Читать книгу The Metamorphoses of Kinship - Maurice Godelier - Страница 6

Introduction

The last thirty years of the twentieth century witnessed an upheaval in family relations and in ideas about the family. We also saw profound mutations in people’s lives – I am thinking first of all of the lives of the millions of individuals of both sexes, of all ages and conditions, who make up the traditionally Christian, capitalist and democratic societies of the Western world, and who will be our principal reference here. These mutations have reshaped the practices, mental outlooks and institutions that define what are known as kinship relations between both individuals and the groups engendered by these relations: nuclear families, what are mistakenly called ‘extended’ families, kindred, and so forth.

Several facts testify to this transformation, including the sharp decline in marriages and the even sharper rise in the number of separations and divorces, resulting in the appearance and multiplication of single-parent families, ‘recomposed’ families, etc. But if the conjugal tie is proving increasingly fragile, the parents’ desire to continue to shoulder their child-raising responsibilities, even after separation and divorce, is nevertheless a social fact that is constantly and strongly asserted. It is an aspect and one of the effects of the tendency to value childhood and children that emerged in Western Europe in the nineteenth century and became fully fledged by the mid twentieth. In short, among the metamorphoses of the conjugal family, if the marriage axis has weakened, the axis of filiation is still solidly in place.1

But filiation itself is likely tomorrow to be no longer what it was yesterday, and defining it has already been made more complex by recent discoveries in biology and the development of new reproductive technologies. Whereas it used to seem a matter of common sense to say that, while paternity may always be open to doubt, there can be no doubt about who the mother is – she is the woman who carried the child in her womb and brought it into the world – nowadays this may no longer be the case. Today, it is possible to transfer an egg fertilized in the body of one woman into the uterus of another woman, where it will continue to develop until the child is born. Whereas formerly, in our societies, the woman who gave birth to a child was perceived as being both the child’s genetrix and its mother, as it becomes possible artificially to separate these three naturally indivisible stages – fertilization, gestation and parturition – the question arises of what, for the child born under these conditions, are the various women who, one after another, contributed to its birth? Generally speaking, because of the importance our culture places on the biological aspect of kinship relations and the genealogical representation of these ties, the question usually comes down to asking: which of these women is the ‘real’ mother?2

For if all these transformations – which sometimes lead in opposite directions – have deeply altered the world of kinship, they have not yet shaken an axiom that, in Europe, has for centuries been the basis of its definition and representation, namely: that kinship is fundamentally a world of both biological and genealogical ties between same-sex or opposite-sex individuals of the same generation or of different generations following in time.

Nevertheless, for some twenty years now, formerly prohibited and repressed unions have emerged into broad daylight and been more or less tacitly accepted by public opinion. Furthermore, these unions are contesting, head-on and for the first time, the genealogical principle that was traditionally seen as the core of kinship: I am talking about homosexual couples. The affirmation and multiplication of such unions has had an impact on family relations as a whole. There are two reasons for this. First, because homosexual couples are demanding legal recognition of their union and that this recognition should allow for a form of marriage. Second, because a minority of these couples wants to go further, demanding the right to raise a family by adopting children engendered outside the couple or by artificial insemination with the help of a more-or-less anonymous sperm donor.

We are thus caught in a paradox. Marriage is increasingly shunned by heterosexuals, while being demanded by homosexuals. Children who, until the appearance of new procreation technologies, owed their birth to sexual relations between men and women who may not have desired children, are now wanted by homosexual couples who, on principle, exclude heterosexual intercourse from their desire. Another paradox for some would be the fact that in homosexual families parenthood may be fully realized simply by becoming a more or less social and affective reality: If a woman can choose to be the ‘father’ and act accordingly, or a man choose to be the ‘mother’ and act accordingly, if both choose to be parents apart from any reference to their biological sex, would this not be undeniable proof that parenthood is basically not biological but social, thus confirming a thesis dear to many kinship specialists?

These contemporary developments would once again seem to confirm the pre-eminent role of anthropology when it comes to thinking about kinship, as might be substantiated by the number of jurists, politicians and psychologists who seek out anthropologists to help them better understand the mysteries of modern kinship before intervening in its evolution. But do anthropologists still want, or are they even able, to answer the questions put to them, when the majority ceased to be interested in kinship as far back as the 1980s?

Before examining what has become of their work on kinship, long considered to be a specialist field and the very flower of anthropology, let us step back and look at the principles of our own kinship system.

The Western European system has three components, which combine with each other to constitute the deep structure of kinship relations in our societies, the framework within which the Westerner is born and lives. The first component is the family, which is nuclear and monogamous. The second is the network of families related by consanguinity or affinity.3 These networks associate individuals of different generations linked mainly by direct or collateral ties of descent on both the father’s and the mother’s side. For, in Western societies, one side counts nearly as much as the other, which is why this kinship system is called ‘cognatic’. Nevertheless, in so far as it is the father who hands his name on to the children, and other elements of social life pass principally or exclusively through him, we say that our cognatic system has a ‘patrilineal bias’. These networks of related families, who associate with each other and whose members feel bound together by ties of solidarity, who help one another and exchange goods and services, are sometimes misnamed ‘extended families’. This expression should actually be reserved for groups of kin – usually a father and his married sons living under one roof and comprising a single domestic unit, or household, and who also often function as a production unit. These ‘extended’ families properly speaking existed in various parts of rural France and Europe under the Ancien Régime, and for a portion of the nineteenth century, but today they have practically disappeared.

