in Mount Hagen in the PNG Highlands where ties with the mother’s
brother are important immediate genealogical ties between cross-cousins
can be recognized as primary, or alternatively classificatory cross-cousins
maybeseenas‘true’kin, because of the practical obligations they take up
and fulfill. Recognition is contextual. Language usages point us to the
recognition of immediate ties as prototypical or‘true’.Anothersetofusages
point us to the recognition of a performative bias that can supersede the
immediate ties. Whoever performs the ideal role becomes the‘real’kinsper-
son. But the transposition does not work with indefiniteflexibility. It has to
work via classificatory rules that shape it, and these too are enshrined in
language usages. In the‘kinship wars’, then, within anthropology, we must
affirm again that both sides were right in that they drew attention to real
phenomena; yet both sides were wrong in that they subscribed to a dichot-
omous mode of thinking that stipulates truth as belonging to only one side
of the debate. Dichotomous thinking is certainly a part of the human
repertoire of thought and is often marked in ritual contexts. However,
from an analytical viewpoint, much can be gained by refusing to adopt
this tendency, and instead looking beyond it to an integrated view that
embraces both sides of a debate but does so on different grounds from those
of the opponents. In this case we have sought to break the frames of an
adversarial debate by expanding the idea of truth to a broader level of
understanding. Theory thus becomes synoptic and avoids the myopia of a
fight between frames (exactly as it proved necessary to avoid dichotomizing
the‘individual’versus‘dividual’debate and for analogous reasons).
One sphere of enquiry which is beset by problems of definition stem-
ming from the same dichotomous thinking about nature and culture that
we have been probing here is in the sphere of what is called‘mental
health’. This concept depends on a separation between mind and body.
Mental health is a well-established category in the biomedical system,
marking off the mental from the bodily spheres. It is the division, in fact,
between mind and body that represents both a tenacious tendency of
thought and an error in trying to understand the phenomena themselves.
Cross-cultural evidence shows two things: First, an absolute difference or
ontological separation between body and mind is rarely posited in folk
cultures, by contrast with the ideas of the philosopher Descartes. Second,
some sort of distinction is generally made, but the relationship of the body
and the mind is seen as intimate and close, so they constantly influence
each other within the same order of being. Cross-culturally, then, the
categorical separation of mind and body in the Cartesian scheme can be
52 BREAKING THE FRAMES