of families, in their members’ behaviours and in the exercise of kinship in general, depending on whether or not divorce is allowed to end the marriage that brought about the family (divorce or separation, since for co-habiting couples divorce is meaningless because there was no marriage to begin with). Whether or not individuals are allowed to remarry after divorce and on what conditions also has an influence. The question arises, too, of the remarriage of a widow or a widower. In the Christian West, because marriage is a sacrament for Catholics and the spouses are supposed to become ‘one flesh’ after their marriage, the bond cannot be dissolved and divorce is forbidden. Divorce was also banned among the Incas,61 and in present-day India it is almost unknown, even if it is permitted by law. The woman who asks for a divorce finds it hard to remarry. And if a man divorces, he runs the risk of having to return his wife’s dowry. Divorce is forbidden in Baruya culture. A man can repudiate his wife, but in this case he gives her to a brother or a parallel cousin, who takes her as a second or third wife.
DIVORCE
Divorce exists in numerous societies and is sometimes practised so intensively that an individual marries and divorces several times, which entails the appearance and disappearance of a succession of more or less reconstituted families. Generally speaking, the fate of the children after their parents’ divorce or separation is decided by custom. Among the Touareg, custom dictates that the sons go with their father and the daughters with their mother. In matrilineal societies, since children belong to the mother’s and not to the father’s lineage, divorce is much more frequent than in patrilineal societies. This is the case with the Trobriand Islanders, the Hopi and so forth.
BACHELORHOOD
A last word on bachelorhood and the status of bachelors in most societies. In many societies, for example the Baruya, it is unthinkable and forbidden not to marry. All individuals, unless they are gravely handicapped, must marry. Among the Inca62 all men having reached twenty-five years of age and all women having reached fourteen were supposed to be married or betrothed. The imperial administration took systematic population censuses and forced those who delayed to marry, sometimes even appointing a spouse. Nevertheless, remaining unmarried is valued in many societies when it is associated with the exercise of an important social function – religious or other – that demands partial renunciation of sexuality and the responsibilities of founding a family. This is the case among the Duna of New Guinea and other groups,63 where the masters of the male initiations remain unmarried for life but secretly marry a spirit-woman, who controls the fertility of the land, the abundance of the game in the forest and who is supposed to be without a vagina. The man is thus a bachelor in his village but a married man in the forest, where he spends most of his time, safe from the pollution and dangers entailed in sexual relations with women. In medieval Western Christendom, after the split between the Roman and Orthodox Catholic Churches, the Roman Church imposed celibacy on priests and monks, who found themselves married with the Church, which was represented as the mystic bride of the crucified Christ. Nuns became the brides of Christ, as attested by the ring on their finger. Like the Duna master of initiations, they were at once virgins among humans and married to a god. This is also the case with the traditional Indian ‘renouncers’.64
As for those bachelors who had no good reason to forego marriage, their status was usually frowned upon in Oceania and Africa. Given the sexual division of labour, an unmarried man had to depend on women to survive – his sisters, his mother or other men’s wives, for example those of his brothers or his uncles. Not having a wife, he could be tempted to take too much interest in the wives of others. And above all, the choice to remain a bachelor is usually regarded as a refusal to do what one is supposed to do to ensure the continued existence of a lineage, of a family, namely to marry and have children. These criticisms were usually even stronger in the case of a woman who refused to marry.
It is important to recall that in the Christian West, the Church not only promoted the celibacy of priests, proscribed divorce and made it difficult for widows to remarry, it also forbade adoption, which reappeared in the various European legal systems only at the end of the nineteenth century.
The adoption of children from outside (and not children who were orphaned or abandoned by their parents) gives children who have no genealogical ties to their adoptive parents the status of descendants. The status of parent in this case is a purely social relationship, devoid of any biological basis, which rests, as Maine said, on a ‘legal fiction’. In forbidding adoption, the Church thus helped promote a model that reduced kinship to essentially genealogical, that is to say biological, ties, even if these ‘carnal’ ties were made sacred by the sacraments of marriage and baptism. The paradox is that, at the very moment when the Church forbade adoption and its social fictions, it promoted another type of entirely imaginary parenthood, a spiritual one, which grew out of the institution at the end of the sixth century of the baptism of children at birth, which eventually replaced adult baptism. The sixth century also saw the institution of godparents.65 The child taken into the Church through baptism is accompanied by a spiritual father and mother, is sponsored by a godfather and a godmother. Theoretically a child’s godparents are even more responsible than the parents for their godchild’s spiritual upbringing. They are supposed to be particularly vigilant that the baptized child acquires the three Christian virtues of chastity, charity (caritas, which means more than the contemporary ‘charity’ and encompasses love of God and one’s neighbour) and uprightness. Godfather, godmother, godson, goddaughter: the Church that had banned adoption and its fictions replaced it with the fiction of the rebirth of children in the Church and chose for this imaginary filiation the vocabulary of genealogical filiation. Simultaneously the marriage prohibitions linked with the incest taboo applying to real kin were extended – with a variety of modalities – to spiritual parents and spiritual children. Initially prohibited to the seventh degree and then to the fourth degree of consanguinity, extended to close affines, husband’s brother, wife’s sister, etc., incest in the Christian West would threaten a second domain, that of the imaginary descent ties between Christians and their God.
Alliance, marriage, simple socially recognized union, with or without exchange, always raises the problem of who one can marry. We already know one can marry persons and into groups that do not come under the incest taboo as it is defined by a given society, or under other taboos which further extend this field: one must not repeat one’s father’s or one’s brothers’ marriage, etc. To these taboos within the field of kinship are added others that originate elsewhere: one must not marry outside one’s religion, class or rank. Which means that it is preferable or mandatory to marry someone of one’s own caste, rank and religion.
There are also a great many kinship systems where positive rules are added to the prohibitions and indicate whom it is prescribed or preferable to marry, which often entails the exchange of persons or goods. These systems are at the far pole from the Western European and Euro-American systems (which are cognatic with an Eskimo-type terminology), where, with the exception of a small group of consanguines and close affines, no one is prescribed and no one is forbidden – in terms of kinship, though not in terms of wealth, rank, name, etc. We are indebted to Claude Lévi-Strauss for having been the first to try to classify kinship systems in terms of the presence or absence of a positive marriage rule contained within the system as part of its structure. His analysis led to distinguishing three classes of systems:66
(1) Systems that make a positive statement about the class and terminological categories in which Ego can and must find a spouse, where exchange is forbidden between parallel kin but allowed and even prescribed between cross kin. For Lévi-Strauss, these systems, which he called ‘elementary structures of kinship’, are based on two types of exchange, depending on whether the wife-givers are or are not takers. In the first case, we are dealing with restricted exchange, in the second, with a generalized exchange, between kin groups.
(2) Systems that multiply marriage taboos and have no positive rule for choosing a spouse. Ego cannot take a wife in his father’s, his mother’s, his father’s mother’s or his mother’s mother’s clan, lineage or line, nor marry a certain number of cognatic kinswomen. However