The third component is Ego’s kindred. This, too, is a network of people related by ties of kinship, but it is centered on the individual. It covers, on the one hand, all those relatives the individual ‘inherited’ at birth – on both the father’s and the mother’s side – as well as the affines of his or her consanguines and the consanguines of his or her affines. This birth kindred is shared by all the children of a particular father and mother, that is, by all siblings. But, when the individual in question marries (or as is often the case today, lives with someone) and has children, then he or she becomes the starting point for a new kindred, which differs from that of his siblings. The two networks, the one formed by the families and the one formed by the related individuals, are open, with boundaries that depend on a number of factors which have nothing to do with kinship: spatial proximity of the families and the individuals; changes in the social status of certain families or individuals, who may no longer see each other; families or individuals who die or disappear due to epidemics, wars, and so on.

These three ingredients, which comprise the field of kinship, existed under the Ancien Régime, but they were associated with other components as well, which either disappeared after the French Revolution and the promulgation in 1804 of the Napoleonic Code or underwent a change of status in the new society and the new moral and sexual order that ensued. Under the Ancien Régime, marriage was a religious act, a sacrament that made the bond between a man and a woman indissoluble. Divorce was forbidden by the Church, unless the marriage could be proven not to have been consummated. Children had to be baptized, and the baptism (like the birth) was recorded on the rolls of the parish that had administered the sacrament. The child’s father was theoretically supposed to be the husband of its mother, and he had authority over his wife and his children.

This configuration of rights, practices and values characteristic of the Ancien Régime began to change with the institution of ‘civil’ marriage in 1804. In principle, the civil marriage was not mandatory, but it rapidly became a de facto obligation in the eyes of the majority of the population, which was quick to understand that the new institution would become the only legal means of legitimizing the children that would be born to a couple. Their birth was henceforth recorded by the state registry office.

In the nineteenth century cohabitation was still stigmatized as a practice of the lower classes or of individuals who had chosen to break with social conventions – artists, for example.4 Children born out of wedlock had no rights. They were bastards and were treated less well than those of the Ancien Régime nobility. There was strong social pressure on young people to marry within their own social class. The only member of the family to exercise authority was the father. He was vested with paternal authority, a right and a concept that go back to Roman Antiquity. It was the husband’s duty to ensure the family’s material conditions of existence. The married woman was under her husband’s authority and was legally incapable. Marriage – whether civil or religious – was still the act that founded the couple. Initially recognized, divorce would be abolished in 1816. Exploration of sexuality and love before marriage was stifled. Of course, homosexuality was forbidden and regarded as an unnatural desire, as a sin by believers, as a pathology in medical circles; and homosexual couples were forced to conceal their relationship.

This quick glance back over the nineteenth century is meant merely to suggest the changes that have been multiplying since the 1960s, when a new society took shape and began to thrive in the wake of the upheaval wrought in Western Europe by the Second World War and the subsequent division of the world into two blocs.

In France in 1970, the notion of paternal authority was abolished and replaced by that of parental authority,5 shared equally between the father and the mother, to whom were enjoined responsibilities toward their children in matters of health, education, safety and morality,6 even in the event of separation or divorce. Parental authority is thus considered to be a function of public order, guaranteed by the state.

In 1975 divorce by ‘mutual consent’ was made possible in France. In 2009, thirty-nine per cent of all marriages ended in divorce. To this figure must be added the large number of separations that do not go through divorce. This is obviously the case for the separation of cohabiting couples. Hence the growing number of single-parent households, and ‘recomposed’ families, which are not an alternative model but simply social configurations that occur at different stages in people’s lives, as the spectacular increase in longevity compared to the nineteenth century now allows individuals to contract several kinds of alliance in their lifetime.

Generally speaking, then, in our society, marriage is no longer the act that founds the couple.7 The couple forms before the marriage, which, if they eventually decide to marry, often takes place only after the couple becomes convinced of the necessity to stabilize their union. But marriage alone no longer makes a family. The family truly comes into being only when a child or two are born. It would therefore be false to claim that we are seeing a wholesale rejection of marriage when the institution has merely lost some of its social importance. At the same time, negative attitudes toward cohabitation have largely disappeared, as has the opprobrium cast on children born out of wedlock.

Networks of related families exist and continue to lend support to their members, beyond the boundaries of their birth or conjugal families, especially in times of economic recession or youth unemployment. But these networks are beginning to shrink, contracting around the axes of direct descent, and increasingly excluding close or distant collaterals. The same is true of the kindred to which an individual feels attached, which also tends to dwindle to a small number of relatives by blood or by marriage with whom he or she has chosen to keep up ties.

What are the forces that have modified the forms and practices of kinship in Western societies since the mid twentieth century? The first is the emphasis on the right to freely choose the other with whom to found a couple. This choice has been freed of social constraints and conventions such as the moral duty to marry within one’s class, to transmit a family name or perpetuate a social group, etc. Desire, love and sentiment now prevail over other, less subjective, more social criteria. In addition, teenage lovemaking is no longer taboo, and everything points to a new attitude toward sexuality. In this context, the loss of desire and/or love for the other have become sufficient reason for splitting up and making oneself available for new ties and a new life.

The second force helping to reshape kinship relations arose out of changes in gender relations and the increasing social pressure for greater equality between the sexes in all areas of social and personal life. The establishment of parental authority and divorce by mutual consent attest to this change.8 The pressure for greater sexual equality can also be explained by the fact that increasing numbers of women are entering the economy and making an essential contribution to the material life of their couple or family. In doing so, they (also) acquire greater material autonomy with respect to their spouse or partner.

