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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
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Verso
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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
1 Kinship in the Field: The Baruya of New Guinea
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)
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?
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
