The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
presence, the outsider acquires a new body and with it a new social identity. He becomes one more descendant of the ancestors of the clan that took him in, a descendant whose identity was not transmitted to him through sexual intercourse, a descendant without genealogical ties, direct or indirect, with the other members of his clan.
And yet his age, his sex, the position he will occupy in the kin network of those who took him in and fed him will make the outsider a kinsman – a son for some, an uncle or a younger brother for others, a brother-in-law, and so on. In a word, the kin terms used by others to designate or address him, and to which he responds using the appropriate terms, act in his case as categories devoid of genealogical content but which nevertheless assign him a symbolic genealogical position in the pre-existing network of kin ties between the members of the society that is now his. What is exceptional in this case – the fact that an individual finds himself related to others without having any genealogical connection with them – is frequent in societies divided into sections (or matrimonial classes), as are a large number of Australian and a few Amazonian societies (the Pano, for example). Belonging by birth or adoption to a particular section gives an individual specific kin ties with all other members of his society, whether they belong to his section or to the three others and even though he has no genealogical ties with most of them.
Let us take a simple example. Imagine a society divided into four sections, of the so-called Kareira type. A man born to section A must marry a woman from section B, and his sister will marry a man from section B. The children of the couple AB belong to section C. The children will in turn marry members of section D, and their children will belong to section A, like their grandfather. For a man from A, all women in B are potential wives, whereas only a few of them will actually be. All children born to women in section B will be A’s sons and daughters, whereas he is not their father. We thus see that, in this system, kinship relations coincide only partially with real genealogical ties. But we also see that this does not imply that kinship relations are purely abstract social relationships that have nothing to do with sexuality and the reproduction of life. In reality, kinship relations, in so far as their abstract categorial content is concerned, are structured by a double reference: descent rules and alliance rules, which back onto the prohibition of incest between members of the same section, and the roles played by the men and women of each section in the initiation ceremonies and the rites ensuring the reproduction of plants and animals, and human beings.37
It is because kinship relations refer to ties between individuals who provide or have provided members of the new generation with the components of their life, in other words of their physical existence and/or their social identity as new human beings, and because the individuals have neither negotiated nor produced these components themselves but have received them as a gift, that these ties constitute a separate domain. This domain is initially dominated by the values of gift and debt, by the existence of rights that have not been acquired by the individual himself but with which he finds himself vested by virtue of relations with certain other individuals who appear as his father(s) and mother(s), his brothers or his sisters, his cousins or his affines, and so on. For, in most societies, there is no such thing as descent without alliance, and the exercise of kinship consists in transforming affines into consanguines and ensuring that, after a certain lapse of time, distant consanguines become potential affines.
In short, kinship ties, whether with descendants or with affines, are inseparable from the relations humans must produce with each other so that new generations of men and women may come into being and human life go on, which by no means implies that humans think they are the only ones involved. But I already hear the objections of those who claim that kinship is a purely social relationship, that there is nothing in its content that refers to sex or gender and to the biological process of reproducing life. Every anthropologist faces these objections and must address them.
PARENTS BY ADOPTION
Let us therefore take the case of adoption, that is, of the creation of a non-engendered line of descent. First of all we must distinguish between adoption and fosterage.
Adoption implies the definitive replacement of the ascendants by the adopting parents. Fosterage is merely the momentary replacement of the ascendants by designated guardians. Adoption entails a change of identity for the child, whether this is deep-seated or not. Fosterage offers a means of preserving the child’s identity and social status.38
It is readily understandable that not just anyone can give his or her child up for adoption, and not just anyone can adopt a child. In ancient Rome, a woman could not adopt a child. Only a male Roman citizen could. But a man was not allowed to adopt a man older than he. There had to be a sufficient age difference, according to ‘nature’, that is to say, which corresponded to the average age at which a man is able to engender children. And yet in Rome eunuchs and men recognized as being impotent could adopt. In the Middle Ages, eunuchs could not legally adopt a child, while the adopter had to be older than the adoptee by a margin that imitated nature. Even in the legal fictions of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, then, where adoption is conceived of as an abstract and not a biological filiation, the reference to engendering and biological filiation is present.39
Adoption,40 when not practised between two sisters, as in Polynesia where two sisters give each other children who were therefore already related to their new parents, makes children (and sometimes even adults, as in Rome) from outside the family into descendants who theoretically enjoy the same attention, the same rights as the other children (if they exist) engendered by the adoptive parents. More generally, adopted children are supposed to enjoy the same status as non-adopted children. So we see that the standard status accorded adopted children does not result from adoption itself but from the rules of conduct set out by the society in question for dealing with non-adopted children.
Moreover, unless they appeared by magic, adopted children were themselves engendered and, even if their social parents are absent, they still had genitors. All societies have various reasons for allowing or forbidding the transfer of children between adults and between social groups. And, in most cases, kinship by adoption is a complementary, second kinship. Nevertheless there are extreme cases in which adoption appears as a plus with respect to kinship by filiation, as among the Mbaya-Guaycuru, cited by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques.
It was a society remarkably adverse to feelings that we consider as being natural. For instance, there was a strong dislike for procreation. Abortion and infanticide were almost the normal practice, so much so that perpetuation of the group was ensured by adoption rather than by breeding, and one of the chief aims of the warriors’ expeditions was the obtaining of children. It was estimated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that barely 10 percent of the members of a certain Guaycuru group belonged to the original stock.41
When children were born and survived, they were not brought up by their parents but entrusted to another family, and visited only at rare intervals.42
Without going to this extreme, other societies testify to the importance that may be given to the adoption of captives. Such is the case of the Txicao of central Brazil studied by Patrick Menget.43 The Txicao are slash-and-burn agriculturalists, hunters and fishers who today live on the left bank of the Xingu River. Their social organization is based on a system of cognatic kindreds organized around uxorilocal residence. The Txicao practise two forms of adoption, one within the group and the other resulting from the capture of enemy children. The term for internal adoption is anumtxi, which means to ‘lift up’. The usual reason for adopting a child is the death of its mother. The child is then entrusted to one of its classificatory mothers to be raised. This form of adoption never gives rise to the definitive rupture of kinship relations with the paternal and maternal kin. The child enjoys all of these relationships concurrently. Another reason for adoption is the woman’s sterility. In this case, her husband’s brother or one of his sisters gives a child who will be adopted when it is weaned. This kin tie is not a substitute for filiation but rather a complement.
The adoption of a captured child is entirely another matter. To understand this practice, it must be seen in its cultural context. For the Txicao, death is not a natural occurrence but the effect of another’s malice. Following a series of deaths in a village, for instance, the villagers would organize a raid to punish the enemy group they suspected of causing these deaths by means