[00:00:00] NARRATOR:
Professor Lévi-Strauss was born in 1908, some twenty years after anthropology began as a formal academic discipline. After an early education that exposed him to philosophy, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and law, he turned to anthropology after reading a book by Professor Robert H. Lowie of the Berkeley Anthropology Department. Professor Lévi-Strauss wrote in Tristes Tropiques, “The revelation did not come to me till 1933 or 1934 when I came upon a book which was already by no means new, Robert H. Lowie’s Primitive Society.
Instead of notions borrowed from books and at once metamorphosed into philosophical concepts, I was confronted with an account of first-hand experience. The observer, moreover, had been so committed as to keep intact the full meaning of his experience. My mind escaped from the closed circuit, which was what the practice of academic philosophy amounted to.
Made free of the open air, it breathed deeply and took on new strength. Like a townsman let loose in the mountains, I made myself drunk with the open spaces, and my astonished eye could hardly take in the wealth and variety of the scene. When anthropology began as an academic discipline in the late nineteenth century, it held as one of its visions to put back together the dimensions of human existence that other academic disciplines had taken apart.
Its goals were synthesizing and holistic. Biology, society, culture, language, psychology, material creations all existed as parts of a whole, and one of the missions of anthropology was to grasp this whole in a theoretical way. Professor Lévi-Strauss has given remarkable breadth and originality to this anthropological enterprise.
In his Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, he transformed the study of family, kinship, and marriage from a descriptive to a theoretical field, and showed how the world’s family and kinship structures are connected both to the symbolic processes of the human mind into universal principles of reciprocity in human social life. Throughout his work on kinship and social structure, including his early work on American Indian societies in Brazil, he draws upon linguistic theory to reveal these structures as well as to show their relations to art, symbolism, and material life. Since the 1950s, he has contributed and is still contributing a series of studies on the structural study of myth and symbolism that have dominated work on these subjects for the last thirty years.
Breaking with empiricist and functionalist traditions, he has tried to show that mythologies develop not as responses to practical or external circumstances, but in accordance with the internal operations of the human mind. In one of his most recent books, translated into English as The Way of the Masks, he applies structural analysis to the ritual art of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. The human mind, social structure, symbolic operations, mythological creations, material culture, kinship and marriage all come together in his work in ways that had never before been imagined.
Cultural systems like language are structured by the unconscious activity of the human mind, and we obey cultural laws that we do not invent. For scope, originality, and permanent impact on his own and other disciplines, he stands alone. Professor Lévi-Strauss has never before been to Berkeley, and at last we are pleased to welcome him here in appreciation for his many lasting gifts to the humanities and social sciences.
On behalf of the University of California and the Charles and Martha Hitchcock Foundation, I present Professor Lo-Claude Lévi-Strauss, who will speak on the birth of historical societies.
(applause)
[00:04:59] CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS:
My first words will be to thank the Charles and Martha Hitchcock Professorship Committee, the Board of Regents of the University of California at Berkeley, President Pierpont Gardner and Chancellor Heyman for the honor they bestowed upon me in appointing me this year Hitchcock Professor. And also to tell that I deeply appreciate the warm welcome my wife and I are getting from the Graduate Division and the Department of Anthropology.
This is my first visit to California. That it should take place at Berkeley has for me a special significance, as it is in this university that the memory is kept alive of two scholars whom I greatly admire and to whom I am indebted both personally and intellectually. Reading one of Lowie’s books turned me into an anthropologist, and it is mainly thanks to Professor Lowie’s support that I could escape defeated France in 1941 and come to this country.
Thereby, Professor Lowie likely saved my life. As to Professor Kroeber, during the years I spent in the United States and thereafter, like Professor Lowie, he evinced a kind interest in my work. We became friendly, and when he visited Paris together with Mrs. Kroeber, he accepted to have dinner with us at our home.
I shall always remember Mrs. Kroeber’s dramatic telephone call at seven in the morning telling me they would not come as Professor Kroeber had passed away during the night. She added that she was alone in their hotel room, sitting by her husband’s body and did not know what to do. I rushed to help her the best I could.
In delivering this lecture and the next, I don’t dare to improvise as I’m used to do in French. My English is far too poor for that. I could have written down my addresses in French and have them translated.
I preferred to directly write them in my clumsy English despite the awkwardness, the grammatical faults, and lexical improprieties for which I apologize once and for all.
(laughter)
I feel that somehow it will sound more authentic if I express myself in my own way. What you probably expect from me is some fresh account of present trends in French anthropology. Therefore, I would like to elaborate on what appears to me as one of the more original features of the humanities and the social sciences in nowadays France.
It is due to the close cooperation that has developed between anthropology and history. The phenomenon is by no means a recent one. The so-called School of the Annales originated after the First World War with historians such as Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and Henri Berr, who were stirred up by Durkheimian sociology, even if they came to resist it.
