The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
dies, not only because its members are replaced by other members but because they own land, titles and rights, all of which must be kept and transmitted intact to the following generations.
We came across analogous phenomena when describing the ‘house’ system. Let us pause for a moment and examine the fact that all members of a lineage are seen as coming from the same sperm (the patrilineal Baruya) or from the blood of the same ancestress (the matrilineal Ashanti or Trobrianders). This blood, which is the same from one generation to the next and is transmitted solely by the women, is not a biological reality. It is a fiction. The concept does not stem from empirical knowledge about the body. It is a representation that makes it possible to exclude certain individuals (who are kin) from the formation and reproduction of the kin groups – lineages, clans – that as collective rights-holders play a role in reproducing the society as a whole. Blood is not merely a concept that makes it possible to determine the internal composition of a lineage and its boundaries, it is also a criterion that legitimizes this exclusion by referring to the presence of a vital component of a person’s identity, which some possess and others do not. Furthermore, it is a component that only some of those who possess it (women in the case of matrilineal systems) have the capacity to transmit to the next generation. A lineage, a matrilineal clan in the Trobriand Islands, thus appears as a kin group built on a twofold fiction – namely that blood is constitutive of an individual’s identity, it is his or her essential substance which only women can transmit, and therefore that the blood of all of the members of the matrilineage, men and women alike, is female blood.
‘Blood’ is therefore not simply the mental representation of an imaginary identity projected onto concrete individuals, it is a concept that gives social meaning to a vital, concrete component of these individuals, an element of their body which connects them simultaneously with their ancestors who made them this gift and to all those who received it in common. At the same time as their life and their identity, members of a lineage also receive the use, to be transmitted to the following generations, of lands, titles and functions, all of which are also gifts from the ancestors and remain the joint property of the group for as long as it exists.
KINSHIP BISECTED
It was on the basis of such facts, and using almost exclusively examples from Africa, that Meyer Fortes48 proposed to distinguish between two components of unilineal descent-group structure, one juridical-political and the other domestic. The first would correspond to the lineage and the clan, as the collective owner of the land and other means of production as well as of the political-ritual functions that give this corporate group a rank and an influence in reproducing the society (cf. the eight matrilineal clans of the Ashanti ‘kingdom’); the second would correspond to each of the families of the married members of the different lineages. In the matrilineal Ashanti society, married men live with their wives during the day, but in the evening they go home to their sisters and their mother, who live together under the authority of the oldest women of the matriline. The family is the unit in charge of bringing up the children. But it is also a unit of production and consumption. The relationships between individuals within the family are relations of bilateral filiation, but they are cross cut and marked by the matrilineal descent principle, which stipulates that a man does not transmit his goods or his functions to his own children but to those of his sister, and that his own children will inherit from their maternal uncle, their mother’s brother.
To account for the close ties between children in this matrilineal system and their father and the members of his lineage, Fortes proposed the notion of ‘complementary filiation’.49 He was strongly criticized by Leach, who felt that the notion concealed or reduced to purely personal and domestic ties between children, on the one hand, their father’s clan and family and, on the other hand, the relations of affinity between two lineages and two clans. As proof of the importance of the father and his lineage in the constitution of the Ashanti person, he cited the fact that, while all members of a matrilineage share the same maternal ancestral blood, called abusua, every child receives from its father and his lineage the spirit (atore) that animates his or her body.50 Leach’s criticism seems to me altogether founded.
But coming back to the distinction between the two spheres – juridical and domestic – that Fortes saw as being combined in kinship, Fortes has also been criticized for having projected a Western perspective onto the Ashanti and the Tallensi in so far as, until recently in the West, the political-juridical sphere was considered to be the preserve of men and the domestic sphere the preserve of women. In many societies however, there is no such clear-cut separation between these domains. For example, women, in their capacity as sisters, may actively participate in managing the patrimony shared by their lineage. Annette Weiner, discussing gender relations in Trobriand society, showed the essential role played by women as sisters of the deceased in the funeral rites, which are extremely important in this part of New Guinea. During these ceremonies, the sisters redistribute large quantities of female wealth in order to restore to their lineage’s patrimony the elements their brother had dispersed over his lifetime by making gifts, for example, to his sons, who in virtue of the matrilineal descent role do not belong to the same dala, the same ‘blood’, the same lineage as their father. The gifts presented by his sisters also make it possible to consolidate alliances threatened with extinction by this death. These facts had been ignored or perhaps deemed to be of little interest by Malinowski, which explains the charges of androcentrism Annette Weiner addressed to his work.
But it is not only in matrilineal societies that women in their role as sisters play an important part in managing lineage or clan resources and wealth. Among the Kako of Gabon, an agriculturalist–hunter-gatherer society with an Omaha-type patrilineal kinship system, the eldest sister of the head of the lineage, who is married in another lineage, intervenes throughout her life in her brothers’ management of lineage goods. She performs the rites that will ensure him success in hunting and war, but also abundant harvests. She has authority over his wife and can, by magical means, make her fertile or barren, thus depriving her brother of children. In short, although she left her original lineage when she married, she continues throughout her life to play a key role enjoyed by neither her brothers’ nor her nephew’s wives.
In Polynesia – Tonga but also Samoa – women as sisters rank socially higher than all their brothers, including their older brothers. They are in fact regarded as being closer to the ancestors and the gods, and play an essential role in the funeral rites. In Tonga, the most sacred, highest ranking person is not the Tu’i Tonga, but his sister, the Tu’i Tonga Fafine, to whom her brother, after having received the first fruits of the harvests from all the kainga (descent groups) in his kingdom, presents the best fruits together with other gifts, always of the finest quality. In short, we must not generalize a simplistic conception of gender relations and the possible forms and contents of male domination.
Another aspect of Fortes’ distinction calls for discussion as well: what did he mean by the political-juridical sphere within kinship relations? If one means the existence of relations of authority and responsibility within the kin group, lineage or clan, and the fact that the same persons represent the entire group to the rest of society, that they affirm and defend its rights in pieces of land, persons and functions, then we have only part of the political-juridical – or better, political-religious – relations that bring a society to exist as a whole, even if there is no central power capable of submitting the reproduction of the society as a whole to its will and power. We have seen this in Baruya society. Each lineage has collective rights in hunting territories, rivers and arable land. The lineage elders manage their distribution and use, and all male members of the lineage take up arms and call on their affines to defend their resources against those who, for instance, have cleared a garden in their forest without permission. But political-religious relations always extend beyond kinship relations and kin groups.
For example, each Baruya clan plays a specific role in the initiation rituals, and it takes the ritual and material cooperation of all clans to make a new generation of warriors that will defend not only their clan lands but the entire tribal territory. Or to take another example from ancient Rome, the pater familias at the head of his gens (a patrilineal descent group) had the right of life and death over his children and over the other members of the gens. He managed its resources. But he and his gens occupied particular positions in Rome’s political system. They belonged to