From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sat Nov 25 2006 - 23:23:37 EST
The analysis below suggests that even primitives
and preliterate peoples are just as human as
bourgeois man in that they not only live in
society but also must produce society in order to
live.
Godelier, it may be remembered, was the author of
Perspectives on Marxist anthropology, a
controversial essay on the Asiatic Mode of
Production and essays on the material and the
mental- he is no longer a Marxist.
As Jack Goody writes New Left Review essay on
Godelier's latest book
http://newleftreview.org/A2592,
"Among the discoveries that have made short work
of Lévi-Strauss's story of the foundations of
society have been the findings of primate
studies, to which Godelier devotes a sensitive
and imaginative chapter. What these have shown is
that both chimpanzees and bonobos (pygmy
chimpanzees in the Congo), our nearest biological
relatives, already live in 'societies' that
exhibit a kind of sketch of human constraints:
young females find sexual partners outside their
immediate natal group, while young males must
wait their turn until adults are willing to yield
partners to them. Enforcing at once cooperation
and hierarchy, these patterns appear to be the
product of mechanisms of natural selection,
though they coexist with homosexual pleasures
among males and females alike, less obviously
attributable to the same functions. The passage
from nature to culture with homo sapiens thus
cannot have been a sudden, discontinuous
transformation, but must have been more
evolutionary in nature. The critical novelty in
human society, Godelier argues, is that males
assume a parental role, something unknown among
these primates, where only mothers look after
children-fathers being unaware of their
connection with them...
"Humans, however, are the only species
co-responsible with nature for their own
evolution. In the past they rarely acknowledged
their own role in creating rules of kinship, but
now they can scarcely do otherwise, as laws and
customs governing relations between and within
the sexes are in full mutation, with the spread
of single parenting, homosexual marriage,
artificial insemination and the prospect of
cloning all now crowding onto the public agenda.
In the last lines of his book Godelier reiterates
that 'what separates human beings definitively
from primates, their cousins in nature, is that
they not only live in society but can and must
produce society in order to live'. It is one of
the underlying messages of this work that in
confronting the unexpected in that task today,
the sang-froid of the anthropologist is needed."
http://newleftreview.org/A2592
Here also is a bit of a precis of Godelier's last book.
Comparative Studies in Society and History (2006), 48: 326-358
Maurice Godelier and the Metamorphosis of Kinship, A Review Essay
Robert H. Barnes
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford
______________
Godelier next turns to a long exposition of
Lévi-Strauss' argument trying to establish that
the incest prohibition gives rise to exogamy,
which in turn gives rise to exchange of women. Of
the three logical possibilities, men exchange
women, women exchange men, or as in Euro-American
and other cognatic societies, one family gives a
man, the other a woman, and there is no question
of one sex exchanging the other, Lévi-Strauss
retains only the first. Godelier denies
criticizing Lévi-Strauss either for considering
male dominance to be universal, or for the idea
that alliance rests often on the exchange of
women between groups represented by men, but for
the idea that the social subordination of women
is based on unconscious structures of symbolic
thought, in the last analysis on the structure of
the brain, and that male dominance is the
universal precondition of kinship relations. As
opposed to Freud, Lévi-Strauss' interpretations
immediately demonstrated the operational value
and efficacy for a certain number of kinship
systems. Lévi-Strauss devoted much less attention
to the forms of descent, which are themselves
highly specific cultural institutions, than to
alliance. Lévi-Strauss' statement that, "the
incest prohibition is less a rule which forbids
marrying the mother, sister or daughter, than a
rule which requires giving the mother, sister or
daughter to another" (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 552),
creates the illusion that these three forms of
exchange are equivalent. Godelier knows of no
examples of a man exchanging his mother in order
to acquire a wife. Lévi-Strauss's assertion
therefore does not engage with the facts. By
leaving aside agonistic exchanges and inalienable
goods, Lévi-Strauss neglects some of the most
important aspects of political and religious
power in society.
Whereas in 1950, Lévi-Strauss took the position
that "language could only arise at one go" and
denied that it might appear gradually
(Lévi-Strauss 1950: 16), by 1967 he had changed
his position, and the sudden appearance of
language had been replaced by a progressive
evolution (Lévi-Strauss 1967: 451). On another
point, too, Lévi-Strauss changed position. Human
society no longer rested simply on exchange. Now
in addition to things that were exchanged, there
were things that were not exchanged, "Not that in
society everything is exchanged, but if there
were no exchange, there would be no society"
(Lévi-Strauss 2000: 494).
