ANTHROPOLOGY FINAL PAPER!!

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THREE Samuel Huntington, Meet the Nuer k i n s h i p , l o c a l k n o w l e d g e , a n d t h e c l a s h o f c i v i l i z a t i o n s

Keith Brown

In his influential 1993 Foreign Affairs article, the leading political scientist Samuel Huntington made the phrase “the clash of civilizations” his own.1 In the article, and in his ensuing 1996 book, Huntington made a bold and straightforward central claim: Political ideologies and self- interest, although still factors in international relations, are being super- seded by cultural ties between groups and countries. In Huntington’s vision, the contemporary world can (and should) be understood as com- posed of seven (or eight) “civilizations,” many of which are led by a “core state,” and all of which are held together by what he calls “cultural kin- ship.” Conflicts between countries from different civilizations, in which each side may draw on the support of “kin-countries,” pose the greatest risks of escalation and potential nuclear confrontation, as core states may then be pitted against one another in “fault-line wars.” World order will

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Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong : Anthropologists Talk Back, edited by Catherine Besteman, and Hugh Gusterson, University of California Press, 2005. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wou/detail.action?docID=227348. Created from wou on 2018-01-31 13:15:19.

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44 K e i t h B r o w n

be preserved against cataclysmic war, he concludes, only if world leaders recognize and respect the importance of culture when they make policy.2

The notion that civilizations are key units of analysis in world history is hardly new, and Huntington offers a list of his intellectual forbears that includes Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Fernand Braudel, and Immanuel Wallerstein.3 He also identifies the influential American anthropologists Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead as sources for his model of cultures as internally coherent units, different and irreconcilable with one another.4

In favoring this model, though, Huntington and his culturalist col- leagues ignore or dismiss a substantial shift in thinking within anthro- pology since the 1980s. Culture is now more often understood as being perpetually in process, shaped by human interactions and societal inter- connections. The discipline still depends upon the method of extended fieldwork in a social setting, which produces what Clifford Geertz famously termed “local knowledge.”5 While some contemporary anthro- pologists still draw on this material to depict cultures as homogenous and distinct, a more general trend is to use the fruits of fieldwork to crit- icize and challenge the oversimplification, ethnocentrism, and stylization on which such representations often depend.6

In this chapter, I seek to show how culturally minded political scien- tists like Samuel Huntington might benefit from anthropology conducted since the days of Benedict, Mead, and Kroeber. My argument has two main parts. First, I examine Huntington’s usage of the term kinship in his argument regarding relations between states in the contemporary world, and seek to identify parallels for his usage in anthropological literature. His formulation of the power of kinship draws on a model that empha- sizes the importance of common descent over marriage (whether for love or interest) and owes much, wittingly or no, to the model of “segmentary lineage” made famous by Edward Evans-Pritchard in his classic 1940 work, The Nuer. I trace some of the nuances that later anthropologists have located in the Nuer case, and in the field of kinship studies more generally. Thinking through the issues of agency, property ownership, and gender roles that underlie the surface simplicities of ethnographic classics can also, I suggest, contribute to a better understanding of the role of identity politics in the modern world order.

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In the second part of the chapter, I seek to demonstrate the utility of local knowledge for culturalist theory by suggesting that, if we insist on narrating political processes through kinship metaphors, we should be open to alternative forms of kinship reckoning. I focus on the Balkans, where I have conducted fieldwork over the last decade. In 1993, Huntington’s argument that Bosnia was a “fault-line war” between “Western,” “Islamic,” and “Eastern Orthodox” civilizations, in which protagonists were aided by “cultural kin,” was still plausible. When the United States intervened on behalf of (Muslim) Bosniaks in 1995, Huntington regarded it as an “anomaly.”7 Subsequently, though, in 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervened on behalf of (Muslim) Albanians in Kosovo; Libya and Iraq (both Muslim) expressed solidarity with Orthodox Serbia; and Bulgaria and Romania (both Ortho- dox) defied Orthodox Russia. In 2001, when (mostly Muslim) Albanian insurgents declared war on the (Orthodox majority) Macedonian state, (Muslim) Turkey, Bosnia, and Albania, and (Orthodox) Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria remained rooted on the sidelines, and a peace agreement was brokered by the (Western) European Union and United States.

