Kinship as metaphor: Sameness and difference

Kinship as metaphor: Sameness and difference

Week 7: The new ethnos: Love it or leave it

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Wednesday, September 11, 2024

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2024/7.2

Main reading: Rytter (2010)

Other reading: Hall (2007); Hall (2017); Nyamnjoh (2022); Linke (2021); Eriksen (2015a); Eriksen (2015b)

When do you feel part of something bigger than yourself

Let’s learn about each other a bit more.

Write on this Padlet: https://sydney.padlet.org/ryanschram/belong

When and where do you feel like you belong, or feel like you are “part of something bigger” than yourself? What is that feeling?

This is ethnographic data

There are, of course, no good or bad answers. This is ethnographic data about us.

Write the first thing that pops into your head. You can always write something else.

How we see this question says a lot about how we think.

We think in metaphors

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are cognitive scientists whose work provides a theory of metaphor that informs Rytter (2010).

ARGUMENT IS WAR (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 4)

• Your claims are indefensible.
• I demolished his argument.
• She shot down all my ideas.

HEALTH IS UP/SICKNESS IS DOWN (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 15)

• I’m in peak condition.
• He fell ill. 
• She declined rapidly.

LOVE IS A JOURNEY (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 45)

• We have been through a lot together.
• Our marriage is on the rocks.
• I don’t know where our relationship is headed.

Thinking in metaphors is selective

When we apply ARGUMENT IS WAR, we are not implying that arguments need troops. Only some elements of WAR are mapped onto ARGUMENT.

Using the metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR to think about arguments ignores that people having an argument are also cooperating with each other, as opposed to actually trying to hurt each other.

• Using this metaphor as a conceptual frame makes it hard to think about some equally valid things about arguing.

There is no such thing as “the Australian people”

What do you think?

Is there such a thing as an “Australian people”?

Say what you think on this Padlet: https://sydney.padlet.org/ryanschram/people

The Danish idea of national attachment is a rule, but even rules have implicit cultural metaphors

The Danish policy that immgrants must have a minimum level of national attachment is neither pro nor anti-immigration. It’s just a rule.

Societies like Australia and Denmark need immigrants, because they need workers.

But their governments, and most governments, are also bureaucracies, and bureaucracies are based on rules.

• Rules do well with quantitative measurements. But how do you measure “attachment”?
  • How can we think about this mental state as a physical substance?

The kinship metaphor of national belonging is selective

In Denmark and many other nation-states, the most influential to conceptualize the nation is with the metaphor

A NATION IS A FAMILY

This makes some things about nations easy to think, but other alternative ways of thinking about nations are hard.

Extending Durkheim’s ideas to the metaphors of nation

Durkheim talks about something useful when he formulates a theory of society as a total system.

All societies have both

• mechanical solidarity, or a feeling of connection and oneness based on sameness and common ideas.
  • All the cells in a body have the same DNA.
• organic solidarity, or a feeling of connection based on mutual interdependence to others who are different.
  • All the organs in one body are distinct and specialized, but all work together.

Durkheim was making an argument about how societies work.

I am appropriating and reinterpreting his concepts to point to different metaphors people might use to understand themselves.

The family metaphor of nations emphasizes sameness

Actual societies are made up of different people but the family metaphor of a nation makes it hard to think of all these different people as part of one system.

National attachment is conceptualized as love

BELONGING TO THE NATION IS THE LOVE OF FAMILY

What would people of Pulau Langkawi say?

References and further reading

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2015a. “Ethnicity.” In Small Places, Large Issues, 4th ed., 329–44. An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology (Fourth Edition). London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.21.

———. 2015b. “Nationalism and Minorities.” In Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology, 4th ed., 345–66. London: Pluto Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt183p184.8.

Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Living with difference: Stuart Hall in conversation with Bill Schwarz.” Soundings 37 (December): 148–59. https://doi.org/10.3898/136266207820465570.

———. 2017. “Nations and Diasporas.” In The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, edited by Kobena Mercer, 125–76. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674982260-005.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Linke, Uli. 2021. “Love Politics: The Nation Form and the Affective Life of the State.” In Race, Gender, and Political Culture in the Trump Era. London: Routledge.

Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2022. “Citizenship, Incompleteness and Mobility.” Citizenship Studies 26 (4-5): 592–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2091243.

Rytter, Mikkel. 2010. “‘The Family of Denmark’ and ‘the Aliens’: Kinship Images in Danish Integration Politics.” Ethnos 75 (3): 301–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2010.513773.