Sep 10, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min · 12 segments
What is kinship? This central question in cultural anthropology is standardly answered in terms of culturally constructed relationships that are unconstrained by biological relationships…
Robert WilsonGuest
Carrie FigdorHost
Well, first of all, your characterization of cognitive science as biology and anthropology as a social science is fragile.
which you might say a bit about why you think they're fragile, but also, again, your work on extended mind and also homeostatic property cluster views of natural kinds.
So there's a lot going on, but it does sort of center on this idea of how different sciences think about kinship or relatedness or the different concepts that are used there.
So to start us off, let me just ask, so for me, all the elements here are familiar to me from your past work.
But their application to, you know, cultural anthropology in particular is sort of new to me.
But is there something going on in cultural anthropology at the moment that is motivating a particular, you know, look at rethinking the way they think about kinship?
And I'm still, even though I've spent quite a long time reading in culture and anthropology, I still can get large parts of it wrong, I'm sure.
But from where I sort of stand as a bit of an outsider, there's two sorts of things that I think have ended up providing kind of motivating threads through the book.
Um, one, which I try and talk a little bit about fairly briefly in the, in the opening of the book is this view that I call separatism about either the social sciences in general or about anthropology more particularly.
And that's just the idea that, you know, these are approaches to understand their subject matter, uh, which is often focused on humans, human structures, societies, um, relatedness, um, that requires a distinctive kind of methodology.
So, so for example, um, it might require a methodology of, you know, uh, the view that Clifford, uh, Gertz had articulated as interpretationism.
The idea that we have to find, you know, rather than, you know, and this goes back to the Geistes versus Naturwissenschaft and distinction from the, from the 19th century.
Um, the idea that there's a sort of, um, you know, what we do when we're trying to understand other cultures is we have to fundamentally employ a kind of, uh, ethno-mythologically grounded, um, stance where we immerse ourselves in the society and we're really trying to understand the particular symbols and their value within the culture from that culture's point of view.
And that's just one sort of version of separatism, but the idea more generally is that you need a special methodology, special approach.
And I think a consequence of those sorts of views, which I think have come to dominate cultural anthropology, is that It often means that you can kind of ignore what's going on elsewhere in other sciences.
And that, to me, came out most clearly when I looked at the work on primatology and the Westermark hypothesis, which, again, we might get to talk about later.
So I want to try and provide basically a position that I don't want to buy into some kind of reductive account of the social science or of anthropology, cultural anthropology in particular, or kinship even more particularly.
But I do want to show that you can use these resources from elsewhere, some of which are philosophically articulated in concert with people in the corresponding disciplines, in the cognitive sciences, for example, the extended uh, mind view or appeals to collective representation, uh, or the collective minds, group minds or something like that.
Well, first of all, your characterization of cognitive science as biology and anthropology as a social science is fragile.
which you might say a bit about why you think they're fragile, but also, again, your work on extended mind and also homeostatic property cluster views of natural kinds.
So there's a lot going on, but it does sort of center on this idea of how different sciences think about kinship or relatedness or the different concepts that are used there.
So to start us off, let me just ask, so for me, all the elements here are familiar to me from your past work.
But their application to, you know, cultural anthropology in particular is sort of new to me.
But is there something going on in cultural anthropology at the moment that is motivating a particular, you know, look at rethinking the way they think about kinship?
And I'm still, even though I've spent quite a long time reading in culture and anthropology, I still can get large parts of it wrong, I'm sure.
But from where I sort of stand as a bit of an outsider, there's two sorts of things that I think have ended up providing kind of motivating threads through the book.
Um, one, which I try and talk a little bit about fairly briefly in the, in the opening of the book is this view that I call separatism about either the social sciences in general or about anthropology more particularly.
And that's just the idea that, you know, these are approaches to understand their subject matter, uh, which is often focused on humans, human structures, societies, um, relatedness, um, that requires a distinctive kind of methodology.
So, so for example, um, it might require a methodology of, you know, uh, the view that Clifford, uh, Gertz had articulated as interpretationism.
The idea that we have to find, you know, rather than, you know, and this goes back to the Geistes versus Naturwissenschaft and distinction from the, from the 19th century.
Um, the idea that there's a sort of, um, you know, what we do when we're trying to understand other cultures is we have to fundamentally employ a kind of, uh, ethno-mythologically grounded, um, stance where we immerse ourselves in the society and we're really trying to understand the particular symbols and their value within the culture from that culture's point of view.
And that's just one sort of version of separatism, but the idea more generally is that you need a special methodology, special approach.
And I think a consequence of those sorts of views, which I think have come to dominate cultural anthropology, is that It often means that you can kind of ignore what's going on elsewhere in other sciences.
And that, to me, came out most clearly when I looked at the work on primatology and the Westermark hypothesis, which, again, we might get to talk about later.
So I want to try and provide basically a position that I don't want to buy into some kind of reductive account of the social science or of anthropology, cultural anthropology in particular, or kinship even more particularly.
But I do want to show that you can use these resources from elsewhere, some of which are philosophically articulated in concert with people in the corresponding disciplines, in the cognitive sciences, for example, the extended uh, mind view or appeals to collective representation, uh, or the collective minds, group minds or something like that.
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