belonging (Carsten 2000). Likewise, the ‘anthropological turn’ in social and cultural history has paved the way to discussing family and gender history in the wider framework of interests and power relations of kin groups, their various alliances and networks, and sometimes contradictory representations and practices (cf. Duindam and Segalen, 2021). New relational approaches thus also have highlighted the entanglement of kinship and gender with economic and political issues, and – not least – religious values (e.g. Sabean and Teuscher 2007 and 2011; on the latter see Diemberger 2021; Gingrich et al. 2021; Lutter et al. 2021; and Signori, 2021).

Partially independent from most other debates at first, paradigmatic shifts in newly conceptualizing kinship studies took place and gained momentum between 1990 and the 2010s. To an extent they occurred at the interface between history and anthropology through the growing relevance of Jack Goody’s work. For instance, in 1991 the journal Continuity and Change devoted a special issue to its reception in the historical disciplines (6 (3), Poos et al. 1991), and various historical studies influenced by his approach appeared in the following decades (cf. the overviews by Guerreau-Jalabert, Morsel, and Le Jan 2002; Jussen 2009; Mathieu 2018, and Segalen 2021). In 2015, the present journal opened a Jack Goody Forum with contributions by him (Goody 2015) and several influential anthropologists (e.g. Yalman 2015; Hann 2015), followed more recently by a close inspection of certain aspects of Goody’s comparative insights on marriage in these contexts (Heady and Yalçin-Heckmann 2020).

In dialogue with Jack Goody, Maurice Godelier elaborated other main aspects of re-conceptualization in this regard within socio-cultural anthropology. After welcoming responses by some of anthropology’s most prominent representatives (e.g. Barnes 2006, Strathern 2014), including Goody (2005), productive assessments of Godelier’s corresponding work have now reached a point where its relevance is overdue to be fully taken into account also by other fields in the humanities and social sciences.

From his The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups (1971) to The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive (1990), Jack Goody proposed a series of arguments and studies that aimed at overcoming earlier theoretical oppositions in kinship studies such as those between alliance and descent schools of reasoning. Emphasizing the central embeddedness of kinship relations in socio-economic domestic units across time (cf. Segalen 2021), Goody insisted upon a clearer differentiation between genealogies, reckoning descent and inheritance practices while emphasizing actual transactions in filiation and marriage (especially for the ‘woman’s property complex’ through dowries, cf. Parkin 2021).

In turn, from his fieldwork among the Baruya in the New Guinea Highlands through his co-edited volume (Godelier et al. 1998) Transformations of Kinship to his Métamorphoses de la Parenté (2004, English 2011), Maurice Godelier has discussed the many diverse sides of kinship relations, and (similar in that regard to Goody’s argument) their merely partial mutual correspondence. Placing a stronger emphasis than Goody on the impact of religion and politics upon kinship relations, Godelier has pointed out that kin and family relations are ubiquitous in all societies in one form or the other, thus being an important component of human life everywhere. Yet in and of themselves, Godelier consistently argued (since 2004) that kin-based relationships – and kinship at large – are not capable of building a society. Hence the previously widely used notion of ‘kin-based societies’ is inadequate. From this perspective, Godelier (2019, 23) identifies kin and family relations as one of five basic pre-conditions of human existence. They are typically informed and shaped by other kinds of relation, but they rarely operate as an independent set of factors causing any major changes in other social fields by itself, that is, transformations of kinship rarely result in anything else than kinship. In that sense, Goody as well as Godelier tend to agree on several priorities in kinship studies. These include (i) a wide comparative perspective, (ii) a more differentiated analytical terminology that includes gender relations in the widest possible sense, and (iii) a ‘middle range’ approach that avoids ignoring the relevance of kinship without attributing any all-encompassing weight to it (cf. Gingrich et al, 2021). In this regard as well as in several others, Godelier and Goody have pioneered a new breakthrough in the collaborative analyses of kinship and gender by historians and anthropologists.

The present collection seeks to further elaborate on these approaches by presenting its analyses through several research lenses. Focusing on kinship and gender in terms of practices of interaction and belonging, to an extent it builds upon insights gained during a large-scale Vienna-based interdisciplinary research endeavour (2011–2019) comprising anthropologists and historians: discussing perspectives on community building in different Eurasian pre-modern settings the VISCOM (‘Visions of Community’) project had implemented a key working group (including this introduction’s authors), who hereby present some central VISCOM conclusions in dialogue with leading international scholars.¹

As one outcome of the VISCOM project for the medieval and early modern eras, three main fields of intersections among the works by Jack Goody and Maurice Godelier may be identified with regard to interrelations between kinship and gender, as indicated here and further elaborated in this theme issue.

