A systematized ethnography of kinship vocabulary and adoption and partner recruitment practices
Find out more about the winning 2024 project ‘A systematized ethnography of kinship vocabulary and adoption and partner recruitment practices, back to the foundations of Na logic’ from the Louis Dumont Fund, which supports research in social anthropology.
The aim of this research project is to systematically document the vocabulary of kinship and the practices of adoption and recruitment of partners in Chinese Na households. Based on life stories, house histories and genealogies, and the collection of kinship vocabulary (terminologies, local conceptions), the aim is to re-describe kinship and local Na logic. It aims to highlight the different kinship groups to which the Na refer, and which necessarily imply a distinction, or even a hierarchy, between these groups. The project thus proposes an analysis of social reproduction that takes account of the respective place of the two sexes in Na households, where descent is mainly in the uterine line. It seeks to demonstrate that the description of a society without father or husband and the characterisation of the kinship system by filiation do not do justice to a number of practices that indicate the importance of the home as the basic unit of all social relations.
Pascale-Marie Milan
After completing her PhD in anthropology at the University of Lyon and Laval University in Quebec, Pascale-Marie Milan is now a post-doctoral fellow at the École française d'Extrême Orient.She has been conducting research with the Chinese Na since 2007, initially looking at the impact of tourism on social organization, and now focusing on the study of kinship from a relational approach. Her work explores the importance of the house as the basic unit of all social relations, to shed light on under-ethnographed practices and better characterize their matrilineal kinship system.
Pascale-Marie Milan