The third force that gradually affected the field of kinship and the family was the progressive valorization of the child and childhood, whereby the child was no longer seen as a being more or less ‘incapable of reasoning’ but as already a person, one whose arrival in the family was no longer endured but rather desired and even, thanks to medical progress, programmed. The child thus came to occupy a much greater place in the family’s affective and economic life. But, at the same time, and as an effect of the action of the two previous forces, many couples made an effort to create a space for themselves alongside and beyond their parental tasks and duties. Obviously, women have the most to gain from family life not being reduced entirely to their mothering role. Finally, having a ‘big’ family is no longer an ideal – if it ever was – and for many groups the new model is instead that of a family comprised of working parents and two children, a boy and a girl.

All of these changes are borne along by a deeper current that did not arise in the field of kinship but which flows through it and continuously acts within it, just as it courses through all areas of social life and acts on them. It is the current that propels promotion of the individual as such, independently of his or her initial attachments to family or social group, that lends value to autonomous behaviour and the capacity to take the initiative, to accept responsibilities, and that enables the individual to rise within the public and private institutions that constitute the economic and political structure of our societies. This upward propulsion of the individual occurs in a historical context where acts of authority on the part of power holders in the state or private companies, regarding persons in their control, spark criticism, resistance and opposition when forcibly imposed without room for dialogue. In short, Western society increasingly prefers deserved or negotiated authority over the kind that is inherited or imposed. The positive side of this trend can be seen in the abolition of paternal authority and the promotion of shared ‘parental’ authority ‘guaranteed’ by the state. To this must be added the fact that children, recognized as beings who must be treated as persons from birth, remain ‘children’ for a shorter period, since they become ‘adult’ at the age of eighteen. Parents have thus been forced to invent forms of authority that did not exist when they themselves were children, forms designed to convince rather than to coerce, based on dialogue rather than violence.9

It has become harder to be a parent, and we are now seeing many families undergoing a profound crisis of parental authority, one that affects the father more than the mother in so far as he was traditionally the one who embodied the law and authority. We thus sometimes find, when the parents separate or divorce, a veritable dissolution of the father figure: eighty per cent of children of separated or divorced parents live with their mother, as compared to eight per cent with their father and six per cent with someone else. Furthermore only twenty per cent of children who live with their mother see their father at least once a week.

If the father and/or the mother remarry, the children find themselves in families composed of fragments of former families. The child then lives with a stepfather or a stepmother, has half-brothers and/or half-sisters if the couple have children together, and stepbrothers or stepsisters if the person with whom the father or mother has chosen to live brings children from a previous marriage. Children in recomposed families therefore have a hard time finding their bearings and their place in these new configurations of persons and ties, and first of all deciding what to call their new ‘parents’. Finally, as separation and divorce become more widespread, many children fear that their parents are going to split up and that they will only see their father or mother once a week, on Sundays, or for part of a vacation.

In short, pulled hither and thither by these opposing and even contradictory currents, the family at the dawn of the twenty-first century certainly no longer looks like the stable basis or keystone of society, if it ever was. And the increasing numbers of homosexual couples demanding the right to raise children they themselves did not engender add new uncertainties about the future of parenthood, the family and marriage.

Globally, and with hindsight, all of the changes that have recently occurred in the family appear to be in keeping with the overall evolution of Western democratic societies, which favour individual initiatives and interests, and which therefore in principle reject despotic forms of public – but also private – authority. To these features must be added other, more specific traits, which can be explained only by the influence of the Christian tradition, either because it continues to affect the lives of individuals and institutions or because it has prompted reactions and breakaways specific to the Western world, particularly in the areas of sexuality or the family. One such example is the institution of civil marriage, which has become the only legal form of marriage in a number of European countries (making religious marriage a matter of personal and private choice).

No one foresaw this evolution when it began to emerge some ten years after the Second World War, and no one today knows exactly where it will lead. Especially since the facts that condition it are both complex and insufficiently known, and the problems, even the most visible ones (like the difficulty parents have in retaining authority over their children, or school teachers over their pupils), have to be shouldered by each person, individually, alone and with no real help from public debate or a sharing of experience.

To say that the evolution of the family is linked to the global evolution of society as a whole amounts to viewing many pronouncements on marriage, the family, love and desire as so many ideological manifestos. For those who condemn the evolution of Western societies in the name of an idealized past, the world has become a jungle in which everyone is condemned to fight with everyone else to impose his particular interests and appetites, even to the detriment of his parents, family and friends. For those who hold this view, the family, once the sanctuary of eminently social values – respect, solidarity, mutual aid – is doomed, and is already nearly dead. For others, on the contrary, we are the first in the history of the world to allow individuals to live as they desire and feel. Ours is a world in which each person freely chooses those with whom he or she will live, ignoring prejudice and convention, and discounting relations of class, caste or any other system of social ranking.

It seems obvious that, between the demonization of today’s society and its ‘angelization’, there is room for another attitude that consists in conducting a detailed inventory of actual situations and practices before making a judgement. This attitude implies setting aside theoretical assumptions and listening to what people have to say about themselves and others, about their past and their present, and trying to confront discourse with actual practice. To be sure, these discourses and practices must be placed in a much longer time frame than that of an individual’s personal memories and references: this time frame is that of the modern history of European societies.

Such an attitude entails combining various approaches and methods from the social sciences, first among which are those used by historians, who try to bring to life a past more often unknown than forgotten or invented, and those used by anthropologists, whose profession demands long immersion in a contemporary society and its observation, at a remove, as it were, but also from within. What does the anthropologist have to say about this evolution?

