Roman Kinship is one of the oldest and most controversial topics in anthropological theory. Partly instrumentalized at the heyday of early evolutionism, it remained to be important in times of synchronic studies as a part of Roman Law. In modern cultural studies neither evolutionary nor kinship theory appear to be ...
(Show more)Roman Kinship is one of the oldest and most controversial topics in anthropological theory. Partly instrumentalized at the heyday of early evolutionism, it remained to be important in times of synchronic studies as a part of Roman Law. In modern cultural studies neither evolutionary nor kinship theory appear to be important as a research strategy. In fact this has to do with the establishment of post-modern theories in anthropology and the development of wider paradigms, that ignore the epistemological and theoretical principles of the former and dismiss the complexity of the latter, although meanwhile especially in evolutionary theory there are approaches that go beyond monocausal explanations and offer more context-sensitive interpretations of social and cultural change.
Nevertheless some „young“ disciplines still deal with more complex and evolutionary theories – in fact, here the search for paradigms is still in progress. Especially studies in bronze- and iron-age-societies of the Celtic area, which try to offer both, synchronic and diachronic approaches, have proven to be a good example also for the study in other ancient cultures. The search for nomothetic issues in early Irish society marks just only one approach in this field, but it clearly shows the need for anthropological theory. In fact those kind of theories dealing with deterministic axioms, as for example causal relations between trade and alliance or control of production and stratification analysed partly on the basis of kinship terminology, are extremely complex and should not be applied without any concern – so of course this models too have to be proven.
In comparison, evolutionary (means non-historical) approaches to roman society are mostly missing, partly due to the reluctance to use the mentioned strategies and partly due to the belief in the universal applicability of historical methods. But to abandon this approaches, in my view, is more a kind of ignoring the complexity of human culture, rather than a solution to concrete problems. This paper seeks for factors in this evolution, including „classical“ elements like kinship, warfare and trade – beyond the implications of simplistic evolutionism, but dealing with thoughts on Irish society and in a strictly comparative way. Because kinship studies have proven to be useful in context of questions on stratification and complexity, I will offer a kind of bottom-up-perspective on the evolution of Roman society in contrast to empire-centred and teleological prejudices on pre-state-societies.
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