We are thus caught in a paradox. Marriage is increasingly shunned by heterosexuals, while being demanded by homosexuals. Children who, until the appearance of new procreation technologies, owed their birth to sexual relations between men and women who may not have desired children, are now wanted by homosexual couples who, on principle, exclude heterosexual intercourse from their desire. Another paradox for some would be the fact that in homosexual families parenthood may be fully realized simply by becoming a more or less social and affective reality: If a woman can choose to be the ‘father’ and act accordingly, or a man choose to be the ‘mother’ and act accordingly, if both choose to be parents apart from any reference to their biological sex, would this not be undeniable proof that parenthood is basically not biological but social, thus confirming a thesis dear to many kinship specialists?
These contemporary developments would once again seem to confirm the pre-eminent role of anthropology when it comes to thinking about kinship, as might be substantiated by the number of jurists, politicians and psychologists who seek out anthropologists to help them better understand the mysteries of modern kinship before intervening in its evolution. But do anthropologists still want, or are they even able, to answer the questions put to them, when the majority ceased to be interested in kinship as far back as the 1980s?
Before examining what has become of their work on kinship, long considered to be a specialist field and the very flower of anthropology, let us step back and look at the principles of our own kinship system.
The Western European system has three components, which combine with each other to constitute the deep structure of kinship relations in our societies, the framework within which the Westerner is born and lives. The first component is the family, which is nuclear and monogamous. The second is the network of families related by consanguinity or affinity.3 These networks associate individuals of different generations linked mainly by direct or collateral ties of descent on both the father’s and the mother’s side. For, in Western societies, one side counts nearly as much as the other, which is why this kinship system is called ‘cognatic’. Nevertheless, in so far as it is the father who hands his name on to the children, and other elements of social life pass principally or exclusively through him, we say that our cognatic system has a ‘patrilineal bias’. These networks of related families, who associate with each other and whose members feel bound together by ties of solidarity, who help one another and exchange goods and services, are sometimes misnamed ‘extended families’. This expression should actually be reserved for groups of kin – usually a father and his married sons living under one roof and comprising a single domestic unit, or household, and who also often function as a production unit. These ‘extended’ families properly speaking existed in various parts of rural France and Europe under the Ancien Régime, and for a portion of the nineteenth century, but today they have practically disappeared.
The third component is Ego’s kindred. This, too, is a network of people related by ties of kinship, but it is centered on the individual. It covers, on the one hand, all those relatives the individual ‘inherited’ at birth – on both the father’s and the mother’s side – as well as the affines of his or her consanguines and the consanguines of his or her affines. This birth kindred is shared by all the children of a particular father and mother, that is, by all siblings. But, when the individual in question marries (or as is often the case today, lives with someone) and has children, then he or she becomes the starting point for a new kindred, which differs from that of his siblings. The two networks, the one formed by the families and the one formed by the related individuals, are open, with boundaries that depend on a number of factors which have nothing to do with kinship: spatial proximity of the families and the individuals; changes in the social status of certain families or individuals, who may no longer see each other; families or individuals who die or disappear due to epidemics, wars, and so on.
These three ingredients, which comprise the field of kinship, existed under the Ancien Régime, but they were associated with other components as well, which either disappeared after the French Revolution and the promulgation in 1804 of the Napoleonic Code or underwent a change of status in the new society and the new moral and sexual order that ensued. Under the Ancien Régime, marriage was a religious act, a sacrament that made the bond between a man and a woman indissoluble. Divorce was forbidden by the Church, unless the marriage could be proven not to have been consummated. Children had to be baptized, and the baptism (like the birth) was recorded on the rolls of the parish that had administered the sacrament. The child’s father was theoretically supposed to be the husband of its mother, and he had authority over his wife and his children.
This configuration of rights, practices and values characteristic of the Ancien Régime began to change with the institution of ‘civil’ marriage in 1804. In principle, the civil marriage was not mandatory, but it rapidly became a de facto obligation in the eyes of the majority of the population, which was quick to understand that the new institution would become the only legal means of legitimizing the children that would be born to a couple. Their birth was henceforth recorded by the state registry office.
In the nineteenth century cohabitation was still stigmatized as a practice of the lower classes or of individuals who had chosen to break with social conventions – artists, for example.4 Children born out of wedlock had no rights. They were bastards and were treated less well than those of the Ancien Régime nobility. There was strong social pressure on young people to marry within their own social class. The only member of the family to exercise authority was the father. He was vested with paternal authority, a right and a concept that go back to Roman Antiquity. It was the husband’s duty to ensure the family’s material conditions of existence. The married woman was under her husband’s authority and was legally incapable. Marriage – whether civil or religious – was still the act that founded the couple. Initially recognized, divorce would be abolished in 1816. Exploration of sexuality and love before marriage was stifled. Of course, homosexuality was forbidden and regarded as an unnatural desire, as a sin by believers, as a pathology in medical circles; and homosexual couples were forced to conceal their relationship.
This quick glance back over the nineteenth century is meant merely to suggest the changes that have been multiplying since the 1960s, when a new society took shape and began to thrive in the wake of the upheaval wrought in Western Europe by the Second World War and the subsequent division of the world into two blocs.
In France in 1970, the notion of paternal authority was abolished and replaced by that of parental authority,5 shared equally between the father and the mother, to whom were enjoined responsibilities toward their children in matters of health, education, safety and morality,6 even in the event of separation or divorce. Parental authority is thus considered to be a function of public order, guaranteed by the state.
In 1975 divorce by ‘mutual consent’ was made possible in France. In 2009, thirty-nine per cent of all marriages ended in divorce. To this figure must be added the large number of separations that do not go through divorce. This is obviously the case for the separation of cohabiting couples. Hence the growing number of single-parent households, and ‘recomposed’ families, which are not an alternative model but simply social configurations that occur at different stages in people’s lives, as the spectacular increase in longevity compared to the nineteenth century now allows individuals to contract several kinds of alliance in their lifetime.
Generally speaking, then, in our society, marriage is no longer the act that founds the couple.7 The couple forms before the marriage, which, if they eventually decide to marry, often takes place only after the couple becomes convinced of the necessity to stabilize their union. But marriage alone no longer makes