Let us imagine someone who knows little of the latest developments in anthropology but who is knowledgeable about the social sciences and is now seeking quickly to discover what has become of kinship studies. This reader would likely start her investigation with the formerly widely accepted opinion that the study of kinship ‘is to anthropology what logic is to philosophy or the nude is to art; it is the basic discipline of the subject’. Despite the somewhat dubious comparisons, this formulation by Robin Fox, author of a still-useful book on kinship,10 seemed at the time of its publication (1961) to state a long-established given.

Without necessarily returning to the founding fathers of anthropology (in particular L. H. Morgan, who in 1871 published his huge Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family11), the mere mention of a few of the great names in the discipline – Pitt-Rivers, Kroeber, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Fortes, Murdock, Lévi-Strauss, Lounsbury, Dumont, Needham – all of whom owe something of their renown to their contribution to kinship studies, should be enough to reassure the non-specialist that kinship is indeed an area in which anthropology excels and an object whose study is more or less its specialty.

Our reader would therefore probably be astonished, as she scrolls through the various available sources on the computer screen, to discover that the study of kinship has practically disappeared from the course lists of numerous American university anthropology departments as well as a certain number in Europe who have followed suit.

In the space of forty years, kinship – which seemed to have come out rather well in the many tough battles through which competing generations of anthropologists sought to define or redefine the object, its principles and (biological and/or social) foundations – had finally dissolved of its own accord. It had become a non-object for many anthropologists themselves, even before today’s self-styled ‘postmodernists’ appeared on the scene and set about ‘deconstructing’ their discipline. This is indicated by the fact that the leading figures of this movement – Marcus, Fisher, Clifford, et al. – made practically no mention of kinship in the many books in which they draw up a critical inventory of anthropology and propose new objects of study for its reconstruction.12

In reality, as the rest of the present work intends to show, this apparent absence stems from the fact that, far from having vanished, the object ‘kinship’ has emigrated to other areas of anthropology where it is being refashioned and linked to new questions. In other words, the analysis of kinship has simply deserted those places where anthropology had been running in circles for decades, bogged down in insoluble problems by false principles. The blanks left by this desertion are not necessarily a sign that the announced death has occurred.

But let us begin at the beginning.

MORGAN, THE FOUNDER

Why begin with the American Lewis Henry Morgan? Because he epitomizes the contradictions facing anthropology from the start. At the same time, he also shows the conditions under which fieldwork and the interpretations anthropologists propose of what they have observed can slowly acquire a scientific character and constitute a new type of knowledge of the other and oneself, one that no longer merely projects onto this other the prejudices of the anthropologist and his or her culture, garbed in discourse borrowed from the exact sciences.

By way of a reminder, let us recall that, in Morgan’s time (1818–81), the paradigm of scientific explanation was Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species. It was in this context that Morgan – a jurist by profession, a railroad company lawyer in Rochester, New York, and friend and defender of the Indians in their struggle against expropriation and other exactions inflicted by European settlers – became fascinated by Indian customs and decided to devote his life to their study.13

While doing fieldwork among the Seneca, a tribe of the Iroquois confederation, Morgan discovered that their kinship relations displayed a logic of their own that was very different from that of the European and American-European systems. He noted that, where Europeans use two terms to designate the father and the father’s brothers (‘uncles’), the Seneca do not make this distinction and use the same term for these men as well as for all those they classify in the same category with respect to an individual of reference (Ego). He also discovered that, vice versa, where Europeans have a single term ‘cousin’ to designate the children of both father’s and mother’s brothers and sisters, the Seneca have two: one for the children of the father’s brothers and the mother’s sisters, and another for the children of the father’s sisters and the mother’s brothers. In other words, they use different terms to designate the children of their parents’ same-sex and opposite-sex collaterals, distinguishing between what anthropologists have called parallel cousins and cross cousins. And since the terms for parallel cousins of both sexes are the same as those used for brothers and sisters, and since brothers and sisters cannot marry each other, parallel cousins cannot marry each other either, on pain of committing incest. On the other hand, it will often be possible, and even recommended, to marry one’s cross cousin. Finally, owing to the fact that, in contrast to kinship terminologies that classify several individuals under a single term – for instance, the father and all his brothers – European terminologies proceed by describing step by step the relations linking one individual to another, as in the expression ‘my grandfather’s grandfather is my great-great-grandfather’, Morgan concluded that there is a fundamental difference in the principles governing these terminologies. He would call the first ‘classificatory terminologies’ and the second ‘descriptive terminologies’. This opposition would subsequently draw strong criticism, and was later emended.

Morgan also discovered that the composition of the Iroquois exogamous groups could be explained using a descent rule that traced descendants exclusively through the women’s line, whereas in Europe descent is traced through both men and women. He used a Latin word, gens, to designate those groups of individuals who regarded themselves as descending through women from a common female ancestor. This was not a matter of chance. And he called the principle governing these kinship groups the ‘matrilineal descent’ rule. He also noted that, once men married, they left their clan and took up residence with their wife’s people. Lastly, he concluded from these observations that all these elements formed a coherent whole with its own logic, in other words, a ‘system’.

