The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
Under the sign of the demons
Several remarks are called for concerning these ‘demoniacal’ forms of marriage (it must not be forgotten that demons, though below the gods, share the same nature).
In Asura, a woman is exchanged for wealth. This form is encountered in Africa and in New Guinea, among the Melpa, for example. In India, it is also called by the names of local tribes, as though it were still marked by the forms of marriage exchange practised by tribal groups subsequently absorbed into the caste system. But even more interesting is the fact that this marriage has negative connotations in India because it does not appear as a gift but as the sale of a daughter, a materially interested gift, which thereby loses its gratuitous character. The father and mother are held equally responsible for ‘selling’ their daughter because they subsequently share the goods received in exchange. It is as though giving a woman in exchange for wealth was already, at the time of the Laws of Manu, assimilated to a commercial transaction in which the parties negotiated the price of a commodity. This view partakes of a world vision and a value hierarchy that associates buying and selling, and more generally all commercial activities, with defilement. It is therefore not because the parents decide for their daughter without her consent that this form of marriage is censured. It is because this marriage is not a gift but a sale, and a sale can be concluded with whoever offers wealth for a woman – whether he is from the same or, worse, from a lower caste. In short, according to this viewpoint, commercial relations have their place in the logic of caste hierarchy but never beyond. It must also be stressed that, in this view, the parents of a girl who has been abducted or forced to marry always have the right to demand material compensation after the fact. This payment is not bridewealth but atonement for a wrong.
Another interesting fact is the recognition expressed in these texts of the woman’s right to marry whom she will if her father has not found a husband for her within a certain lapse of time after her menarche (Gandharva marriage).38 In this case, she is free to marry; however, although she is not at fault she loses her right to any dowry. She no longer represents her family and no longer has a right to their support or to their assets. Last and above all, these ancient texts leave room for the love marriage. To be sure, this is considered a bad form of marriage because it does not respect paternal authority, but it is accepted as a possibility. Moreover, it is this form of marriage that for centuries has nourished a whole poetic, lyric, even ‘romantic’ literary genre. Today its importance in people’s imaginary and aspirations has not ceased to grow and it now passes for the ‘modern’, non-traditional form of marriage, shifting desire and individual wishes to the fore, rather than the authority of one’s kin, who continue to pursue their marriage strategies in view of maintaining or raising their position in the caste hierarchy.
Today, too, the extreme monetarization of the dowry, the consequence of a distortion of ancient customs, resulted in a law being passed in 1961 in India which forbids a girl’s parents to pay a dowry to the parents of the future husband on pain of as much as six months in prison and a fine. The law also stipulates that, if a brideprice is paid, it should go to the woman or be used by the newlyweds to set up house, but should not be paid to the father of the bride. This now-banned dowry or brideprice is called vara-dakshina, from vara (future husband) and daksina (gift made to the household priest for performing the life-cycle sacrifices). It actually functions as a groomwealth, as a payment demanded by the parents of the groom for allowing their son to marry. The vara-daksina is widespread and has taken on a modern form linked to the expansion of commercial and monetary relations. Instead of the young woman arriving at her husband’s house decked in her traditional finery (gold, jewellery, clothing, etc.), she now comes bearing several hundreds of thousands of rupees, the sum her future in-laws have demanded to accept her as a daughter-in-law. More than ever in India it is better to have sons than daughters to marry.
Thus in Brahmin marriages, although the givers of a virgin do not receive a woman or wealth in return, on the spiritual level they receive a sort of indirect gift from the takers, since the latter take responsibility for the pollution their daughter bears and bears away with her. But there are also societies in which wife-takers give nothing in return. An example is provided by the former marriage practices of the Sioux Indians.
In Sioux society, where the men divided their time between making war, hunting buffalo and taking part in large-scale rituals, and where all of the material goods belonged to the women, to the wives, the rule was to marry outside the band. The ideal wife was a prisoner of war, and the adoption of children or adults was just as important as descent. Their kinship terminology was Dravidian, but they had no specific term for husband or wife. The word for ‘to marry’ was ‘to abduct’, to capture (a woman). Moreover, a man was forbidden to speak to his in-laws, who were treated as, or really were, enemies. Sisters lived under the very strict supervision of their brothers, and it was the latter who made the decisions concerning their marriage and the size of the brideprice (in horses or other forms of wealth) that the suitor was to pay. Warriors gave their sisters enemy scalps, and it was the women who tortured prisoners, sometimes to death. Ideally the brother-in-law should be killed in order to capture his sister. We are at the far pole from the practices and values of the Baruya, for whom sister exchange between two men binds them for the rest of their lives and draws them into a cycle of exchanges of goods and services that ceases only with their death. Ultimately, in Baruya society, two brothers-in-law eventually become closer and more committed to each other than two brothers.
It may be the prime importance of bride abduction, of marriage founded on capture, on predation, that explains why, in a highly unusual manner, Sioux kinship terminology derives the terms for cross cousins from those designating affines, the wife’s brother and sister. The outside prevails over the inside, but it is an outside characterized by predation and death. At least this is what Emmanuel Desvaux has tried to show in an article rich in surprising perspectives, devoted to the difficulties of Sioux kinship nomenclature.39
WHEN TAKERS AND GIVERS ARE EQUAL
Finally, the last possibility: wife-givers are neither superior nor inferior to wife-takers. Takers and givers are equal. This is the case in many societies, including the Vezo of Madagascar, studied by Rita Astuti.40 In this possibility, the exchange takes the following form. The woman’s parents say to the man’s parents: ‘We give you our daughter, take her.’ And the man’s parents respond: ‘We give you our son, take him.’ The two gifts are equivalent. The Vezo have a cognatic kinship system in which a person is linked to the ancestors through men and/or through women, indifferently. There is therefore in this case no exchange of women by the men or exchange of brothers by their sisters. Nor is there any such thing as exchanging a woman or a man for wealth (bridewealth or groomwealth). There are two reciprocal gifts of individuals of different sex by two families, who cooperate to produce a third family whose members will descend from each of the two spouses inseparably. From a certain standpoint, it cannot be said that these two gifts of persons of different sex are an exchange. The gifts are two parts of a single act performed at the same time by two families in order to form a third. In addition, according to Rita Astuti, this society does not discourage sex before marriage and does little to encourage it afterwards. The woman has more rights over the children than the man.
A summary of the various cases of marriage and the status of the partners is shown in the following table:
| Wife-givers are superior to wife-takers (anisogamy) |
| Wife-takers are superior to wife-givers (anisogamy) |
| Wife-givers and wife-takers are equal to each other (isogamy) |
It is clear that the obligation to pay a bride- or a groomprice to seal an alliance places young people of marriageable age in a situation of personal dependence on their parents, their elders, their family or their lineage. Generally speaking, these young people have not yet