People do not live their lives in order to comment upon some academic theory. Rather, they strive for a decent existence, according to their specific ideas of proper relationships among themselves and with the powers around them. This ethnography fixes its gaze firmly on the intricacies of the quotidian ways to achieve these aims. Written in highly accessible prose, Living Kinship, Fearing Spirits stands out for its fresh and intimate look on some of anthropology's central topics. It also appeals to anyone interested in life in the Asian uplands, especially the Southeast Asian mainland.
The Khmu are the largest minority in Laos and comparatively well studied—“comparatively” referring to a plethora of minorities in a heavily understudied country. Based on sixteen months of fieldwork in an upland village, mostly in 2014 and 2015, this study focuses on kinship, not because anthropological tradition dictates it, but because it is of such importance for people themselves. With an exquisite subtlety of detail, Rosalie Stolz explicates not only the rules and values that people observe, but also how they judge nuances of behavior that do not fit their expectations.
This does not mean that Stolz's account is theoretically uninformed. She explicates her theoretical assumptions in an almost fleeting manner, but they nevertheless provide her with the conceptual tools to attain the proverbial “thick description.” Among them is an understanding of kinship as a multifaceted, holistic process and of rituals as events that define and transform the relationships that make up sociality.
The Khmu could be a textbook case of a type of kinship known as asymmetric alliance. Women are supposed to marry their father's sister's son, and men their mother's brother's daughter, or another member of a broad class of equivalent relatives. Other cousins are forbidden to marry. This results in a clear differentiation of wife-giving and wife-taking groups that potentially continues over generations without reversing the direction into which people marry.
However, Stolz does not take kinship as a given set of rules. Instead, she highlights four crucial processes that demand people's constant attention. First, people acquire knowledge about the genealogical and historical background of relationships so as to treat others properly. Stolz describes how children are socialized into this knowledge, as well as her own learning process. Second, kinship relations change in the course of a lifetime. This long chapter details the rituals and roles that people move through until their entire personal network is restructured during their mortuary rituals. Third, shared work and mutual help are central to the maintenance and recognition of kinship. Finally, Stolz approaches kinship through the transfer of food, gifts, and services. Here, she follows the classical distinction between sharing among close relatives and gift exchange between more distant, especially affinal kin. Sharing, emphasizing identity, marks relationships within households and among agnatic kin, while exchange, constituting difference, establishes relations between households, especially those of wife givers and wife takers.
Still, kinship does not exhaust Khmu village-based sociality, and Stolz addresses these additional dimensions in a chapter on the concept of the village. As in other societies in the region, the village is an important unit in select contexts, especially the ritual for its protecting spirit, while in others, households are more prominent. The ritual itself hierarchizes these two levels: only after the village priest has renewed relations with the village spirit, households renew relations with their wife-givers. The village represents sociality in general, which Stolz demonstrates by documenting cases of failure. She retells how people who are mentally disturbed or possessed by a witchcraft spirit are removed from communities. Stolz mentions labor migration and external relationships to the state or the lowlanders, but chooses not to address them in detail, despite the importance of the outside for the maintenance of village-level sociality.
Stolz suggests the term “efficacious kinship” for her analysis of Khmu sociality. The term encompasses the rules that people articulate, as classical kinship studies would, but it goes beyond them by looking at the fine detail of everyday relationship cultivation. However, the strategic use of rules, as a Bourdieuan approach would emphasize, is not her main concern. It would have been interesting to know more explicitly how Stolz positions her work within the field of kinship studies, in relation to these alternative approaches, and also in ritual studies. The book surprisingly lacks a comprehensive discussion of kin terms. Given its attention to specific actors in the village, genealogical charts would have been helpful. Apart from this, this book combines lively, sensitive, and empathic description with thoughtful analysis into an exemplary study of contemporary life in the Asian highlands.
