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CHAPTER TWO

The Components of Kinship

The following pages are intended to provide the non-specialist with a few basic indications of the diversity of the forms and content of kinship. It will also give me the occasion to clarify my position on certain basic problems, such as whether ‘the exchange of women by men’ (and for men) is indeed the universal basis of all kinship systems, as Lévi-Strauss asserted in 1945. I will also discuss recent progress made in the analysis of certain kinship systems – Dravidian and Iroquois – which once again raises the question of the reversibility or non-reversibility of transformations of kinship systems over the course of their historical evolution. Finally, I will take the opportunity to outline the large blank areas that it would be useful to explore, for example: how the Sudanese and Hawaiian systems work. I will temporarily leave to one side other questions, such as the relationship between the body, kinship and power or the foundations of the incest taboo, which will be dealt with in later chapters.

Let us therefore attempt an overview of the domains of kinship by means of a rapid inventory of its components, letting the Baruya guide us. What was at issue, for the Baruya and for ourselves, when together we analyzed what kin ties were for them? The existence of social groups made up of men and women claiming to descend – through the male line exclusively – from one or several common ancestors. The members of these ‘patrilineal descent’ groups were dispersed among the different Baruya villages, with the married men usually continuing to live with their father and their brothers while, the women left their family to go with their husband. These groups had different names, which gave their members a particular identity: Andavakia, Bakia and so on. The fact that a person belonged to one group or to another was due to birth or to adoption by the family of one of the married men in the group. Families – whether monogamous or polygamous – thus presented themselves as social groups, distinct from descent groups, from lineages and from clans but directly tied to lineages, since the families in question were those of married male members of these lineages and clans.

Within these families, however, the children are sons and daughters of both their father and their mother, and these bilateral ties of filiation link them to both their paternal and their maternal kin. It is the family that initially socializes the children and ensures the production of the bulk of the individuals’ means of subsistence, and it is in the family setting that the consumption takes place. Moreover, the Baruya use separate terms for family (kuminidaka) and descent group (navaalyara or yisavaa) (see Chapter 1). It is the descent groups and not the families that hold in common growing lands and hunting territories, names and functions. At birth men and women alike receive names that were already carried by their ancestors. Only men inherit land, however. And some of them, the eldest sons of the masters of the initiations, inherit the formulae and sacred objects, which are lineage property; if the sons prove capable, they succeed their fathers in taking responsibility for part of the male initiation rites.

In the family as in the lineage, authority is exercised primarily by the men, and, within the same generation, by the older brother over his younger brothers and over all his sisters, including those older than he. The members of a descent group generally feel a duty of solidarity toward each other when it comes to finding a spouse for the young men and avenging a murder or a grave offence affecting one of their group. But in reality, in a good number of cases, owing to marriage with women from different lineages, men of a same lineage may take sides, each going to the aid of his own affines and therefore sometimes finding themselves fighting with other group members.

The first basic components of the kinship domain thus encompass modes of descent and descent groups, filiation, the family, residence, and material and immaterial realities that are inherited or transmitted from one generation to the next. They also include marriage rules and authorized alliances between individuals and between the descent groups to which they belong. The Baruya had two types of such rules: positive and even prescriptive, which made the exchange of women between lineages the obligatory form of marriage within the tribe; and negative, which forbid men of the same generation taking a wife in their mother’s lineage and thus repeating their father’s marriage, or two brothers taking a wife in the same lineage. And, of course, they were forbidden to marry their real or their classificatory sisters, or at least not the closest classificatory sisters, since Baruya marry women from their clan who may be geographically or genealogically distant. But as I have pointed out, a Baruya can marry his mother’s sister’s daughter, who is a ‘sister’ for him. This is a second fundamental component of kinship: it includes marriage rules, alliance strategies, prohibition of incest (and once again residence after marriage, the family and the lineage).

All of the relationships a Baruya man or woman entertains with the members of his or her birth or adoptive family, with the members of his or her lineage, with direct affines as well as with the affines of his or her consanguines (e.g. a brother’s wife’s brother) and with the consanguines of affines (e.g. the brother-in-law’s brother) are designated by terms that often subsume several of these ties (e.g. ‘father’ is used for father’s brothers as well, etc.). The set of terms allowing a Baruya speaker to address other persons (address terms) while taking into account their kin ties, or to express the relations that link them with others, or that link other Baruya with each other (reference terms), are a local variety of a type of terminology identified a long time ago and known as the Iroquois type.

