ABSTRACT
In this chapter, intended as a general meditation on kinship pragmatics, I examine how the Maneo understand their identities and relations; specifically, I contrast Western views with local, largely pragmatic theories of knowledge by exploring the way Maneo use their knowledge of kinship in the course of conducting their lives. This focus on knowledge-use represents something of an accommodation on my part to the fact that while the Maneo orient their actions in terms of their relations and respective identities, they also improvise and manage the very knowledge on which kin-designations are based. Time and again, people would misidentify and relocate kin in the pantheon of their relations. Often the same kin were the subject of disagreement, but not always. The “mistakes” Jennie and I encountered belie more than mere confusion or calculation, which such improvisations would suggest. The inconsistencies raise two broader points concerning the ground against which claims are made. First, the anomalies only appear so from particular vantage points. It is this perspectival condition which made our efforts to compile genealogies perhaps more a liability than an asset to understanding how such knowledge is used (Barnes 1967; Zeitlyn 1993). Second, Maneo efforts to construct kinship, if not motivated by specific objectives, are nonetheless compelled by the actions of others in promoting their own interpretations of relationships. Situations in which such interpretations disagree or push the limits of what people know about relations can pose challenges that are interesting locally and ethnographically. Occasionally, the challenges can be quite dramatic, as when a stranger arrived one day and announced that he was the son of an ancestor. The event reveals the stakes behind such claims and the associated problems of assessing them. It also points to the extent to which knowledge is taken for granted in everyday interactions.