When he extended his study to other North American Indian tribes with different languages and cultures, he discovered that, beyond these differences, a number of them used kinship terminologies that had the same structure as that of the Seneca. This type of structure would come to be called ‘Iroquois’. Other groups, however, such as the Crow and the Omaha, had very different terminologies and marriage rules. Confronted with this diversity but also these convergences, Morgan decided to launch a worldwide survey of kinship terminologies and marriage rules. He drew up a questionnaire describing nearly a hundred possible kin ties with respect to a male or a female Ego, which constituted a sort of family tree ending or starting with Ego, and he sent out nearly one thousand copies to missionaries, civil servants and colonial administrators all over the world.14

Thanks to their replies, Morgan was the first person in history to dispose of such a quantity and diversity of information on kinship practices in societies dispersed widely over the face of the earth. Analysis and comparison of this data showed that the dozens of terminologies collected in totally unrelated languages turned out to be varieties or variants of a few types, which he dubbed Punaluan, Turanian, etc., and which we now, following Murdock, call ‘Hawaiian’, ‘Dravidian’, etc. As a consequence, European kinship systems, too, would appear as varieties of one of these structure types, the one that would come to be known as ‘Eskimo’. In 1871 Morgan gathered part of the data together with his theoretical conclusions into his famous Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, published under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, in the conclusion to which he stressed the importance of kinship relations in human history and particularly in ‘non-civilized’ societies.

We thus see how Morgan endowed anthropology with one of its objects of study (kinship), with a method for studying it (the genealogical questionnaire), and with a first batch of findings including the discovery of some of the rules non-European societies had chosen to organize ties of descent and alliance between the individuals and the groups that make up these societies.

But all this was possible only because of Morgan’s remarkable and persistent effort to decentre his thinking with respect to the categories of his own (Euro-American) society and culture. This decentring itself was made possible only by suspending judgement, by temporarily placing in brackets those things that were taken for granted and shared by the members of his society and culture. To be sure, suspension of judgement alone would not have given Morgan’s research a scientific character. He also had to learn to turn factual observations into problems to be solved, questions to be asked, in sum into a new way of considering the facts, breaking them down and putting them back together. But he also had to invent a method for observing facts in the field, concepts for describing them and hypotheses for attempting to explain them. Last of all, he had to pose the principle that, in order to understand the data collected in any society, one must compare it with data gathered in other societies, similar or not, close by or not.

Morgan’s approach thus marked a profound rupture with the spontaneous ethnography practised by missionaries, military officers, colonial administrators, traders and other representatives of the Western world, all of whom had been striving since the sixteenth century to improve their knowledge of the customs of the populations they were trying to convert, control or administer, and who had, in certain cases, set down their observations in letters, reports or accounts of their travels.

THE INCOMPLETE DECENTRING

But there is another side to Morgan’s work. As soon as his Systems was published, he turned to the task of marshalling all his data and analyses with a view to reconstructing, as so many were attempting at the time, the evolution of humankind. In 1877, he published Ancient Society,15 in which he described how humanity had gone from a primitive ‘savage’ state (scarcely differing from that of the animal world, and where promiscuity reigned between the sexes) through to the ‘civilized’ state. On this account, the greatest inventions of this last state had appeared in Western Europe and were continued in the United States of America in a new society, created by Europeans to be sure, but without the after effects of feudalism, which in the mid nineteenth century continued to hobble the march of progress and democracy in most nations of the Old World. In a speculative schema purported to explain the evolution of humankind via three successive stages of social development (the primitive savage state, the barbarian state and the civilized state), Morgan went on to assign to one or another of these stages each of the various exotic societies whose kinship terminologies he had collected and analyzed. Polynesian societies with their chiefs and complex social structures thus became witnesses to and vestiges of the age when, having just emerged from the primitive state of animal-like promiscuity, groups of brothers ‘married’ groups of sisters – a ‘fact’ that ‘explained’, according to Morgan, the characteristically small number of terms in ‘Hawaiian’ kin terminologies and their extensions, wherein all of the men and all of the women in the generation above an individual are his ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers’ and those of his own generation are his ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’.

In short, the same man who had managed to decentre his own thinking with regard to Western categories and had engendered a new discipline, this time around harnessed his findings to a speculative ideological version of history that – once again, though now with new arguments – made Europe and America the mirror in which humankind could at once contemplate its origins and measure its evolution, in a process that had left a great number of peoples far behind.

This explains why, twenty years earlier, Morgan had designated the Iroquois descent groups with the Latin term gens. As a jurist schooled in Roman law, he considered that the Iroquois clans held the key to understanding the Roman gens or the genos of the ancient Greeks. The kinship system of the nineteenth-century Iroquois was thus projected onto ancient Roman society. But, as the Iroquois gens (it would later be called ‘clan’) was matrilineal and the Roman gens patrilineal, the Iroquois were taken as providing evidence of an even more archaic state of the gens. This vision would rapidly (in 1884) be adopted by Friedrich Engels in his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in which he attempted to bring Morgan’s evolutionist speculations into line with Karl Marx’s historical materialism.

In the end, by presenting the Western nuclear – and monogamous – family as the most rational form of family, as that form in which the ‘blood’ ties connecting a child to his or her (real) father and to his or her (real) mother were finally visible, Morgan, despite his efforts to decentre his thinking with regard to the values and representations of his own society, was never able to treat the Western way of organizing kinship, the family and marriage as merely one cultural model among others, a model that was just as ethnocentric and therefore equally as ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’ as the others.

We now understand why Morgan’s work immediately drew so much criticism, targeted at his evolutionism, which, as it quickly became clear, had to be jettisoned if progress was to be made in exploring the domain he himself had helped to found as an object of scientific knowledge and upon which his work on the Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity had conferred its first letters of nobility.

For decades following Morgan, hundreds of field surveys, conducted in so-called ‘tribal’ societies of Africa, Asia, America and Oceania, or in ‘peasant’ societies in Europe, Asia and Latin America, confirmed the importance of kinship relations in the functioning of these societies.

