2. Matrilineal systems are numerous in Central Africa (the ‘matrilineal’ belt of Africa), in part of North America, in eastern New Guinea and in the Solomon Islands, and in a few minorities of Southeast Asia or China.30
3. Duo- and bilineal systems are few and far between; we find them here and there in Africa, Asia and Oceania.31
4. Cognatic descent systems are plentiful in the expansion zone of Malayo-Polynesian-speaking societies, which stretches from Madagascar to Easter Island, by way of Taiwan, which is close to this expansion zone. Large numbers are also found in Amazonia.
5. Cognatic systems based on kindred prevail in Europe, in populations of European origin in North and South America, in Japan and in certain areas of Malaysia and Indonesia.
In the absence of a map of the world-distribution of these systems, it is evident that we cannot go very far toward finding correlations between the nature of these systems and other aspects of the culture and structures of their associated societies.
I will complete this inventory by examining several theoretical problems raised by the analysis of these systems over the last decades.
Application of a descent rule, whether lineal or non-lineal, gives rise to groups of individuals of both sexes, in several successive generations, that have been dubbed ‘lineages’ and ‘clans, in the case of uni-, duo- and bilineal systems, and ‘branches’ or ‘demes’ – terms unfamiliar to the public – sometimes used to designate cognatic descent groups. Whereas applying the descent rule in lineal and bilineal groups suffices to define and close the boundaries of the groups, in the case of undifferentiated, non-lineal groups, other principles are needed to define a descent group and give it boundaries (individuals having resided on an ancestral site for a long time, for instance).
CONCERNING THE IMAGINARY CHARACTER OF DESCENT PRINCIPLES
An initial remark is needed here to underscore the abstract, social, and in part imaginary character of these rules and therefore of the kinship relations they engender. To favour the relations that pass exclusively through the male or exclusively through the female line is to attribute a different social status to the two sexes by overdetermining one to the detriment of the other in the production of social ties between the generations and, in each generation, between the sexes. Even in cognatic systems, where the rule of gender equivalence ensures the transmission of descent and the continuity of the group, in certain contexts only the men or only the women, the eldest or the youngest, etc. are selected to transmit certain components of social life – titles, land, ritual functions – which are, at the same time, components of the kin group’s identity and local conditions of the global reproduction of the society as a whole.
Later, we will discover another proof of the abstract, social character of kinship when we look at marriage systems and kinship terminologies that distinguish between parallel and cross cousins, two categories of individuals of both sexes whom we know (something we have learned recently) to stand at the same genetic and biological distance from Ego but whose social status is basically different and even opposed, since theoretically one may marry one’s cross cousins but not one’s parallel cousins, because the latter are assimilated to siblings. This remark poses the problem of the relationship between kinship and biology. But to tackle the question, we must start from a universal fact anyone, anthropologist or not, can see when travelling the world: there is no language that does not have a so-called kinship vocabulary. In all languages, whatever the society’s descent and marriage rules, there are specific words to designate the positions and relationships of individuals of both sexes in at least five generations – two ascending and two descending generations starting with an individual (or a class of individuals in positions equivalent to that of Ego) characterized universally by his or her sex and by the place he or she occupies in his or her generation with respect to others of both sexes born before or after and connected to either the same ‘relatives’ or to the relatives of these relatives.
In short, all societies are concerned with organizing, on the one hand, the succession of generations – an obvious condition of their physical continuity – and, on the other hand, the relationships between persons of both sexes belonging to a certain number of successive generations (usually five). All cultures attribute meaning to these facts and to these relationships. All languages talk about them. Individuals of both sexes belonging to different generations, which succeed each other and are linked to each other in the process of reproducing human life, as well as being linked by the place their society attributes to them in this process – these are, to my way of thinking, both the biological and the social underpinnings of kinship relations. Kinship relations are therefore not just any kind of social relations. They are not, for example, relations springing from the desire on the part of a certain number of individuals or groups to create a hometown football club and who get together to bring it about, finance it, train local players or recruit outside players, and who fight to see their club rise higher and higher in the national and international tables.
Some anthropologists, like Mary Bouquet or Janet Carsten,32 concerned with ridding the definition of kinship of any reference to the biological process of reproduction, devote considerable time to scrutinizing the word ‘relative’, which designates any kind of kin and comes from the verb ‘to relate’, in an attempt to discover the real meaning cleansed of any hint of biology and therefore of kinship. Of course all they found at the heart of the word was the formal notion of a ‘tie’ or ‘link’ between two components, henceforth connected by this tie, a notion that can apply to all manner of ties without permitting their distinction. For, as Holy reminds us,33 one can be connected in a thousand social ways – people can be close friends, come from the same town or the same country, etc. – and to distinguish between these different types of relatedness we need to reintroduce contexts, specific contents that will allow us to distinguish, for example, the relatedness of friendship from the relatedness of ethnicity from the relatedness of citizenship. Eliminating all reference to the reproduction of life in analyzing the domain of kinship, and glossing the etymology and the semantic field of the word ‘relative’, do not lead to any positive deconstruction of kinship theories, but only to their dissolution in a sea of formal discourses that provide no hold on the realities.
In reality it is impossible to grasp the domain of kinship relations if one completely separates kinship relations between the sexes from the reproduction of life. The recent appearance in Western Europe and North America of same-sex families, and the legal and ethical debates this continues to arouse, will not contradict us here. For with the appearance of gay or lesbian couples the question is still one of gender, and, with the adoption of children or insemination, it is very much that of the transformation of a couple into a family. Sex, gender, couple and family: we are once more immersed in the universe of kinship.
It is impossible deliberately to disregard, even more so to deny, that – whatever role a society assigns to the man or the woman in making babies, whatever the rule followed by this society to determine who the child will belong to after birth, what groups of adults will have rights and duties with regard to the child (which are liable not to be identical for the father’s or fathers’ and the mother’s or mothers’ sides) – in all known societies there are rules (associated with representations and value judgements) that define the conditions under which unions between individuals of the opposite sex (and today of the same sex) will be socially recognized and which set out in advance the social identity of any children that may be attributed to these couples either by birth, by adoption (with or without insemination) or by other means. And it is by putting these rules into practice – or into action if one prefers – that people produce, between themselves and between the social groups to which they belong by birth (families, houses, clans, lineages, etc.), the specific social relations that are precisely kinship relations. This is true of all known kinship systems, including that of the Na of Yunnan, where the unions between a woman and the men who visit her at night (or a man and the women he visits at night) almost never result in a ‘marriage’ and therefore in an ‘alliance’ between two kin groups, two houses. For in this case, too, the union of the sexes and the status of the children are defined by society, since the sexual permissiveness of the adults is countered by a total taboo on sexual relations within the houses; and within the resident matriline,