If one anomaly is unfortunate, such a profusion smacks of careless- ness. It is hard to know which would be more galling for a devotee of Huntington’s doctrine that kin-countries rally, and that states should not act outside their civilizational limits: the extracivilizational hyperactivity of the United States; the apparent treachery of Libya, Iraq, Bulgaria and Romania; or the “kin-indifference” of Macedonia’s near-neighbors. Perhaps, though, to recycle a phrase used by the anthropologist David Schneider to criticize doctrinaire kinship theorists in the 1960s, the prob- lem lies in muddles in the model.8 Whereas Huntington emphasizes the importance of kinship’s primordial ties and contrasts them strongly with instrumental calculations of self-interest, Balkan societies (as well as oth- ers) do not necessarily make such neat divisions. Anthropologists work- ing in the former Yugoslav republics of Serbia and Macedonia, and in Greece, Albania, and Bulgaria, have documented the importance of what they term fictive kinship, whereby people unrelated by blood nonetheless forge bonds that are enduring and sacred. One such bond is enshrined in the institution of kumstvo, or godfatherhood. This chapter concludes, then, by exploring how far the introduction of notions of fictive kinship

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in general, and kumstvo in particular, might help political scientists seek- ing to find space for culture— not just their own but also that of others — in their models of international politics.9

S a m u e l H u n t i n g t o n : K i n s h i p T h e o r i s t ?

After the considerable impact of his 1993 article, in 1996 Samuel Huntington published a refined and extended version of his “clash of civ- ilizations” theory. In the book, which shed the question mark of the arti- cle title, he explicitly deals, in particular, with the basis of ties between groups, countries, or states within his civilizations, stating early in the work his core premises that “societies sharing cultural affinities cooperate with each other,” and “countries group themselves around the lead or core states of their civilizations.”10 He goes on to use a metaphor more commonly found in anthropology to further describe both of these forms of relationship. In explanation of Islamic countries providing funds and arms to Bosnia in the early 1990s, he states that their actions were guided not by ideology, power politics, or economic interest but by “cultural kin- ship.”11 Later he refers to the European Union countries as “cultural kin” to Austria, Finland, and Sweden.12 He extends the same metaphor in describing the role of core states within civilizations, stating that “a core state can perform its ordering function because member states perceive it as cultural kin. A civilization is an extended family and, like older mem- bers of a family, core states provide their relatives with both support and discipline.”13 His view of intrafamily relationships is further illuminated by his use of a similar metaphor to explain “bandwagoning,” or throwing in one’s lot with a powerful actor. Stressing sibling ties, he writes that “a younger boy will bandwagon with his older brother when they confront other boys; he is less likely to trust his older brother when they are alone at home. Hence more frequent interactions between states of different civ- ilizations will further encourage bandwagoning within civilizations.”14

Although power inequalities and distrust are factors within Huntington’s civilizations/families, their effects are trumped in “fault- line wars.” In his account of the mechanism of escalation that such con-

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flicts produce, he again uses the metaphor of kinship, and claims that the bonds of shared culture have effects, regardless of interest: “In the usual communal conflict, Group A is fighting Group B, and Groups C, D, and E have no reason to become involved unless A or B directly attacks the interests of C, D or E. In a fault-line war, in contrast, Group A1 is fighting Group B1 and each will attempt to expand the war and mobilize support from civilization kin groups, A2, A3 and A4, and B2, B3, and B4, and those groups will identify with their fighting kin.”15 He dubs this phe- nomenon the kin-country syndrome, crediting a Boston Globe journalist, H. D. Greenway, with the invention of the term.16

By treating these references to kinship as we might those of an anthro- pological informant, we can infer how Huntington sees cultural ties working. Clearly, his starting point is a comparison with ties of blood, rather than ties of marriage. In his “extended family,” members are dis- tinguished only by seniority in age: there seems to be no question of pos- sible differences between sibling, spousal, or in-law relations. Addition- ally, we can note that the only gender-marked reference he makes is to males. Fuller details of what he means by kinship, though, are not pro- vided explicitly, suggesting that he believes the metaphor is wholly trans- parent and obvious in meaning. And to the casual Western reader, this is perhaps the case: we all know, near enough, what kinship means.

