Growing up in Europe : A century of theoretical self-deception

Abstract

Western anthropologists invented the concept of kinship to describe the “other” which seemed to be integrated by kin ties. While Euro-pean (broadly speaking) kinship principles rested on the assumption that birth-related ties must be re-evaluated and replaced by choice-based ones during the process of growing-up, the societies with strong “kin ties” seemed to be lingering in social childhood. I use Western social theories not as sources of intellectual wisdom, but as ethnographic artifacts produced by the intellectual elites of the so-cieties under scrutiny. Theoretical assumptions like status contract, Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft, strong-weak ties, bonding-bridging so-cial capital—all reiterate the same vision of social change where the past, and early social life is associated with ties produced through birth and the future is associated with choice. A similar framework (flesh vs spiritual kinship) was advocated by European Christians since early Medieval times. Many of these theories draw direct par-allels with (European) assumptions of individual development: if birth-related ties are not severed, pathology of sorts results. The fear (or prediction) of the constantly disappearing European family also is a part of the general narrative of growing up in Europe. I argue that we need to start looking at European kinship not via theory that was developed to describe the “rest” but as an integral part of Eu-ropean social fabric and consequently evaluate the stream of global theories (e.g., proposing ends of history) in a world where Europe heads towards the periphery.