Durkheim and After by Philip Smith

Author:Philip Smith [Smith, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509518319
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

The structural push to explore kinship organization indicated in the quotation was matched by one concerning collective representations. Here Evans-Pritchard (1940) continues in the tradition of Durkheim and Mauss’s Primitive Classification. In a dedicated chapter of great interest, he reflects on how concepts of time and space mirror social organization. The Nuer are organized by a kinship system consisting of patrilineal kinship groups (descent along the male line). Evans-Pritchard shows how memory of genealogies is selective. Ancestors drop out, or come back into play, or are invented as groups split or unite. The process of remembering, forgetting, and creating reflects current groups and residential arrangements, with genealogies lined up so as to be consistent with contemporary social organization. Genealogical history, spatial distributions (say in villages), and social groups are coordinated. The analysis is consistent with that of Halbwachs (see above), although I could not find him cited. As Mary Douglas observed in a footnote unfortunately buried in her introduction to Collective Memory (Halbwachs 1980), Evans-Pritchard got to just the same insight from a completely different path. Consider:

Beyond the annual cycle, time reckoning is a conceptualization of the social structure, and the points of reference are a projection into the past of actual relations between groups of persons. It is less a means of coordinating events than of coordinating relationships, and is therefore mainly a looking-backwards, since relationships must be explained in terms of the past. (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 108)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.