LÉVI-STRAUSS AND HIS CRITICS

Once kinship ties began to appear as the very basis of these societies, their study was regarded as providing the key to understanding the way societies worked. This in turn resulted in a proliferation of studies on the subject, including works by some of the biggest names in anthropology, making kinship studies the lynchpin of the new social science. Indeed, because this theoretical context endowed kinship systems with a twofold primacy – ontological in relation to the life of societies and epistemological in terms of their scientific study – George Peter Murdock was able to entitle a book almost entirely devoted to the inventory and analysis of kin terminologies and systems throughout the world, Social Structure (1949).16 The publication, in the same year, of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Elementary Structures of Kinship17 was to confirm the importance of kinship in the appearance, development and destiny of humankind.

Lévi-Strauss changed the scope of kinship studies by postulating that the incest taboo had been the primary condition both for the emergence of kinship relations and for the appearance of ‘genuine’ human society, henceforth separate from the animal-like state and pursuing its development in another world, a man-made one, the world of culture. The goal was no longer simply to understand tribal or peasant societies but to circumscribe and apprehend that which was truly human in man – in short, and as the philosophers say, to grasp his essence.

The goal thus singularly outstripped the standard theoretical ambitions and limits of anthropology, and of the other social sciences taken separately. Lévi-Strauss’ thesis set out a global vision of humankind that resembled Morgan’s minus the evolutionism, since Morgan had made the exclusion of incest (which he believed to have been gradual), in other words of primitive, animal-like promiscuity between the sexes, the driving force behind the changes in the family and in kinship relations, and one of the conditions of human progress. It is perhaps for this reason that Lévi-Strauss dedicated his book to Morgan. Furthermore, he was implicitly in agreement with Freud, who half a century earlier, in Totem and Taboo,18 had explained the emergence of kinship relations by the sons’ murder of a despotic and incestuous father. (The sons, so the theory goes, after having killed their father in order to gain access to their sisters and their mother, decided to renounce incestuous relations with them so as to avoid being obliged eventually to kill each other. Kinship relations would theoretically have appeared once the brothers began to exchange their sisters and their mothers, whom they had renounced, with other groups of men, who theoretically had done likewise.)

Yet, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss paid scant attention to the fact that Freud had based kinship relations on the exchange of women and had made this exchange the consequence of the incest taboo – an attitude that can probably be ascribed to Freud’s claim that, in order to emerge from animal-like sexual promiscuity, it was necessary first to kill the father who tyrannized the primal horde. This was a thesis smelling of brimstone, which foregrounded sexuality and its repression, and claimed to explain by a unique act – one that was unverifiable but whose consequences were irreversible – and furthermore by a murder, what Lévi-Strauss claimed to explain by the shock resulting from the emergence of language and symbolic thought in the human species.

With Lévi-Strauss, it was possible to believe that the study of kinship, thus elevated, had a considerable future and that its importance would no longer be contested. After the publication of his book, having turned his attention to American Indians’ mythology, Lévi-Strauss would progressively leave the task of continuing the pursuit to his students, but not without having laid out the course of research for others.19 Naturally he believed that this task could be carried out only by disciples or colleagues who shared his thesis that the explanation of the differences in the various kinship systems lay in the forms of sister-exchange, and that these had to be analyzed using a method he called ‘structural analysis’. Many took up the challenge, and some made important findings.20

But the edifice was already cracking under the strain of criticism from various parts. I will give only a few examples. Feminist anthropologists, in particular, rapidly rejected the idea that kinship was necessarily based on the exchange of women by men, objecting that this amounted to making male domination the primary, insurmountable and therefore ‘natural’, as it were, condition of the existence of kinship relations and society.21 If this was true, an insuperable limit was set on the progress women could hope to make toward greater gender equality.

Leach, for his part, having greeted Lévi-Strauss’ ideas with interest and introduced them in Great Britain, later undertook a critique. Already in his book, Pul Elya, a Village in Ceylon: A Study of Land Tenure and Kinship,22 he had written that the (Dravidian) kin ties between the people of this village were no more than an idiom, a language in which social realities were expressed and dissimulated and which carried more weight than kinship. These realities were: relations with the land, land ownership, ties apart from which ‘kinship systems had no reality’. This was a provocation of the kind Leach was fond of launching, but the formula produced its effect. His criticism prefigured by several years that which certain self-styled Marxist anthropologists – Claude Meillassoux and Emmanuel Terray in France, Joel Khan in England, among others – would direct against the thesis that kinship relations (rather than relations of production) were at the root of human society.23

Leach’s iconoclastic blow was to be followed by many others, and they came from the two British temples of anthropology of kinship: Cambridge and Oxford. One after another, the concepts of kinship, marriage, incest and descent, together with Meyer Fortes’ notion of complementary filiation, prescription or preference in the choice of a spouse in elementary systems, were dissected and confronted with various facts that contradicted the accepted definitions. Once again Leach had paved the way, in another book published the same year as Pul Elya (1961) but whose title, Rethinking Anthropology,24 clearly suggested that the time of comforting self-evident notions was already over: in it he declared that marriage was not an institution that could be given a universal definition. Finally, in 1969, the Association of Social Anthropologists, presided over by Leach himself, declared that the time had come to put anthropology on a sound footing and decided that the first question up for discussion should obviously be: kinship. Rodney Needham was given the task of organizing a major symposium on ‘Kinship and Marriage’. Some of the papers presented on this occasion appeared in 1971 in the volume Rethinking Kinship and Marriage,25 a title clearly indicating that the authors were approaching these questions from the same critical angle as Leach.

