New Guinea or Schneider’s Yapese informants, at another level it is recog-
nized (see discussions in Strathern and Stewart 2011 ). If this were not so,
we would not expect to see such strong rules governing sexual activity and
linking it to marriage and the legitimacy of children born to a marriage.
Even in the Trobriand case, where maternal ties predominate, patrifiliation
is also recognized as significant and linked to marital ties. Third, then, what
wefind is an underlying substratum of ideas founded on the human species’
reliance on sexual reproduction, coupled with numerous variations in
interpretations of this fact and the cultural elaborations built up from it.
From a holistic viewpoint, we must embrace both sides of the argument.
What we call‘kinship’is a product of the fusion of this substratum with
numerous systemic differences. In this process of fusion nature becomes
culturalized and culture is naturalized. It is therefore unproductive to pick
apart this holistic web of signifiers and dissolve it back either into nature or
into culture, or to argue that one or other of these categories is transcen-
dent. Kinship is the intrinsic amalgamation of nature and culture in the
processes of embodied living and adaptation. Further, what we call biology
should not be narrowly linked to genetics or conception or birthing.
Nurturance and care of offspring are obviously as important as any other
factors, and these features are also obviously linked to species-wide patterns
of survival based on the need for long periods of growth and socialization
of humans.‘Children’as a symbolically loaded social category are the
markers of this selectionist feature of human sociality.
Finally, here, the insistence on the special imperatives of‘nature’,
whether focused on genetic ties, birthing, or caregiving, can be seen as
another evolutionary feature. If nature is seen as providing a self-explanatory
imperative, then it will work as a motivation for individuals with or without
recourse to further sources of value of values placed on life. Thus nature in
this sense will always be incorporated into culture, if we see culture also
primarily as an adaptive force. Nothing, however, proceeds out of nothing,
and without a background substratum of processes, ideological elaborations
could not work. The upshot of this discussion is that the perennial debate
between extensionist and constructionist themes of kinship is to be resolved
not by proving one side right and the other wrong but by stepping back and
seeing that both are right in their own terms. What we call kin terms do
recognize‘extensions’, distinguishing immediate/‘real’from classificatory/
extended ties. But the extensions are just as real as the immediate relation-
ships in building systems of social organization. The plasticity of human
imagination enables actors to play these themes either way. So, for example,
5 NATURE VERSUS CULTURE: A MISTAKEN CONUNDRUM 51