In a methodological sense, first, this concerns the requirement for approaches that follow comparative and processual priorities to allow for sufficiently addressing diversities as much as commonalities, changes and transitions as well as continuities. Processual and comparative methodological priorities allow for de-essentializing established conceptions of kinship and gender relations without abandoning useful cross-cutting criteria of analysis and interpretation. This may be enacted along a temporal processual axis, across limited regional or wider intercontinental spaces of socio-cultural diversity, or preferably both.

In a conceptual sense, second, this implies that a focus on kinship and gender addresses them as semi-autonomous fields or semi-dependant variables, with partial intersections upon each other, while including specific relevance for interactions with religious, normative and legal factors (emphasized more explicitly by Godelier) as well as with those rooted in the environmental and economic realm (highlighted more actively by Goody). To varying degrees, most contributions to the present theme issue indeed take both of these main spheres of embeddedness into account in their analysis of interrelations between kinship and gender.

In an empirical sense, third, these methodological and conceptual orientations are translated into research practices that observe social stratification as cross-cutting interrelations between kinship and gender on most if not on all levels. This goes beyond the basic requirements of source criticism addressing the inherent biases of written records frequently giving privilege to the elites while ignoring subaltern voices. It also implies the continuous task of examining where and when specific, empirical interrelations between kinship and gender may attain potentially encompassing effects across social strata and hierarchical status groups, and where this is improbable if not supported by any sufficient evidence.

Within these priorities and orientations, the present endeavour invites readers to refocus attention on how kinship relations, in their updated and specified conceptualizations, define and inform some of the core elements in all social relations, including intra- and cross-gender practices. Simultaneously, refocusing that academic attention also includes the reciprocal opposite – that is, observing how fields of men's and women's agency not only find, but also create social spaces within and beyond the fields provided by kinship relations.

As outlined above and explicitly embraced in all contributions, we conceive of gender and kinship in terms of intersecting analytical and social categories as well as of central dimensions in comparative and transcultural historical analyses. This theme issue highlights the ways these intersections operate in an empirical sense. It brings together various studies in and about Asia, Europe, and Africa roughly between 700 and 1900 CE, but in its final contribution Robert Parkin goes beyond this temporal framework to open up comparisons with the contemporary world. Moreover, all contributions reflect upon the relevance of these two dimensions for visions of community and practices of community building along conceptual and methodological lines. All of this issue’s contributors use these improved analytical tools to focus on selected key topics such as marriage patterns (including their implications for status and transactions) and inheritance practices (including their relevance for women) as well as spiritual, social and material economies (including donation practices, relations to and within religious communities). The publication thereby brings together contributions from history and anthropology that integrate broad comparative overviews (Duindam, Parkin, Segalen) with regionally and/or temporally more specialized, in-depth studies based on research in VISCOM’s project parts (Gingrich et al., Lutter et al.) and closely related endeavours (Diemberger, Signori).

Jeroen Duindam opens the collection with his comprehensive discussion of ruling dynasties' practices in reckoning descent and succession together with forging alliances in a great variety of periods and locations, to better understand recurring patterns and mechanisms. He specifically considers royal matrilineality in order to explore shifting gender roles among rulers as well as the impact of these differing roles on political alliances. He thus reassesses classic views that matrilineal descent remains limited largely to small-scale societies. From these reassessments, Duindam then proceeds to a careful consideration of the connections between matrilineality, diffusion of power, and consensual forms of rulership.

Martine Segalen, by contrast, focuses on the other end of societal hierarchies, as she introduces gender in European rural societies into her broad analysis of inheritance practices and women's agency from the early modern period up the twentieth century. She examines the impact of impartible and in-egalitarian versus partible and more egalitarian forms of property devolution on women’s status and possibilities of agency, and eventually explores gendered positions within farms as production units and domestic domains.