Another basic ingredient of the kinship domain is thus the existence of a particular vocabulary which allows an individual (Ego), defined by his or her sex, to address other individuals who are related in various ways, or to describe the kin ties that bind individuals, who may or may not be personally related to the speaker (e.g. X is the migwe, cross cousin, of Y because his father A married . . . and so on).

But I ran into kinship once again when I asked the Baruya to explain what a child is, how they represented the process of its conception, the man’s role (the father), the woman’s role (the mother) and the Sun’s role in forming the child that the woman was going to bring into the world. Such representations exist in every society. And they bear the mark of their kinship systems (patrilineal, matrilineal, etc.) as well as that of the political and economic systems that determine relations (usually unequal) between individuals according to gender, clan, caste, religion, etc. Finally, investigating kinship also meant identifying the rights and duties of those who regard themselves as kin of a child born to or adopted into their group, and their respective responsibilities in its education and transformation from a child into a responsible adult. And of course this includes the child’s reciprocal duties and rights with regard to the various categories of people related to it.

It is by bringing together all of these factors that we can finally understand what it means to be a parent, a relative or a child in a given society, to be a given kind of relative and a given kind of child, and thus what is covered in other societies by what we designate by the terms ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘siblings’, ‘affines’, etc.

In sum, analyzing the domain of kinship in a society amounts to exploring and reconstructing the ties between the following aspects of the society’s organization:

(1)The modes of descent reckoning and the groups they engender; filiation; material and immaterial realities that are inherited and transmitted from one generation to the next; and family and residence.

(2)Marriage rules and alliance strategies; the incest taboo (and once again residence after marriage, family, lineage, etc.) (But we must be careful here: there are societies in which there is no marriage [the Na of Yunnan] or where it is only simulated [the Nyar in India].)

(3)Representations of what a child is, of the process of the child’s conception, of its development and of what is meant in different cultures by what we designate by the words ‘fatherhood’, ‘motherhood’, ‘consanguinity’, ‘affinity’, as well as the rights and duties that bind various kinds of kin.

Like all other social relations, kinship relations do not exist purely between individuals (and between the groups to which they belong – family, lineage, household, caste, etc.), they also and at the same time exist within the individuals. One is defined as the son or daughter of . . . as the (real or classificatory) father or mother of . . . These ties are stamped into people’s very being, into their consciousness and their sexed body. For to be born a Baruya man or woman is to know that one’s body has been made and nourished in one’s mother’s womb by one’s father’s sperm and that it was then completed by the Sun before the spirit of an ancestor from the father’s lineage entered the body and took possession.

It is for this reason that it is impossible fully to understand the nature and workings of kinship relations by analyzing them once they have been detached, disjoined from the ways they are thought and experienced by those who were born to these relations and (more or less) compelled in the course of their existence to take them on and reproduce them. It is for this reason, too, that the field of kinship in any society is marked out by two series of representations. On the one hand, there is a vocabulary of some thirty words on average, learned and known by all members of the society, which enable each person, according to his or her sex and generation, to situate all others with respect to him- or herself or with respect to others within the types of kinship relations existing in the society and which have their own logic. X is my migwe aounie – my cross cousin (migwe) on the breast (aounie) side, that is to say, my mother’s side. Y is so-and-so’s younger brother, and so on. At the other pole are those representations that a society has of what a child is, of how it is conceived, of what it receives from the father, from the mother or from the ancestors (and from which side), of what it will grow up to be if it is a boy or a girl, etc.

All of these representations work their way into the individual’s consciousness from infancy and delineate the cultural form of the intimate relationship the individual will have with him- or herself and with others. At the heart of the representations that delineate each person’s private relationship with him- or herself according to gender lie not only complementary gender relations, but also relations of authority and domination that work in favour of one of the two sexes, not only in the sphere of kinship but beyond, within the economic, political or religious relations between the groups and individuals that make up the society.