During a conversation I had with Lucien Febvre over, over thirty years ago, he expressed the hope that historians would turn towards problems such as the origin and geographical distribution of the button. Febvre was well aware that, according to its presence or absence, this humble item of haberdashery enables to draw a major dividing line amongst men’s compartments. Clothes are either draped or sewn.
Two vestimentary styles which make the greater demand, the former on the body, the latter on the fabric. In complementary domains of the textile arts and of the carriage of the body, those contrasting clothing patterns entail corporal behaviors, ways of life, attitudes of the individual towards his or her surroundings, which may help to differentiate civilizations. Thus, French historians have shown eagerness to borrow from anthropologists sundry subject matters and theme of investigation.
As a result, traditional boundaries between the two disciplines are being modified. So far, history and anthropology could be distinguished in two major ways. History included in its domain societies that, as a matter of convenience we may call complex or developed, the past of which is recorded in archives.
On the contrary, anthropology’s lot consists in those societies improperly called primitive or archaic, in any case ignorant of writing, and about the past of which so little is known that we are reduced to guesses. Therefore, most of the time, we must content ourselves to study them in their present condition. What distinguished history from anthropology even more was the nature of the data of special relevance to each.
To history did belong the ruling classes, the feats of arms, the reigns, the treaties, the conflicts, and the alliances. While anthropology was concerned almost exclusively with the daily life of the common people, their manners and customs, the elementary relationships of men and women with their environment. It is by getting closer to anthropologists that historians became aware of those obscure manifestations of social life, subterranean, so to speak, and of their importance to their studies.
In return, by renovating its field of study and its method, history sprouted a new branch, currently called in France historical anthropology, which is of great service to anthropologists. Historical anthropology studies past stages of the life of our own society. And although these stages are given in succession, it puts them on an equal footing with contemporary stages of the life of societies widely different from our own.
As a result, the number of social experiments available for a better understanding of the human condition has considerably grown. That is not all. When history undertakes, in its own way, by use of written documents or decorated monuments, an anthropological study of our own society’s past stages, it makes it easier for anthropologists to study the present condition of those same societies, a task which so far they were reluctant to tackle except in narrowly bounded sectors because they felt they lacked familiarity with the time dimension, which is not dispensable when one wishes to deal with complex or semi-complex societies.
Such being the case, a new question arises. If here and there the same methods may be applied, if the same kinds of data may be identified, if the same perspective may be adopted. What difference subsists between the distant societies that anthropologists study nearly alone and those societies very near to us, which anthropologists and historians are now discovering they may profitably study together?
I have once suggested to distinguish them as respectively hot and cold societies, a distinction which has given rise to innumerable misunderstandings. For I never thought of these terms as labels designating real categories. Rather, I used them for heuristic purposes to qualify two theoretical social types of which, paraphrasing Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one could say, quote, “That they do not exist, have never existed, and will never exist, but of which we, we should nevertheless form a clear notion.”
End quote. In the present case, this notion is needed in order to understand that societies seemingly belonging to several irreducible types differ less from each other in reality than insofar as they subjectively nurture images of themselves contrasting with each other in a major respect. While all societies are equally historical, Only some of them are willing to admit it.
The others shrink from the fact and prefer to ignore it. Therefore, it is legitimate to rank all societies on an ideal scale, not according to their degree of historicity, which is the same for all, but rather according to the way they experience it. On such a scale, there will be borderline cases which it is of paramount importance to identify and to discuss in order to find out under which conditions and circumstances a social group and its members open themselves to history.
Why, when, and how a society ceases to look up at history as a disorder and as a threat. When and how does it get to consider it as a tool which can be used to work on the present and to transform it?
[00:17:34] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yeah
[00:17:36] CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS:
By calling simultaneously upon history and anthropology, it is sometimes possible to cross that threshold. For instance, let us consider in an anthropological perspective a past stage of Japanese society only known to us from written sources. The Genji Monogatari, a novel about court life during the Heian pe-period written in the 11th century, offers precious psychological indications on a society traditionally favoring cousin marriage, but which within a given time and within a particular social sphere entertains doubts about it.
Whenever this type of marriage is being considered, the individuals concerned react in the same way. For instance, I quote, “A marriage between cousins was not wholly unacceptable,” says the father of a marriageable girl, “but people would think it at best uninteresting.” Even the lower classes think it, it is rather dull and common things for cousins to marry.
He, the prospective son-in-law, would do far better to find a rich and stylish bride a little farther afield. Another father in search of a son-in-law concurs. Marriage to a near relative is not usually held to be very interesting.
An eventual bridegroom is even more reluctant. There was no mystery, no excitement in the proposal, he says. These quotations make clear why and how, in the mind of the protagonists, cousin marriage differs from marriage between not related or less closely related individuals.
While cousin marriage brings about security, it also generates monotony. The same alliances repeat themselves generation after generation. The social structure is merely reproduced.
On the contrary, marriages at a distance, though risky and adventurous, allow the families concerned to speculate by contriving new alliances. They set history in motion, so to speak, by forming unprecedented coalitions. How- however, those experiments, said to be exciting in the text, unroll on a scene on which cousin marriage still constitutes the backcloth.
