The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
accede to or were excluded from given functions in the city. But all sons born to freemen, once accepted by their father and presented to the city magistrates, became Roman citizens (civis romanus) and enjoyed life-long privileges attached to this status wherever Rome exercised its power and its dominion.
In short, even in ‘segmentary’ tribal societies like the Nuer and the Bedouins, political relations are not to be confused with the relations of power or solidarity that spring up between clans or lineages in times of conflict. The well-known Arab saying, ‘Me against my brother; my brother and I against my cousins; I, my brother and my cousins against the world’, is not the last word on political relations in these societies. For even in the event of a scission between the kin groups that make up a tribe or a tribal confederation, the seceding groups associate with others, and the broadest resulting social group once again takes the overall form of a tribe. Furthermore, the Arab proverb is not universally valid. When a conflict arises between two Baruya lineages both of which have given wives to a third lineage (and have received wives in return), the third lineage splits into two groups, each of which goes to the aid of one of the feuding lineages. This practice can be seen as revealing of a concern to balance forces and avoid one of the lineages undergoing such a defeat that it is for all practical purposes doomed to disappear or to abandon its lands and seek asylum in a neighbouring tribe. But it is also the outcome of a marriage rule that obliges brothers to marry into different lineages and is the concrete proof that solidarity between members of a same lineage, of a same blood, comes second to each man’s solidarity with the lineage that gave him a wife. In this case marriage alliance plays a direct role in the way the descent reckoning operates. This is perhaps because marriage is based on the direct exchange between two men and two lineages of one of their sisters (or for fathers, of one of their daughters). The marriage alliance does not have the same importance when there is no direct exchange of women and a lineage exchanges wives for bridewealth, which used to be the most prevalent practice in Africa, but also in Asia and certain parts of Oceania.
These facts hardly concord with Fortes’ theoretical position on kinship. For above and beyond the question of the division of kinship into two domains, or the distinction between descent and complementary filiation, Fortes is probably the most eminent representative of those theoreticians of kinship for whom the essence of kinship resides in descent and not in alliance. He repeatedly declared that he was drawn to the study of institutions that were indispensable for ensuring the temporal continuity without which there can be no enduring society, and for this process to continue, he stressed, institutional forms of alliance are not essential.51 This places him in direct opposition to Lévi-Strauss, for whom kinship is first and foremost alliance. For Fortes, however, ‘the ways in which the reproductive cohabitation of men and women is regulated are of secondary concern’.52
Let us return to the problem of descent groups that persist over many generations. We have remarked on the very small number of rules used to generate these groups and which operate by manipulating the difference between the sexes (unilineal, duo- and bilineal systems) or by cancelling this difference (undifferentiated systems). Why have some societies chosen this principle rather than another? Meyer Fortes always refused to ask this kind of question, claiming that societies are not like individuals, who can over their lifetime ‘choose’, for example, the languages they want to speak. He is right on this last point. But one day we will have to come up with satisfactory answers to this type of question. Murdock53 and in his wake Goodenough54 in effect attempted to explain the appearance of matrilineal systems by change of residence, which in certain circumstances (importance of women’s gathering activities), they suggested, switched from virilocal to uxorilocal and entailed substitution of a matrilineal descent rule for the patrilineal rule that had previously applied. But these hypotheses proved unconvincing.
Jack Goody took another tack. Leaving to one side the unresolved and unresolvable question of why certain societies adopted a patri- or matri- or nonlineal descent rule for forming kin groups, and adopting Fortes’ idea that descent groups (whatever their principle of organization) are corporate groups, ‘moral persons’ who act as a ‘collective individual’, Goody turned to the raisons d’être of these collective subjects that traverse generations and transcend the life and death of their members. He thus advanced the hypothesis that the appearance of these groups had its basis in different forms of common ownership of the resources indispensible for the survival, reproduction and development of tribal societies – hunting and fishing grounds, lands cultivated using extensive agricultural or horticultural techniques.
However Fortes had already rejected Goody’s hypothesis in his own explanation of the formation of corporate descent groups in tribal society. ‘I maintain that it is a mistake to interpret the model of corporate descent groups to imply that productive or durable or any other form of property is the formative basis of corporate group structure in tribal society.’55 His reason for rejecting hypotheses based on the social importance of various forms of property was that ‘filiation and descent would probably be accepted as endogenous variables that are predominantly if not entirely independent of exogenous forces’.56 For him, the relations and institutions entailed in kinship have a sui generis, autonomous status in all societies.
RELATIONS OF DESCENT AS A SOURCE OF DUTY OF ALTRUISM
The formation of these corporate descent groups that transcend the existence of their physical members from one generation to the next would be explained by the fact that, wherever and whenever they are found, kinship relations link people personally, whether or not they love or even like each other. Meyer Fortes called this principle that sums up the obligations engendered by these ties, by their inherent strength, ‘the rule of prescriptive altruism’, ‘the axiom of Amity’. In short, he believed this duty of altruism between kin to be the psychological, moral and religious force that transformed a group of related individuals into a collective individual, a corporate group, which encompassed them all, present in each member while remaining distinct.
I do not deny that the universe of kinship is a place where solidarity, cooperation and sharing often prevail over competition, refusal to help others and egotism, if only because it is into the universe of kinship relations that children are usually born and that they survive only because they are cared for by adults who are related to them and for this reason feel and believe themselves to be obliged to do this. But the ‘duty-of-altruism’ explanation is too general and proves to be inadequate if one seeks to explain the formation of social groups that exist and develop by placing (and keeping) their material and immaterial resources in common and ensuring that each generation considers itself less as the owner of these resources than as a ‘steward’ whose first duty is to transmit them in turn to the following generations. One has only to remember that for hundreds of years, in both the East and the West, in both the Old and the New World, land, whether for growing or for hunting, was excluded from those things a person could buy or sell. There were fundamental reasons for this, which were not only moral or religious but also pragmatic and material. For by holding their material and immaterial resources in common, individuals and families gave themselves the means to survive and grow together, even in hard times. In this common holding and refusal to divide up resources (which by no means implies that they were exploited collectively) a material and social force was added to the moral force of the obligations that bound kin together.
I will conclude this point by voicing my agreement with Fortes that kinship relations are specific and that their evolution and their transformations lead to the formation of other types of kinship relations and not to something else, for example class relations. But transformations and evolution are not brought about by internal factors alone. While they are specific, in no case are kinship relations completely autonomous, but neither do they depend mechanically on the transformations and evolutions occurring elsewhere in society. Nevertheless these relations always entail stakes that do not stem from kinship. Before going into this second component of kinship – alliance relations – I would like to give what seems to me a particularly striking example of the material and social stakes entailed in the functioning and reproduction of kin groups, and at the same time an example of the way these groups manipulate the imaginary and symbolic stakes involved in kinship relations to serve their own interests. The example is that of child sacrifice in the Mandak and Barok societies of the South Pacific island of New Ireland.57 This sacrifice used to enable members of the