The Metamorphoses of Kinship - Maurice Godelier

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      The Mandak and the Barok are matrilineal societies divided into two exogamous moieties each of which has a number of matriclans and matrilineages which own lands, rivers, sacred emergence sites and rights in the making of the carved cult objects known as malanggan. These goods were regarded as ‘food’ that each clan gave in abundance to each of its members and which were an extension of the food received from the mother while in the uterus. Each matriclan has an enclosure where the men of the clan sleep and a burial site for all of the clan members, both men and women. The clan, the male enclosure and the burial site are, in the Mandaks’ minds, a sort of vast maternal womb, which contains and nourishes its members and then receives them when they die.

      In certain circumstances, when a matrilineage that is short of land wanted to acquire some of the clan territory of a man who had married one of the women of the lineage or when a woman cut off from her clan and living on her husband’s lands was widowed and sought to ensure herself and her descendants the right to go on living in the village she should have left after her husband’s death, in both cases the man’s youngest child was beaten to death at the funeral by his maternal uncle, ‘who then took the child’s body to the male enclosure of the paternal lineage and placed it in the tomb where the father’s corpse had been laid’.58 The sacrificed child was supposed to live a second imaginary and symbolic gestation in the same ‘maternal container’ that gave birth to its father. The child was thereby ‘reborn’ in death as a member of its paternal matrilineage and automatically became the owner of a usage right in the lands of this lineage. At the same time, this right extended to the child’s mother and to her descendants. Paradoxically, it was the son who came to belong to a new lineage after death and transmitted the belonging to his mother and brothers, thus re-engendering them, as it were, in a different lineage from that of their birth. One can measure the imaginary character of all of these transformations, but also the fundamental social importance in this society of a reassignment of kinship acquired in this instance at the cost of child sacrifice.

      In other cases, instead of sacrificing one of its children, a lineage desirous of acquiring permanent rights in pieces of another clan’s territory would pay a very large compensation in pigs and other valuables. Wealth was substituted for a life, for life, which is the principle of all systems in which women are not exchanged for women or (which also happens) men for men.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      Alliance and Residence

      (Second and Third Components)

      ALLIANCE: FORMS AND RULES

      With the analysis of alliances and marriage we enter another zone of scientific turbulence induced by the publication, in 1949, of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Structures élémentaires de la parenté. Taking the opposite stand from Radcliffe-Brown’s then-dominant thesis, which maintained that descent was the essence of kinship, Lévi-Strauss asserted that, on the contrary, kinship was based on alliance, since, owing to the universal taboo on incest, no descent group, no family, could perpetuate itself alone; all were compelled to contract alliances in order to reproduce themselves. And for Lévi-Strauss, alliance meant that men exchanged women from their own group, whom they were forbidden to marry.

      In short, for Lévi-Strauss, if alliance takes precedence over descent, it is because kinship is basically exchange, and, more specifically, the exchange of women between and by groups of men.1

      We will not go into the foundations of the incest taboo at this time – these will be dealt with later – but merely recall the explanation proposed by Lévi-Strauss in the following passage, which is more than a theory of kinship, since, according to the author, with the incest taboo we are dealing with the very origins of human society, with the decisive moment when humans extracted themselves from the state of nature and entered the state of culture:

      As Tylor has shown almost a century ago, the ultimate explanation is probably that mankind has understood very early that, in order to free itself from a wild struggle for existence, it was confronted with the very simple choice of ‘either marrying-out or being killed-out’. The alternative was between biological families living in juxtaposition and endeavoring to remain closed, self-perpetuating units, over-ridden by their fears, hatreds, and ignorances, and the systematic establishment, through the incest prohibition, of links of intermarriage between them, thus succeeding to build, out of the artificial bonds of affinity, a true human society, despite, and even in contradiction with, the isolating influence of consanguinity.2

      According to this approach, our distant ancestors did not originally live in society but in isolated biological families that perpetuated themselves through incest. The state of nature from which humankind had to extricate itself was that of animal-like promiscuity, of generalized incest. This had been Morgan’s vision. It was also that of Freud, in Totem and Taboo (1911), before going on to be adopted by Lévi-Strauss (1949).

      EXCHANGE OF WOMEN, OR LÉVI-STRAUSS’ COUP DE FORCE

      Let us take a closer look at Lévi-Strauss’ argument, which links the incest taboo, exogamy and the exchange of women by men in a single chain of cause and effect. He posits that the origin of the different marriage rules should be sought in the various forms that this exchange can take.

      But this line of reasoning actually conceals a real coup de force. For, logically speaking, the incest taboo (and, I repeat, we will not discuss here whether or not it is universal), admits simultaneously of three possible forms of exchange. Either men exchange women among themselves, or women exchange men among themselves, or men and women leave their families to create new ones, and in this case it cannot be said that a brother exchanges his sister or a sister her brother for a spouse. But that is not all. The latter form is no longer a direct exchange of persons but a matter of reciprocal gifts of men and women between families.

      Of course Lévi-Strauss was not unaware of the logical existence of these three possibilities, but he retained only one of them – the exchange of women by men – as the sole possibility that fitted reality. And he dismissed the other two as illusions that humans (women in particular) took pleasure in entertaining about themselves.

      The female reader, who may be shocked to see womankind treated as a commodity submitted to transactions between male operators, can easily find comfort in the assurance that the rules of the game would remain unchanged should it be decided to consider the men as being exchanged by women’s groups. As a matter of fact, some very few societies, of a highly developed matrilineal type, have to a limited extent attempted to express things that way. And both sexes can be comforted from a still different (but in that case slightly more complicated) formulation of the game, whereby it would be said that consanguineous groups consisting of both men and women are engaged in exchanging together bonds of relationships [kinship].3

      In point of fact, as we will see, there are societies where the women exchange men among themselves, and many more where families make each other mutual gifts of their sons and daughters. The rules are not the same in each case, even if the basic rule is always that of exchange. In all events, Lévi-Strauss posits male domination as the condition for the emergence of human kinship systems, and one that has continued to be so down to the present day. Male domination is a transhistoric, ontological fact that Lévi-Strauss links to the emergence of the human capacity for speech and symbolic thought. For, if he is to be believed, ‘the emergence of symbolic thought must have required that women, like words, should be things that were exchanged’.4

      Caught up in this logic of the ontological character of male domination, one of Lévi-Strauss’ closest disciples, Françoise Héritier, would even try to show, in L’Exercice de la parenté,5 that all kinship terminologies – even those of the Crow type, usually associated with societies having matrilineal descent groups in which sisters treat their brothers like sons – bear the mark of the ‘differential value of the sexes’, which rates the man more highly than the woman, and the brother more highly than the sister.

      Let me be clear. I do not deny that male domination exists; but unlike Claude Lévi-Strauss and Françoise Héritier, I do not think that it is a constituent principle of kinship. What is constituent, owing to the incest taboo, is the obligation to exchange. But exchanging women is

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