During the Heian period, this type of marriage was frequent in the imperial family, and it is striking that the Genji monogatari should advocate only once a marriage between cousins and should do it through the voice of the then-reigning emperor. This emperor is faced with a thorny problem. He seeks an appropriate husband for a daughter of his own blood, no doubt, but a bastard child deprived of nobility in the maternal line.
The only solution
[00:21:31] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Mm-hmm.
[00:21:34] CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS:
He can think of consists in marrying her to a son of his father’s half-brother. To this half-brother, himself a bastard child who was denied a noble rank, the former emperor had nevertheless given in marriage one of his daughters. Where, thinks out the present emperor, could he find a better solution than to follow in the second generation the precedent of the first?
Incidentally, we have here a technically flawless definition of marriage with a matrilineal- with a matrilateral cross-cousin. Therefore, in that case, the concern for security overrides other considerations. By marrying cousins together, the emperor hopes to establish an equilibrium between two marriages, the inequality of which stems from the fact that in each case, one of the spouses, deprived of support on the maternal side, was or is also a junior in the paternal line.
Altogether, the emperor’s reasoning is somewhat akin to that of Louis XIV, when he decided to marry one of his bastard daughters, Mademoiselle de Blois, to his nephew in the junior paternal line, Philippe d’Orléans, the future regent. Thus, cousin marriage permits to relieve strains inflicted on the social order, and it also protects it from new hazards. In a state of affairs like the one just described, prudence puts safety first and dictates the marriage choices.
On the other hand, less perilous junctures may encourage families to take chances and to seek new connections. A literary source has thus unveiled for us the psychological incentives which temporarily, perhaps, were moving a part of the Japanese nobility away from the practice of cousin marriage at the turn of the tenth century. Except in critical circumstances, a society facing a historical destiny consciously accepts to assume it.
This attitude contrasts most markedly with another one which anthropologists could observe in Fiji still recently. Fijian society consisted in numerous lineages. Some insisted in keeping alive the same matrimonial alliance during the span of several generations, but they all were at liberty to marry with other lineages.
However, and in contradistinction with the actual practice, as soon as a marriage was consummated, the spouses were considered cross-cousins, and the members of the two families concerned called each other by the kinship terms suited to this new situation. Thus, Fijian society pretended that the rule of cousin marriage prevailed even when it did not abide by it. By combining two approaches, one historical and the other anthropological.
I could offer as an example two societies, both of which seemingly haunted by an elementary structure probably rooted in their respective pasts. But while Fijian society remains nostalgic about it, and in words, if not in fact, was unable to break away from it, the ancient Japanese society was assessing its shortcomings. It was discovering unaided a course typical all over the world of social stages we call Middle Ages.
That is, societies aiming merely at reproducing themselves and undergoing passively changes rather than begetting them, may nevertheless, without forsaking kinship, launch into the great game of matrimonial alliances. By so doing, they throw themselves open to history, and they grow aware of their ableness to shape their own future. The transition between those two stages is often hardly perceptible.
Only a slight bend in the rules and in the conduct permits to detect it. However, essential consequences follow. The idiom of kinship does not serve anymore to perpetuate the social structure.
It becomes a means to break it down and to remodel it. Families cease to reproduce themselves according to rules applying uniformly to all. Each one feels free to maneuver for a more profitable position.
Therefore, the paternal line and the maternal line receive, if not an equal weight, at least relative importances which compare with each other. Neither line may be held to be the pivot of the social structure. Rather, the social structure comes to rest on their balance.
Not only in the Genji Monogatari, but also in historical chronicles of the same period, such as Okagami and Eiga Monogatari, the same theme oc-occurs over and over again as if it were a leitmotif. For a successful career, a man depends on his wife’s family. To ensure a man a princely fortune is the business of the maternal line.
No wonder a young man who was exhorted thus, “Go get yourself a wife and useful in-laws.” In spite of geographical distance and of a sixth-century gap, I have allowed myself to compare the Japanese emperor in the novel with Louis XIV, both of them similarly concerned with the future of a bastard child and resorting to the same device to ensure it. Once more, Saint-Simon, the great French memorialist of the early eighteenth century, may be called upon to help us identify a social state, the particular feature of which consists in a propensity to manipulate kinship types so as to keep the two lines in balance.
As a matter of fact, Saint-Simon uses exactly the same words as the fictional characters of the historical figures of old Japan when he explains that being deprived of, of support on the maternal side, he had to give up marrying an orphan damsel. This would have been, he says, a noble and rich marriage, but I was alone. And I needed a father-in-law and a family on whom I could rely.
When the maternals find themselves the targets of such enterprises, do they play a game of their own? And if so, how do they conduct it? It is well known that in old Japan, from the middle of the eleventh century to the end of the twelfth century, the Fujiwara clan had succeeded to lay hold of political power through systematically marrying their sisters and daughters to the imperial heirs.