D e b a t i n g D e s c e n t , M u l l i n g o v e r M e a n i n g s

Anthropologists, though, do not take the term so lightly, and much ink has been spilt in the course of the discipline’s history over the intricacies of kinship. Scholars have investigated kinship systems both near and far to ascertain the different ways in which people reckon the ties created by descent and by marriage, and weigh the obligations that they create.17

Scholars have also waged bitter wars with one another over the relative merits of different approaches to the topic; and more recently, there has been a higher level discussion over whether there are sufficient grounds for presuming that kinship can be treated as a discrete topic of study.18

In anthropological debates over kinship, a key point of departure is

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Edward Evans-Pritchard’s seminal work on the Nuer, a Sudanese peo- ple.19 During the 1930s, British colonial authorities trying to establish con- trol over Sudan were perplexed by the Nuer capacity to organize rela- tively large forces for combat without having a clear central command structure located in a “state.” Evans-Pritchard set out to explain this phe- nomenon, and did so by reference to what he called the segmentary lin- eage system. The Nuer, according to Evans-Pritchard, were internally divided and subdivided into social groups or segments defined by their ties to named ancestors; these could fight one another or unite to fight a common foe. Loyalties were thus ordered, nested within each other, lim- iting internal conflict and allowing Nuer to unite against an external foe. When a man quarreled with his brother, for example, others did not join the fighting. But when some dispute arose between members of different descent groups, then each could rely upon fellow descent-group members for support, and as a result, the conflict could escalate. The limit of con- flict, in each case, was the point in the adversaries’ genealogical history at which they recognized a common ancestor. Brothers in dispute had the same potential allies, and so could not call on them against one another: first cousins in dispute could mobilize their own brothers, and their fathers, but no one beyond that. In contrast, two men in dispute whose first common ancestor lay six generations back could each call upon a host of allies. And when the enemy was non-Nuer—either the Dinka (a neigh- boring Sudanese people) or the British colonial authorities—all Nuer potentially could rally.

The concept of segmentation remains influential, especially in con- temporary scholarship on national identity. Michael Herzfeld, for exam- ple, notes that Cretan villagers might feud with one another, but that, when Cretan pride is at stake, they rally to the island’s cause; and when Greece is threatened from the outside, Cretans put aside their quarrels with Athens.20 Anthropological studies of ethnicity and nationalism, and historical studies of the relationship between local and national identi- ties, have reproduced Evans-Pritchard’s diagrammatic representations in their explanations.21 Part of the enduring appeal of The Nuer is its unity of affect, achieved through a stark and declarative style that invokes the authority of good, English common sense.22 In explaining the fluid Nuer

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concept of cieng, for example, Evans-Pritchard employs a robust, easily comprehensible parable:

If one meets an Englishman in Germany and asks him where his home is, he may reply that it is England. If one meets the same man in London and asks him the same question, he will tell one that his home is in Oxfordshire, whereas if one meets him in that county he will tell one the name of the town or village in which he lives. If questioned in his town or village he will mention his particular street, and if questioned in his street he will indicate his house. So it is with the Nuer. . . . The variations in the meaning of the word cieng are not due to the inconsis- tencies of language, but to the relativity of the group-values to which it refers.23