This important book deserves a mention here, for through it runs a major contradiction that illuminates the nature of this first big wave of criticism directed against kinship studies by top anthropologists who were experts in the field. Needham’s two introductory texts provide a spectacular illustration. First of all, certain chapters, such as Thomas Beidelman’s on the representation of kinship among the Kaguru of Tanzania, or J. Fox’s ‘Sister’s child as plant’, on metaphors of consanguinity in Roti, an Indonesian island, as well as long passages in which Needham restates and develops his earlier analysis of the Purum, on the Wikmunkan or on the notion of prescriptive marriage, are by no means criticisms of kinship studies but, on the contrary, direct and enriching extensions.

On the other hand, in some passages Needham and Leach hoist the rebel flag. Needham, for instance, claimed to be a structuralist, while at the same time criticizing Lévi-Strauss for having yielded to the ‘passion for generalities’, an expression borrowed from Wittgenstein26 (of whom Needham was a fervent admirer). The criticism was aimed not solely at Lévi-Strauss and this theory of incest, but also at Meyer Fortes, for having posited the existence of a complementary filiation present in unilineal kinship systems. This thesis correctly claimed that, in a patrilineal society, for example, the child’s ties with its mother’s lineage or clan, without constituting actual ‘descent’ ties, had a strong existence that was recognized and which in many circumstances completed the descent ties. For Needham, considering the extreme diversity of the facts, all general definitions of incest, marriage, etc., looked very much like ‘all-purpose words’, abusive generalizations. But at the same time, he rightly criticized his colleagues who had not yet grasped that: ‘it is not only that we cannot make sociological inferences, about institutions, groups, and persons, from the structure of a terminology, but we cannot even infer that the statuses denoted by any one term will have anything significant in common’.27

It is from this viewpoint that we must read the following declarations, which created quite a stir at the time:

By this account, ‘kinship’ is certainly a thoroughly misleading term and a false criterion in the comparison of social facts. It does not denote a discriminable class of phenomena or a distinct type of theory, and it does not admit of special canons of competence and authority. Accordingly, it cannot be said that a social anthropologist is ‘good at kinship’; what he is good at is analysis. What that means depends on whatever he happens to be analysing.28

Or elsewhere: ‘To put it very bluntly, then, there is no such thing as kinship, and it follows that there can be no such thing as kinship theory.’29

In the same volume, Leach would go even further than Needham, putting the latter in the same bag as the anthropologists he had criticized: ‘All of which adds up to saying that, in my view, the utility of the study of kin-term systems as sets – which runs from Morgan to Rivers to Radcliffe-Brown to Goodenough to Lounsbury and, by a different route, to Lévi-Strauss and Rodney Needham – is pretty well worked out.’30 Provocations and paradoxes, as we can see, were Leach’s daily bread.

Needham evinces the same attitude when, having buried the concept of kinship together with any attempt to work out a general theory of kinship, he stresses in terms taken from strictly classical anthropology that, ‘the deeper the analyst goes, the more he is obliged to concentrate on singularities of cultural signification: this involves trying to put a coherent construction both on an unpredictable variety of meanings and functions that any individual term may have and on the set of terms in combination’.31

Wise words, which show that Needham’s and Leach’s rejection of the notion of kinship and their criticism of all general theories did not at the time mean a death sentence for kinship studies but the declaration, in deliberately excessive and gratifying terms, not that the study of kinship should be halted but that it should be conducted on different bases, not stopping at terminologies but going on to the links between kinship and economy, power, religion, etc.

This was no longer the case fifteen years later with the publication of David Schneider’s book Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984).32 For many, this appeared to be the final blow to the majestic edifice of kinship writings. After having described how, twenty years earlier, he had analyzed the kin system of the Yap Islanders (in Micronesia), where he had begun his fieldwork, Schneider launched into a radical self-critique of his early writings and proposed another interpretation of the same data, and particularly of the basic unit of Yap society, the tabineau. Previously he had defined it as an extended patrilocal family combined with a matrilineal kinship system. In his second version, Schneider stressed that it seemed to him that, for the Yap Islanders, what bound together the members of a tabineau was not kinship but actual cooperation in working the same piece of land, and that it was this alone which founded an individual’s right to the land. In sum, he no longer regarded the tabineau as a kin group or Yap society as kin based, but as being based on other relations (economic) and other values (religious and economic). Schneider’s auto-critique concurred with Leach’s position on kinship in Pul Elya. In spite of this convergence, though, Schneider merely mentioned it in passing, without dwelling on it, and aimed a first criticism at ‘almost all anthropologists’ who had gone before (and against himself in his former life): that of having abusively posed the principle that kinship was a universally recognized basic value in all societies. This was the very opposite of Lévi-Strauss’ view.

Schneider nevertheless decided to go on and sift through the principal definitions of kinship from Morgan to Scheffler and Lounsbury. When he had finished, he felt entitled to say that all studies on kinship, from Morgan on, had been explicitly or implicitly based on the same ethnocentric definition. For Europeans and Euro-Americans,33 kinship concerns essentially procreation, the reproduction of human beings. This reproduction is primarily a biological process, and therefore the genealogical ties between individuals are biological ties, ‘blood’ ties. For Westerners, the nuclear family is the place where the parents’ blood mingles in and is shared by the children. Finally he deemed that anthropological theories reflect the Western idea – found equally in Malinowski, Meyer Fortes or Scheffler – that, whatever cultural values and social attributes may be associated with these genealogical ties in a given society, there lies at the heart of all kinship systems a universal genealogical structure that is inescapable and indissoluble, which proceeds from the nuclear family. It is from this structure, regarded as the core of ‘primary’ kinship relations, that, by the twofold process of direct extension and unilateral reinterpretation, all of the other kin relations are derived.34 Schneider’s general conclusion that ‘the study of kinship derives directly and practically unaltered from the ethnoepistemology of European culture . . . [that] Blood is presumably Thicker than Water’35 became a pseudo-scientific postulate which he called ‘the Doctrine of the Genealogical Unity of Mankind’.36 This postulate, he conjectured, was the basis of the genealogical method, perfected by Morgan, Rivers and others, that all field anthropologists used to explore the kinship system in the society they had chosen to study. This being the case, all were doomed to failure, since, because they were using a method that incorporated Western cultural prejudices assumed to be universal sociological truths, their work could only produce results that confirmed these universal truths.

