New on kinship

The rules according to which the various cultures determine, for each individual, the extent and the contours of his relative, correspond to the social management of a natural fact, that of human generation. Born of a man and a woman, we all register in a family tree. This biological given specific to the species, cultures have very diverse ways of considering it. Such a culture will grant a cardinal value to the father-son bond, while another will almost completely ignore it. Such a culture will confuse all the parents’ collaterals by designating them all as “ uncles “, While another will make the paternal uncle an almost equivalent of the father, and will see in maternal uncle a way of male mother, etc. What anthropologists call for the study of “ relationship Is nothing more than the examination of very variable treatment that the various societies apply to the genealogical material.

Back on the prohibition of incest

Claude Lévi-Strauss is undoubtedly one of the great contributors to the study of kinship. In Elementary kinship structureshe had sought the foundations of the prohibition of incest. It could not be the diffuse perception of a genetic danger, since certain societies hate the marriage between a man and the daughter of his maternal aunt, when they see a good eye her marriage to the daughter of his maternal uncle, who is just as close to the genetic point of view. The thesis he established was therefore the following: the prohibition of incest is not a primordial fact, it is only the reverse of the imperious duty to leave the women of the relative to others. Before the prohibition, there is the obligation of exchange: to give your sister is to acquire brothers-in-law who will become as many political, commercial, ritual partners, etc. The facts invoked in support of the demonstration came in particular from the Aboriginal societies of Australia, and the great civilizations of the Far East.

However, it is precisely on this point that Laurent Barry comes to bring the contradiction to the one who was his master. Lévi-Strauss had conceded two exceptions to his thesis. First of all, our own societies, which can hardly say that the horror of incest is based on the obligation of exchange. He pulled from it with a rhetorical pirouette: the man who forbids his sister puts her in fact at the disposal of the anonymous mass of mariable men, expecting in return for one of them to do the same for his benefit. But I doubt that the prohibition weighing on incest is experienced in this way by the members of our societies. The other exception is what anthropologists used to call the “ Arab marriage ». Many Bedouin societies consider that the best marriage is the one who unites a man with the daughter of his paternal uncle. But in societies where belonging to the clan is transmitted by men, the daughter of my paternal uncle belongs to the same clan as me, so that by marrying it I become in a certain way my own brother-in-law.

Laurent Barry begins his book with the study of this so-called Arab marriage, which, far from being confined to a few isolates from the desert, is known to the Maghreb and the Near East to Southern Africa. It shows that this supposed preference for the daughter of the paternal uncle is only the visible effect of a deeper fact: the reluctance to marry other cousins. No doubt this cousin belongs to the same agnatic clan as me but, whatever the social and political importance of the clan, my kinship does not merge with him. Although it has no political effect as visible as the link that unites them to their father, the one who unites children with their mother is held for more precious. To be related is above all to be born of the same belly and to have been fed in the same breast. And the related people are all the closer since the link that unites them is closer to this ideal. This is how the brothers and sisters of milk are considered to be close relatives ; that the children of two sisters are still very close, and explicitly considered in some of these societies as “ almost born in the same belly ». In general, the proximity between two individuals is assessed in the number of female links present in the genealogical chain which unites them. When they are only connected by women, they are very close. When they are only connected by men, they are infinitely less and already very close to no longer being parents. And the statistical data exploited by the author shows in a surprising way that a man is less likely to marry a given relative that she is closer to him in this very specific sense. It is therefore not the obligation of exchange which founds the prohibition of incest in these societies, but indeed the reluctance to marry relatives deemed too close.

Have a parent

Now it would seem that, mutatis mutandisthe same is true in many cultures. The reluctance to marry a parent is universally a primary fact, prior to the obligation of exchange and not presupposing it. It must still be understood that “ have a parent »Has a very variable meaning according to the societies, and this variability is precisely what Laurent Barry endeavors to make appear in the almost 800 pages of his book. Being a parent comes everywhere to participate in an identity, in a common substance, but this participation is transmitted variablely. For Arabs and other sub -Saharan peoples, it is first transmitted by women. In ancient China, it was first transmitted by men ; And, logically, it was well seen that a man married the daughter of his maternal aunt, a marriage today rarer but still allowed.

There are also other societies where participation in the kinner is made up of two distinct components, one of which is supposed to be transmitted by the mother and the other by the father. In India, it is considered that the bones of an individual come from his father, while his flesh comes from his mother ; The Maring of New Guinea think that the father transmits his fat (via his sperm) and the mother his blood ; For the Ashants of Ghana, the Father transmits his mind and the mother transmits his blood. And even when these components received respectively from the father and the mother have no identifiable anatomical base, the idea remains the same. Take the Ashanti case to fix the ideas. Two sisters receive their mother from their mother and transmit it to their children, who will therefore be parents in this respect and will not be able to marry. In the same way, two brothers receive their minds from their father and will transmit it to their children, who will therefore not be able to marry. But consider a brother and a sister. They share the same blood and the same spirit, received respectively from their mother and their father. But the boy will only transmit his mind, because the blood of his children will come from their mother. And the girl will only transmit her blood, because the mind of her children will come from their father. Although, in our way of assessing parental proximity, the children of this boy and this girl are just as close cousins ​​as the children of brothers or children of sisters can be, they are not according to the Ashanti, and will be able to marry.

As for our societies, they considered from late antiquity, that is to say long before the laws of genetics were discovered, that belonging to the relatives was transmitted in a common way and undifferentiated by the mother and by the father-which do not form “ only one flesh “(Una Caro). So that the proximity between two individuals united by a family chain is simply by counting the links of this chain, without differentiating female links from male links. Below a number of links, kinship is too close for marriage to be possible. This minimal threshold below which marriage is excluded varied over time, history that the author traces in large lines. Such a configuration seems to us to go without saying, but we see that it is only the particular realization of a combinatorial which receives other achievements elsewhere. And its apparent adequacy with what the laws of genetics are teaching us could well be disrupted by the prospects opened by the progress of assisted medical procreation. We will therefore undoubtedly have to relearn that kinship is only the sometimes very biased interpretation that a society makes biological data. This long journey through history and time is therefore in the end of nature to reveal something to us about ourselves.

So here is a young author who, not content with offering an alternative well constructed to a long prestigious thesis, exemplans what the program of anthropology must be – and as well, of all the social sciences. First by showing what is cultural in what we hold too quickly as natural. Then, by showing that, so arbitrary as they appear, the combinations implemented by the social game are, as Raymond Aron would have said, that variations on a small number of fundamental themes.