“All the Flesh Kindred that Ever I See”: A Reconsideration of Family and Kinship in Utopian Communes

Abstract

My gospel relations are dearer to me Than all the flesh kindred that ever I see: So good and so pretty, so cleaver they feel; To see them & love them increases my zeal, O how pretty they look! How pretty they look! How cleaver they feel! (.. .) Of all the relation that ever I see My old fleshly kindred are furthest from me, So bad and so ugly, so hateful they feel To see them and hate them increases my zeal. O how ugly they look! How ugly they look! How nasty they feel!-From the Shaker song Gospel Relation (Andrews 1940: 20) introduction As demonstrated by the above lyrics, the Shakers (known officially as the "United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing") were not favorably disposed toward the bonds of marriage, family, and kinship. Started as a Quaker splinter group under the charismatic leadership of Ann Lee in Manchester, they emigrated to the United States, gathered further adherents there, and became a communal sect in 1787. Within the next sixty years, they grew to more than 4,000 members in sixteen villages in New England and the Midwest. 1 True to their view of God as androgynous, and their founder as the female equivalent of Jesus Christ, women had a comparatively strong position in 395

What human kinship is primarily about: toward a critique of the new kinship studies

“…In any case, the fact is that kinship in our species is nothing if not individual, because the bonding that we undergo, especially as children, is socially selective (Flanagan 1999: 40–2). Attempts to collectivise it – whether in Fourth World universal systems of kin categorisation (Shapiro 2005b) or Western communes (Brumann 2003) – have at best a very limited success.…”

On the Alleged Disjunction between Cultural and Darwinian Understandings of Human Kinship

“…As Sandall (2001: x) has pointed out, the idea of an "undivided commune," of "primitive communism," is a fantasy of the Western communitarian tradition, of which McKinnon is plainly part, as are Marx and Engels. The occasional attempts to put it into practice have all been failures, unless they take seriously the very human desires of parents to bond with their children (and vice versa), and of men to bond with women (and viceversa) (see, e.g., Kanter, 1972;Brumann, 2003;Spiro, 2004). Thus there really is something special about ties among close procreative kin -i.e., the nuclear family.…”

The Nuclear Familyversusthe Men's House? A re-examination of Mundurucú Sociality

“…Shapiro , 2009d. Pertinent here as well are the very real sexual bonding between man and women (Fisher 1995), the demonstrable tendency of people to favour close kin (e.g., Beattie 1971; Daly and Wilson 1988, 19-24;Marshall 1976, 288), and the equally demonstrable difficulty collectivist theorists, both in the Western world and in the former Soviet-dominated world, have had in their attempts to abolish or minimise such ties (e.g., Brumann 2003;Figes 2007, 541-52;Spiro 1954). In what follows I treat any and all of these traits as indicative, though not definitive, of the nuclear family.…”