Samuel Huntington’s model of the world as composed of seven (or eight) civilizations, in which individual member-states look to their civi- lizational kin for support, bears a superficial resemblance to this anthro- pological abstraction developed in the first half of the twentieth century. On closer examination, though, its relative thinness quickly becomes apparent. According to Evans-Pritchard, “Nuer habitually express social obligations in a kinship idiom” and go to war together because, they say, “their ancestors were sons of the same mother.”24 By contrast, the basis of the kinship that Huntington detects between states is simply “culture.” Whereas, in the formal model proposed by Evans-Pritchard, tribes display a clear hierarchy of loyalties and order of allegiance determined by descent-depth and tied to feelings of home, Huntington’s civilizations have no such clear social mechanism for progressive mobilization of their membership. Where Evans-Pritchard and other anthropologists see nested, “socio-spatial” loyalties at work—from hut to hamlet to village; to primary, secondary, and tertiary tribal sections; to tribe; to “Nuerland”— Huntington’s model focuses on just two levels of loyalty: civilizations and states. And whereas in Evans-Pritchard’s account and those of the more reflective scholars of national identity, higher levels of mobilization are inherently hard to sustain and always vulnerable to processes of internal fission, Huntington portrays a one-way path to civilizational clash, in which the “lesser” identities simply lose their significance.25

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N o L o n g e r M e n O n l y

The “clash of civilizations” argument, then, seems to have less structure than a sixty-year-old classic of formalism. When viewed from the per- spective of subsequent work on the Nuer material, pioneered by Evans- Pritchard himself, this argument’s shortcomings as a model of reality become even clearer, and the vision of kinship it embraces more inade- quate. Since Evans-Pritchard’s own follow-up account of Nuer kinship and marriage, subsequent studies have stressed the fluidity and change in Nuer lives and the dangers of overrigid models.26 Sharon Hutchinson, for example, describes social and cultural systems as “inherently unfinished, open-ended, and riddled with uncertainties.” As she points out, “What earlier generations of anthropologists tended to view as ‘the logic’ of a particular social system has . . . often appeared, on closer inspection, to be merely the logic of some segment of it.”27 Evans-Pritchard’s first book rep- resented descent through the male line as the decisive source of loyalty, but Hutchinson elaborates the dimensions of maar, a Nuer word that she translates as “relationship” as well as “kinship.” The bonds of maar can be created through the maternal line and through the binding power of cat- tle given by a father to an adopted son.28 Susan McKinnon emphasizes how Evans-Pritchard’s analytical distinction of descent from kinship makes it more difficult for readers to grasp how the effects and signifi- cance of marriage alliances and blood ties mingle. Evans-Pritchard’s early focus on biological lineage through the male line, she suggests, conjures a world populated only by men, by and large considered interchangeable, whereas the reality is that an individual’s membership in a group was more often established by the exchange of cattle between competing groups at marriage or at birth than by simple genealogical connection.29

In the case of the Nuer, then, work by Hutchinson and McKinnon builds on Evans-Pritchard’s own work to show the significance of vari- ous kinds of exchange between people of different genders, generations, and bloodlines in creating kinship. Some people, it turns out, are far more important than they “really” should be by Evans-Pritchard’s strict geom- etry, and many of those people turn out to be women. One response to

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Samuel Huntington’s model of kinship between states and cultures, then, would be to ask where gender fits in the metaphor.

What kind of older relative, for example, does Huntington imagine Orthodox Russia to be to the Eastern Orthodox states of the Balkans? Asking the question in this way might sound like dogged, misplaced lit- eralism, but anthropologists, who as a group can claim some authority on the subject of kinship, could reasonably argue that it matters a great deal. Core states, in Huntington’s description, may resemble older brothers or authority figures of an older generation—the stern uncle, perhaps, or the hard-to-please father. But Huntington also sees these core states as enjoy- ing, or at least seeking to elicit, near-automatic loyalty from their kin. David Schneider’s research in the late 1960s had already demonstrated how indistinct the lines were between kin and nonkin in North America: the only point on which his informants provided near unanimity was that one should always help one’s mother when ill.30 In Huntington’s world, then, it could be argued that, for all the masculinist language and rhetoric, core states aspire not only to command grudging support but also to attract the same unconditional love that American mothers once did.

