The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
and between the groups they form is not enough to make a society, in the sense of a territorial group that exists and must reproduce itself as a whole, that represents itself to itself as a whole and acts as such at the political-religious level. In sum, no one is obliged to conclude, after having reconstructed genealogies, that kinship is the universal basis of societies that have no classes or castes. No one is compelled to overrate the importance of kinship and its real functions in the production and reproduction of a given society. On this point I agree with Schneider. But I go further, for I maintain that there is no such thing as kin-based societies, on the one hand, and, on the other, societies based on other kinds of social relations – classes, for instance. To my mind, no society as a social group that presents itself to its members as a whole and is reproduced as such by them can be kin based. That kinship is the basis of societies is an axiom of social anthropology that does not seem to me to have been demonstrated and which I now reject after having accepted it for years.
To conclude this chapter, I would like to step back from the Baruya and place their case in a broader context. We have seen how a young anthropologist had no difficulty discovering that the Baruya’s kinship terminology belongs to what is called the Iroquois type. Of course, the Baruya were unaware of this, and their ignorance had no effect on the way they led their lives. They lived their relationships as they found them, striving to reproduce them if it suited them; but to compare their relationships with those existing in other societies, about which they ignored everything down to their very existence, would have been meaningless to them.
And yet the fact that a number of societies with very different languages, cultures and structures never having had any historical contact with each other possess kinship terminologies with the same structure raises a whole series of questions. What is an Iroquois-type terminology? How many variants of this type are there? Where in the world are other examples found? Is there a connection between this type of terminology and the Baruya marriage rule of direct ‘sister’ exchange? Is there a connection between this type of terminology and the existence, in Baruya society, of a patrilateral descent principle? The Iroquois that Morgan studied followed a different rule, in which descent was calculated through the female line, thus a matrilineal principle. Furthermore, if the Baruya recognize themselves as being the son or daughter of a father and a mother, and thus represent themselves as being in a bilateral relationship of filiation with their paternal and maternal kin, what is the significance of favouring the ties that go through the men, starting from a common ancestor, to constitute the kin groups we have called lineages and, with more reserve, clans? Finally, is it because this descent rule is patrilineal and the children belong to their father’s lineage that the Baruya give so much importance to sperm in their representations of child conception? And yet we know that there are societies where the kinship terminology is of the Iroquois type and descent reckoning is patrilineal and which nevertheless do not hold sperm to be of much importance, for instance the Paici of New Caledonia. Nor should we forget that, for the Baruya, the husband’s sperm is not enough to make a child, since the Sun must intervene to complete its formation in the mother’s womb. But the Sun is a male power, which acts as a father to all Baruya, whatever their lineage.
In short, these questions take us to another level, that of the theoretical analysis of the field data, an analysis that can be carried out only by comparing the Baruya’s ways of living and thinking with those found in other human groups that are close or distant over space or in time. It is not that the Baruya do not compare their own ways of doing and thinking with those of their close or more remote neighbours – and, since 1951, with those of Europeans – but they do this by enumerating the differences, without being able actually to explain the reasons, except to say: this is how it’s been for a very long time and the ancestors (and the gods) of the various groups are the ones who made it so.
What makes the difference between the spontaneous empirical comparisons everyone can make with nearby societies and the comparisons that anthropologists construct are, on the one hand, the terms of comparison and, on the other, the breadth and diversity of the selection of cases to be compared. For when we compare Baruya kinship terminology with the neighbouring systems, we are comparing not only vocabularies but also sets of relationships engendered by a certain number of principles (descent, marriage, etc.), which structure a set of kin terms. This structure defines the system as belonging to a type, usually already identified (Iroquois, Dravidian, Sudanese, etc.). One can also compare the Baruya with other examples of the same Iroquois-type terminology found in New Guinea, America or Oceania, in societies the Baruya have never heard of. But a kinship terminology is a logical-linguistic set of some thirty words, on average, whose content is of a different order of abstraction than the Baruya representations of, say, the process of making a baby and the role played by the father, mother and Sun. This set of representations can in turn be compared with those that have been worked out in other societies, nearby or far away, with various kinship systems.
Although the comparison of representations of how a baby is made is every bit as ‘constructed’ as the comparison of terminologies, the results do not put the Baruya in as vast a category as that of Iroquois-type terminologies, but into a smaller set; that of patrilineal societies stressing the primary role of sperm. But, if we add the role of the Sun, the Baruya’s cultural singularity shifts to the fore and gives them a specific identity, though not one that is unique, since six or seven of their neighbours – who speak the same language and initiate their boys in the same way – also see the roles of sperm and the Sun in a like manner. But other groups – to the west and the south of the Baruya and their neighbours and who belong to the same big linguistic group, such as the Ankave – lay the stress not on sperm but on menstrual blood, do not go in for ritual homosexuality, and do not give the same importance to the Sun.32 Why?
In short, the global comparison of societies is clearly not a good way to start. The analysis needs to deconstruct the social relations in a society before attempting to place them in the overall dynamic configuration from which they were detached in an abstract fashion. This global configuration exists in all societies, since it is by reproducing it that societies reproduce themselves and ensure their historical existence. To be capable of creating an analytical reconstruction of these various global configurations that make each society singular is the most ambitious aim of the social sciences, of which anthropology is but one particular discipline. Successes along this path are few and far between, and a high degree of methodological rigour and prudence are called for if one wants the comparison between societies taken as a whole, defined by a few structures and values judged to be characteristic of their functioning and identity, to have any true meaning for science.
I will therefore not be comparing societies ‘globally’ in the following chapters. These caveats having been stated, I will try briefly to describe the components of the domain of social life that anthropology designates by the term ‘kinship’. But first I will recapitulate what I have learned in terms of theory and methods from my fieldwork about the nature of kinship relations and their role in the Baruya society of New Guinea.
The first lesson is that there is no assurance of carrying out a successful study of kinship if one starts by trying to resolve the questions this poses, because kinship is closely bound up with all sorts of practices and areas of life that may be much more important to the anthropologist than to the actors themselves.
The second lesson is that systematically recording genealogies does not mean that one has yielded to a genealogical vision of kinship. The Baruya themselves make a distinction between classificatory kinship and kin ties based on genealogical links. It must therefore be concluded that kinship categories are broader than genealogies without being completely separate.
The third lesson is that making a systematic survey of genealogies does not mean that one has in mind the Western concepts of consanguinity. As soon as one works from the local ideas about procreation, the conception of a child and its development in its mother’s body, and so on, one is no longer reproducing the Western concept of consanguinity as shared blood. In one society, the blood will come from the father, as will the bones; in another, the bones will come from the father and the blood from the mother. All one can say is that, in all societies, individuals have paternal and maternal kin. But that in no way dictates the content of the concepts of fatherhood, motherhood, marriage and alliance in a given society.
The