Saharan genealogies: Beyond constructivism in kinship studies

Abstract

The main criticism of constructivism in kinship studies is its persistent obsession with nature, despite its primary intention to oppose it. Underlying this critique is the idea that constructivist thinking does not exist outside modern theories produced by critical thinkers. In this article, I distinguish between critical constructivism, whose agenda is to “unveil” the logics that determine behavior, and symmetrical constructivism, an approach that recognizes actors as possessing the same capacity as anthropologists in identifying social constructions, as opposed to given realities. Each of these approaches proves inadequate for understanding most of the emic conceptualization of genealogies and kinship ties. This article is based on long-term ethnographic study of the Aït Messaoud, Saharans from southern Morocco, who are certainly a radical example of the possibility of dissolving the idea of a dichotomy between “human fabrication” and “that which belongs to the world itself,” and thus of overcoming the barrier of constructivism in kinship studies, in Morocco and beyond.