Let me say a few words about the exchange of men among women, which is an actual practice even if there are few examples. This is the rule among the Rhades of Vietnam, the Ata Tana’ai6 of the Flores Islands, the Tetum of central Timor, the Negeri Sambilan7 of Malaysia, the Nagovisi of Bougainville, the Makhuwa8 of Mozambique and a few other groups. All of these societies are matrilineal, and residence is either matrilocal or uxorilocal. Among the Rhades,9 it is the bride’s family that pays compensation to the family of the groom. In place of bridewealth, we have here groomwealth,10 made up of valuables, jugs, Chinese gongs and livestock. Among the Tetum,11 the men go from their mother’s house to that of their wife, which is built next to the ‘big house’ of the eldest woman of the lineage. It is she who keeps the lineage’s valuables, the cult objects (which are female) and the relics of the male members of the lineage. Each house is divided into two spaces: one inside, which holds the women’s quarters, the harvests, and the relics and cult objects; and the other outside, a sort of large platform in front of the house, which is also divided in two, with one side for the husbands and the other for the brothers of the women of the house. The households thus function as brother-exchange groups, the ideal being to repeat these bilateral exchanges from one generation to the next.
Among the Nagovisi,12 the women control their matrilineal land and act as stewards of its wealth. They play an important role in managing village life and, before the Europeans arrived and people converted to Christianity, women took part in the male initiations.
KINSHIP IS NOT UNIVERSALLY FOUNDED ON THE EXCHANGE OF WOMEN BY AND FOR MEN
The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the formula: kinship is based on the exchange of women between and by men does not have the universal validity Lévi-Strauss and his disciples attributed to it. And therefore men’s domination of women is not the basis of kinship. Were this not the case, the feminist struggles of the past decades (which began in the West but have now spread far beyond) to move societies toward ever greater gender equality in the management of public affairs and private life, all these struggles that have brought our societies so far, would ultimately come up against the need to tear down kinship relations in order to achieve this equality. This is the criticism that Gayle Rubin made of Lévi-Strauss’ thesis early on in an article that was to have a considerable impact.13
Can we say then that, once rid of the abusive generalization that kinship is based on the exchange of women by and between men, once it is reduced to the proposition that kinship is based on various forms of exchange, Lévi-Strauss’ theory has an analytical basis? Roughly speaking, the answer is ‘yes’. But we must be aware that this amended theory no longer has anything to do with the first, since the exchanges that found kinship are now analyzed in a different and broader perspective. For even set on new empirical and analytical foundations, the thesis of kinship as exchange can never alone be the general theoretical basis for the anthropological analysis of kinship. It is necessary for analyzing forms of alliance and the marriage rules that express them. But it leaves aside or minimizes the importance of the forms and modes of descent reckoning. Systematically the inverse of Meyer Fortes (who saw alliance as a second and secondary aspect of kinship), Lévi-Strauss demonstrated a lack of interest throughout his work in analyzing the logics of descent, except at one later point when he rapidly explored the concept of the ‘house’. It was when studying the art of the Indians of the northwest coast of the United States and Canada, that, after having reconstructed the ties between the different types of masks and the Indians’ myths and rites,14 he tried to situate this corpus in the overall internal workings of societies whose complexity had somewhat disconcerted Boas.
Today claims to the hegemony of one thesis over the other, to the primacy of alliance over descent or vice versa, of one school over the other, are a thing of the past. Moreover, in Europe the institution of marriage is crumbling while descent stands fast. Our era is marked by a theoretical pragmatism that has nothing eclectic about it. It consists in solid knowledge of the theories, in refusing to simplify the facts under analysis to make them fit a given thesis, in knowing how to analyze the hypotheses found in highly divers and opposing theoretical approaches that have proven themselves capable of shedding light on certain facts, and in knowing how to combine them to explain other, even more complex facts without claiming to explain everything. It is in this context that we propose to examine a few forms of exchange and to scrutinize the very concept.
Let us restate the departure point of this examination. It seems well established that, owing to the incest taboo, the reproduction of kinship relations and the perpetuation of families and descent groups (where these exist) demand that individuals of both sexes look ‘outside’ for partners of the opposite sex with whom to establish the socially recognized forms of union that will ensure the reproduction of these relations and the perpetuation of these groups. This ‘outside’ can vary from very close to very distant, since the incest taboo can be limited to the closest consanguines and affines of a person’s birth family or extend beyond the boundaries of the lineage to all members of the clan, if it is truly exogamous, or even to cousins of the third degree, as in certain cognatic societies of Oceania –Tuamotu,15 the Cook Islands,16 Anuta,17 – or of Malaysia – among the Iban18 and their neighbours – and, finally, to the seventh degree of kindred (a restriction the Catholic Church attempted to impose on Western Christian societies between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries).
It should be remembered that marriage is one of the forms of socially recognized union, but it is not the only one, even if it is the most frequent. Moreover, when there are several forms of marriage in the same society, they never have the same status. Some may not imply any form of exchange, for example marriage with a captive.
Exchanges that seal a matrimonial alliance usually appear as reciprocal gifts. These gifts can take the form of either the exchange of a person for a person or the exchange of goods and services for a person. In the second case, a certain amount of wealth is collected by the groom’s family and transferred to the family of the bride (bridewealth) or assembled by the bride’s family and transferred to that of the groom (groomwealth). There can also, as among the Vezo, be two groups, one of which gives a son when the other gives them a daughter, the man and the woman being considered ‘equivalent’, and their children as mingling inseparably and indistinguishably within themselves what comes from their father and what comes from their mother.19
Finally, there are alliances without counter-gifts, as in India, which consist in giving a young virgin to the family of her future husband to which is added the obligation of a gift of wealth, a dowry. The dowry must be as large as possible to show the social status of the bride’s family and is often negotiated between the two families.
THE EXCHANGE OF A PERSON FOR A PERSON
Let us analyze the first case: the exchange of a person for a person, taking the example of direct sister exchange involving real or classificatory sisters (e.g. patrilateral parallel cousins) between two men. Such an exchange seals an alliance between the men’s and the women’s lineages.
WIFE-GIVERS ARE SUPERIOR TO WIFE-TAKERS
We have already cited an example of this case when analyzing the prevailing form of marriage among the Baruya, ginamaré, which is precisely an exchange of sisters between two men and two patrilineal lineages.