The American Literatures and Cultures Workshop
in collaboration with the Medicine, the Body, and Practice Workshop
present Averill Leslie
Ph.D. Candidate, Anthropology
“The Kinship of Kallikaks: Henry Goddard’s Ad Hoc Charting of a Pathogenic Family and its Foil”
Discussant: Rachel Watson
Ph.D. Candidate, English Language & Literature
Wednesday, May 18th
4:30 – 6:00 PM
Room: Haskell 101
ABSTRACT: This essay analyzes the kinship logics at play in Henry Goddard’s 1912 eugenical family study, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-mindedness. As one of the seminal texts in the U.S. eugenics movement, this text has been the subject of heavy criticism in the hundred years since its publication, but—in a curious turn for a work that takes “family” as its central analytic—almost no attention has been given to how kinship operates within its pages. Goddard’s book charts two different branches of the same family to produce a “controlled” proof of the hereditary etiology of mental defect, but I notice and explore inconsistencies in the way he assembles each family tree. Rejecting both incompetence and book-cooking as explanations, I show how the “anomalous” relatives on the family’s so-called bad branch—a series of hyper-extended affines who at first glance have no business being included in a cognatic scheme—are in fact patterned, obeying an internally coherent kinship logic that is founded on larger eugenical logics of contagion and containment. Ultimately I suggest that Goddard’s notions of pathology and kinship collapse onto one another, and that his concept of relatedness therefore varies from family to family depending on each one’s placement within pathogenic or normative contexts.
Putting these findings in dialogue with kinship theorists of the past several decades, I offer a radical expansion of processual and anti-essentialist accounts of kinship, concluding that what “family” means varies not only across cultures and socioeconomic contexts, but also from one family to another—a circularity implying a new variant on the arguments that there is no such thing as kinship. This contribution to kinship theory in turn calls forth an argument concerning contemporary U.S. society: Goddard’s enterprise, “faulty” genealogies and all, is little different from what most Americans as well as most contemporary genomic scientists do routinely, blur biogenetics with cultural tropes in their deployments and perceptions of kinship relations.
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