As soon as a so– as a son was born to the reigning emperor, they even compelled the latter to abdicate and to leave the power in the hands of the Empress Dowager and of her male relatives who provided the regent. The moral dispositions associated with that policy are worth noting in the contemporary text. Marriage was polygamous, and the father of imperial wives intensely competed with each other as they depended for rank and power on their respective daughters’ fecundity and on the sex of their grandchildren.
The Fujiwara backed their daughters as if they were racehorses. The first one who gave the dy-dynasty a male, a male heir beat the others sometimes, as we say, at the post. A court literature, which relates love affairs only in veiled terms, when it comes to women’s physiological life, expresses itself With utmost crudity.
The reader is spared nothing about their monthly periods, whether these are present or missing, profuse or scanty, and when women are confined concerning their bleeding and the time taken to evacuate the afterbirth. It is as if women were prize animals reared to compete in an agricultural show. Families eager to establish or to maintain their alliance with the dynastic line have a foremost concern to be provided with daughters.
However, no sooner their fathers get them married, they cherish exclusively a new idea, namely that they should give birth to a son with respect to whom, by way of new daughters, they will start afresh the same operations. Ancient France displayed a like pattern, if not in the royal family, at least in the upper nobility. To quote Saint-Simon again, Chamillart, who at that time was Louis XIV’s great minister, aimed at establishing firmly his son through an alliance which would help the latter to continue in high office.
The Noailles, a very noble family, anchored everywhere by means of their daughters, wished to put one of them in that powerful house so that they would hold everything. In societies of that type, paternal right notwithstanding, women are really the operators of power. This fact accounts for the remarriages that occur so frequently in societies where women are, so to speak, stakes so heavy that no family resigns itself to put them down once and for all.
Should the woman divorce or get widowed, she must be of service again. The Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia did not even wait to reuse their daughters until their husband died or until the marriage broke down. They compelled them to divorce and to remarry several times in succession so that together with their future children, they would secure each time a higher rank in the social order.
The role of operators of power assigned to women may sometimes take extreme forms. It gives one the illusion that the system is matrilineal or even matriarchal when actually male lineages are competing for power by means of their women, which they use as mere instrument. In the Merina Kingdom of Central Madagascar, and among the Lovedu of South Africa as well.
A similar reform took place, curiously enough, at about the same time in the early 19th century. Succession from woman to woman replaced succession in the male line. In Madagascar, during three-quarters of a century and until the annexation by the French, the Merina throne was exclusively devoted to women.
This is still the case with the Lovedu. But in this South African kingdom, power actually belonged to the queen’s brothers and maternal uncles. They even bred the queen female heirs by secretly acting as incestuous lovers.
In the typology I am trying to set up, Madagascar’s place is halfway between the Lobedu and medieval Japan. In Madagascar, a male line provided the queen’s husbands, who were at the same time their prime ministers and governed on their behalf. During the 19th century, Prime Minister Rainilaiarivony was the successive husband of three queens, as eight centuries earlier in Japan, the regent Fujiwara Michinaga had been the father-in-law of three successive emperors.
In such cases, the idiom of kinship is diverted for political purposes, and this new way of using it tends to obliterate the distinction between the paternal and the maternal lines. The maternal line encroaches upon the paternal line. Eventually, the respective rights of the two lines intermingle.
This trend reaches its extreme limit with the African institution of women marrying women. A highborn lady could take one wife or several ones. She became the legal father of their children born to them through the services of authorized lovers.
This custom, which amounts, so to speak, to an inverted patrilineal rule, finds an almost perfect match in North America. A Kwakiutl nobleman who wished to enter, as was said, a family who had no daughters could symbolically marry a son, or, failing a son, a limb, arm or leg of the family head. According to that system, men married men, and not so outlandish-looking practice when we recall among ourselves the words addressed by a suitor of old to his future father-in-law, “It is not your daughter” whom I shall marry, sir.
It is yourself and your house. The systems we have been discussing so far offer a third aspect. Not only do they obliterate the distinction between the father’s side and the mother’s sides, they also obliterate the distinction between exogamy and endogamy, or more precisely, They circumvent it.
In fact, the two phenomena are linked. If these systems cannot be said to be either patrilineal or matrilineal, the explanation for this uncertainty lies in the modalities of matrimonial alliance and in the respective powers wielded by the wife-takers and the wife-givers. In its capacity of wife-taker, a group avails itself of its male members to strengthen its position.
As wife-giver, it employs its female members to the same end. This principle holds true whatever the rule of descent or affiliation. How shall we then account for the differences?
There are societies or periods in the life of the same society when perhaps within some social circles only, the relationship between wife-givers and wife-takers undergoes strains to the extent that the stress is reflected in their social conduct. This relationship, either strained or unstable, lies at the root of the so-called bilateral or cognatic systems. The game of matrimonial alliance unites and opposes together, all together, the wife-takers and the wife-givers.
Their mutual relationship consequently oscillates between two poles. This oscillation may characterize the life of one and the same society when it occurs in time on account of a fluctuating demography, or it may oppose two societies where the power is split differently between the wife-givers and the wife-takers. In the last case, the difference is probably caused by structural factors which should be seeked at a deeper level.