Beyond Nuerland and the nuclear family, other anthropologists have taken the study of kinship still further from its associations with blood ties. From a growing literature focusing on patterns of social relations in gay and lesbian communities, it is clear that many individuals count as kin those with whom they have relationships of care. Traces of such attitudes were apparent in David Schneider’s work in Chicago mentioned above, where he identifies three terms for distant blood relatives: “shirt-tail rela- tions,” “wakes-and-weddings relatives,” and “kissin’ cousins,” each of which is acknowledged as a diluted form of kinship that carries only a ves- tigial sense of obligation or connection.31 By contrast, in San Francisco as described by Kath Weston, and Berlin as described by John Borneman, people whose ties biologists and lawyers would mark as contingent or even transgressive themselves experience those same relationships as familial, and they are willing to defy normative thinking in order to for- malize them.32 Borneman, for example, describes a case where, to establish shared property rights, one man legally adopts his male lover, and another where one member of a lesbian couple legally marries her partner’s son to

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gain residence rights. If individuals are so creative in negotiating the bonds of kinship, can we not imagine that states and their leaders might exercise similar ingenuity? Culturalist political scientists, it could be argued, could take from Weston’s account of parenting, and Borneman’s distinctions between hetero- and homosex, new metaphors for thinking about the new world order and the relations among its members.

M u d d l e s i n t h e M o d e l , f r o m B o s n i a t o M a c e d o n i a ( v i a K o s o v o )

Perhaps, though, in suggesting that Samuel Huntington might be the standard-bearer in a war against heteronormativity in American political science, I am getting ahead of my argument. It seems less outlandish, though, to suggest that his analysis of the Yugoslav breakup of the 1990s merits some revision in light of events in the region. As noted above, Huntington represents the conflict in Bosnia as a “fault-line war” in which three sides distinguished on religious grounds enlisted the assis- tance of their “cultural kin.” In 1993, he argued, the alignment of the par- ties made this evident. The Bosnian Croats were backed by Croatia— both Catholic—and, beyond them, by “Western” Germany. Orthodox Christian Russia backed Orthodox Christian Serbia, which in turn backed the Orthodox Bosnian Serbs. Bosnia’s Muslims, a plurality in the repub- lic but lacking a neighboring supporter, drew support from elsewhere in the Islamic world, especially Iran and Turkey. By 1996, however, the world looked different: the war in Bosnia had been ended by the Dayton Peace conference, presided over by the United States, which had taken direct action on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims. Serbia, under President Slobodan Milosevic, had proved ready and willing to negotiate on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs, who were excluded from the peace talks, and to yield—on their behalf—some of their original demands.

The simple kin-state model could not accommodate these anomalies. Accordingly, in his 1996 book, Huntington offered analytical refinements to his model. He distinguished between primary, secondary, and tertiary parties in conflicts, the implication being that these represented succes- sively more influential political powers. If the Bosnian Croats were the

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primary party, their secondary supporter, or “rallier,” was Croatia, and their tertiary kin, Germany. The peace settlement in Bosnia, he argued, represented a case where tertiary and secondary powers successfully used their intracivilizational influence to dissuade their “kin” from con- tinuing to fight. That left the anomaly of U.S. involvement on the side of the Bosnian Muslims; this Huntington explained either as “civilizational realpolitik”—with the aim of offsetting Iranian influence in Bosnia—or as determined by moralistic attitudes, which saw the Bosnian Muslims as victims struggling to preserve multiculturalism.33

By such ad hoc means, effectively sneaking self-interest and balance-of- power thinking back in, Huntington preserved his cultural theory without substantially rethinking its basic principles. Subsequent events in the Balkans posed further challenges to his model. Even as he was cohosting an April 1999 conference at Harvard on the theme that “culture matters,” the United States was engaged in a war in the Balkans with the stated humanitarian goal of preventing Christian Orthodox Serbs from killing Kosovar Albanian Muslims. In the course of that war, the United States provided arms and training to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which some analysts, as well as the Serbian military, referred to as a “Muslim guerilla army.” Contrary to Huntington’s model, other Islamic states did not assist this side: instead, Baghdad and Tripoli expressed support for (Orthodox) Serbia. Russia, in accordance with Huntington’s model, protested at the NATO aggression against Serbia and even sent troops to seize the airport in Kosovo’s capital, apparently in collusion with Serbia. But Russian plans to fly in reinforcements were thwarted, apparently by the refusal of Orthodox Bulgaria and Romania, under pressure from NATO, to allow Russian aircraft passage through their airspace.34

