The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
had to depend on women to survive – his sisters, his mother or other men’s wives, for example those of his brothers or his uncles. Not having a wife, he could be tempted to take too much interest in the wives of others. And above all, the choice to remain a bachelor is usually regarded as a refusal to do what one is supposed to do to ensure the continued existence of a lineage, of a family, namely to marry and have children. These criticisms were usually even stronger in the case of a woman who refused to marry.
It is important to recall that in the Christian West, the Church not only promoted the celibacy of priests, proscribed divorce and made it difficult for widows to remarry, it also forbade adoption, which reappeared in the various European legal systems only at the end of the nineteenth century.
The adoption of children from outside (and not children who were orphaned or abandoned by their parents) gives children who have no genealogical ties to their adoptive parents the status of descendants. The status of parent in this case is a purely social relationship, devoid of any biological basis, which rests, as Maine said, on a ‘legal fiction’. In forbidding adoption, the Church thus helped promote a model that reduced kinship to essentially genealogical, that is to say biological, ties, even if these ‘carnal’ ties were made sacred by the sacraments of marriage and baptism. The paradox is that, at the very moment when the Church forbade adoption and its social fictions, it promoted another type of entirely imaginary parenthood, a spiritual one, which grew out of the institution at the end of the sixth century of the baptism of children at birth, which eventually replaced adult baptism. The sixth century also saw the institution of godparents.65 The child taken into the Church through baptism is accompanied by a spiritual father and mother, is sponsored by a godfather and a godmother. Theoretically a child’s godparents are even more responsible than the parents for their godchild’s spiritual upbringing. They are supposed to be particularly vigilant that the baptized child acquires the three Christian virtues of chastity, charity (caritas, which means more than the contemporary ‘charity’ and encompasses love of God and one’s neighbour) and uprightness. Godfather, godmother, godson, goddaughter: the Church that had banned adoption and its fictions replaced it with the fiction of the rebirth of children in the Church and chose for this imaginary filiation the vocabulary of genealogical filiation. Simultaneously the marriage prohibitions linked with the incest taboo applying to real kin were extended – with a variety of modalities – to spiritual parents and spiritual children. Initially prohibited to the seventh degree and then to the fourth degree of consanguinity, extended to close affines, husband’s brother, wife’s sister, etc., incest in the Christian West would threaten a second domain, that of the imaginary descent ties between Christians and their God.
Alliance, marriage, simple socially recognized union, with or without exchange, always raises the problem of who one can marry. We already know one can marry persons and into groups that do not come under the incest taboo as it is defined by a given society, or under other taboos which further extend this field: one must not repeat one’s father’s or one’s brothers’ marriage, etc. To these taboos within the field of kinship are added others that originate elsewhere: one must not marry outside one’s religion, class or rank. Which means that it is preferable or mandatory to marry someone of one’s own caste, rank and religion.
There are also a great many kinship systems where positive rules are added to the prohibitions and indicate whom it is prescribed or preferable to marry, which often entails the exchange of persons or goods. These systems are at the far pole from the Western European and Euro-American systems (which are cognatic with an Eskimo-type terminology), where, with the exception of a small group of consanguines and close affines, no one is prescribed and no one is forbidden – in terms of kinship, though not in terms of wealth, rank, name, etc. We are indebted to Claude Lévi-Strauss for having been the first to try to classify kinship systems in terms of the presence or absence of a positive marriage rule contained within the system as part of its structure. His analysis led to distinguishing three classes of systems:66
(1) Systems that make a positive statement about the class and terminological categories in which Ego can and must find a spouse, where exchange is forbidden between parallel kin but allowed and even prescribed between cross kin. For Lévi-Strauss, these systems, which he called ‘elementary structures of kinship’, are based on two types of exchange, depending on whether the wife-givers are or are not takers. In the first case, we are dealing with restricted exchange, in the second, with a generalized exchange, between kin groups.
(2) Systems that multiply marriage taboos and have no positive rule for choosing a spouse. Ego cannot take a wife in his father’s, his mother’s, his father’s mother’s or his mother’s mother’s clan, lineage or line, nor marry a certain number of cognatic kinswomen. However repetition of alliances with these same groups is not only allowed, it is sought, after a certain number of generations, as soon as distant consanguines can once more become affines. As a typical example of this category, Lévi-Strauss cites the Crow and the Omaha systems, later studied in more detail by Françoise Héritier.67 The findings of the latter’s analysis led her to object to the general thesis Lévi-Strauss used to characterize alliance.68 Héritier showed that, if it is true that two brothers or two sisters cannot marry in the same direction, a brother and a sister can do so, which means that in every other generation an exchange of ‘real or classificatory sisters is possible without violating any rules’. She thereby showed that elementary forms of restricted exchange are present in Crow–Omaha systems, even if they are concealed beneath numerous tacit prohibitions. Radcliffe-Brown’s sacrosanct rule – the genealogical equivalence of siblings – therefore does not apply in this case. Cross-sex siblings can do what parallel-sex siblings cannot; a brother and a sister do what two brothers or two sisters cannot do: marry in the same direction, replicate an alliance.
Alongside Crow-Omaha systems, which many anthropologists, such as Viveiros de Castro, continue with some reason not to regard as genuine, specific ‘systems’, Lévi-Strauss placed in the category of semi-complex systems and without analyzing them, the Iroquois and Hawaiian systems. And the matter has been left up in the air ever since. We will return to this issue later when we analyze the difference between Iroquois and Dravidian systems. The Baruya, as we will recall, have an Iroquois system, practice direct sister exchange, forbid the repetition of marriages before several generations, and diversify their alliances in each generation so that two brothers do not marry in the same direction or into their mother’s or their father’s lineages. According to this description, the Baruya should be placed in societies with semi-complex structures. But in their case, it is their ‘regime’ of ‘marriage’ that would be ‘semi-complex’ and not their kinship system or terminology.69
(3) Systems that fall into ‘complex structures’ of kinship, where marriage prohibitions concern ‘kin positions defined by their degree of proximity to Ego’. The formula corresponds specifically to cognatic systems with kindred, like the Western European systems and those of the Canadian Inuit. In this case, beyond the more or less narrow circle of prohibited kin, other criteria that have nothing to do with kinship intervene in the choice of a spouse and therefore in marriage strategies, if these exist. With complex systems, kinship, according to Lévi-Strauss, ‘leaves the determination of the spouse to other, economic or psychological, mechanisms’. We have seen that this was true of the Melpa, who sought to use marriage to make an affine into a moka partner or to make a moka partner into an affine.
Once again, combining the word ‘complex’ with the word ‘structure’ is not the best solution. When it comes to structure, contemporary Western systems, the Canadian Inuit system,70 or that of the New Guinea Garia are not complex, or much less, in any event, than the Australian or Iroquois systems – like those of the New Guinea Yafar or the Ngawbe in Costa Rica. What is complex is the variety of criteria other than kinship that determine the spouse and eventually the marriage strategies these various criteria can inspire in certain social strata or classes. In any event, today we see more clearly that kinship does not suffice to organize any society. For example, whether one considers the Australian Aborigines, the Baruya or the South Indian Pramalai Kallar,71 one cannot get married if one has not been initiated. In Europe, until recently, a young man did not marry before he had done his ‘military service’ or reached his majority. Kinship is always subordinated to other social relations, placed in the service of other goals than that of reproducing kinship.