The Metamorphoses of Kinship. Maurice Godelier

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      The Metamorphoses of Kinship

      Maurice Godelier

      TRANSLATED BY NORA SCOTT

      Many thanks to the corporate foundation EISAI

      First published in English by Verso 2011

      © Verso 2011

      Translation © Nora Scott 2011

      First published as Métamorphoses de la parenté

      © Librairie Arthème Fayard 2004

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the author have been asserted

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Verso

      UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

      US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

      www.versobooks.com

      Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

      Epub ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-895-2

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

      Typeset in Minion by Hewer UK Ltd, Edinburgh

      Printed in the US by Maple Vail

      To Lina.

      To Alexandre.

      Contents

       Introduction

       1 Kinship in the Field: The Baruya of New Guinea

       2 The Components of Kinship

       3 Filiation and Descent (First Component)

       4 Alliance and Residence (Second and Third Components)

       5 Kinship Terminologies (Fourth Component)

       6 The Functions and Field of Parenthood

       7 Begetting Ordinary Humans (Fifth Component 1)

       8 Begetting Extraordinary Humans (Fifth Component 2)

       9 The Sexed Body: A Ventriloquist’s Dummy That Gives Voice to the Order or the Disorder of Society and the Cosmos

       10 Incest (Sixth Component): And a Few Other Misuses of Sex

       11 Concerning the Origins and the Basis of the Incest Taboo: Freud and Lévi-Strauss

       12 Proposals for a Different Scenario

       13 Of the Past, We Cannot Make a Clean State: Assessing the Theories

       Conclusion: What Future for What Kin Ties?

       Glossary

       Bibliography

       Index of General Terms

       Index of Personal Names

       Index of Societies

       Maps

      Introduction

      The last thirty years of the twentieth century witnessed an upheaval in family relations and in ideas about the family. We also saw profound mutations in people’s lives – I am thinking first of all of the lives of the millions of individuals of both sexes, of all ages and conditions, who make up the traditionally Christian, capitalist and democratic societies of the Western world, and who will be our principal reference here. These mutations have reshaped the practices, mental outlooks and institutions that define what are known as kinship relations between both individuals and the groups engendered by these relations: nuclear families, what are mistakenly called ‘extended’ families, kindred, and so forth.

      Several facts testify to this transformation, including the sharp decline in marriages and the even sharper rise in the number of separations and divorces, resulting in the appearance and multiplication of single-parent families, ‘recomposed’ families, etc. But if the conjugal tie is proving increasingly fragile, the parents’ desire to continue to shoulder their child-raising responsibilities, even after separation and divorce, is nevertheless a social fact that is constantly and strongly asserted. It is an aspect and one of the effects of the tendency to value childhood and children that emerged in Western Europe in the nineteenth century and became fully fledged by the mid twentieth. In short, among the metamorphoses of the conjugal family, if the marriage axis has weakened, the axis of filiation is still solidly in place.1

      But filiation itself is likely tomorrow to be no longer what it was yesterday, and defining it has already been made more complex by recent discoveries in biology and the development of new reproductive technologies. Whereas it used to seem a matter of common sense to say that, while paternity may always be open to doubt, there can be no doubt about who the mother is – she is the woman who carried the child in her womb and brought it into the world – nowadays this may no longer be the case. Today, it is possible to transfer an egg fertilized in the body of one woman into the uterus of another woman, where it will continue

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