Hybridity Theory and Kinship Thinking |
Hybridity Theory and Kinship Thinking
Cultural Studies
Volume 19, Issue 5 (2005)
pages 602-621
DOI: 10.1080/09502380500365507
Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester
A parallel is posited between the ways hybridity and kinship are thought about in Western contexts, challenging the idea that kinship and biology tend to lead to narrow, roots-oriented, essentialized definitions of identity. Rather than being the opposite of rhizomic, diasporic hybridity, kinship and biology partake of the tension between roots and routes that is characteristic of all hybridity. Anthropological evidence on the character of Western kinship thinking is examined to elucidate some features of its flexibility. Theories of hybridity are seen as being themselves a type of kinship thinking.
Introduction
Concepts of hybridity—and related ones of mestizaje, syncretism, creolization, mélange , métissage , mixture—have been widely deployed in cultural theory, especially in relation to fields in which racial and ethnic identifications are made (Anzalduá 1987, Bhabha 1994, Garcıá Canclini 1995, Gilroy 2000, Hale 1996, 1999, Ifekwunigwe 1999, Kapchan & Strong 1999, Nelson 1999, Smith 1997, Werbner & Modood 1997, Young 1995). The concept of diaspora, although not at first sight nor necessarily associated with processes of mixing, may be deployed to the same kind of effect, evoking a context or dynamic which creates mixing (Brah 1996, Hall 1996, Gilroy 2000).
In much of this work, there is a current that sees hybridity as potentially subversive of dominant ideologies and practices and leading to the dislocation and destabilization of entrenched essentialisms, often with a focus on racial and ethnic categories and boundaries, and frequently in colonial and post-colonial contexts. On the other hand, there is also an awareness that hybridity carries with it some other possibilities and meanings, which are seen in a less positive light. These possibilities revolve around ideas of roots, genealogical kinship links, biology and essentialism. As Kapchan and Strong (1999, p. 242) put it, ‘There is hybridity that may refer to and reify history and genealogy, for example, and hybridity that seems to make a mockery of it’. In a similar vein, Young (1995, pp. 24/5) distinguishes between ‘organic’ and ‘intentional’ modes of hybridity (see below). We are faced with a dualism in hybridity theory between potentially positive hybridity, which is dynamic, progressive, diasporic, rhizomic, subversive, anti-essentialist, routes-oriented and based on collage, montage and cut-and-mix; and a potentially negative hybridity, which is biological, genealogical, kinship-based, essentialist, roots-oriented and based on simple ideas of combining two wholes to make a third whole.
I argue that this dualism involves a narrow and stereotyped understanding of biology and kinship. Both of these domains are in fact characterized by dynamic processes of cultural practice which display their own tensions between roots and routes, between essentialisms and non-essentialisms, between being and becoming. Recognizing this does not dissolve the basic dualism outlined above—it makes biology and kinship straddle the divide, as hybridity itself is said to do—but it re-situates kinship and biology in important ways. It carries the theoretically and politically important implication that identities which invoke either kinship and/or biology (e.g. blood, genes) as tropes of belonging and identification should not necessarily or automatically be seen as essentialist (or needing justification in terms of their ‘strategic essentialism’), exclusivist, politically conservative, absolutist or fundamentalist…
…An illustration of the kinship assumptions that underlie thinking about processes of mixture is furnished by the recent literature on mixed-race identities in the USA. Root argues that mixed-race people ‘expose the irrationality by which the [racial] categories have been derived and enforced’ (Root 1996a, p. xxv). This idea that the US system of racial reckoning is irrational is supported by Spickard who describes the ‘illogic’ of American racial categories. Part of his argument is that all racial categorizations are illogical because they do not accord with the facts of biology—which, as he recognizes, only makes the categories illogical if they pretend to be based on biology. But ‘what is most illogical is that [in the USA] we imagine these racial categories to be exclusive’ (Spickard 1992, p. 20). For example, one could only—until 1997—check one census box for racial identity and this census practice broadly reflected social usage. To take the most common example, it is illogical to have to be either black or white, when so many people are black-white mixes. The US ‘one-drop rule’ that classifies anyone with ‘one drop of black blood’ as black is the mainstay of the either/or system—a system arguably now losing its dualist rigidity (Root 1996b, Azoulay 1997). This rule determines that ‘a white woman can give birth to a Black child, but a Black woman can never give birth to a white child’ (Nash 1995, p. 950, citing Barbara J. Fields). In one brutal sense, this system is highly logical: it defines a clear rule and follows it to a logical conclusion. In what sense, then, is it illogical, except insofar as any racial categorization is illogical? The intuition that the US system is illogical comes, I believe, from a sense of the ‘logic’ of a Western cognatic kinship model that assumes that a child gets equal amounts of its constitution from both parents. This does not necessarily mean people think a child born to a ‘black’ parent and a ‘white’ parent is literally physically half black and half white—although this mode of thought may, indeed, be widespread, in view of the fact that people routinely talk of having, say, black or white ‘blood’ in their veins, or of being, say, a quarter West Indian or half Scottish. Whether or not the kinship logic is understood in physical terms, it can also simply supply a way of thinking about the allegiances and ties that such a child would have ‘logically’ (i.e. ‘naturally’ by the precepts of Western kinship reckoning). It is against the background of this assumption that the US system appears illogical…
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Tags: Cultural Studies, Peter Wade