To sum up, let us say that, in the overwhelming majority of known societies, kinship relations arise from the implementation by individuals and by the groups to which they belong of principles commonly accepted in their society. These rules define whom it is possible or forbidden to marry and specify who the children born of the couple will belong to. In many but not all societies it is also possible to adopt children and even adults, and to treat them as full members of the adoptive family or clan. Polynesian societies and the Inuit engage intensely in the giving of children as gifts between families. Here, too, there are rules that determine the circumstances in which a kin group (family, lineage, household) can adopt someone and whom it can adopt.1

All of these rules prescribing what individuals can and cannot do and often what they should or should not do are the source of positive or negative ‘values’ attached to the actions of individuals and groups and to the social relations to which their actions give rise. Rules and values are mental (idéel)2 realities that are by no means an epiphenomenon of kinship relations but one of the conditions of their production. For in a society one cannot get married without knowing what marriage is and whom, in this society, one is allowed or forbidden to marry. And once a marriage has taken place, what was formerly a mental condition now becomes an internal component.

Of course, every society has individuals who ignore in practice the (positive or negative) norms in use. Some even oppose them openly, often at their own peril. Contradictions between norms and practices obviously do not stem purely from individual decision, though they tend to multiply when a society undergoes rapid and deep changes that make it increasingly hard to reproduce the old structures. So it is today in certain Australian Aboriginal groups, where up to 25 per cent of marriages are ‘irregular’, in other words correspond to unions traditionally forbidden by their system. One of the reasons for this situation is the demographic collapse of these groups, which means that there are no longer enough permissible spouses in certain of the ‘sections’ into which Aboriginal society is divided. A number of men have therefore married women from their own section or from their own ‘moiety’, and who are therefore their ‘sisters’, thus breaking the incest taboo and the rule of exogamy on which their kinship system was based.

Such facts give us an opportunity to clarify an important point. All of the transformations that occur in a kinship system always (if the society continues to exist) lead to the establishment of another type of kinship relations, to the appearance of another kinship system. Changes in kinship never produce anything but more kinship; and kinship relations can never turn into, for example, caste or class relations. If this is true, we must therefore turn elsewhere to explain the emergence, around 4000 bce in the Near East and around 2000 bce in the New World, of the first societies differentiated into castes or classes, in which new institutions were to appear – such as various forms of centralized power, chiefdoms, states and empires.

Before the appearance of these new forms of power, all human societies were probably organized according to combinations of different types of kinship relations with different kinds of political-religious relations, different from kinship relations but directly articulated with and encompassing them. It is this direct articulation that disappears, more or less rapidly and more or less completely, with the development of caste- and class-based societies. India is an example of a single political-religious system in which the system of castes is articulated and coexists with three types of kinship systems: Indo-European in northern India, Munda3 in central India, and Dravidian in the South.4

KINSHIP, POWER AND WEALTH

I will end this overview with a few words about the relationship between kin ties, power(s) and wealth. In many societies, concluding a marriage alliance between two groups gives rise to transfers of wealth and services, sometimes even political and/or religious titles, between wife-givers and wife-takers. The young couple may receive a dowry from their respective families, or the groom’s family may pay bridewealth to the family of the bride, or, in the event that two women exchange brothers (as among the Rhades of Vietnam5 or the Tetum of Timor6), the woman’s family may pay the sisters of the future husband a ‘groomprice’. In short, the establishment of a matrimonial alliance is the occasion for transfers of wealth – in the form of cattle, jewellery, and sometimes land or titles – which give rights in persons and are often followed by counter-gifts in various proportions. Generally speaking, however, the greatest flow of wealth, functions, titles and crests, and knowledge, circulates between ascending and descending generations along certain kin ties and following rules that regulate the procedures of inheritance and succession.

Several remarks are called for here. All of these titles, these functions, this knowledge, this wealth, circulate in the form of gifts that always have a personal character because establishing new kinship relations or reproducing old ones always means entering into relationships that subsequently bind the individuals or the groups of individuals involved, even if the personal character of these bonds varies with the distance that separates the parties. These gifts are not simply a demonstration of generosity on the part of the givers, they are part of the obligations incumbent on them (and on the groups to which they belong) because they are or wish to become kin.

