The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
line (or radically opposing descent and alliance), this system plays on all kinship relations in order to maintain a ‘house’ and conserve its name and its seat, in other words a rank, a crest and privileges in the political-religious system that encompasses all houses and ranks them with respect to all others within a territorial group which Boas calls a ‘tribe’. Furthermore, this system defines not only the rank and place of each house but the rank and place of each individual in the house according to birth order and sex.
Far from being merely a ‘language’, as Lévi-Strauss suggests,15 reiterating a thesis stated well before by Beattie16 and then by Leach,17 Tambiah18 and others, kinship relations actually function as relations of appropriation and transmission of the material and social conditions of the houses’ existence (fishing and hunting territories), and determine their capacity to amass the wealth that will be entered in the potlatches, the competition by means of gift-giving between numayn for titles or to legitimize their transmission. But these titles, ranks, crests and myths, the immaterial property of the ‘houses’, are not attributes of kinship. They do not exist physically as do the hunting and fishing territories that each house has appropriated. They exist socially as part of a political-religious system of titles and privileges distributed hierarchically, and therefore unequally, between the ‘houses’; and in virtue of this distribution they come to reside in the workings of the kinship relations that structure them. But, as I said, titles, ranks, crests and privileges are not attributes of kinship; they belong to a component of society that encompasses all kin groups and places them permanently at its service for its own reproduction: this part of society is the political-ritual system which enables the society to exist as a whole, and represents it as such. This political-religious system is therefore not to be confused with the worship each ‘house’ may pay its ancestors or the tutelary gods that afford support and protection. These acts of veneration of course apply to a universe of representations, myths and rites shared by all members of the society, but in themselves they are part of the specific identity of each ‘house’.
Lastly, there is one point that Claude Lévi-Strauss, Pierre Lamaison and the others who participated in the discussion on the notion of house neglected, and that is the fact that there are two major differences between the tribal aristocracy of the Kwakiutl ‘houses’ and the ‘houses’ of the feudal aristocracy of Europe and Japan. Kwakiutl society was self-governing, there was no state. In Europe and in Japan, there were various forms of state, of central power embodied in a royal or imperial house (in Japan it was the families of the emperor and the shogun). Among the Kwakiutl, commoners were kinsmen of the aristocrats, they were the younger siblings of descendants of family lines who had no seat or crest; they were freemen. In Europe and in Japan, commoners had no kin ties with the aristocratic families, and marriage was forbidden between these social classes – on pain, for the aristocrats, of forfeiting their title and their condition. Furthermore, commoners were not freemen. They were serfs or dependants, living on lands owned by the noble families, which they were allowed to use in exchange for payment of rents in labour, produce or money, thus enabling the nobles to live in keeping with their condition, surrounded by the signs of their distinction.
A certain similarity is created between the tribal and the feudal ‘houses’ (and in their successoral practices) by the fact that a large portion of the functions, and therefore of the state’s power, was shared between the families and family lines of the feudal hierarchy, who exercised these functions over their lands and their people – the right to sit in judgement, the right to raise troops and make war, the right to preside the village meeting, the right to collect taxes on the goods circulating or sold on their lands, and so forth. But, in Europe, there was yet another type of ‘house’, found more specifically in mountainous regions, where the economy was based on a combination of farming of privately owned lands and stock-raising on communal pastures, jointly owned by all members of the community. In these regions, one found village communities also organized into ‘houses’. Each had a name attached to it, whatever its owners’ patronym. Owing to the importance of their ‘house’ (i.e. the wealth composed of farming lands and livestock), these owners held a distinct rank in the organization of village power, and their voice carried more or less weight in managing community lands and business. Each ‘house’ also had its own pew in the parish church. In order to reproduce itself, the system required that each ‘house’ be transmitted as a block to a single descendant, usually the eldest son, but sometimes, if there were no sons, to the eldest daughter, whose husband would move into the ‘house’ and take its name. The system thus implied the creation of a strongly marked hierarchy between the descendants and, in general, the exclusion of all of the younger children from the inheritance; they in turn were obliged to leave the house and become priests, or soldiers, or stay at home but remain bachelors and become virtual servants to the brother or sister who had inherited the name and the property. In short, what is perpetuated in these systems is not a family line but a name and a domain that is conserved through the families which become the successive owners.
Having come this far, since we live in Europe where the feudal aristocracies have been replaced by ‘bourgeois’ dynasties – rarely very old and always turning over – and the system of peasant ‘houses’ has become residual (livestock raising no longer having the same importance in the mountain economy or being done indoors, and the French government having outlawed primogeniture), I will say a few words about another system, which was much more prevalent in Europe than ‘houses’ and continues to exist in almost all strata of our societies: this is the system of ‘kindreds’. Which brings us back to kinship.
Today’s world is populated with millions of monogamous nuclear families, often reconstituted, following a divorce, on the part of one member of the couple if not both, and including the children of this previous marriage. These individuals’ memories of their ascendants rarely go back beyond their grandparents. And the vast majority of them have forgotten the existence and the names of their grandparents’ collaterals, if they ever knew them. They may remember a few great uncles and great aunts and some of their descendants, distant cousins. Generally speaking these are descendants of their father’s and mother’s brothers and sisters, close cousins, whom one sees most often, as well as these cousins’ married or unmarried children. This is on average the extent of the genealogical memory and knowledge of most members of Western European societies and of those in the Americas who have European roots.
THE KINDRED
In this sea of nuclear families, where there is no general affiliation principle that might group them more or less mechanically into lineages and clans, there are nevertheless fuzzy collections of kin, whose existence is never guaranteed and whose longevity is always temporary. These groups are of two kinds and overlap in part.
The first is exclusively centred on an individual. This is what is called his or her ‘kindred’.19 The other kind is not centred on an individual but contains him or her. These are groups of families whose members are related to each other, and who see each other regularly and help each other; up to a certain point, they feel a bond of mutual solidarity. In so far as the family into which an individual is born (or adopted) is part of such a group, it can be said that this individual’s belonging is initially automatic. He (or she) will be socialized in childhood, at the same time as his siblings, within a group of families and kin that will overspill to a greater or lesser degree the bounds of the nuclear birth or adoptive family. In so far as these groups continue to exist, even if one or another of the individuals in them decides to break with his family or disappears, it can be said that they are decentred with respect to Ego and partially independent from Ego. They existed before Ego was born, but he determines whether they continue to exist through him. For an individual can decide to stop seeing certain relatives and their families, or vice versa certain relatives and their families can decide not to see Ego. In a word, the individual finds himself at the centre of a network of kin whom, depending on circumstances, he sees or ignores and who, for, the same reasons or others, see or ignore him.
A person’s kindred is first of all a network of individuals who are either directly attached to him, and he is at the centre; or are related by ties that start or end with him. To the ascendants and descendants we must add Ego’s brothers and sisters, who share the same ascendants, Ego’s half-brothers and half-sisters, who share some of them, their spouses, brothers-in-law and Ego’s nieces,