The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
rapidly identifying Baruya kinship terminology as a variety of the Iroquois type. This shows that the conceptual findings of scientific inquiry into the forms of organization of human societies and their attendant cultural representations do not coincide with the actors’ own experience; that is to say, with their own awareness of themselves and their institutions. From the moment one discovers that Baruya kinship terminology is a variety of the Iroquois type, a problem arises that is not part of the Baruya’s experience, namely: where, on the face of the earth, do we find societies using the same terminology, despite the fact that there is no historical record of contact between the groups in question? Which in turn raises other questions: can we understand, for example, the reasons why, in places so far apart and at such different times in history, terminologies having the same formal structure appear?
Fifth lesson: Baruya kinship terminology tells us nothing about the descent rule they have adopted to manage their kin ties. The Baruya principle is patrilineal, whereas descent reckoning among the Iroquois, who gave their name to the terminology, is matrilineal. There is, therefore, no necessary tie between kinship terminology and descent rule. This needs explaining.
Sixth lesson: Do the Baruya have clans? No, if we regard exogamy as a constituent principle of the existence of a clan; yes, if a clan is merely a group that sees itself as having a political-ritual identity based on a unilineal descent principle without this necessarily making it exogamous. Finally, we have seen that in the same society two types of exchange can be used to establish a marriage alliance. The Baruya exchange either a woman for a woman or wealth for a woman. According to the first rule, they conform to the category of elementary kinship structures; according to the second, they have already entered the realm of complex structures. We must ‘think’ this duality and identify in a more global manner how it appears in other contexts.
Seventh lesson: Taking several paths through some complex realities, we have come to the conclusion that kinship is not the basis of Baruya society. But we went further and affirmed more generally that, to exist as such, a society must exist as a whole that unites all of the groups that form it and at the same time encompasses them, because this whole lies at another level, the level of political-religious relations, which cement its unity in a largely (for us) imaginary and symbolic manner and ensure, by means that are not all imaginary or symbolic (e.g. warfare, access to hunting grounds, etc.), its overall reproduction. Which raises the question of the axiom reiterated throughout the past by most anthropologists, namely, that ‘primitive societies’, in other words, societies without class or caste structures, are ‘kin based’. This axiom becomes meaningless if kinship is never enough to make a set of kin groups into a society.
Eighth and last lesson, which is also important: Throughout our analysis of Baruya kinship relations, we have seen that these relationships are subject to the dynamics of the power relations in this society. And we have also seen that gender relations are a privileged site of the articulation between kinship and power. This appeared in the representations of male and female bodily substances – as well as in numerous other social and cultural facts that implement and illustrate the forms and mechanics of the domination of one sex over the other, in the present case of men over women. It is therefore not possible to understand kinship relations without analyzing the place occupied by men and women, and in a broader perspective the social attributes attaching to each, and which make them different genders.
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)