The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
an uncle and his nieces, an aunt and her nephews, and of course between a mother and her sons. The children born of the men’s nocturnal visits to other houses belong exclusively to their mother’s house and are raised by all of the members – male and female – of their matriline.
It must also be recalled that all societies, even though they may believe that certain births are not the result of a union between a man and a woman but stem from the union of a woman with a spirit or a god, recognize that there is a connection between sexual intercourse between two people of opposite sex and the birth of a new human being. Nevertheless, recognizing this does not necessarily mean that the man and the woman who unite are perceived as the genitors of the children born to them. In many matrilineal societies, for example, the ‘father’, in other words the mother’s ‘husband’, is not recognized as being the ‘genitor’ of the children his wife bears. In the Trobriand Islands, as we will see, a woman is not pregnant because she has been fertilized by her husband’s sperm. She becomes pregnant when the spirit of a male or a female ancestor of her clan wishes to come back to live with his or her people and leaves Tama, the island of the dead, in the form of a spirit-child who floats over the water to Kiriwina and enters the woman’s body. The spirit-child then mingles with the woman’s menstrual blood, which coagulates and becomes a foetus. When the woman tells her husband she is pregnant, he multiplies his sexual relations with her to nourish the foetus in her womb and shape it to resemble him. The patrilineal Baruya do not consider the woman to be the genetrix of her children. It is the man who makes the foetus in her womb from his sperm, and it is the Sun that makes the foetus into a human child. The woman’s womb is a ‘netbag’ where the actions of the husband and the Sun, the child’s only genitors, work together.
In short, in the Trobriand Islands as among the Baruya, people are perfectly capable of detailing their genealogy over several generations – moreover they have numerous reasons to keep it in mind. But reconstructing their genealogy with them by no means implies, as Schneider claims, that the anthropologist projects Western cultural presuppositions onto the ties being described, namely: that through sexual intercourse a man and a woman become the genitors of the children that will be born to their couple, that children are of the ‘same blood’ as their parents, that ‘blood is thicker than water’ and so on. If a married Trobriander is not the genitor of his children, who in all events will not belong to his clan but to that of their mother and their mother’s brother, he is therefore not a ‘father’ in the Western sense of the term; and nothing obliges an anthropologist from the West to project his own cultural representations when he asks people he knows to tell them their genealogy. In fact he is prevented from doing so by what he knows of their culture. The Trobriand example is a particularly convincing demonstration. How can one project the Western notion of consanguinity onto a society where, as Annette Weiner showed much more clearly than Malinowski had a half century earlier, the blood (dala) that flows in the veins of all members of a clan is always the ‘same’ blood, which comes from the blood of the founding ancestress of the clan who one day emerged, alone or with a brother, from a hole in the ground? And the very word that designates that blood also means ‘clan’, since every child that comes out of a woman’s womb is made from its mother’s menstrual blood, which the spirit of a clan ancestor in search of reincarnation came to coagulate and inhabit.
Let us travel back, to the Classical China of the Chu. At this time, society was ruled by a warrior nobility, by kings, princes and dukes organized into big patrilineal clans (tsu). These clans encompassed all descendants of a common ancestor, with whom they shared not the same blood but the same breath (ch’i). This breath bound them together into a community of feeling (kan-tung), which they shared with the ancestor from whom they were never separated and whom they regularly worshipped at his tomb (tsung). Even if their bodies were separate, the breath that gave life to a father and his sons, and to the sons together, was always the same breath. The Chinese notion of agnation thus has nothing to do with the idea of ‘one blood’, which the West inherited from the Romans. We also see why the terms used to designate the elder lineages (ta-tsung) or the younger lineages (hsiao-tsung) that make up a clan are constructed with reference to the descendants’ obligation to make offerings on the ancestor’s tomb (tsung) and to venerate him down through the generations.34 This viewpoint ignores the woman’s reproductive capacities. Life here can be perpetuated and extended only through the breath (ch’i) that dwells in men.
The examples of the Trobriand Islanders and of the ancient Chinese nobility point up another aspect of kinship relations. If, in the Trobriand Islands, it is the same blood that unites a mother and her children, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts on the mother’s side to their nephews and nieces, and connects them all to the founding clan ancestress, and if, in Chu China, it is the same breath that unites a father and his sons and brothers, and connects them to the founding clan ancestor who has a separate body but the same breath, it means that the birth of a child in each of these societies is the result of a gift of essential vital principles stemming from invisible but ever-present and ever-acting ancestors who are transferred to the new human being taking shape through the agency of either men (the fathers) or women (the mothers). We must therefore take careful note that these vital principles are not made by these fathers or mothers, who are merely the chosen, favoured vehicles of their transmission. What is essential is that individuals think of themselves and experience themselves as not separated by part of themselves from certain ancestors.
But there is nothing exceptional about these examples. They simply place us in a particularly clear manner in the presence of the fact that, in all known societies, the making and birth of a baby are the outcome of a series of gifts that human beings, but also ancestors, spirits or gods, have made in order to assemble and unify the components of a new human being. Whether these components appear in the form of what we in the West call bodily substances (blood, bones, flesh, etc.) or of less visible realities (breath, soul, spirit – which, moreover, many societies do not see as totally immaterial realities, since souls are liable to reappear after death), for the child all of these are gifts that beings, which can be human and/or non-human, close or remote, have made so that it can be born. For a child (and for its parents) this has two consequences, which take various forms depending on the society. The child will be led to conceive of himself (or herself) (and even to feel) as being identical to or resembling all those of whom he (or she) will learn that he shares some component of his being, by virtue of which he is ‘the same’ as they. Hence the community of breath and feeling invoked by ancient Chinese authors. Second, as soon as adults have taught the child that he owes his existence and the elements of his being to a certain number of visible or invisible human and non-human donors who have made him what he is, the child will find himself indebted to them for his life and therefore under obligation.
But this feeling of obligation can die out or be called into question if the individual discovers or imagines that the human or non-human beings to whom he believes he owes his birth and being do not act as they should toward him; furthermore there often exists the idea that a child’s ‘real’ parents are not the people who gave birth to him but those who raised him and behaved toward him as parents should. One must also be careful about thinking that in all societies a person’s identity is constructed from what they received from others at birth. Most societies consider that a person’s identity is constructed over their lifetime, both by what they receive from others and which becomes incorporated in them and by what detaches itself from them and becomes incorporated in others. Some societies even consider that what one receives from others after birth counts as much, if not more, in creating kinship ties between oneself and others as what one received from one’s parents at birth. This is the case for the Baining of New Britain.35 As the Anglo-Saxons say, nurture is often stronger than nature.36
In reality, the ancestors’ strength and identity are not always transmitted solely through blood, breath, sperm or the soul, which borrow the medium of sexual relations in order to mingle and act. In numerous Melanesian societies, the ancestors and their powers are present in the ground they cleared. It was their flesh that fattened the land, their bones placed in trees that attract game and keep away evil spirits. These beliefs and rites explain why an adopted lost child or an outsider taken in after an unfortunate war can gradually become a relative who can legitimately claim the same ancestors. By working the same land year after year, by sharing and eating the same products of this land impregnated with