The war in Kosovo was clear evidence that a simple version of the “clash of civilizations” cannot account for the complex web of geopoli- tics. It was simply not true that kin-states were drawn into conflicts along predictable lines dictated by cultural affinity. Huntington’s formal logic of patterned escalation does not fit the Balkans, where, in the words of one ethnographer, “cultural praxis . . . can best be described as mixed, heterogeneous, contradictory, fragmented, and incoherent.”35 Further evidence of this was provided two years later, when a paramilitary Albanian organization called the National Liberation Army launched an

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armed insurgency against the Macedonian state in early 2001. Some local and international analysts, admittedly, found evidence that civilizations were clashing again and that “kin” rallied in the six months of fighting, as Orthodox Ukraine supplied Macedonian security forces with ad- vanced weaponry and Muslim fighters, or mujahideen, were reported as fighting alongside the Albanian insurgents, who also had ties to the Kosovo Liberation Army. But there was rather more kin-indifference. Within Macedonia, the vast majority of the country’s 1.4 million Ortho- dox Macedonians and five hundred thousand Muslim Albanians main- tained a commitment to peaceful resolution of the fighting. (Muslim) Turkey, Bosnia, and Albania, and (Orthodox) Serbia, Greece, and Bul- garia limited their engagement to expressions of concern. The fighting dragged on for six months, until the European Union and the United States brokered a cease-fire settlement.

T h e T r o u b l e w i t h K i n

What, then, do the conflicts in Kosovo and Macedonia in 1999 and 2001, in which Albanians were protagonists, mean for theories of civilizational kinship? Clearly the failure of Islamic countries to rally to the side of Kosovar Albanians, the support of the United States for the Kosovar Albanians, and the disregard of supposed kin loyalties by states on both “sides” in the Macedonia conflict all raise doubts over such theories’ applicability. One response is to look more closely at the credentials that groups or countries have for membership in one civilization or another. In this regard, it turns out, Albanians are particularly difficult to pin down. In Huntington’s scheme, they are categorized as Muslim. In fact, some Albanians in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania are Catholics; in Albania around 20 percent of the population are Eastern Orthodox; and as a modern state, Albania has a defiantly secular history. Still more significantly, as Ger Duijzings points out, Albanians in Kosovo and Macedonia have a strong tradition of Sufism rather than the more main- stream Sunni Islam. Like Shia Muslims, members of Sufi orders have a special devotion to Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, and his son

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Husayn, whom they believe were unjustly denied their true inheritance. They attach special significance to Kerbela, the site of Husayn’s murder by the Caliph Yazid (whose reign they see as illegitimate) in 680. Thus to the Albanians of Kosovo and Macedonia, the Sunni Islam faith declared by the Islamic Community of Yugoslavia and by Bosnian Muslims repre- sents the legacy of traitors and murderers.36 Tensions between these two branches of Islam are not easily overcome, even where an external foe is in question, so it is hard to dub Albanians simply as members of “Islamic” civilization.

Other Balkan states, especially members of the alleged Eastern Ortho- dox bloc, also fit uneasily into Huntington’s system. Speaking of the fric- tions between Macedonia and Bulgaria, a Macedonian told me in the spring of 2000, “We hate each other so much, we must be brothers!” This captures a long history of intimate contact and quarrelling over status. Bulgaria’s autonomous Orthodox church was born out of an Ottoman decree in 1870 and was bitterly resisted by the Greek-dominated patriar- chate. During the Second Balkan War of 1913, World War I, and World War II, disputes over territory and population pitted Bulgaria against Serbia and Greece as Bulgaria sought to win what its people thought of, and in some cases still think of, as their rightful property—most of the modern republic of Macedonia. After World War II, to be sure, Bulgaria was a compliant satellite of Soviet Russia, but in recent years the country has swung dramatically toward the West, and in November 2001 it was admitted into NATO. As with Albania, the country has enough quarrels with its Orthodox neighbors, especially with regard to interpretations of a past its people hold sacred, to make its membership of and cooperation in an Eastern Orthodox bloc fraught with complications.

