Why kinship is progeneratively constrained: Extending anthropology

Abstract

The conceptualisation of kinship and its study remain contested within anthropology. This paper draws on recent cognitive science, developmental cognitive psychology, and the philosophy of science to offer a novel argument for a view of kinship as progeneratively or reproductively constrained. I shall argue that kinship involves a form of extended cognition that incorporates progenerative facts, going on to show how the resulting articulation of kinship’s progenerative nature can be readily expressed by an influential conception of kinds, the homeostatic property cluster view. Identifying the distinctive role that our extended cognitive access to progenerative facts plays in kinship delivers an integrative, progenerativist view that avoids standard performativist criticisms of progenerativism as being ethnocentric, epistemically naïve, and reductive.

Ethnobiology, the Ontological Turn, and Human Sociality

“…The kind of naturalistic way forward here that one of us has begun to explore revolves around reinvigorating reproductive or progenerative views of kinship that function to unify discussions across the biological, cognitive, and social sciences (Wilson 2016(Wilson , 2022a(Wilson , 2022b. The key idea here is that it is sensitivity to an array of basic progenerative facts that grounds kinship, a sensitivity that is not uniquely human but that has been elaborated distinctively in different human cultures.…”