Whatever may remain of Lévi-Strauss's attempt to
link exchange with the incest prohibition,
Godelier (2004: 461-62) proposes an alternative
view corresponding to six criteria:
1. It is necessary to separate the analysis of
the prohibition of incest from the other
prohibitions pertaining to sexual practices.
2. The prohibition of incest pertains to
forbidden sexual unions before it does to
prohibited marriage ties.
3. The prohibited sexual practices pertain to
heterosexual and homosexual relations.
4. The prohibition of incest is found
associated with prohibitions pertaining to
relatives by alliance, either because the
prohibitions pertaining to consanguines are
"extended" to affines, or because prohibitions of
another type apply to certain affines in
complementing prohibitions pertaining to
consanguines.
5. The prohibition of incest presupposes the
development of conceptual thought and diverse
means of communication, proto-languages and
articulated languages. These developments did not
appear as a Big Bang, but rather as a process
taking place in the long extent of human
evolution. These processes were for the most part
unconscious, although the prohibitions themselves
were conscious social facts.9
6. There is no reason to suppose that
primitive humanity lived in isolated biological
families (as assumed by Lévi-Strauss) or hordes
(as assumed by Freud) before living in society.
There is no reason to postulate for the distant
ancestors of men and their descendants the
logical or historical priority of consanguineous
families living in a state of permanent sexual
promiscuity rather than the development of proper
forms of society.
To establish his own position on the evolution of
society, Godelier turns to a long survey of
modern studies of chimpanzees and bonobos, and he
concludes that these animals live naturally in
multimale and multifemale societies like humans.
These societies are characterized by the
separation of the sexes and subordination of one
sex to the other, and their sexuality includes
heterosexual, homosexual, and autoerotic forms.
There is no trace of primitive promiscuity among
the chimpanzees and bonobos. These animals are
able to act on nature in making tools and
selecting food sources, but they cannot modify
the organization of their society. Like other
primates, humans did not give themselves society,
but in contrast to them they developed the
ability to transform their manner of living in
society and to invent new forms of society.
Human beings produce society in order to live.
Unlike chimpanzees and bonobos, humans do not
leave the raising of children exclusively to
females. In most human societies, males and
females cooperate not only in raising children
but in procreation of children. Human sexuality
has pushed the distinction between the sexuality
of desire and the sexuality of reproduction
farther than is found in any other species of
primate. Human sexuality is egoistic, but even
extreme permissiveness must stop at the doors of
the families, the groups which are directly
responsible for raising children. Crossing these
limits is to commit what is called "incest"
(Godelier 2004: 491). It should be remarked that
by saying so, Godelier is in effect proposing his
definition of incest. Human families exist in two
types. There are those composed solely of
consanguines, such as the Na of Yunnan and the
Nayar of Malabar, and those (the majority)
structured by alliance (between husband and wife)
and descent and filiation (between parents and
children). Sexual permissiveness in the last case
endangers not only ties of consanguinity, but
also those of affinity. As demonstrated by
reference to brother/sister marriage in Roman
Egypt (which is similar to the behavior of gods),
societies have two choices to make: (1) to marry
without exchange or with; (2) to unite like gods
or not like gods. There are no societies where
marriage takes place only between very close
relatives. Brother/sister marriage does not
authorize other forms of close marriage or sexual
relations. There is no society where an
individual may satisfy all of his desires. Where
close kin sexual unions prohibited in other
societies are authorized in one society, such
unions are not considered incestuous. They bring
the couple closer to gods and take their
legitimacy from a political and religious
cosmology.
Godelier's (2004: 494-95) then lists twelve theoretical conclusions:
1. There is no society which permits
individuals to satisfy all their sexual desires.
2. Two possibilities exist to assure the
continuity of groups which make up a society
which for survival depend on the birth of
children who will continue their physical and
social existence: to exchange between themselves
sexual partners, generally women, but sometimes
men, or not to exchange at all and to reproduce
among themselves.
3. To exchange does not necessarily mean to
form a marriage alliance. The exchange of
substances is not an exchange of persons and does
not transform itself into a social alliance (as
in the case of the Na).
4. To form a marriage alliance does not
necessarily mean to exchange, giving to others
and receiving from others, but sometimes as well
to keep for oneself and to ally among one's own
group.