In both cases, however, social organization may be mistakenly believed to be either patrilineal or matrilineal, while it is neither one, n- while it is neither one nor the other as the descent rule, should there be one, appears irrelevant. What is exclusively relevant in such cases must be looked for in the modalities of the exchange relationship between intermarrying groups. These modalities outweigh any unilineal criterion.
This explains in the long run that intermarrying group may nevertheless resort at will either to exogamy or to endogamy. Exogamy allows them to diversify their alliances so as to gain social, economical, or political advantages, although not without incurring some risks. On the other hand, endogamy strengthens and perpetuates previous advantages, but it exposes the line temporarily more powerful to the dangers represented by a collateral line that has become too close and is able to challenge its rule.
The alliance net thus alternately opens up and closes down. In the first case, it opens up to history and makes capital out of its contingencies. In the second case, it succeeds to keep hold of its patrimony, ranks, and titles to ensure their periodical return.
I have alluded to exotic parallels. However, even amongst the European nobility, genealogies display a striking contrast, which is also a correlation, between marriage with non-kin or even strangers and marriage with close relatives, many instances of which also occur in Saint-Simon, first cousins, uncle and niece, aunt and nephew, et cetera. In that case, too, we are clearly confronted with a pattern inherent in a type of societies or in a particular stage of their evolution.
In Japan during the Heian period, residence was shown by Professor W.H. McCullough to be duolocal if not uxorilocal. The husband visited his wife at their home, a fact which explains why married women were often called after the place where they resided, the Lady of the First or of the Fifth Avenue. Women possessed and habitually handed over to their daughters one or several mansions in town and sometimes country estates as well.
Not until the twelfth century did the place name become a patrilineal name. The same chance happened at about the same time in medieval Europe when the so-called land name replaced the race name. But even in more primitive societies with a cognatic bent, for instance, in New Guinea, one meets with the same dialectics of the land name and the race name.
It stands out as a characteristic feature of this type of social organization. Indeed, it may provide us with a simple clue to identify it. In many places of Oceania, and also in Africa, the origin of the main kingdoms is accounted for by myth about a noble stranger marrying the sister or daughter of autochthones.
She brought him, say the myth, the land and the sovereignty over it. In the same way, it is worth noting that according to the old Madagascan chronicle, the Merina dynasty goes back to a maybe real, maybe mythical people, the Vazimba. When a body of royal inspectors was created in the nineteenth century, they were named spouses of the land, Vadintany, a title well in agreement with the native assumption that the Merina rule started with newcomers who married the land, personified by the sisters or daughters of the first occupants.
Anthropologists devote most of their studies to societies, the framework of which is constituted by kinship. Therefore, they often wonder what becomes of descent groups when rudimentary forms of the state emerge in their midst. The quest- the question should be answered with caution.
The state may appear in many guises and make itself operative in different sector of social life. Governmental functions may become diversified, political power centralized, deciding or executive bodies stabilized, the population may progressively be freed from the kinship links, either real or fictitious, uniting them to their rulers. Furthermore, between the so-called stateless societies and those with an incipient state, there is room for numerous social forms different from each other and in which descent groups continue to exist alongside centralized political or administrative bodies.
Even so, we are now in a better position to understand how and in which way the old blood ties, as Marx and Engels used to say, become eventually distorted. Something essential happens when descent groups split up and their segments combine with segments detached from other groups, giving birth to social units of an altogether different kind. Without stretching the facts too far, we might see there, on the sociological level, a transformation not wholly dissimilar to what took place on the biological level when sexual reproduction appeared.
At all events, the consequences are the same. Individual entities become diversified, and new forms are created at a much faster pace. Those social units of a new type result as much from the different ways they form by processes of crossing over and translocation, as from their capacity to reproduce themselves and change.
In other words, they result as much from alliance as from filiation, and those two principles may freely replace each other. Some years ago, I suggested that the old term house, as we speak of an aristocratic house, be put in service again to designate those social units. As a matter of fact, historians who have pondered over the nature of the house in the European area have themselves insisted it was distinct from the family and did not coincide either with the agnatic law.
Sometimes they say the house was deprived of a biological basis. It rather consisted in a heritage, both material and spiritual, which included dignities, origins, kindred, names, symbols, position, power, and wealth. That description fits perfectly social institutions well known in America, Polynesia, and to a point in Africa, which for a century anthropologists declare, declared not to be able to accommodate in their traditional typology as they were neither tribes nor clans nor lineage nor families.
What do we mean then when we call a social unit a house? In the first place, the house is a corporate group. Next, it owns an estate consisting of goods that are both material and immaterial.
And last, it is a social body which perpetuates itself by transmitting its name, its wealth, and its titles in direct or fictitious line, held legitimate under the sole provision that this continuity may be expressed in the idiom either of kinship or of affinity, and more often than not of both. The house can be defined neither by a rule of unilineal descent nor by a mode of reproduction which would be exclusively exogamous or endogamous. Therefore, only one criterium is left from which all the other proceed.
