Another basic ingredient of the kinship domain is thus the existence of a particular vocabulary which allows an individual (Ego), defined by his or her sex, to address other individuals who are related in various ways, or to describe the kin ties that bind individuals, who may or may not be personally related to the speaker (e.g. X is the migwe, cross cousin, of Y because his father A married . . . and so on).
But I ran into kinship once again when I asked the Baruya to explain what a child is, how they represented the process of its conception, the man’s role (the father), the woman’s role (the mother) and the Sun’s role in forming the child that the woman was going to bring into the world. Such representations exist in every society. And they bear the mark of their kinship systems (patrilineal, matrilineal, etc.) as well as that of the political and economic systems that determine relations (usually unequal) between individuals according to gender, clan, caste, religion, etc. Finally, investigating kinship also meant identifying the rights and duties of those who regard themselves as kin of a child born to or adopted into their group, and their respective responsibilities in its education and transformation from a child into a responsible adult. And of course this includes the child’s reciprocal duties and rights with regard to the various categories of people related to it.
It is by bringing together all of these factors that we can finally understand what it means to be a parent, a relative or a child in a given society, to be a given kind of relative and a given kind of child, and thus what is covered in other societies by what we designate by the terms ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘siblings’, ‘affines’, etc.
In sum, analyzing the domain of kinship in a society amounts to exploring and reconstructing the ties between the following aspects of the society’s organization:
(1)The modes of descent reckoning and the groups they engender; filiation; material and immaterial realities that are inherited and transmitted from one generation to the next; and family and residence.
(2)Marriage rules and alliance strategies; the incest taboo (and once again residence after marriage, family, lineage, etc.) (But we must be careful here: there are societies in which there is no marriage [the Na of Yunnan] or where it is only simulated [the Nyar in India].)
(3)Representations of what a child is, of the process of the child’s conception, of its development and of what is meant in different cultures by what we designate by the words ‘fatherhood’, ‘motherhood’, ‘consanguinity’, ‘affinity’, as well as the rights and duties that bind various kinds of kin.
Like all other social relations, kinship relations do not exist purely between individuals (and between the groups to which they belong – family, lineage, household, caste, etc.), they also and at the same time exist within the individuals. One is defined as the son or daughter of . . . as the (real or classificatory) father or mother of . . . These ties are stamped into people’s very being, into their consciousness and their sexed body. For to be born a Baruya man or woman is to know that one’s body has been made and nourished in one’s mother’s womb by one’s father’s sperm and that it was then completed by the Sun before the spirit of an ancestor from the father’s lineage entered the body and took possession.
It is for this reason that it is impossible fully to understand the nature and workings of kinship relations by analyzing them once they have been detached, disjoined from the ways they are thought and experienced by those who were born to these relations and (more or less) compelled in the course of their existence to take them on and reproduce them. It is for this reason, too, that the field of kinship in any society is marked out by two series of representations. On the one hand, there is a vocabulary of some thirty words on average, learned and known by all members of the society, which enable each person, according to his or her sex and generation, to situate all others with respect to him- or herself or with respect to others within the types of kinship relations existing in the society and which have their own logic. X is my migwe aounie – my cross cousin (migwe) on the breast (aounie) side, that is to say, my mother’s side. Y is so-and-so’s younger brother, and so on. At the other pole are those representations that a society has of what a child is, of how it is conceived, of what it receives from the father, from the mother or from the ancestors (and from which side), of what it will grow up to be if it is a boy or a girl, etc.
All of these representations work their way into the individual’s consciousness from infancy and delineate the cultural form of the intimate relationship the individual will have with him- or herself and with others. At the heart of the representations that delineate each person’s private relationship with him- or herself according to gender lie not only complementary gender relations, but also relations of authority and domination that work in favour of one of the two sexes, not only in the sphere of kinship but beyond, within the economic, political or religious relations between the groups and individuals that make up the society.
To sum up, let us say that, in the overwhelming majority of known societies, kinship relations arise from the implementation by individuals and by the groups to which they belong of principles commonly accepted in their society. These rules define whom it is possible or forbidden to marry and specify who the children born of the couple will belong to. In many but not all societies it is also possible to adopt children and even adults, and to treat them as full members of the adoptive family or clan. Polynesian societies and the Inuit engage intensely in the giving of children as gifts between families. Here, too, there are rules that determine the circumstances in which a kin group (family, lineage, household) can adopt someone and whom it can adopt.1
All of these rules prescribing what individuals can and cannot do and often what they should or should not do are the source of positive or negative ‘values’ attached to the actions of individuals and groups and to the social relations to which their actions give rise. Rules and values are mental (idéel)2 realities that are by no means an epiphenomenon of kinship relations but one of the conditions of their production. For in a society one cannot get married without knowing what marriage is and whom, in this society, one is allowed or forbidden to marry. And once a marriage has taken place, what was formerly a mental condition now becomes an internal component.
Of course, every society has individuals who ignore in practice the (positive or negative) norms in use. Some even oppose them openly, often at their own peril. Contradictions between norms and practices obviously do not stem purely from individual decision, though they tend to multiply when a society undergoes rapid and deep changes that make it increasingly hard to reproduce the old structures. So it is today in certain Australian Aboriginal groups, where up to 25 per cent of marriages are ‘irregular’, in other words correspond to unions traditionally forbidden by their system. One of the reasons for this situation is the demographic collapse of these groups, which means that there are no longer enough permissible spouses in certain of the ‘sections’ into which Aboriginal society is divided. A number of men have therefore married women from their own section or from their own ‘moiety’, and who are therefore their ‘sisters’, thus breaking the incest taboo and the rule of exogamy on which their kinship system was based.
Such facts give us an opportunity to clarify an important point. All of the transformations that occur in a kinship system always (if the society continues to exist) lead to the establishment of another type of kinship relations, to the appearance of another kinship system. Changes in kinship never produce anything but more kinship; and kinship relations can never turn into, for example, caste or class relations. If this is true, we must therefore turn elsewhere to explain the emergence, around 4000 bce in the Near East and around 2000 bce in the New World, of the first societies differentiated into castes or classes, in which new institutions were to appear – such as various forms of centralized power, chiefdoms, states and empires.
Before the appearance of these new forms of power, all human societies were probably organized according to combinations