M a k i n g ( A n t h r o p o l o g i c a l ) S e n s e o f t h e B a l k a n s

One way to deal with the civilizational conundrums posed by Albania, Bulgaria, and other countries or groups in the Balkans is to dismiss them as irrelevant details. That is of course the approach of Samuel

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Huntington, whose apocalyptic scenario for the next world war, sched- uled for 2010 and precipitated by rivalries between the American and Chinese civilizations, links Bulgaria and Greece to the Orthodox bloc and envisions them launching invasions of Turkey and fighting against Albania in support of a Serbian attack on Muslim Bosnia.37 Another response to the history of bitter local disputes—a history which indicates that neither Albania nor Bulgaria seems constrained by ties to Islam or Orthodoxy—is to dismiss the utility of Huntington’s kin-based civiliza- tions altogether. As I hope this chapter makes clear, a third, more pro- ductive response is to find and utilize metaphors of kinship that are cul- turally appropriate to the processes they are intended to illuminate.

As noted above, descent and marriage are not the only ways in which kinship bonds are created. In Catholic Latin America and in the Orthodox Balkans, ethnographers have charted the significance of fictive kinship, a term they use to describe relations of sponsorship between families. The most important of these is godparenthood, which links a marrying cou- ple or a new child to a sponsor who is unrelated by blood, and who is subsequently prohibited from marrying into the family. In Spanish, the relationship is referred to as compadrazgo. In Serbian and Macedonian, the sponsor, if male, is known as the kum; in Greek, the term is koumbaros; and in Albanian, kumbar. The bonds of solidarity thus created are permanent and powerful and may even be considered more sacred than those of blood or marriage.38

The concept of kumstvo, or godparenthood, gives us an extra resource for thinking about the creation of loyalty in the Balkans. It is especially useful if we are prepared to take one more liberty in thinking of states (or, in one case, future states) as if they were individuals enmeshed in rela- tionships and to reflect that those under discussion here — Bulgaria, Albania, the republic of Macedonia, and Kosovo — are all relatively young or, in the last instance, yet to be born. Huntington himself set a precedent here for classifying countries by age: in his vision, though, the younger (and smaller) members of civilizations find themselves captive and even bullied members of extended families run by senior, stronger members. Bulgaria, in such a scenario, can either stand shoulder to shoul- der with Russia and its other Orthodox brethren (who in fact spent most of the twentieth century rubbing its face in the dirt) or risk being left to

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fend for itself. Albanian-dominated Kosovo lacks the resources to argue its case in family councils and must put up or shut up, even though its Sufi residents reject core doctrinal beliefs of older Islamic states.

If, however, one takes an expanded view of kin-state to include the “godparent” mode as commonly understood in the Orthodox Balkans, then Bulgaria and Kosovo, like other small states, in fact have other options. Ritual sponsors, traditionally, are not recruited from either blood kin or from families already related by marriage; but the bonds between a kum and a child are powerful and benefit both parties. Historically, small, young Balkan states looking for such external assistance have found plenty of offers. When the modern Greek state was created in the mid–nineteenth century—at a time when many members of the rural population around Athens spoke Albanian — Russia vied with Britain and France to control the politics of the new country. Britain, Soviet Russia, and the United States also wrangled over the Balkan countries in the closing days of World War II, when Winston Churchill handed Joseph Stalin the famous scrap of paper that put Greece under Western control, put Bulgaria under Soviet control, and left Yugoslavia as an area of equal influence.39 Since the end of the cold war and the breakup of Yugoslavia, powerful sponsors are again anxious to recruit client states and exert regional influence. At the birth of brand-new states, and the dramatic ide- ological reform of others, godparents stand ready in the wings to play a part in leading the new entities through a bewildering world, in which other claimants to their loyalty might lead them astray.