In a society organized into houses, filiation substitutes for alliances and alliances substitutes for filiation. At the beginning of my address, I was wondering how and under which condition a society comes to acknowledge the reality of a historical dimension in which it was already immersed, no doubt, but that so far it had chosen to ignore. When we speak of cold society, we also imply that such society keeps their ideology at short distance from their practice.
This is the reason why anthropologists have often argued as if the former mirrored faithfully the latter. It appears more likely that, as it is the case elsewhere, ideology always misrepresents the real life of the people. How, however, the twists remain simpler so that the observer and the analyst don’t have too much trouble trying to to straighten out the distortion.
Another point characteristic of those societies is that relationships of superiority or of inferiority between individuals and groups cease to be transitive. Superior in some respects, a social or political station may become inferior in some others. Long ago, Hocart put forward telling examples of that phenomenon in Fiji.
More recently, Elizabeth Bott, writing on the Polynesian kingdom of Tonga, has demonstrated how in a hierarchical society with bilineal descent, exchange cycles may nevertheless close up by the combined effect of two parameters. Rank and power varied in inverse function of each other, so that when the cycle closed up, political power was eventually converted into high rank. The same phenomenon could be observed in feudal France.
It sometimes happened that on account of one of his estates, a powerful lord happened to be vassal of one of his own vassals. Still, in the early 12th century, the French king himself, as Count of Vexin, was the vassal of the Abbot of Saint-Denis. Not so long ago, ethnographical sources were confidently resorted to whenever peculiar customs in our own civilization, either dead or still alive, could be understood only as survivals of customs still found in vigor among so-called primitive tribes.
In opposition to this obsolete primitivism, we are now becoming aware that the past of our own society is rich in forms of social life and types of social organization which may help us clarify those of, of different societies where they appear faintly distinct and blurred because they are poorly documented or when observed in the field could not be scrutinized long enough. Between the so-called complex or developed societies and those improperly labeled primitive or archaic, the distance is less than was formerly believed. In order to overcome it, anthropology must learn to avail itself of history to the same extent as history may avail itself of anthropology.
The approach I am advocating no doubt raises theoretical as well as methodological problems. In hopes that parallels would appear and that coincidences would manifest themselves. I have juxtaposed or even superimposed societies which under no account can be placed in a single category.
Some of the societies so far considered are of a very low technical and economical level, while others belong to developed countries. They are scattered all over the world, kept apart in time by a gap of several centuries. Some of them have been literate for five or six hundred years, as is the case with medieval Japan.
The other ones did remain ignorant of writing until quite recently. Out of such a nondescript hotchpotch, how could one extract food for thought? More precisely, in order to bring out a certain type of social structure, I have been led to mingle societies that are heteroclite in every other respect.
Therefore, it may be argued that this type of social structure has no existence of its own, or rather, that it only exists as an arbitrary and gratuitous mental construct with no real historical stage mirrors, and which cannot be identified with any known period of social evolution. In order to answer this criticism, one should beware of a confusion frequent on the part of many anthropologists and maybe of some historians, too. This is a confusion between elementary and complex on the one hand, prior and posterior on the other hand.
The former opposition applies to systems classified according to their form, the latter to systems arranged in genealogical order. The question whether a form is simple or complex is of a logical nature. It has no relevance to the question as to how a previous form came to be replaced by a new one.
The latter question pertains to history, not to logic. Are we thus condemned to choose between those two approaches? And should it be so that when we endeavor putting up structures in a logical order, we renounce to know how they evolved in time?
There is simple evidence to the contrary. Historical research and structural analyses get on well together in the work of authors whose name is more readily associated with the latter. Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics, spent years putting up the several versions of the Nibelungen in genealogical order and trying to demonstrate that underneath the poem lay a chronicle of Burgundy’s first kingdom.
W.H.R. Rivers is usually depicted as a supporter of diffusionism, which is an extreme form of historical thought. We thus fail to perceive that in his work, this epistemological outlook exists alongside another one, distinctly structural, and one never gets the feeling that they clash. Human scholars and social scientists could profitably ponder over problems of current concern to the natural sciences.
They should not do so with the purpose of hastily gearing, so to speak, man’s cultural behavior with his animal nature after the fashion of the sociobiologists. But because debates now underway among zoologists raise philosophical questions concerning the relationship between the notion of classification and that of genealogy. In this connection, it is worth noting that the new systematics of species, either living or extinct, that goes by the name of cladistics or cladism, may be alternatively or simultaneously conceived as a method for assigning an order of succession in time to species, more or less directly related, or as a typology unconcerned with the search for pedigrees.
Taken in the last sense, cladistics works out rigorous procedures intended to define group, to set them in hierarchical order, to establish between them relationships of nesting and of inclusion. These procedures deserve our closest attention, for they present a heuristic value not only in zoology, but also in all fields where relationships comparable to homologies can be found. In fact, cladistics may teach history and anthropology two main lessons.