5. Everywhere where exchanges take the form of
the exchange of persons and give place to diverse
forms of alliance, the units of procreation and
the raising of children combine ties of affinity
and ties of filiation and descent, thus ties of
consanguinity. Allies, by their union, engender
consanguines.
6. Wherever there are unions resting on the
exchange of persons and formalized by an
"official" alliance, the sexual permissiveness
authorized to individuals stops at the doors of
the units of procreation and the raising of
children. They are prohibited between the
individuals of different sex and generation who
make up these units and are considered as
incestuous except if, on the other hand, they are
regarded as unions making humans closer to gods.
7. In consequence, and logically, in the
societies prohibiting sexual unions between near
kin, humans are not authorized to imitate gods.
Relations of humans with gods are invoked either
to prohibit them or to permit relations between
near kin. Unions among humans always bring into
question the whole of society and cosmos.
8. There is no possible biological foundation
to prohibiting sexual unions with the
consanguines of affines or the affines of
consanguines. Only social reasons could explain
such prohibitions (which have no genetic
consequences for the human species). It is
necessary therefore for such unions to menace
social cooperation and the ties of solidarity
created between two groups of kin for them to be
prohibited. However this situation indicates as
well that the development of exchanges of
partners giving place to alliances is a trait
specific to human kinship.
9. No society known functions solely on the
basis of endogamous unions between very close
kin. Even in societies where such unions are
authorized, other unions exist which obey other
principles, unions with very distant consanguines
or unions with non-kin, strangers; and these
unions could themselves give rise to exchanges.
10. Even in societies where certain unions
between close consanguines are not only
authorized but sought after, other unions between
consanguines are forbidden. It is necessary
therefore to conclude that there exists no
society that functions without one form or
another of what is called the prohibition of
incest.
11. The prohibition of unions between certain
categories of consanguines is universal, but does
not imply that the prohibition of the union of
brother and sister is universal and that the
exchange of women or men between two groups of
kin should be everywhere the foundation of
alliances.
12. The reciprocal giving of substances (sperm)
between groups of kin does not necessarily
produce alliance between groups.
Of all the inventions which have slowly separated
humans from other primates and profoundly
restructured the division of labor between men
and women, one perhaps has more importance than
the ability to manufacture and use tools and
weapons, that is the domestication of fire. For
men, unlike animals, fire is a weapon and a tool.
Specifying the social conditions of sexual unions
and the membership of the resulting children to
groups were two problems which societies had to
confront and resolve. Godelier proposes the
hypothesis, contrary to Tylor and Lévi-Strauss,
that our ancient ancestors already lived in
families and that the very slow learning of new
material and social relationships between the
sexes created new relationships between adults
and children as well as between groups where
children were born and raised.
Man is the only animal species which has become
co-responsible with nature for its own evolution.
Humanity is the only social species which
consciously and socially manages its sexuality.
The two principles, to keep and to share, apply
to all domains of life, including the provision
of food. Even in the capitalist West not
everything is available for sale. Societies and
individuals are under two obligations, to
exchange and to keep and transmit. Lévi-Strauss
is wrong, Godelier says, to attempt to explain
father's brother's child marriage among Arabs as
an exchange of the right to keep, that is to keep
marriage between close consanguines.
(Lévi-Strauss 1988: 147). In this case the right
to keep is distinct from the obligation to give.
Neither kinship relationships nor the family are
the basis of society. Kinship relations, contrary
to Fortes, are not necessarily the domain of the
purest sentiments of altruism. They may also give
rise to hatred and enmity. Kinship does not
permit by itself creating a material and social
dependence among all individuals and all groups
in a society. It is no longer possible to claim
that "primitive" societies, lacking castes,
classes, and the state, were based on kinship.
"But such a claim does not mean, as Leach would
have it, that kinship is nothing but a language
or a veil, or worse, an invention of
anthropologists and therefore the West" (Godelier
2004: 517).
Chinese filial piety was a feudal imposition on
domestic life and Australian section systems, far
from being typical of Australia, spread only
recently in western Australia and are primarily
concerned with ordering even non-kin for ritual
purposes. Social relationships having nothing to
do with kinship penetrate kin relationships. The
social becomes kin. First all that becomes
kinship transforms into relations between the
sexes, and finally all that is kinship impresses
itself on the sexual body of individuals from
birth and becomes an attribute of their sex. The
difference of sex becomes a difference of gender.
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