Variance in American kinship: implications for cultural analysis

The question of variance in American kinship provides a rich basis for a discussion of several critical conceptual, theoretical, and methodological Issues embedded in the cultural analysis of kinship or any other cultural domain. The paper begins with an examination of the extent to which David Schneider's cultural account of American kinship represents and explicates the symbolic system of second‐generation Japanese‐Americans. This leads to the major theoretical problem: the way in which we formulate heuristic levels of analysis and construe their interrelationships. An explication of the theoretical consequences of Schneider's scheme of the behavioral, normative, and cultural systems and his articulation of the “pure” and “conglomerate” levels of the cultural system compels us to reassess the goals of cultural analysis and suggests the kind of theory of meaning and action that will prove most instructive in such an endeavor.