In the first place, cladistics asserts as a principle that two species cannot be considered closely related on the mere strength of their having one of several primitive features in common. No close relationship can be inferred between man on the one hand, the tortoise or the salamander on the other hand, from the fact that they all possess five fingers. This is a primitive feature which probably did belong to all, lo– to all land vertebrates.
Some species have kept it. It was lost by some others, like for instance, the horse, to which despite its single finger, man stands closer than to any batrachian or reptile. The same principle holds true for the humanities and the social sciences.
For instance, societies allowing or prescribing marriage by sister exchange should not on that sole account be placed near to each other on a genealogical tree. We are dealing here with a crude kind of matrimonial exchange. Unless it is expressly prohibited, it may exist or reappear in any society from the more primitive up to the more civilized.
As a matter of fact, it occurs now and then in our own. The same can be said of cousin marriage, which is now reappearing in the French countryside. Inasmuch as the automobile makes communication easier, collateral lines who had settled apart and had become estranged get acquainted with each other again.
The matrimonial policy of old was in favor of concatenated marriages, according to an expression still in use. It may have in store new prospects. But even under such circumstances, we would have no right to claim a close relationship between contemporary French rural society and that of the Nambikwara.
In the second place, cladistics relies exclusively upon evolved traits held in common when it sets about placing species near each other on the same tree, although those species may differ widely in respect to their anatomy, their physiology, their biological behavior, or the way they adapt to their surroundings. Thus, birds will be placed closer to crocodiles than to warm-blooded animals. The seal will be placed closer to the weasel and the otter, the sea lion closer to the dog and the bear than the seal and the sea lions are close to each other, despite superficial resemblances on which score they hitherto were both classified as pinnipeds.
Likewise, the gorilla and the chimpanzee will be considered closer to man than they are to the orangutan, so that the so-called class of the great apes should be dropped from the zoological vocabulary. The old systematics conceived living and fossil species as if they were successive steps in an evolutionary sequence. Each one was looked upon as a direct predecessor or as a surviving offshoot of another species.
The relationship between species was thought of as one between ancestor and progeny. To that general genealogical perspective, cladistics substituted another one based on collateral relationships. Species are no more parents and children to each other, but rather sisters or cousins.
Therefore, all species, either living or fossil, are placed on the same rank. The parallelism with the anthropological approach, is striking, as this is exactly what we do in our own way, when we compare societies. From the cladist’s standpoint as well as from our own, to seek a common ancestor is an unrewarding task.
In a cladogram, there is no room for ancestral species. Such species only play the part of a posteriori conditions that one is at liberty to lay down if one insists that a classification should always conceal a genealogy. However, a major difficulty hinges upon the number of criteria among which a choice should be made in order to define sister species.
Will the criterion be morphological features, the mode of reproduction, the number of chromosomes, the nucleic acids, the hemoglobin chains, or some other? From each criterion or group of criteria, a different tree or cladogram will result. Subjective preferences come into play, and the principle of economy does not al-always allow to settle the case at hand.
From the time it was first propounded about twenty years ago, cladistics has remained a controversial topic. I shall refrain from interfering in those debates for two reasons. First, they fall within the province of specialists.
Second, the anthropologist may espouse the cladist’s program, but he will follow it backward. Cladists reject the factor they call primitive. They construct sister groups by keeping in only those factors they call derived or evolved.
We too take into account the evolved feature of the society which are– we are studying, but when we do so, we are aware that the outcome of our inquiry will belong to the realm of ethnohistory, if not plainly of history. Our distinctive task as anthropologists consists in unveiling simple traits which may persist or reappear in the more different social species, not with a view to discover them, but on the contrary, because our aim is to bring them to the fore. There is a simple reason for that.
The more primitive characteristics of living species are well known to biologists. For instance, they know that when looked up at the molecular level, physicochemical processes are everywhere the same. Anthropologists lag far behind in their researches.
They have not yet succeeded to identifying the full range of the elementary mechanisms which operate in like manner in all types of social organizations, whatever their degree of complexity. It is on those elementary mechanisms that we focus our attention. The type of social structure I have tried to try to trace out raises another problem.
Do those societies with house deserve being credited with the structure, since when trying to describe them, the only data at my disposal consisted of individuals or groups competing with each other, each one the master of its own strategy. More precisely, did I not mistake for a social structure of a distinctive kind what actually amounted to a statistical average taken of countless particular choices freely made or, to say the least, unpredictable when observed from without? It seems unlikely that societies can be divided into two mutually exclusive categories, as if only some of them were endowed with a structure, while the substance of the other would be entirely made up of contingent events.
Therefore, should we concede that the latter evades structural analysis, we will be drawn to the conclusion that structural analysis is inapplicable to all. Of late, this criticism has been met with over and over again as it finds its inspiration in a spontaneism or a subjectivism that has become the fashion of the day. However, the question may be raised whether, by lending an ear to it, we will not relinquish every attempt to discover some organizing principle in social life.