Some might view such interference with suspicion and use metaphors laden with negative connotations (cradle-snatching? pedophilia? brain- washing?) to question the motives of the sponsor state and delegitimate the relationships thus formed. Samuel Huntington himself is certainly convinced that this kind of intrusive meddling on the part of the United States is a recipe for national disaster. Cross-civilizational alliances, he argues, can only be interest driven: their strength can never rival that of cultural kin-ties. But by drawing such an absolute distinction between two kinds of bonds — sentiments based on enduring cultural affinity, and alliances constructed to yield short-term, calculated benefits—he discounts a phenomenon known throughout the Balkans and, in a dif- ferent form, to ethnographers of kinship everywhere. When people

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invest belief and trust in relationships, the ties they forge may over time develop a strength that rivals or overmasters those rooted in blood or enshrined in law.

I have already suggested that Samuel Huntington, and others inter- ested in new ways of thinking about kinship in world politics, might enjoy recent works of anthropological theory. They could also learn from Macedonian and Albanian interpretations of U.S. intervention in Kosovo in 1999. Macedonians are certainly critical of that intervention, and do consider Albanians to be members of a non-Western civilization, but they are not bewildered by U.S. assistance to the Kosovo Liberation Army. They describe the United States as playing the role of godfather, or kum, to a proposed “Greater Albania.” They thus describe the relations of one portion of a people (expansionist Albanians) and a superpower in the way they might describe the relationship between two families who cre- ate an enduring connection that dominates other loyalties. Kosovar Albanian familiarity with the concept also surfaced in a human interest story reported by the Independent journalist Robert Fisk. A Kosovar Albanian named his daughter “Kfor” after the NATO-led protection force KFOR, and expressed the hope that the British commander, General Jackson, would act as godfather.40 Perhaps the journalist intended this as a quaint story about local customs and a pathetic gratitude. But it can also be read as an example of how ordinary people, as well as theorists, make links between local cultural forms and international politics.41

Families have strategies to extend their webs of obligation and common interest and thus create culturally specific kinship ties that have not, so far, informed the theorizing of political scientists. Such anecdotes of cul- ture as practice give an indication of what anthropology—an openness to the categories of others, and an engagement with the messy realities of everyday life — might contribute to the rethinking of world order.

C o n c l u s i o n

What, then, of cultural kinship? The metaphor remains a powerful tool of understanding and illuminating global politics. Other political scientists,

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though wary of accepting the whole “clash of civilizations” package, nonetheless find inspiration in this particular component.42 Other recent works in the field, dealing with both international and domestic politics, suggest wider interest in addressing issues of culture and identity.43

Although Huntington and his discipline are often perceived by anthro- pologists as doctrinaire and overly scientistic, such culturalist initiatives, and the cross-disciplinary thinking they demand, should be welcomed for what they might well be: signs of intellectual curiosity and vigor. As I have tried to indicate in this chapter, though, Huntington’s writing con- veys an understanding of culture in general, and kinship in particular, as a somewhat static and limiting force in the world. What it lacks is any reflexive sense of the cultural specificity of that view of culture and kin- ship. As David Schneider put it almost twenty years ago, “European social scientists use their own folk culture as the source of many, if not all, of their ways of formulating and understanding the world around them.”44 Huntington’s adherence to an old-fashioned model of primor- dially rooted loyalty seems a classic case.

The professional anthropologists I cite here, and at least some of the residents of Macedonia with whom I have worked over the past ten years, offer perspectives also informed by culture. And they present cul- ture differently, as a work in progress yielding ground to human agency and will. If there is a single point I hope readers take from this chapter and reiterate in the important debates kindled by “The Clash of Civi- lizations?” it is that Samuel Huntington’s view of culture and kinship need not define the conversation. For anthropologists and others who ex- plore new ways of thinking about the new world order, the debate over whether culture shapes politics is over: of course it does. The question that remains, and the question that Huntington’s lengthy writing consis- tently skirts, is how.

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