Raymond T. Smith

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The American Kinship Project was started by David M. Schneider after extended discussion with Raymond Firth while both were fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in the 1958-59 academic year.  Both Schneider and Firth had been interested in extending the anthropological study of kinship from so-called "primitive" societies to modern industrial urban populations, Firth in London and Schneider first among student populations while he was at Harvard.   The two now settled upon a comparative study of middle class kinship in London and Chicago, and were successful in obtaining financial support from the National Science Foundation.    Each one recruited research assistants and set about collecting genealogical information from a sample of informants.  They also exchanged interview guides and other documentary materials.  However, they had not resolved the deep theoretical differences in their respective approaches, and indeed may not have been wholly aware of them at the outset.  But as soon as the interpreted materials began to appear it was clear that they approached the study of kinship from profoundly different theoretical positions.

To put the matter as simply as possible, Firth and his collaborators were concerned with what one might call the pragmatics of kinship relations whereas Schneider and his associates thought of themselves as students of the culture of kinship.

Whereas Firth limited his study to the functional range of kinship relations, Schneider urged his research assistants to record every single person known to be related in any possible way to every individual appearing on his or her genealogy.  He then sought to discover how much the informant (EGO) knew about that person.  Thus, if the informant knew that his mother's mother's brother's son's wife had siblings who were married, they would go on the genealogy even if EGO knew little or nothing about them and had never met them.  If it was known that they had children of unknown age or gender, they too would go on the genealogy with an appropriate notation as to how much was known about them.  For Firth and his associates this was irrelevant information.

As the analysis of the materials gathered in the course of the two studies progressed it became evident that the results would not be comparable, and each study was published separately: Firth, Raymond, Hubert, J. and Forge, A. 1970. Families and their Relatives. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Schneider, David M. 1980 [1968]. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall].  Although Schneider announced in the Preface to the 1968 edition of American Kinship that a "book comparing American and British kinship is being planned" it never came to fruition.

I had known David Schneider since the early 1950s, and even more closely during the year I spent at the University of California at Berkeley in 1957-58.   By the early 1960s it had become evident to me that the studies of domestic organization that I and others had carried out in the Caribbean were grossly deficient in their understanding of the nature and extent of kinship ties outside "the household," and in fact attributed to household composition and organization a centrality that was only partially justified.  When I began to undertake further studies in Caribbean kinship it was following a three year stay in Ghana from 1959 to 1962, a one year stay at McGill University in Montreal from 1964 to 1965, and a permanent move to the University of Chicago in 1966 where Schneider had just completed a term of office as chairman.  From 1967 to 1972 I was occupied in research in Jamaica and Guyana as well as teaching in the graduate programme at the University of Chicago, and that research was heavily concentrated on genealogical research inspired by Schneider's methods--while not embracing his "cultural" approach.  During this period Schneider and I undertook a small study for the Children's Bureau as part of their wider interest in the incidence of pre-marital pregnancy.  This study focussed entirely on low income families in Chicago.  Although Schneider had mentioned in his book American Kinship that he planned "a volume on class and kinship" he had in fact only got as far as writing an essay on "Middle Class and Lower Class American Kinship" that had been rejected as a possible contribution to a festschrift being planned for Talcott Parsons.  This essay contained no data and some quite dubious generalizations about class differences in America, which he was only too ready to acknowledge.  It became his main contribution to the short volume that we published jointly in 1973 as Class Differences and Sex Roles in American Kinship and Family Structure, a volume that incorporated the data from the Children's Bureau study.  I have discussed this study, among others, in a chapter of Leith Mullings' edited book Cities of the United States: Studies in Urban Anthropology, Columbia University Press 1987.