Should we resign ourselves to look at social life as a medley of individual choices, as if a state of perpetual disorder were all that was needed to account for social creativity? In my concluding words, I would like to offer brief remarks on an intellectual viewpoint which, in my opinion, would lead to renounce every attempt at scientific thinking. Let us take for an example Professor Françoise Héritier’s– Héritier-Augé’s important research.
There are societies with numerous marriage prohibitions and where beyond those limitations, individuals are free of their matrimonial choices. Working with a computer, Professor Héritier-Augé has convincingly demonstrated that in those societies, the alliance networks are as neatly organized as if matrimonial choices were subject to rules. That remarkable fact admits of two interpretations.
First, we might hypothesize that in a relatively small society, marriages beyond the prohibited degree unceasingly intermingle the population, so that, unbeknown to them, everybody becomes everybody’s kin in the same approximate degree. Such being the case, the fact that most marriages occur between individuals so related would be the outcome of a demographic structure kept unchanged through the operation of hidden factors. However, we could interpret the phenomenon differently and claim that motivations of an either affective, moral, economic, or political in nature are all that is needed to explain it.
Those motivations would instigate each individual to marry as near as permitted by the prohibited degrees. But even so, would the phenomenon merely result from the interplay of individual preferences? Genealogical records extending up to several generations show that marriages within a given range of relatedness are quite frequent.
Therefrom, we may infer that those matrimonial preferences being shared by so many individuals reflect a social norm. They stem from collective constraints and exigencies. They conform to a model which cannot result from the adding up of individual yearnings, either of an ethical or of a sentimental nature, for those yearnings are so widespread that they presuppose an underlying pattern.
Furthermore, are we not foreseeing a stage of scientific thinking, which brings hope that the old opposition between structure and event may be finally overcome. There are by now physicists and chemists willing to, and even eager to dialogue with the social sciences. In fields so widely apart as the thermodynamics of fluid, kinetic chemistry, and the shaping out of towns Throughout the centuries, they demonstrate that apparent asymmetries, turbulences, and instabilities may be self-organizing and that even out of disorder regularities arise.
We should not let ourselves to be waylaid by those trite authors who claim that to look for orderly arrangements and to emphasize individual creativity are incompatible endeavors. On the contrary, when we set ourselves the task of recording and analyzing individual strategies and individual choices, we open for our disciplines new fields of research where so far they were overcautious not to venture themselves. In its first stage, anthropology had to content itself with the easier tasks.
It selected for study small societies, the framework of which rested essentially on kinship. Besides, these societies are formulated for their own use working laws of a rather simple kind, even being granted that these laws offer but a distorted image of the true principles according to which they function and reproduce themselves in time. Whenever anthropologists wanted to tackle societies more numerous and more complex, they confined themselves within those relatively protected tracts that the turmoils of history had ignored or bypassed.
Time has come for anthropology to tempt fortune on more turbulent waters. Nor that it should repent its former concerns, as these will remain foremost, but so as to widen and develop its everlasting vocation, which consists to unveil and investigate those levels of social life where some kinds of order emerge. For that purpose, anthropology turns toward history once again, not only towards the so-called new history, to the growth of which it has perhaps contributed, but toward this most traditional kind of history, which is sometimes disparaged and obsolete, we find it buried in dynastic chronicles, genealogical treatises, memoirs, and other works devoted to family matters.
During the forthcoming years, many anthropologists will peruse Saint-Simon and the historical sources resorted to him. they will immerse themselves in forgotten or scorned works such as the Peerage Books by Father Anselme, Imhoff, d’Hozier, Courcelles, the Genealogical Table or Genealogical Atlas of Hübner, Koch and Hopf, the Almanacs of Gotha, Debrett’s Peerage of England, Scotland and Ireland, et cetera. To such works, they will devote as much care and attention as they already give to parochial registers and notaries’ archives.
The reason for that shift of interest, I should rather say widening of interest, is clear. Of the factual history, the one we call in French histoire événementielle, and of the new history, It is generally said that the former registers on a daily basis the doing of prominent personages, while the latter gives all its attention to the slow transformations, whether demographic, economical, or ideological, originating in the humbler social strata. However, the difference does not appear so great when one compares the complicated matrimonial combinations engineered by Blanche de Castille in the 13th century and those which French peasant families were still working out in the midst of the 19th century.
In both cases, the individuals of the group concerned may believe that they act from self-oriented motives, that they yield to sentimental impulses, or that they fulfill some moral duties. However tangled these individual strategies may be, they nevertheless disclose a pattern. In order to unravel those strategies and to make their pattern stand out, anthropologists must call upon the historian’s method and knowledge.
Those among the latter who sometimes blame structuralism for giving precedence to the static over the dynamic will be perhaps surprised, though reassured, I hope, at and by our eagerness to rehabilitate factual history down to the more petty details. They may rely on anthropologists’ fullest cooperation to extract out of an alleged muddle of dates and anecdotes, some of the raw material, and certainly not the less substantial, that we will use jointly to go on as before, building up the science of man, which it is our common task to further. Thank you.
(applause)