In short, once they have entered the universe of kinship, this wealth, this knowledge, these functions or titles, however they may have been acquired, circulate along relations of descent or alliance as gifts, unilateral gifts with no possible or expected reciprocation, or as gifts followed by counter-gifts, as reciprocal gifts. Which leads us to another important point. Generally speaking, the exchanges that occur within the domain of kinship and in the name of kinship do not come under the heading of commercial exchanges and do not obey market logic. This can give rise to idealization of kin ties in societies where the bulk of exchanges have become impersonal and are carried out through commercial relations. In contemporary Western societies, the relationship between money and kinship is ambiguous if not a subject of conflict. There are some relatives from whom you do not dare buy anything because they will never accept payment, and this creates a debt that is hard to live with. There are those who give you a good deal ‘because you’re a relative’. There are some who never give you a ‘break’ and whom you secretly reproach for treating you like a stranger, in other words like non-kin. These are relatives who do not feel ‘obligated’ to do something for you, even though you are a relative. For in all societies, kin ties, or at least the closest ties, are a source of obligations and debt – and are lived as such.

A few concluding remarks on the relationship between kin ties and political-religious powers, and with the production of the material conditions of existence and wealth. Because political and/or religious functions come into the possession of certain kin groups (family, lineage, household) and are transmitted to persons occupying a certain position within the kinship relations that structure these groups (from father to eldest or youngest son, from maternal uncle to nephew, etc.), the perpetuation of these groups – in other words the reproduction of the kinship relations that allow them to exist – is one of the major conditions for the reproduction of the political-religious system, which in turn enables the society to exist as a whole. It is important to remember here that, even though these functions reside within kin groups, this does not mean they are kinship relations. If we look at all of the functions and titles, which are always unequally distributed among kin groups – as is the case in Polynesian chiefdoms such as Tonga – we see that taken together they constitute a global system of political-religious relations obtaining between all local kin groups but which are not the same thing as the kinship relations that actually exist between these groups; on the contrary, the political-religious relations co-opt kinship relations and use them for their own reproduction.

It is the existence of this global system and the hierarchy between the various titles and functions that oblige or forbid various kin groups (household, clan, lineage) to contract a given type of alliance and that oblige men and women to marry within their status or to develop complex strategies to marry above their rank (in the hope of procuring a more elevated title). In such societies, certain kin groups (clans, houses) can disappear, others may lose their title, while yet others rise to a higher status; but these events merely change the place of the person within the system, they do not compromise its existence, quite the opposite.

Alongside ownership of titles and functions which are often not redistributed among all of the kin groups that make up a society but concern only a fraction of them (for example the eight Baruya clans that own the Kwaimatnie and cooperate in the initiation of the boys of all of the clans, including those that do not have sacred objects), there are other forms of property: horticultural lands, hunting or fishing grounds, tools and weapons. Owning these forms of property in combination with the labour and know-how of the members of the kin groups (and/or their dependents, clients, servants, slaves, etc.) enables these groups to produce the bulk (or a significant portion) of their material means of existence, in other words both their means of subsistence and the share of material wealth they need to exchange or redistribute on the occasion of weddings or funerals, or which will be offered to the gods, or paid as tribute to the chief or as taxes to the state.

In short, in many societies, kin groups are at the same time units of production, of redistribution, of consumption and of exchange of means of subsistence and wealth. Depending on the society – and I will give some examples below – land can be owned in common by a lineage while being redistributed for use by the families of the lineage, who work it separately. Sometimes each of these families keeps their harvest in their own silo, sometimes they gather their harvests into a common silo placed under the authority of the lineage elders, who set aside the portion to be used as seed the next year and then, each day, mete out to each family the amount it needs.7 In short, on the basis of the social division of labour between the sexes and generations, which is not itself part of kinship, the production and the redistribution of the means of subsistence and wealth are carried out by persons occupying different positions in the relations that structure their kin group.

The authority wielded over those involved in the work process or in the redistribution of subsistence goods or wealth is identical to that found in the kinship relations, which thus take on directly the functions of social relations organizing production. The redistribution and the consumption of the material conditions of existence in these contexts, and the material tasks necessary to the existence and the reproduction of the kin group, thus appear as obligations imposed on its members by their kin ties, as attributes of kinship relations. It is also an obligation connected with kinship that compels the elder men of a lineage to collect the bridewealth (pigs, bird-of-paradise feathers, money) that will enable one of their young men to marry when he comes of age. Once again, kinship appears as a universe of personal ties – ties of solidarity and sharing, but also of dependence and authority – between the individuals that comprise the group, not only those born to the group but also those who have entered it through adoption or marriage.

