The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier
with his theoretical conclusions into his famous Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, published under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, in the conclusion to which he stressed the importance of kinship relations in human history and particularly in ‘non-civilized’ societies.
We thus see how Morgan endowed anthropology with one of its objects of study (kinship), with a method for studying it (the genealogical questionnaire), and with a first batch of findings including the discovery of some of the rules non-European societies had chosen to organize ties of descent and alliance between the individuals and the groups that make up these societies.
But all this was possible only because of Morgan’s remarkable and persistent effort to decentre his thinking with respect to the categories of his own (Euro-American) society and culture. This decentring itself was made possible only by suspending judgement, by temporarily placing in brackets those things that were taken for granted and shared by the members of his society and culture. To be sure, suspension of judgement alone would not have given Morgan’s research a scientific character. He also had to learn to turn factual observations into problems to be solved, questions to be asked, in sum into a new way of considering the facts, breaking them down and putting them back together. But he also had to invent a method for observing facts in the field, concepts for describing them and hypotheses for attempting to explain them. Last of all, he had to pose the principle that, in order to understand the data collected in any society, one must compare it with data gathered in other societies, similar or not, close by or not.
Morgan’s approach thus marked a profound rupture with the spontaneous ethnography practised by missionaries, military officers, colonial administrators, traders and other representatives of the Western world, all of whom had been striving since the sixteenth century to improve their knowledge of the customs of the populations they were trying to convert, control or administer, and who had, in certain cases, set down their observations in letters, reports or accounts of their travels.
THE INCOMPLETE DECENTRING
But there is another side to Morgan’s work. As soon as his Systems was published, he turned to the task of marshalling all his data and analyses with a view to reconstructing, as so many were attempting at the time, the evolution of humankind. In 1877, he published Ancient Society,15 in which he described how humanity had gone from a primitive ‘savage’ state (scarcely differing from that of the animal world, and where promiscuity reigned between the sexes) through to the ‘civilized’ state. On this account, the greatest inventions of this last state had appeared in Western Europe and were continued in the United States of America in a new society, created by Europeans to be sure, but without the after effects of feudalism, which in the mid nineteenth century continued to hobble the march of progress and democracy in most nations of the Old World. In a speculative schema purported to explain the evolution of humankind via three successive stages of social development (the primitive savage state, the barbarian state and the civilized state), Morgan went on to assign to one or another of these stages each of the various exotic societies whose kinship terminologies he had collected and analyzed. Polynesian societies with their chiefs and complex social structures thus became witnesses to and vestiges of the age when, having just emerged from the primitive state of animal-like promiscuity, groups of brothers ‘married’ groups of sisters – a ‘fact’ that ‘explained’, according to Morgan, the characteristically small number of terms in ‘Hawaiian’ kin terminologies and their extensions, wherein all of the men and all of the women in the generation above an individual are his ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers’ and those of his own generation are his ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’.
In short, the same man who had managed to decentre his own thinking with regard to Western categories and had engendered a new discipline, this time around harnessed his findings to a speculative ideological version of history that – once again, though now with new arguments – made Europe and America the mirror in which humankind could at once contemplate its origins and measure its evolution, in a process that had left a great number of peoples far behind.
This explains why, twenty years earlier, Morgan had designated the Iroquois descent groups with the Latin term gens. As a jurist schooled in Roman law, he considered that the Iroquois clans held the key to understanding the Roman gens or the genos of the ancient Greeks. The kinship system of the nineteenth-century Iroquois was thus projected onto ancient Roman society. But, as the Iroquois gens (it would later be called ‘clan’) was matrilineal and the Roman gens patrilineal, the Iroquois were taken as providing evidence of an even more archaic state of the gens. This vision would rapidly (in 1884) be adopted by Friedrich Engels in his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in which he attempted to bring Morgan’s evolutionist speculations into line with Karl Marx’s historical materialism.
In the end, by presenting the Western nuclear – and monogamous – family as the most rational form of family, as that form in which the ‘blood’ ties connecting a child to his or her (real) father and to his or her (real) mother were finally visible, Morgan, despite his efforts to decentre his thinking with regard to the values and representations of his own society, was never able to treat the Western way of organizing kinship, the family and marriage as merely one cultural model among others, a model that was just as ethnocentric and therefore equally as ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’ as the others.
We now understand why Morgan’s work immediately drew so much criticism, targeted at his evolutionism, which, as it quickly became clear, had to be jettisoned if progress was to be made in exploring the domain he himself had helped to found as an object of scientific knowledge and upon which his work on the Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity had conferred its first letters of nobility.
For decades following Morgan, hundreds of field surveys, conducted in so-called ‘tribal’ societies of Africa, Asia, America and Oceania, or in ‘peasant’ societies in Europe, Asia and Latin America, confirmed the importance of kinship relations in the functioning of these societies.
LÉVI-STRAUSS AND HIS CRITICS
Once kinship ties began to appear as the very basis of these societies, their study was regarded as providing the key to understanding the way societies worked. This in turn resulted in a proliferation of studies on the subject, including works by some of the biggest names in anthropology, making kinship studies the lynchpin of the new social science. Indeed, because this theoretical context endowed kinship systems with a twofold primacy – ontological in relation to the life of societies and epistemological in terms of their scientific study – George Peter Murdock was able to entitle a book almost entirely devoted to the inventory and analysis of kin terminologies and systems throughout the world, Social Structure (1949).16 The publication, in the same year, of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Elementary Structures of Kinship17 was to confirm the importance of kinship in the appearance, development and destiny of humankind.
Lévi-Strauss changed the scope of kinship studies by postulating that the incest taboo had been the primary condition both for the emergence of kinship relations and for the appearance of ‘genuine’ human society, henceforth separate from the animal-like state and pursuing its development in another world, a man-made one, the world of culture. The goal was no longer simply to understand tribal or peasant societies but to circumscribe and apprehend that which was truly human in man – in short, and as the philosophers say, to grasp his essence.
The goal thus singularly outstripped the standard theoretical ambitions and limits of anthropology, and of the other social sciences taken separately. Lévi-Strauss’ thesis set out a global vision of humankind that resembled Morgan’s minus the evolutionism, since Morgan had made the exclusion of incest (which he believed to have been gradual), in other words of primitive, animal-like promiscuity between the sexes, the driving force behind the changes in the family and in kinship relations, and one of the conditions of human progress. It is perhaps for this reason that Lévi-Strauss dedicated his book to Morgan. Furthermore, he was implicitly in agreement with Freud, who half a century earlier, in Totem and Taboo,18 had explained the emergence of kinship relations by the sons’ murder of a despotic and incestuous father. (The sons, so the theory goes, after having killed their father in order to gain access to their sisters and their mother, decided to renounce incestuous relations