The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
their numbers and to capture children to replace the dead Txicao. The adult prisoners were killed on the spot and their bodies used to make a series of trophies, which the warriors displayed upon returning to celebrate their victory.
The status of captured children was complex and they held both a central and an ambiguous position in Txicao social organization. The captured child is called an egu, a term that designates at the same time trophies taken from enemy corpses, house pets, the bamboo horns played at initiations or any member of an animal species as it relates to the spirit master of its species. The child’s education follows two rules: to root out the child’s ethnic origins by making fun of them and to reward the acquisition of Txicao qualities. Gradually, as the alien child acquired more and more Txicao features, he becomes a source of pride for his adoptive kin. As Patrick Menget writes, it is as though the adopted child became a superlative child, adding something to the group’s identity. When the adopted child grows up he or she becomes a favoured sexual partner for the Txicao, and as such the object of rivalries. Nevertheless, the union between a Txicao man and an adopted women is never a marriage in the strict sense of the term. The word used to designate this woman is still that used for family pets. But at the same time, captives are considered to be the principal source of proper names for the Txicao, and they thus contribute something of their alien identity to making new Txicao. This practice corresponds to the logic shared by many Amazonian societies, which are constantly on the lookout for elements in outsiders that could be used to constitute themselves, whether in the form of another’s flesh (cannibalism), symbolic components (trophies), disembodied entities (spirits of the dead) or finally identities connected with names. But the ambiguous status of the adopted prisoner, who is both more and less than a Txicao, shows that the ultimate reference is still that of the native-born Txicao.
Another, this time more serious, objection: there are a number of kinship systems, the Australian section systems, for instance, in which individuals from different sections are, with respect to each other, as fathers, sons, husbands or wives, without being linked, for the most part, by any real genealogical tie or alliance. Yet an individual will call the child of a woman, of a ‘wife’ whom he has never married, ‘son’ or ‘daughter’. This is an example of the ‘categorial’ character of many kin terms and explains the fact that individuals who do not stand in the same genealogical relation to Ego are classified under the same term (the term ‘cousin’, for example, designates both the son of a paternal uncle or a maternal aunt) and who may even not have any genealogical tie whatsoever with Ego.
We will deal later with this problem, which has continually enflamed debates between the partisans of the two opposing theses. For one side, from Malinowski to Scheffler by way of Murdock, these categorial terms result from the extension of the kin terms used to address the father, the mother, the brothers and the sisters who live alongside the child or to refer to them beyond the nuclear family circle (where children worldwide are supposed to be born and live their early childhood). According to this theory, there is a shift from the real father to the metaphorical fathers (the father’s brothers, who also are ‘fathers’) and from the primary relationships within the nuclear family to the secondary relationships created by the extension of the genealogical links between individuals and between their generations. For the other side, from Hocart to Leach and Dumont, this categorial classification is neither secondary nor derived from a genealogical classification but exists in and of itself, the class of ‘fathers’ being made up of a number of men in an equivalent relation to Ego one of whom is the mother’s husband. It is therefore not by extending the notion of father but by reducing the class to a single individual that one obtains the genealogical father. Extension? Reduction? We favour the reduction thesis, and this is because of the very argument Lounsbury and Scheffler use to combat it.
For what matters are the social values and statuses a society attaches to the fact of being a father, a son, etc., whether we are dealing with a classificatory or with a ‘genealogical’ father or mother. What matters are the attitudes, obligations and rights that the recognition of these relationships entails for the individual. And the more essential or vital components of their ‘flesh-and-blood’ existence or their social identity these relations appear to contribute or to have contributed, the stronger the bonds between the individuals.
A FAUX DÉBAT
We would like to show here that the quarrel between partisans of an exclusively genealogical (and in the last analysis biological) theory of kinship and those of a purely social theory (which in the last analysis excludes any reference to genealogical and biological ties) fuels a false debate based – on both sides – in part on real facts but used to ask bad questions. Whatever they may think, both sides have to explain what a father is and what is expected of fathers (or mothers, etc.) in a given culture and in a given kinship system. In each case they are confronted with the various ways societies have come up with to think and regulate the process of reproducing life, which means organizing the succession of the generations and the appropriation of the children born in each through the individuals of both sexes who claim to be their parents.
In short, the quarrel between extensionists and reductionists in no way calls the definition of kinship into question. Both sides miss the point. For however you become a relative – by birth or by adoption, by eating the same food or by living on the same piece of land, etc. – once you are, you have to behave like a member of the family, that is, treat the other members as though they had given you certain pieces of themselves – their blood or their sperm, their breath or their name, their spirit – elements that helped give you life and a social identity and which became part of you and which you can give in turn, can detach from yourself and give to others, who will in turn exist partly thanks to you.
Of course, as we will see later, these representations of the components (sperm, blood, breath, etc.) that are believed to pass from one individual to another and from one generation to the next are partly fictitious, and a society’s ethnobiological conceptions are not a matter of biology but of ideology. But beforehand, to show those features of kinship that cannot be explained by biology or ethnobiology, let us recall that it is not the biological ties that explain that two related individuals will (or will not) share the same residence, own (or not own) land together, intervene on the same side or on the other side of a political conflict: all these social behaviours are connected with kinship relations and mean that these are also social relations which can in no way be reduced to biological facts (even though kinship relations are largely underpinned by biology).
Whatever the role each culture ascribes to the man, the woman, the ancestors and the gods in making children, kinship relations attach divers social realities to the relationships that grow up between individuals owing to their (real or fictive) place in the reproduction process according to their sex and generation. Sex and sexuality are at the heart of kinship. And the fact that the taboo on incest, which concerns the exercise of sexuality, is a universal condition44 for the reproduction of kinship relations is a constant reminder of their existence and importance.
This detour having been completed, we can now resume our study of descent groups. To simplify the task, we will limit ourselves to groups, lineages and clans resulting from the application of a unilineal descent rule. These social groups are constructed with reference to ancestors, and therefore to a memory, and are based on a criterion that selects from among all the descendants of these male and female ancestors who share an identity those men and women who transmit it. This criterion can be the fact of coming from the same sperm (Baruya), from the same blood (Trobrianders) or from the same breath (Chinese). In most cases memory of the founding ancestors does not go back more than four or five generations. And if the name of the lineage founder is usually known by his descendants, the name of the most remote ancestor, from whom all of a clan’s lineages are believed to descend, is either unknown, legendary or mythic (a supernatural being). But even if the name is unknown, the existence of real ties between the lineage ancestor and the clan ancestor is posited. In some societies – Mandarin China as well as the aristocratic families of Tonga – a written record (ancestor tablets) or an oral account (recitation of genealogies) traces the ancestors back fifteen or more generations. Because they share the same ancestors and the same bodily and social identity, together the members of a lineage make up a sort of collective individual, a ‘corporate group’, as Meyer Fortes called it,45 following Maine46 and Max