Andre Gingrich and his co-authors provide a temporally wide, yet geographically focused study of the ‘medieval’ Yemeni highlands from early Islamic times up to the periods preceding Ottoman rule (sixteenth century CE). Addressing three major social strata – high status groups, heterogeneous tribal majorities and low status minorities – they outline Arabization and Islamization as two crucial influences introducing new normative, terminological and cultural standards within a continuing diversity of prevailing kinship and gender relations in the tribal highlands. Adopting a long-term perspective, they are able to show how the agriculture-based South Arabian model of tribal territoriality opened up wider spaces of agency for a majority of women in reckoning descent and inheritance, while new hegemonies emerged. Over time the minorities of high and of low status groups were subjected to the more rigid regimes of explicit rules of patrilineality and hypergamy.

Hilde Diemberger provides a close reading of the unique biography of a fifteenth century Tibetan princess, from where she explores gender and kinship practices among Tibetan rural elites at a time when marriage alliances were essential to the maintenance and the reproduction of relationships in Tibet’s regional polities. She offers insights into kinship networks that underpinned the importance of women's patronage practices, and shows how much a discussion of Tibetan Buddhist spiritual kinship and reincarnation can contribute to debates in the anthropology of kinship and gendered relatedness.

Methodologically comparable to Diemberger, both Gabriela Signori and Christina Lutter and her co-authors take the multiple relations and interactions between religious communities and noble as well as urban elites in fourteenth century Central Europe as a starting point to discuss spiritual and material economies as two sides of the same coin. Signori concentrates on a wide range of evidence documenting forms of memorial culture in medieval nunneries. She shows the extent to which Christian practices of commemorating the dead were not just an internal communal practice, but integrated biological and spiritual kinship with economic and social bonds in various ways. Moreover, Lutter et al. suggest that these mechanisms were deeply tied in with practices of property devolution in Central European towns and cities: economic transactions and related memorial practices show a high number of female actors underlining the salience of bilateral kin relations as well as possibilities of women’s agency, while a stabilization of patrilineal groups can rarely be traced beyond a few generations before the fifteenth century.

Throughout this special issue, kinship and gender are addressed in their conceptual versions as well as by their empirical richness as relational social dimensions, as resources and organizing principles of social, economic, religious and political life including various forms of rulership, as local and regional ties at the intersection of discourses and a variety of practices, as symbolic fields connecting past and present, and as interpersonal codes. The collection thus combines micro-level studies with macro-level considerations and strives to open up methodological avenues for establishing a ‘middle-ground’ for integrating regionally based, intercontinental and global comparison.

In the end, this may also promote a better understanding of contemporary dimensions of kinship and gender. Robert Parkin’s worldwide survey of marriage arrangements is a powerful case in point against the background of current debates of forced marriages among immigrant communities in Western countries: Parkin examines the underlying reasons for arranged marriages generally and shows that they are actually very widespread cross-culturally. Western values and practices stressing freedom of choice in spouse selection appear to be in a minority position worldwide and thus need explanation as much as the persistence of arranged marriages elsewhere in the world.

At the same time, this demonstrates how a careful re-assessment of current debates in kinship studies may offer new approaches for understanding gender relations in the periods immediately preceding and accompanying the emergence of ‘multiple modernities’. Under this and related terms (e.g. alternative modernities), many historical social scientists – by building on the pioneering works of Eric Wolf (1982), Shmuel Eisenstadt (2000, 2003) and Arjun Appaduarai (2002) – have developed the basic argument that the global dissemination of market economy, migration, scriptural communication and corresponding institutions not only shared basic commonalities, but also differed by its actual implementation in fundamental ways. In a similar manner, the present theme issue may contribute to debates and reflections as to which extent the late pre-modern eras also were shaped by multiple historicities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Special Research Programme (SFB) 42 VISCOM Visions of Community: Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400–1600 CE), https://viscom.ac.at/home/ (04.12.2020), funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) as a cooperation between the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2011–2019. The editors are grateful for the valuable assistance and feedback by a number of colleagues. They include all contributors as well as David Westacott (Vienna) for his efforts in copy-editing, the VISCOM team’s junior scholars, as well as this journal’s editors and its two anonymous reviewers. In addition, Christina Lutter extends her gratitude for relevant dialogues to Bernhard Jussen (Frankfurt) and Margareth Lanzinger (Vienna). Andre Gingrich acknowledges valuable exchanges with Maurice Godelier (Paris) and Eva-Maria Knoll (Vienna).