A remark is necessary concerning economic relations and functions as compared to political-religious functions and relations. The role of the economy and its connections with kinship relations are not the same in societies without castes or classes and in societies where these exist. In the first case, there is no, or only a limited, social division of labour. In the second case, in caste-based societies for example, everything that serves material reproduction (means of subsistence, wealth, services) is produced in these societies by different social groups, each of which is specialized in the production of certain products (blacksmiths, farmers, fishers) or certain services (barbers, gravediggers, etc.).

Alongside these castes whose labour contributes directly to the production of goods and services are others that do not participate in these various work processes but control them socially and receive a share of the product, either because they own the land that the others cultivate or because they exercise religious or political-military functions, and a share of what is produced is allotted them so that they may devote all their time to the exercise of their function. In these societies, of which India is the classic example, each kin group produces whatever its caste is supposed to produce and receives from others the goods and services owed it in exchange. In this case, the economy is a global system that binds together all castes and thereby the kin groups that compose them. No kin group can therefore be materially self-sufficient, if one understands by material conditions of existence much more than the mere means of subsistence. Such a global system, without excluding the use of money and the development of commercial exchanges, operates basically according to other rules than those of the market.8

In contemporary Western societies, where the capitalist economy rests on the mass production of goods and services bought and sold as commodities, where there is a much more complex social division of labour than in caste-based societies (which rested more on agriculture than on industry), and where a person’s status and activity are not definitively settled at birth since there are social classes of owners and non-owners of the means of production and exchange whose access is theoretically open, the economy also constitutes a global system that links all the groups in the society, all the families and all the individuals, through the market (or rather markets – of labour, of industrial products, of money, etc.). Each person must derive the bulk of his means of social existence from whatever he sells or buys in the marketplace. In this context, with the exception of certain sectors such as agriculture, crafts and (small) businesses, families no longer function as production units but rather as consumption units. For those who own the principal means of production and exchange, by virtue of which they intervene in various sectors of the capitalist system, the family is a unit of wealth accumulation, of asset management and sometimes, more rarely, of the direct management of a firm producing goods or services.

In contrast, in societies where there is no social division of labour, or if there is then it concerns only the production of certain goods or certain services, the economy does not function as a global system linking together in their production and distribution all of the kin groups that compose a society whose sovereignty over a territory, its resources and the men and women living there is known (if not recognized) by the neighbouring groups. In such societies, of which the Baruya are an example, the economic activities of production, redistribution and consumption of goods and services remain local and separate, and do not cause kin groups to depend directly and daily on each other in order to reproduce themselves. Nevertheless their material cooperation is necessary and expected in times of war, when most of the men are away fighting and the women cannot venture unaccompanied to their gardens to gather what they need to feed their family and their pigs. This is also the case when it comes time for the initiations, which run for weeks and require big gardens to be planted in advance with a view to liberally feeding the hundreds of guests. But these are exceptional circumstances, in which the economy is placed in the service of the reproduction of the society as a whole, in the service of the social relations that, precisely, encompass all kin groups and cause them to exist within this whole.

In conclusion, let me say that it is clear that kinship is not only about establishing ties of alliance and descent between individuals and between the groups to which they belong. Other realities – material, political, religious – reside within kinship relations and are reproduced along with them. These realities are so many stakes which, depending on circumstances, bring together or divide those who recognize each other as being closely or less closely related. It is not enough to have tender memories of sharing the maternal breast to keep brother from turning against brother or daughter against mother. The passion for power and wealth break ties, sweep away the feelings and obligations that ‘should’ exist between family members.9

And it is because all kinds of social relations that do not come down to kinship relations also reside in them and are reproduced in part along with them that it is impossible to know in advance the importance of kinship in the workings of any given society at any given period. Any general claim concerning the real nature and importance of kinship in society is meaningless.10 And going even further, for a peasant without anything to transmit and a lord who has titles, lands and a glorious genealogy to hand on, kinship can have neither the same meaning nor the same importance, even if both use identical kin terms.

We will now look at each of the four blocks of facts and concepts that make up the field of kinship, both on the ground and in theory – filiation and descent, alliance, residence, and kinship terminologies. These will be the subjects of the next four chapters.