The study of kinship occupies a paradoxical place in social anthropology, being both omnipresent and isolated. The manifestations of kinship infiltrate all sectors of society, animating the economy as well as rituals, political relations as well as representations of nature, and technical cooperation as well as moral prescriptions. It was also the focus of the first surprises of Westerners when they became involved in outlining a “science of the other” by identifying the sources of exoticism: the great pioneers immediately came up against the disconcerting observation that notions felt by them as obvious, and therefore presumed to be universal (father, mother, uncle, aunt, cousins, etc.), broke into a thousand pieces when tested by the facts observed from a distance. The astonishing variation in the bonds of inbreeding and arrangements of matrimonial alliance could not fail to become a central stronghold of ethnology.

Unfortunately, the majestic fortress was imperceptibly transformed into an ivory tower, this isolation worsening in the 1980s as the ultimate and disconcerting consequence of a triumph: that of the dazzling theory that Claude Lévi-Strauss presented in 1949 in Les structures élémentaires de la parenté [LEV 67]¹, whose international success in the discipline was immediate. It conquered without hesitation, proved to be a decisive influence and became an essential reference point for discussions on this subject. A small community of specialists was formed around this contribution in order to refine the analyses. However, as they advanced along this path, researchers focused on the various psychological activities that logically constituted ideal kinship systems, neglecting the ancillary treatments caused by intertwined practical circumstances: historical, ecological, economic and political. A fascination for universal facts and fundamental laws flourished, creating an anthropology explicitly assimilated to a psychology [LEV 62, p. 174] to the detriment of “prosaic” sociological questions. In short, what was to become a switch between invariants and variables split the two types of investigations. Enclosed in this game, the science of kinship gradually lost its appeal, if not its beauty, to the point, Laurent Barry deplored, of being “seen as a cabinet of curiosities or as a mystery paving the way to a quest for pure abstraction” [BAR 00, p. 13]. In writing these words, he wanted to believe that this image was over, but it must be said that, from a global point of view, it persists today by quietly rejecting all denials.

A second disenchantment, coming from an increasingly dominant relativism², followed that of materialism, noting that structuralism did not respond to its concerns and swept history away by an accumulation of disparate contingencies. For many, kinship represented, “par excellence”, the aspiration of anthropology to a constructive but constraining scientificity. As such, it could not fail to embody, in the eyes of the new current, a naive, excessive and, ultimately, illusory ambition: a life that was certainly not conducive to the dismantling of its problems.

Contrary to this perception, let us recall a spontaneous and scathing reply by Françoise Héritier, questioned some 20 years ago on the label of “dinosaur of the human sciences”, which this field of research was now given:

“Those who make this judgment understand nothing. Kinship is indeed a dinosaur of the human sciences, but not in the sense that it would mean that it belongs to the past! It is in the sense that ‘it is there’, in an instrumental way, that it poses genuine problems and until we understand how these things work at the heart of social cohesion, it is difficult to see how we can understand the pure intelligibility of politics or economics, to take only these two areas” [HER 99, p. 14, our translation].

Some silver lining: the two disapprovals that overwhelm it (that of a materialism that demands an interweaving of analyses and that of a relativism that renounces the appetite for science) place the study of kinship at a crossroads, in the sense that it can only invalidate one by ratifying the other. If, in fact, it remains exclusively affiliated with an investigation on the mental substrate of our species, then the essential part of its task is carried out and it is up to a psychology stricto sensu to continue the exploration by making the information that has been generously offered to it bear fruit. On the contrary, if it intends to develop by itself an “intelligibility” of all the phenomena concerned, this anthropology will have to become fully sociological again and agree to restore a constant communication with comparative observations of heterogeneous collective experiences. However, we will see that, strictly speaking, it will not be a question of restoring a lost harmony, but of establishing a completely new organization.

This book was born from the meeting of the three authors around the thesis defended by one of them. Sejin Park, the applicant, proposed a “thought experience” in the sociology of hominization that discerned logical thresholds, necessary passages and transitional conditions, in which kinship necessarily played a crucial role [PAR 15]. Laurent Dousset, a kinship specialist, and Georges Guille-Escuret, rooted in an interdisciplinary methodology, were part of the jury. Parallel to the torture of their younger brother, the elders engaged in a lively discussion about the missed opportunities and old barriers that undermine the “exercise of kinship”³. The following chapters reflect this. The objective of the first chapter is to remove a number of epistemological barriers that had provisional relevance in certain historical phases of social anthropology, but which eventually blocked potentially legitimate analytical procedures. In the second chapter, Park will identify “the evolving relevance of a mode of reproduction governed by kinship relationships” over three periods of our kind. Finally, Dousset will dedicate the final chapter to the dual emblem of hermetic kinship systems and “primitive” societies, often presumed to exist upstream of history, to begin a reflection on the forms of social organization of prehistoric humans when they colonized the Sahul continent. Against the current of evolutionary prejudices, this presentation will instead show them immersed in ecology through history (and vice versa) into kinship.

Our small volume alone will certainly not solve such a vast difficulty, nor will it be enough to get the sector out of its rut: the intention here is to start a more modest questioning – in the literal sense of the expression – whose motives lie in the theory, but whose stakes are far beyond it. For many applied research projects, for example, kinship raises an epistemological obstacle, both chronic and impassable: it poses many pressing problems for agronomists, “developers” and economists, without them being able to understand its intervention, let alone anticipate it. It is therefore necessary to examine in theory the vicious circles and the a priori blocked paths that lead it to confine itself, so that a dialogue can then be unlocked with the outside world. Hence, despite the title, the reader will only discover a small sample of ecological correlations in this book: the urgency is to find a way to reach them, without the incongruous use of preconceived determinations.

Introduction written by Georges GUILLE-ESCURET.