in turn resulted in a proliferation of studies on the subject, including works by some of the biggest names in anthropology, making kinship studies the lynchpin of the new social science. Indeed, because this theoretical context endowed kinship systems with a twofold primacy – ontological in relation to the life of societies and epistemological in terms of their scientific study – George Peter Murdock was able to entitle a book almost entirely devoted to the inventory and analysis of kin terminologies and systems throughout the world, Social Structure (1949).16 The publication, in the same year, of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Elementary Structures of Kinship17 was to confirm the importance of kinship in the appearance, development and destiny of humankind.
Lévi-Strauss changed the scope of kinship studies by postulating that the incest taboo had been the primary condition both for the emergence of kinship relations and for the appearance of ‘genuine’ human society, henceforth separate from the animal-like state and pursuing its development in another world, a man-made one, the world of culture. The goal was no longer simply to understand tribal or peasant societies but to circumscribe and apprehend that which was truly human in man – in short, and as the philosophers say, to grasp his essence.
The goal thus singularly outstripped the standard theoretical ambitions and limits of anthropology, and of the other social sciences taken separately. Lévi-Strauss’ thesis set out a global vision of humankind that resembled Morgan’s minus the evolutionism, since Morgan had made the exclusion of incest (which he believed to have been gradual), in other words of primitive, animal-like promiscuity between the sexes, the driving force behind the changes in the family and in kinship relations, and one of the conditions of human progress. It is perhaps for this reason that Lévi-Strauss dedicated his book to Morgan. Furthermore, he was implicitly in agreement with Freud, who half a century earlier, in Totem and Taboo,18 had explained the emergence of kinship relations by the sons’ murder of a despotic and incestuous father. (The sons, so the theory goes, after having killed their father in order to gain access to their sisters and their mother, decided to renounce incestuous relations with them so as to avoid being obliged eventually to kill each other. Kinship relations would theoretically have appeared once the brothers began to exchange their sisters and their mothers, whom they had renounced, with other groups of men, who theoretically had done likewise.)
Yet, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss paid scant attention to the fact that Freud had based kinship relations on the exchange of women and had made this exchange the consequence of the incest taboo – an attitude that can probably be ascribed to Freud’s claim that, in order to emerge from animal-like sexual promiscuity, it was necessary first to kill the father who tyrannized the primal horde. This was a thesis smelling of brimstone, which foregrounded sexuality and its repression, and claimed to explain by a unique act – one that was unverifiable but whose consequences were irreversible – and furthermore by a murder, what Lévi-Strauss claimed to explain by the shock resulting from the emergence of language and symbolic thought in the human species.
With Lévi-Strauss, it was possible to believe that the study of kinship, thus elevated, had a considerable future and that its importance would no longer be contested. After the publication of his book, having turned his attention to American Indians’ mythology, Lévi-Strauss would progressively leave the task of continuing the pursuit to his students, but not without having laid out the course of research for others.19 Naturally he believed that this task could be carried out only by disciples or colleagues who shared his thesis that the explanation of the differences in the various kinship systems lay in the forms of sister-exchange, and that these had to be analyzed using a method he called ‘structural analysis’. Many took up the challenge, and some made important findings.20
But the edifice was already cracking under the strain of criticism from various parts. I will give only a few examples. Feminist anthropologists, in particular, rapidly rejected the idea that kinship was necessarily based on the exchange of women by men, objecting that this amounted to making male domination the primary, insurmountable and therefore ‘natural’, as it were, condition of the existence of kinship relations and society.21 If this was true, an insuperable limit was set on the progress women could hope to make toward greater gender equality.
Leach, for his part, having greeted Lévi-Strauss’ ideas with interest and introduced them in Great Britain, later undertook a critique. Already in his book, Pul Elya, a Village in Ceylon: A Study of Land Tenure and Kinship,22 he had written that the (Dravidian) kin ties between the people of this village were no more than an idiom, a language in which social realities were expressed and dissimulated and which carried more weight than kinship. These realities were: relations with the land, land ownership, ties apart from which ‘kinship systems had no reality’. This was a provocation of the kind Leach was fond of launching, but the formula produced its effect. His criticism prefigured by several years that which certain self-styled Marxist anthropologists – Claude Meillassoux and Emmanuel Terray in France, Joel Khan in England, among others – would direct against the thesis that kinship relations (rather than relations of production) were at the root of human society.23
Leach’s iconoclastic blow was to be followed by many others, and they came from the two British temples of anthropology of kinship: Cambridge and Oxford. One after another, the concepts of kinship, marriage, incest and descent, together with Meyer Fortes’ notion of complementary filiation, prescription or preference in the choice of a spouse in elementary systems, were dissected and confronted with various facts that contradicted the accepted definitions. Once again Leach had paved the way, in another book published the same year as Pul Elya (1961) but whose title, Rethinking Anthropology,24 clearly suggested that the time of comforting self-evident notions was already over: in it he declared that marriage was not an institution that could be given a universal definition. Finally, in 1969, the Association of Social Anthropologists, presided over by Leach himself, declared that the time had come to put anthropology on a sound footing and decided that the first question up for discussion should obviously be: kinship. Rodney Needham was given the task of organizing a major symposium on ‘Kinship and Marriage’. Some of the papers presented on this occasion appeared in 1971 in the volume Rethinking Kinship and Marriage,25 a title clearly indicating that the authors were approaching these questions from the same critical angle as Leach.
This important book deserves a mention here, for through it runs a major contradiction that illuminates the nature of this first big wave of criticism directed against kinship studies by top anthropologists who were experts in the field. Needham’s two introductory texts provide a spectacular illustration. First of all, certain chapters, such as Thomas Beidelman’s on the representation of kinship among the Kaguru of Tanzania, or J. Fox’s ‘Sister’s child as plant’, on metaphors of consanguinity in Roti, an Indonesian island, as well as long passages in which Needham restates and develops his earlier analysis of the Purum, on the Wikmunkan or on the notion of prescriptive marriage, are by no means criticisms of kinship studies but, on the contrary, direct and enriching extensions.
On the other hand, in some passages Needham and Leach hoist the rebel flag. Needham, for instance, claimed to be a structuralist, while at the same time criticizing Lévi-Strauss for having yielded to the ‘passion for generalities’, an expression borrowed from Wittgenstein26 (of whom Needham was a fervent admirer). The criticism was aimed not solely at Lévi-Strauss and this theory of incest, but also at Meyer Fortes, for having posited the existence of a complementary filiation present in unilineal kinship systems. This thesis correctly claimed that, in a patrilineal society, for example, the child’s ties with its mother’s lineage or clan, without constituting actual ‘descent’ ties, had a strong existence that was recognized and which in many circumstances completed the descent ties. For Needham, considering the extreme diversity of the facts, all general definitions of incest, marriage, etc., looked very much like ‘all-purpose words’, abusive generalizations. But at the same time, he rightly criticized his colleagues who had not yet grasped that: ‘it is not only that we cannot make sociological inferences, about institutions, groups, and persons, from the structure of a terminology, but we cannot even infer that the statuses denoted by any one term will have anything significant in common’.27
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