For Schneider there was only one conclusion, and it was simple and clear: from Morgan onward, kinship studies had simply gone in circles, and the objective analysis of kinship had not yet truly begun.

In the course of the present work, I will examine and reply to these criticisms one by one. Some are simply inadmissible. But I cannot pass over in silence the fact that numerous anthropologists had shown, well before Schneider, that in one or another society the kin terms people use to refer to those they regard as relatives do not correspond to ‘real’ genealogical ties but to relations between categories of individuals considered to be in the same social relationship to each other. Durkheim had already noted as much concerning Australian Aboriginal peoples – for which Schneider praised him while reproaching him for not having sought to show how this social relationship was precisely a kinship relation rather than something else. Many others had followed in Durkheim’s steps, such as Hocart, Leach and Dumont, whom Schneider does not cite.

Moreover, even in societies where informants emphasize genealogical ties between individuals, it is hard, if one takes cultural representations of procreation seriously, to reduce these genealogical ties to biological ones as they are understood in European culture, in other words, as relations that entail the sharing and mingling of the parents’ blood. Furthermore it is widely accepted that cultural representations of the role of blood in making babies are a matter not of biology (as an experimental science) but of ideology.

There is nothing mechanical about culture. It suffices to cite societies where the ‘descent rule’, as anthropologists say, is patrilineal and yet no mention is made of the possible role of sperm or blood in making a child. Furthermore, while it is true that the presence of an Iroquois-type terminology in certain societies in Africa, Oceania and America says nothing about how each of them sees the process of conceiving a child and therefore how they represent what we call motherhood, fatherhood, etc., it remains to be explained why so many societies having different cultures use kinship terminologies whose formal structure is similar. This point, too, Schneider passed over in silence, seeking as he was to imprison his colleagues in a false syllogism. Starting, on the one hand, from the real fact that one never knows in advance what kinship is in a non-European society and, on the other hand, from the fact that we know that Europeans use kinship as a set of biological and social relations which link individuals of the two sexes in the process of reproducing life and the succession of generations, Schneider contended that trying to discover how other societies thought of this process always came down to finding in others that which one already had in oneself and had transported to the other society. Anthropologists would thus merely be ‘discovering’ in other cultures pretexts for erecting mirrors in which their own image would be reflected infinitely, but garbed in the features of the other.

In sum, if for Leach and Needham the term ‘kinship’ finally did not designate a distinct class of facts or any distinct type of theory, they had nevertheless continued to study the facts of kinship and attempted to theorize them. Schneider, on the other hand, considered that there was indeed such a thing as kinship, but only in Western societies. Or more precisely, that it might exist in other societies, but that one could not postulate this existence and that any attempt to discover it was bound to fail if one counted on the genealogical-survey method. After Schneider, was it still worth spending even one hour on kinship?

In reality things did not turn out as Schneider had predicted. Kinship had, in the meantime, become entangled with other issues and had emigrated to other sites, where its object had begun to be reshaped and enriched. Anthropologists had, for example, become increasingly interested in gender relations and in the questions of the form and foundations of male or female powers in the private and public spheres. Kinship was also increasingly being seen no longer as a separate area but as an aspect of the global process of social reproduction. Or again, at the other pole from this global approach but in complement to it, kin ties were being considered as a part of the process of constructing the person, the self.

By shifting sites in this way, the study of kinship had finally deserted those places where it had been running in circles for decades, exhausting itself in an attempt to answer false questions to which Leach, Needham and also Schneider had the merit of drawing attention. Since the 1980s, almost no one has proposed to deduce the structure of a society from the formal analysis of its kin terminology. And vice versa, no one now explains the presence of a given kinship terminology by the existence of a particular mode of production or political system.

So the predicted death has not occurred! And, taking a closer look, we see that today’s preferred topics of study (construction of the person, gender relations, kinship in the global functioning of a society, etc.) are not really new. What is new is first of all that these topics have moved to the forefront of research concerns. The explanation does not lie in scientific reasons alone, but also in what is going on in our societies, for example, the social struggles and pressures for greater gender equality. New, too, is the fact that in our search for answers we can no longer rely on notions that were only recently still taken for granted, such as the idea that so-called ‘primitive’ societies are ‘kin based’ or that the family is the basis of society. To these reasons we must add the fact that, in the present context of the fast-growing globalization of the capitalist economy and the inclusion of all societies in this world system, the process of the overall reproduction of each local society rests less and less on that society’s own bases, so that the kinship relations that may once have played an important role in this process now contribute increasingly less to the social reproduction of its groups and individuals.

The conclusion to be drawn from this brief overview of the transformations in kinship studies on the ground and in theory seems clear. Anthropology cannot exist as a scientific discipline unless it constantly submits its concepts, its methods and its findings to criticism and criticizes them itself, always placing this self-examination in historical context, taking in not only the history of anthropology and the social sciences, but also the history of the societies in which anthropologists learned their trade as well as that of the societies in which they later exercised it.

It is in this perspective that I am now going to revisit my own work, in order to show how I studied kinship in the field, among the Baruya, a society in New Guinea where I lived and worked for a total of more than seven years between 1967 and 1988.